Where'er thou art, he is: th' eternal mind
Acts through all places, is to none confined;
Fills ocean, earth, and air, and all above,
And through the universal mass does move.—Wakefield.
[1097] "Our mortal part," is put in opposition to "soul," and the antithesis is a recognition of the soul's immortality. The allusion was too slight to offend Bolingbroke, or, perhaps, to attract his notice.
[1098] Dugald Stewart observes that everyone must be displeased with this line, because the triviality of the alliteration is at variance with the sublimity of the subject.
[1099] First edition:
As the rapt Seraphim that sings and burns.
The name Seraphim, says Warburton, signifies burners, and Wakefield quotes, in illustration, from Spenser's Hymn of Heavenly Beauty, stanza 14:
And those eternal burning Seraphims
Which from their faces dart out fiery light.
[1100] These are lines of a marvellous energy and closeness of expression.—Warton.
The concluding lines appear to be a false jingle of words which neutralise the whole of Pope's argument. If there is to Providence "no high, no low, no great, no small," the gradation of beings is a delusion. What things are in the sight of God, that they are in reality, and since no one thing in creation is superior or inferior to any other thing, Pope's language throughout this epistle is unmeaning. The final phrase of the couplet is bathos. God is not only the "equal" of "all" his works, he is immeasurably beyond them.
[1101] The "order" is the gradation of beings, and "what we blame" is our own rank in the scale of creation, whereas, says Pope, our "proper bliss depends upon it."