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Waste sandy valleys,' once perplex'd with thorn,
The spiry fir and shapely box adorn:

To leafless shrubs the flowering palm succeed,
And odorous myrtle to the noisome weed.

6

The lambs with wolves shall graze the verdant mead,
And boys in flowery bands the tiger lead.
The steer and lion at one crib shall meet,
And harmless serpents 3 lick the pilgrim's feet.
The smiling infant in his hand shall take
The crested basilisk and speckled snake,
Pleased, the green lustre of the scales survey,
And with their forky tongues shall innocently play.
Rise, crown'd with light, imperial Salem, rise,
Exalt thy towery head, and lift thine eyes!
See a long race5 thy spacious courts adorn;
See future sons and daughters, yet unborn,
In crowding ranks on every side arise,
Demanding life, impatient for the skies!
See barbarous nations at thy gates attend,
Walk in thy light, and in thy temple bend;
See thy bright altars throng'd with prostrate kings,
And heap'd with products of Sabean springs!
For thee Idume's spicy forests blow,
And seeds of gold in Ophir's mountains glow.
See heaven its sparkling portals wide display,
And break upon thee in a flood of day!
No more the rising Suns shall gild the morn,
Nor evening Cynthia fill her silver horn;
But lost, dissolved in thy superior rays,
One tide of glory, one unclouded blaze
O'erflow thy courts: the Light himself shall shine
Reveal'd, and God's eternal day be thine!
The seas shall waste, the skies in smoke decay,
Rocks fall to dust, and mountains melt away;
But fix'd his word, his saving power remains;

Thy realm for ever lasts, thy own Messiah reigns!

Of the "Essay on Criticism," Dr. Johnson remarks, "if he had written nothing else, it would have placed him among the first critics and the first poets; as it exhibits every mode of excellence that can embellish or dignify composition-selection of matter, novelty of arrangement, justness of precept, splendor of illustration, and propriety of digression."10

PRIDE.

Of all the causes which conspire to blind
Man's erring judgment, and misguide the mind,
What the weak head with strongest bias rules,
Is Pride, the never-failing vice of fools.
Whatever Nature has in worth denied,

She gives in large recruits of needful Pride!

2 Isa. xi. 6-8.
7 Isa. Ix. 6.

3 Isa. lxv. 25.
8 Isa. Ix. 19, 20.

4 Isa. Ix. 1.
6 Isa. Ix. 4.
Isa. li. 6; liv. 10.

1 Isa. xli. 19; lv. 13. 6 Isa. lx. 3. 10 "For a person only twenty years old to have produced such an Essay, so replete with a know ledge of life and manners, such accurate observations on men and books, such variety of literature, such strong good sense, and refined taste and judgment, has been the subject of frequent and of just

admiration."-- Warton.

For as in bodies, thus in souls, we find

What wants in blood and spirits, swell'd with wind.
Pride, where Wit fails, steps in to our defence,

And fills up all the mighty void of sense.
If once right reason drives that cloud away,
Truth breaks upon us with resistless day.
Trust not yourself; but, your defects to know,
Make use of every friend-and every foe,
A little learning is a dangerous thing!
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless youth we tempt the heights of Arts,
While, from the bounded level of our mind,
Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind;
But more advanced, behold with strange surprise
New distant scenes of endless science rise!
So pleased at first the towering Alps we try,
Mount o'er the vales, and seem to tread the sky;
Th' eternal snows appear already past,

And the first clouds and mountains seem the last:
But, those attain'd, we tremble to survey
The growing labors of the lengthen'd way;

Th' increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes,
Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise!

Essay on Criticism, 201.

SOUND AN ECHO TO THE SENSE.
'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence,
The sound must seem an Echo to the sense:
Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar.
When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labors, and the words move slow:
Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain,

Flies o'er th' unbending corn, and skims along the main.'
Essay on Criticism, 364.

EVANESCENCE OF POETIC FAME.

Be thou the first true merit to befriend;
His praise is lost, who stays till all commend.
Short is the date, alas, of modern rhymes,
And 'tis but just to let them live betimes.

