"The Inchanted Island," and "The State of Innocence" come under no criticism. They are literary FACINORA. No rational account--no theory of them can be given. There they are--melancholy, but instructive facts. They express the revolution of the national spirit, on the upper degrees of the social scale. That which thirty, twenty, ten years before was impossible, happens. The hewing in pieces of Shakspeare, to throw him into the magical caldron, to reproduce him, not in youth but in dotage, shows a death, but not yet the consequent life. Stupendous and sweet Nature whom we possessed, has vanished--fled heavenward--resolved into a dew--gone, into the country. At least, she is no longer in town! It may safely be averred, that no straining of the human intellect can compute the interval overleaped betwixt those originals, and these transcriptions. It is no translation, paraphrase, metaphrase. It is as if we should catch a confused and misapprehending glimpse of something that is going on in Jupiter. It is a transference from one order of beings to another; who have some intellectual processes in common, but are allied by no sympathy. The sublime is gone! The beautiful is gone! The rational is gone! The loving is gone! The divine is not here! Nor the angelical! Nor the human! Alas! not even the diabolical! All is corrupted! banished! obliterated!
We have seen Dryden complaining of Shakspeare's language and style--of the language as antiquated from the understanding of an audience in his own day--of the whole style as being "so pestered with the figurative expressions, that it is as affected as it is obscure." And we were aware of the modest self-attribution, "_I have refined the language_," in Drydenising Troilus and Cressida, "which before was _obsolete_." And Samuel Johnson corroborates and enlarges the self-praise. "Dryden was the first who _refined the language of poetry_."
At this day, such expressions fill the younger votary--creative or critical--of our vernacular muse with astonishment and perplexity, and set an older one upon thinking. Such assertions, it must be said, are "_unintelligible_" now, because a nobler unfolding of time, a happy return of our educated mind to the old and to the natural, has "_antiquated_" the literary sentiment, which Dryden and Johnson shared, and which they so confidently proposed to fitly-prepared readers.