POPE. 365 



Father.&quot; It would not have been safe to have referred to 

 the thirty -first verse: &quot;Pear ye not, therefore, ye are, of 

 more value than many sparrows.&quot; 



To my feeling, one of the most beautiful passages in the 

 whole poem is that familiar one : 



&quot; Lo, the poor Indian whose untutored mind 

 Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind, 

 His soul proud science never taught to stray 

 Far as the solar walk or milky way : 

 Yet simple Nature to his hope has given 

 Behind the cloud-top hill a humble heaven ; 

 Some safer world in depth of woods embraced, 

 Some happier island in the watery waste, 

 Where slaves once more their native land behold, 

 No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold. 

 To be 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.&quot; 



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



&quot; 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.&quot; 



Then follows immediately the passage about the poor 

 Indian, who, after all, it seems, is contented with merely 

 being, and whose soul, therefore, is an exception to the 

 general rule. And what have the &quot; solar walk &quot; (as he 

 calls it) and &quot; milky way,&quot; to do with the affair ? Does 

 our hope of heaven depend on our knowledge of astronomy 1 

 Or does he mean that science and faith are necessarily 

 hostile 1 And, after being told that it is the &quot; untutored 

 mind&quot; of the savage which &quot; sees God in clouds and hears 

 him in the wind,&quot; we are rather surprised that the lesson 

 the poet intends to teach is that 



&quot; 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. 



