356 POPE. 



In these pastorals there is an entire want of nature. For 

 example, in that on the death of Mrs. Tempest : 



&quot; Her fate is whispered by the gentle breeze 

 And told in sighs to all the trembling trees ; 

 The trembling trees, in every plain and wood, 

 Her fate remurraur to the silver flood ; 

 The silver flood, so lately calm, appears 

 Swelled with new passion, and o erflows with tears ; 

 The winds and trees and floods her death deplore 

 Daphne, our grief ! our glory now no more ! &quot; 



All this is as perfectly professional as the mourning of an 

 undertaker. Still worse, Pope materialises and makes too 

 palpably objective that sympathy which our grief forces 

 upon outward nature. Milton, before making the echoes 

 mourn for Lycidas, puts our feelings in tune, as it were, and 

 hints at his own imagination as the source of this emotion 

 in inanimate things, 



&quot; But, the heavy change now thou are gone ! &quot; 

 In &quot; Windsor Forest&quot; we find the same thing again : 



&quot; Here his first lays majestic Denham sung, 

 There the last numbers flowed from Cowley s tongue ; 

 early lost, what tears the river shed 

 When the sad pomp along his banks was led ! 

 His drooping swans on every note expire, 

 And on his willows hung each muse s lyre ! &quot; 



In the same poem he indulges the absurd conceit that, 



&quot; Beasts urged by us, their fellow-beasts pursue, 

 And learn of man each other to undo ; &quot; 



and in the succeeding verses gives some striking instances 

 of that artificial diction, so inappropriate to poems descrip 

 tive of natural objects and ordinary life, which brought 

 verse-making to such a depth of absurdity in the course of 

 the century. 



&quot; With slaughtering guns, the unwearied fowler roves 

 Where frosts have whitened all the naked groves ; 

 Where doves in flocks the leafless trees o ershade, 

 And lonely woodcocks haunt the watery glade ; 



