A troop of deities came down to guide
Our steerless barks in passion's swelling tide,
By virtue's card.—Wakefield.
After ver. 108 in the MS.:
A tedious voyage! where how useless lies
The compass, if no pow'rful gusts arise!—Warburton.
[1177] Psalm civ. 3: "Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters, and walketh upon the wings of the wind."—Bowles.
Dryden's Ceyx and Alcyone:
And now sublime she rides upon the wind.—Warton.
Pope held that "fierce ambition" was instigated by the Almighty, Epist. i. ver. 159, and compared his inspiration of such tumultuous passions to his "heaving old ocean, and winging the storm." The poet must be understood as upholding the same extended and licentious doctrine when he returns to the comparison, and talks of "God mounting the storm" of the passions, and "walking upon the wind."
[1178] After ver. 112 in the MS.:
The soft, reward the virtuous or invite;
The fierce, the vicious punish or affright.—Warburton.
[1179] How, that is, can the stoic succeed in destroying passions which enter into the very composition of man? The stoic made no such pretension. What he laboured to "destroy" were those "perturbations of mind" which Zeno, Tusc. iv. 6, maintained to be "repugnant to reason, and against nature," and for which the stoical remedy, Tusc. iv. 28, was the demonstration that they "were vicious, and had nothing natural or necessary in them." The principle for which Pope contended was the very maxim of the stoics,—they insisted that "reason should keep to nature's road." The real question was, whether they did not sometimes go too far, and condemn natural emotions under the name of prohibited perturbations.