and perhaps this came nearer Pope’s real opinion than the verse he substituted for it. Warburton is careful not to mention this variation in his notes. The poem is everywhere as remarkable for its confusion of logic as it often is for ease of verse and grace of expression. An instance of both occurs in a passage frequently quoted:—
“Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate;
All but the page prescribed, their present state;
From brutes what men, from men what spirits know,
Or who would suffer being here below?
The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?
Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food,
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.
O, blindness to the future kindly given
That each may fill the circle meant by heaven!
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish or a sparrow fall,
Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world!”
Now, if “heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate,” why should not the lamb “skip and play,” if he had the reason of man? Why, because he would then be able to read the book of fate. But if man himself cannot, why, then, could the lamb with the reason of man? For, if the lamb had the reason of man, the book of fate would still be hidden, so far as himself was concerned. If the inferences we can draw from appearances are equivalent to a knowledge of destiny, the knowing enough to take an umbrella in cloudy weather might be called so. There is a manifest confusion between what we know about ourselves and about other people; the whole point of the passage being that we are always mercifully blinded to our own future, however much reason we may possess. There is also inaccuracy as well as inelegance in saying,
“Heaven,
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish or a sparrow fall.”
To the last verse Warburton, desirous of reconciling his author with Scripture, appends a note referring to Matthew x. 29: “Are not two sparrows sold for one farthing? and one of them shall not fall to the ground without your Father.” It would not have been safe to have referred to the thirty-first verse: “Fear ye not, therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.”
To my feeling, one of the most beautiful passages in the whole poem is that familiar one:—
“Lo, the poor Indian whose untutored mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind,
His soul proud science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk or milky way:
Yet simple Nature to his hope has given
Behind the cloud-topt hill a humbler heaven;
Some safer world in depth of woods embraced,
Some happier island in the watery waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold.
To be contents his natural desire,
He asks no angel’s wing, no seraph’s fire,
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.”
But this comes in as a corollary to what went just before:—
“Hope springs eternal in the human breast,
Man never is but always to be blest;
The soul, uneasy, and confined from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.”
Then follows immediately the passage about the poor Indian, who, after all, it seems, is contented with merely being, and whose soul, therefore, is an exception to the general rule. And what have the “solar walk” (as he calls it) and “milky way” to do with the affair? Does our hope of heaven depend on our knowledge of astronomy? Or does he mean that science and faith are necessarily hostile? And, after being told that it is the “untutored mind” of the savage which “sees God in clouds and hears him in the wind,” we are rather surprised to find that the lesson the poet intends to teach is that