independent knowledge of their meaning. The famous line.
Man never is but always to be blest,
is an example of defective construction, though his language is often tortured by more elliptical phrases.[1] This power of charging lines with great fulness of meaning enables Pope to soar for brief periods into genuine and impressive poetry. Whatever his philosophical weakness and his moral obliquity, he is often moved by genuine emotion. He has a vein of generous sympathy for human sufferings and of righteous indignation against bigots, and if he only half understands his own optimism, that "whatever is is right," the vision, rather poetical than philosophical, of a harmonious universe lifts him at times into a region loftier than that of frigid and pedantic platitude. The most popular passages were certain purple patches, not arising very spontaneously or with much relevance, but also showing something more than the practised rhetorician. The "poor Indian" in one of the most highly-polished paragraphs—
His faithful dog shall bear him company,
intrudes rather at the expense of logic, and is a decidedly conventional person. But this passage has a certain glow of fine humanity and is touched with real pathos. A further
- ↑ Perhaps the most curious example, too long for quotation, is a passage near the end of the last epistle, in which he sums up his moral system by a series of predicates for which it is impossible to find any subject. One couplet runs—It is impressive, but it is quite impossible to discover by the rules of grammatical construction who is to be never elated and depressed.Never elated whilst one man's depress'd,
Never dejected whilst another's blest.
