English Poetry in the Eighteenth Century [pp. 30-50]

THE PRINCE TON RE VIEW.
ment, too, even in the hands of such an artist as Pope, can never
be made poetical. The best parts of the poem are the illustrations and rhetorical episodes with which Pope has adorned it.
Some of his moral maxims and condensed versions of philosophic views compensate for the triteness of many of the
thoughts and the tiresomeness of the reasoning parts. As Mr.
Stephen has said, "If the test of poetry were the power of expressing a theory more closely and pointedly than prose, such
writing would take a high place.... His precision and firmness of touch enables him to get the greatest possible meaning
into a narrow compass. He uses only one epithet, but it is the
right one, and never boggles and patches, or, in his own phrase,
'blunders round about a meaning.'" Take as a specimen the
passage that precedes the well-known episode about "the poor
Indian:"
"Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate,
All but the page prescribed, their present state:
From brutes what men, from men what spirits know,
Or who could suffer being here below?
The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
Had he thy reason would he skip and play?
Pleased to the last he crops the flowery food,
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.
O blindness to the future! kindly given,
That each may fill the circle marked by heaven;
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish or a sparrow fall,
Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,
And now a bubble burst and now a world.
Hope humbly, then; with trembling pinions soar;
Wait the great teacher Death, and God adore!
What future bliss he gives not thee to know,
But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast;.
Man never is, but always to be, blest.
The soul, uneasy and confined from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come."
This, no doubt, is all very true, and tersely and cleverly expressed; few writers ever lived who could express it so well. But
somehow it fails to touch the hidden springs within us, to awaken
those deep emotions which rise spontaneously under the touch
of the great masters.
4o