1 These lines are usually cited as fine examples of adapting the sound to the sense, but Dr. John-
son, in the ninety-second number of the Rambler, has demonstrated that Pope has here signally
failed. "The verse intended to represent the whisper of the vernal breeze must surely be confessed
not much to excel in softness or volubility; and the smooth stream' runs with a perpetual clash
of jarring consonants. The noise and turbulence of the 'torrent,' is indeed distinctly inaged; for
It requires very little skill to make our language rough. But in the lines which mention the effort of
'Ajax,' there is no particular heaviness or delay. The 'swiftness of Camilla' is rather contrasted
than exemplified. Why the verse should be lengthened to express speed will not easily be discovered.
But the Alexandrine, by its pause in the midst, is a tardy and stately measure; and the word 'un
bending,' one of the most sluggish and slow which our language affords, cannot much accelerate its

motion"

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No longer now that golden age appears,
When Patriarch-wits survived a thousand years:
Now length of Fame (our second life) is lost,
And bare threescore is all e'en that can boast;
Our sons their fathers' failing language see,
And such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be.
So when the faithful pencil has design'd
Some bright idea of the master's mind,
Where a new world leaps out at his command,
And ready Nature waits upon his hand;
When the ripe colors soften and unite,
And sweetly melt into just shade and light;
When mellowing years their full perfection give,
And each bold figure just begins to live;
The treacherous colors the fair art betray,
And all the bright creation fades away!1

Essay on Criticism, 474.

The Essay on Man" is a philosophical, didactic poem, in vindication of the ways of Providence, in which the poet proposes to prove, that, of all pos sible systems, Infinite Wisdom has formed the best: that in such a system, coherence, union, subordination, are necessary: that it is not strange that we should not be able to discover perfection and order in every instance; be cause, in an infinity of things mutually relative, a mind which sees not infinitely, can see nothing fully.

THE SCALE OF BEING.2

Far as Creation's ample range extends,
The scale of sensual, mental powers ascends:
Mark how it mounts to Man's imperial race,
From the green myriads in the peopled grass;
What modes of sight betwixt each wide extreme,
The mole's dim curtain, and the lynx's beam:
Of smell, the headlong lioness between,
And hound sagacious on the tainted green;
Of hearing, from the life that fills the flood,
To that which warbles through the vernal wood;
The spider's touch, how exquisitely fine!
Feels at each thread, and lives along the line:
In the nice bee, what sense, so subtly true,
From poisonous herbs extracts the healing dew?
How Instinct varies in the grovelling swine,
Compared, half-reasoning elephant, with thine!
'Twixt that, and Reason, what a nice barrier!
For ever separate, yet for ever near!
Remembrance and Reflection, how allied;
What thin partitions Sense from Thought divide!
And Middle natures, how they long to join,
Yet never pass th' insuperable line!
Without this just gradation, could they be
Subjected, these to those, or all to thee?

1 "Nothing was ever so happily expressed on the art of painting."-Warton.

"These lines are admituole patterns of forcible diction. To live along the line,' is equally bold and beautiful. If Pope must yield to other poets in point of fertility of fancy, yet in point of propriety, closeness, and elegance of diction, he can yield to none."- Warton.

1727-1760.]

POPE.

The powers of all, subdued by thee alone,
Is not thy Reason all these powers in one?

Essay on Man, 1. 207.

OMNIPRESENCE OF THE DEITY.1

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul;
That, changed through all, and yet in all the same,
Great in the earth, as in th' ethereal frame,
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees;
Lives through all life, extends through all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent;
Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part,
As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart;
As full as perfect, in vile Man that mourns,
As the rapt Seraph that adores and burns;
To Him, no high, no low, no great, no small;
He fills, He bounds, connects, and equals all.

ADDRESS TO BOLINGBROKE.

Essay on Man, 1. 387.

Come then, my Friend, my Genius, come along;
O master of the poet and the song!

