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 tyre! " 



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 haiint 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 



