Pallas grew vap'rish once and odd,
She would not do the least right thing
Either for Goddess or for God,
Nor work, nor play, nor paint, nor sing.
Jove frown'd, and "Use (he cried) those eyes
So skilful, and those hands so taper;
Do something exquisite and wise"—
She bow'd, obey'd him, and cut paper.
This vexing him who gave her birth,
Thought by all Heaven a burning shame,
What does she next, but bids on earth
Her Burlington do just the same?
Pallas, you give yourself strange airs;
But sure you'll find it hard to spoil
The sense and taste of one that bears
The name of Savile and of Boyle.
Alas! one bad example shown,
How quickly all the sex pursue!
See, madam! see the arts o'erthrown
Between John Overton and you.
It is the prerogative of easy poetry to be understood as long as the language lasts; but modes of speech, which owe their prevalence only to modish folly, or to the eminence of those that use them, die away with their inventors, and their meaning, in a few years, is no longer known.
Easy poetry is commonly sought in petty compositions upon minute subjects; but ease, though it excludes pomp, will admit greatness. Many lines in Cato's soliloquy are at once easy and sublime:
'Tis the Divinity that stirs within us;
'Tis Heaven itself that points out an hereafter,
And intimates eternity to man.
—If there's a Power above us,
And that there is all Nature cries aloud
Through all her works, he must delight in virtue,
And that which he delights in must be happy.
Nor is ease more contrary to wit than to sublimity; the celebrated stanza of Cowley, on a lady elaborately dressed, loses nothing of its freedom by the spirit of the sentiment:
Th' adorning thee with so much art
Is but a barb'rous skill;
'Tis like the pois'ning of a dart,
Too apt before to kill.