Confirm the tidings as they roll, And spread the truth from pole to pole. What, though in solemn silence all And utter forth a glorious voice; "The hand that made us is Divine." One of Addison's best pieces is that written at the tomb of Virgil, in 1741 he also achieved a dramatic triumph in his celebrated tragedy of Cato. Let us rehearse his grand soliloquy : It must be so. Plato, thou reason'st well! Or, whence this secret dread, and inward horror, Eternity!-thou pleasing, dreadful thought! Through what new scenes and changes must we pass ! But shadows, clouds, and darkness rest upon it. Through all her works), He must delight in virtue; The soul, secured in her existence, smiles The wreck of matter, and the crush of worlds! POPE was a precocious genius; for when only in his thirteenth year, he wrote these pleasing lines on Solitude: Happy the man whose wish and care A few paternal acres bound, In his own ground. Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread, Blest, who can unconcern'dly find Hours, days, and years slide soft away, Sound sleep by night; study and ease, Thus let me live unseen, unknown, Steal from the world, and not a stone Tell where I lie. He tells us that he sought the solace of poesy to beguile his hours of physical suffering. At the age of sixteen he wrote his Pastorals; and two or three years later, his Messiah, and Essay on Criticism. Pope's bodily infirmity caused him to be at times very irascible; and on one occasion his long-tried friend, Bishop Atterbury, in pleasantry, described the poet as Mens curva in corpore curvo.' His Essay on Man is replete with nervous and picturesque passages; it is, however, occasionally tinctured with the heresies of his friend Bolingbroke. Subjoined are a few fine passages from his famous Essay on Man: Hope humbly then-with trembling pinions soar; Yet simple nature to his hope has given Behind the cloud-topped hill a humbler heaven; Where slaves once more their native land behold, He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire; In justice to the poet, however, we ought to cite his noble couplet on his friend :— "How pleasing Atterbury's softer hour! How shined his soul unconquered in the Tower!" 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, Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear : All nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; All partial evil, universal good. The Rape of the Lock, which Johnson styles "the most airy, ingenious, and delightful of all Pope's compositions," was occasioned by a frolic of gallantry. Here are two passages; one portraying the mysteries of the toilet, and the other the heroine of the story: And now, unveiled, the toilet stands displayed, First, robed in white, the nymph intent adores, |