[1402] "Nature" is not a power coordinate with God, but only the means by which he acts.
[1403] Bolingbroke, Fragment 51: "A due use of our reason makes self-love and social coincide, or even become in effect the same."—Wakefield.
[1404] Happiness is with Pope the sole end of life, and virtue is only a means. The means cannot be more binding than the end, and happiness is not obligatory and virtue is. A certain contempt, again, for pain and privation is heroic, but indifference to moral worth is degradation. Thus virtue is plainly an end in itself, and is superior, not subordinate, to happiness.
[1405] Overlooked in the things which would yield it, and in other things magnified by the imagination, as is happily expressed by Young, when he says, Universal Passion, Sat. i., 238:
None think the great unhappy but the great.
[1406] Pope personified happiness at the beginning, but seems to have dropped that idea in the seventh line, where the deity is suddenly transformed into a plant, from whence this metaphor of a vegetable is carried on through the eleven succeeding lines till he suddenly returns to consider happiness again as a person, in the eighteenth line.—Warton.
The change from a person to a thing commences at the third verse, where Pope calls happiness "that something," and he changes back to the person in the eighth verse, where he addresses happiness as "thou."
[1407] MS.:
O happiness! to which we all aspire,
Winged with strong hope, and borne with full desire;
That good, we still mistake, and still pursue,
Still out of reach, yet ever in our view;
That ease, for which in want, in wealth we sigh,
That ease, for which we labour and we die;
Tell me, ye sages, (sure 'tis yours to know),
Tell in what mortal soul this ease may grow.
[1408] "Is there," asks Mr. Croker, "any other authority for shine as a noun?" The noun is found in Milton, and Locke, and in much earlier writers, but Johnson says, "it is a word, though not unanalogical, yet ungraceful, and little used."