POPE. 409 



tune, as it were, and hints at his own imagination as the 

 source of this emotion in inanimate things, 



" But, the heavy change now thou art gone ! " 

 In " Windsor Forest " we find the same thing again : 



" 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! " 



In the same poem he indulges the absurd conceit 

 that, 



" Beasts urged by us, their fellow-beasts pursue, 

 And learn of man each other to undo" ; 



and in the succeeding verses gives some striking in 

 stances of that artificial diction, so inappropriate to 

 poems descriptive of natural objects and ordinary life, 

 which brought verse-making to such a depth of absurd 

 ity in the course of the century. 



" 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 wookcocks haunt the watery glade; 

 He lifts the tube and levels with his eye, 

 Straight a short thunder breaks the frozen sky: 

 Oft as in airy rings they skim the heath, 

 The clamorous lapwings feel the leaden death; 

 Oft as the mounting larks their notes prepare, 

 They fall and leave their little lives in air." 



Now one would imagine that the tube of the fowler was 

 a telescope instead of a gun. And think of the larks 

 preparing their notes like a country choir! Yet even 

 here there are admirable lines, 



" Oft as in airy rings they skim the heath," 

 " They fall and leave their little lives in air," 



for example. 



In Pope's next poem, the " Essay on Criticism," the 

 18 



