Know then this truth (enough for man to know),
"Virtue alone is happiness below."
... Never elated while one man's oppress'd;
Never dejected while another's bless'd....[C]
See the sole bliss heaven could on all bestow!
Which who but feels can taste, but thinks can know:
Yet poor with fortune, and with learning blind,
The bad must miss, the good untaught will find:
Slave to no sect, who takes no private road,
But looks through nature up to nature's God;
Pursues that chain which links the immense design,
Joins heaven and earth, and mortal and divine:
Sees that no being any bliss can know,
But touches some above and some below;
Learns from this union of the rising whole,
The first, last purpose of the human soul;
And knows where faith, law, morals, all began,
All end, in love of God and love of man.
FOOTNOTES:
[B] If the Essay on Man were shivered into fragments, it would not lose its value: for it is precisely its details which constitute its moral as well as literary beauties.—A. W. Ward, quoted by Mark Pattison.
[C] In these two lines, which, so far as I know, are the most complete, the most concise, and the most lofty expressions of moral temper existing in English words, Pope sums the law of noble life.
Ruskin, Lectures on Art.