And while the Muse now stoops, or now ascends,
To Man's low passions, or their glorious ends,
Teach me, like thee, in various nature wise,
To fall with dignity, with temper rise;
Form'd by thy converse, happily to steer
From grave to gay, from lively to severe;
Correct with spirit, eloquent with ease,
Intent to reason, or polite to please.
O! while, along the stream of time, thy name
Expanded flies, and gathers all its fame,
Say, shall my little bark attendant sail,

Pursue the triumph, and partake the gale?
When statesmen, heroes, kings, in dust repose,

Whose sons shall blush their fathers were thy foes,
Shall then this verse to future age pretend
Thou wert my guide, philosopher, and friend?
That, urged by thee, I turn'd the tuneful art
From sounds to things, from fancy to the heart;
For wit's false mirror held up nature's light;
Show'd erring pride, whatever is, is right?
That reason, passion, answer one great aim;
That true self-love and social are the same;
That VIRTUE only makes our bliss below;
And all our knowledge is, OURSELVES TO KNOW?

Essay on Man, iv. 3/3.

feel myself almost

1 "In reading this exalted description of the omnipresence of the Deity, tempted to retract an assertion in the beginning of this work, that there is nothing transcendently sublime in Pope. These lines have all the energy and harmony that can be given to rhyme."-War

ton's Essay, ii. 77.

3 "In this concluding address of our author to Lord Bolingbroke, one is at a loss which to admire most, the warmth of his friendship, or the warmth of his genius."——- Warton.

But it is in the "Rape of the Lock" that Pope principally appears as a POET, in which he has displayed more imagination than in all his other works taken together. "Its wit and humor," says Dr. Drake, "are of the most delicate and highly finished kind; its fictions sportive and elegant, and conceived with a propriety and force of imagination which astonish and fascinate every reader." 2

THE TOILET.3

And now, unveil'd, the Toilet stands display'd,
Each silver Vase in mystic order laid;

First, robed in white, the Nymph intent adores,
With head uncover'd, the cosmetic powers.
A heavenly image in the glass appears,
To that she bends, to that her eye she rears;
Th' inferior Priestess, at her altar's side,
Trembling begins the sacred rites of Pride.
Unnumber'd treasures ope at once, and here
The various offerings of the world appear;
From each she nicely culls with curious toil,
And decks the Goddess with the glittering spoil.
This casket India's glowing geins unlocks,
And all Arabia breathes from yonder box:
The tortoise here and elephant unite,

Transform'd to combs, the speckled and the white.
Here files of pins extend their shining rows,
Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux.
Now awful beauty puts on all its arms;
The fair each moment rises in her charms,
Repairs her smiles, awakens every grace,
And calls forth all the wonders of her face;
Sees by degrees a purer blush arise,
And keener lightnings quicken in her eyes.
The busy Sylphs surround their darling care,
These set the head, and those divide the hair;
Some fold the sleeve, whilst others plait the gown,
And Betty's praised for labors not her own.

DESCRIPTION OF BELINDA.

Rupe of the Lock, 1. 121.

Not with more glories, in th' ethereal plain,
The sun first rises o'er the purpled main,
Than issuing forth, the rival of his beams
Launch'd on the bosom of the silver Thames.

1 The subject of this poem was a quarrel, occasioned by a little piece of gallantry of Lord Petre, who, in a party of pleasure, found means to cut off a favorite lock of Mrs. Arabella Fermor's hair. "On so slight a foundation has he raised this beautiful superstructure; like a fairy palace in a desert."- Warton.

2 "I hope it will not be though! an exaggerated panegyric to say that the Rape of the Lock is the BEST SATIRE extant; that it contains the truest and liveliest picture of modern life; and that the subject is of a more elegant nature, as well as more artfully conducted, than that of any other heroi comic poem. If some of the most candid among the French critics begin to acknowledge that they have produced nothing in point of SUBLIMITY and MAJESTY equal to the Paradise Lost, we may also venture to affirm, that in point of DELICACY, ELEGANCE, and fine-turned RAILLERY, on which they have so much valued themselves, they have produced nothing equal to the Rape of the Lock."Warton.

a “The description of the Toilet is judiciously given in such magnificent turns, as dignify the offices performed in it. Belinda dressing is painted in as pompous a manner as Achilles arming."— Warton,

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