And then, if ever, mortal ears Had heard the music of the spheres. On thy sweet mouth distill'd their golden dew, Heaven had not leisure to renew: For all thy blest fraternity of love Solemnised there thy birth, and kept thy holyday above. O gracious God! how far have we To increase the streaming ordures of the stage? Her wit was more than man, her innocence a child. Art she had none, yet wanted none; Such noble vigour did her verse adorn, That it seemed borrow'd, where 'twas only born. Her morals too were in her bosom bred, By great examples daily fed, What in the best of books, her father's life, she read. Each test, and every light, her muse will bear, Light as the vapours of a morning dream, So cold herself, whilst she such warmth exprest, 'Twas Cupid bathing in Diana's stream. Now all those charms, that blooming grace, Heaven, by the same disease, did both translate; When in mid-air the golden trump shall sound, And there the last assizes keep, For those who wake, and those who sleep; From the four corners of the sky; When sinews o'er the skeletons are spread, Those clothed with flesh, and life inspires the dead; And foremost from the tomb shall bound, The way which thou so well hast learn'd below. To the Pious Memory of the Accomplished Young Lady, THE HUMAN MIND. MEN are but children of a larger growth; All for Love. MODES OF DEATH. Adam. THE deaths thou show'st are forced and full of strife, Raphael. There is—but rarely shall that path be trod, Gently they lay them down, as evening sheep Adam. So noiseless would I live, such death to find, Eve. Thus daily changing, with a duller taste State of Innocence. 6 POPE. 1688-1744. PRINCIPAL WORKS: Essay on Criticism, 1711, written at the age of twenty-one.-The Rape of the Lock, published not long afterwards, was suggested by a 'romantic' incident. Two aristocratic families had been set at variance by the secret abstraction of a lock of hair from the head of a beauty of the day, Miss Arabella Fermor, by her indiscreet lover; and Pope in this piece undertook to mediate between the offended and offending parties, and laugh them together again 'in the most brilliant mock-heroic poem in the world.'-Windsor Forest, 1713, a fine descriptive poem in a somewhat different style from his other productions, as it exhibits, however faintly, some sense of the attractions of nature. Translation of the Iliad, 1713-25, which Gibbon has well characterised as having every merit but that of likeness to the original'— The Epistle from Eloisa to. Abelard, 1716, founded on the well-known story of the illicit loves of the professor of theology of the eleventh century and his too charming pupil-the prototype of the Nouvelle Héloïse or Julie of Rousseau. The delicacy of the poet, it has been observed, in veiling over the circumstances of the story, and at the same time preserving the ardour of Eloisa's passion, the beauty of his imagery and description, the exquisite melody of his versification, rising and falling like the tones of an Æolian harp, as he successively portrays the tumults of guilty love, the deepest penitence, and the highest devotional rapture, have never been surpassed.-Essay on Man, 1733, the merit of which depends rather upon its poetic than philosophic excellence.-The Dunciad, in three books (a fourth being added in 1742), a bitterly satirical reply to the lampoons and libels which had greeted his recent miscellanies in prose and verse, undertaken in conjunction with Swift. In the later edition of the Dunciad, Colley Cibber, the then laureate, takes the place of Theobald, the original 'monarch of dulness,' who was dethroned to make way for him. Chiefly remarkable for that unrivalled easiness of versification and satire which especially distinguishes Pope. In 'masculine' vigour, however, he is inferior to his great master, Dryden. Perhaps his Eloisa to Abelard may be regarded as his finest poem. The Messiah, an imitation of Virgil's well-known Eclogue and of the Jewish prophets, is also greatly and deservedly admired. |