408 POPE. 



ward so eminently distinguished him. The faciUty of 

 expression is remarkable, and we find also that perfect 

 balance of metre, which he afterward carried so far as to 

 be wearisome. His pastorals were written in his six- 

 teenth year, and their publication immediately brought 

 him into notice. The following four verses from his 

 first pastoral are quite characteristic in their antithetic 

 balance : — 



" You tlmt, too wise for pride, too good for power, 

 Enjoy the glory to be great no more, 

 And carrying with you all the world can boast. 

 To all the world illustriously are lost! " 



The sentiment is afi'ected, and reminds one of that future 

 period of Pope's Correspondence with his Friends, when 

 Swift, his heart corroding with disappointed ambition at 

 Dublin, Bolingbroke raising delusive turnips at his farm, 

 and Pope pretending not to feel the lampoons which 

 imbittered his life, played together the solemn farce of 

 affecting indifference to the world by which it would 

 have agonized them to be forgotten, and wrote letters 

 addressed to each other, but really intended for that 

 posterity whose opinion they assumed to despise. 



In these pastorals there is an entire want of nature. 

 For example in that on the death of Mrs. Tempest : — 



" 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 remiirmur to the silver flood; 

 The silver flood, so lately calm, appears 

 SAvelled 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! " 



All this is as perfectly professional as the mourning 

 of an undertaker. Still worse. Pope materializes and 

 makes too palpably objective that sympathy which our 

 grief forces upon outward nature. Milton, before mak- 

 ing the echoes mourn for Lycidas, puts our feelings in 



