306 POPE. 



To le contents his natural desire, 

 He asks no angel s wing, no seraph s fire, 

 But thinks, admitted to that equal sky, 

 His faithful dog shall bear him company. 



But this comes in as a corollary to what went just before: 



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. 



Then follows immediately the passage about the poor Indian, 

 who, after all, it seems, is contented with merely bein^ and 

 whose soul, therefore, is an exception to the general rule! And 

 what have the ^solar walk (as he calls it) and milky way, to 

 do with the affair ? Does our hope of heaven depend on our 

 knowledge of astronomy ? Or does he mean that science and 

 faith are necessarily hostile ? And, after being told that it is 

 the untutored mind of the savage which sees God in clouds 

 and hears him in the wind/ we are rather surprised that the 

 lesson the poet intends to teach is that 



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 the ethereal frame: 

 Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, 

 Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees. 



So that we are no better off than the untutored Indian, after the 

 poet has tutored us. Dr. Warburton makes a ra .her lame at 

 tempt to ward off the charge of Spinozism from this last passage. 

 He would have found it harder to show that the acknowledg 

 ment of any divine revelation would not overturn the greater 

 part of its teachings. If Pope intended by his poem all that 

 the bishop takes for granted in his commentary, we must deny 

 him what is usually claimed as his first merit clearness. If he 

 did not, we grant him clearness as a writer at the expense of 

 sincerity as a man. Perhaps a more charitable solution of the 

 difficulty would be, that Pope s precision of thought was nd 

 match for the fluency of his verse. 



Lord Byron goes so far as to say, in speaking of Pope, that 

 he who executes the best, no matter what his department, will 

 rank the highest. I think there are enough indications in these 

 letters of Byron s, however, that they were written rather more 

 against Wordsworth than for Pope. The rule he lays down 

 would make Voltaire a greater poet, in some respects, than 

 Shakespeare. Byron cites Petrarch as an example ; yet if 

 Petrarch had put nothing more into his sonnets than execution, 

 there are plenty of Italian sonneteers who would be his match. 

 But, in point of fact, the department chooses the man and not 



