He crowned the wond'ring earth with golden grain,
Taught to command the fire, control the main,
Drew from the secret deep the finny drove,
And fetched the soaring eagle from above.
The first couplet is again varied:
He taught the arts of life, the means of food,
To pierce the forest, and to stem the flood.
[1364] MS.:
Till weak, and old, and dying they began.
This couplet is followed in the MS. by a second which Pope omitted:
Saw his shrunk arms, pale cheeks, and faded eye,
Beheld him bend, and droop, and sink, and die.
[1365] Men are said by the poet to have been awakened by the death of the patriarch to reflection upon his original, and to have advanced upwards from father to father, that is, from cause to cause, till their enquiries terminated in one original Father, one first, independent, uncreated cause.—Johnson.
At ver. 148 we are told that "the state of nature was the reign of God," and at ver. 156 that "all vocal beings"—man, bird, and beast—joined then in "hymning" their Creator. This condition of things, we learn from ver. 149, dated from the "birth" of nature, which is contrary to Pope's present conjecture that the primitive families may, perhaps, have had no conception of a Deity. The poet's language is irrational. If God did not reveal himself to them in any direct way, they might yet be supposed capable of inferring from their own existence and that of the universe, a truth which their posterity deduced from the death of patriarch after patriarch.
[1366] Pope ought to have written "began." He has improperly put the participle for the past tense. The meaning of the couplet is, that men may possibly have learned from tradition that, "this all," did not exist from eternity, but had a beginning, and therefore a Creator.