Pope perfected the music and elegance of the English verse. Drawn out of chaos by old Chaucer; softened by Spenser; twisted into pliancy by Surrey; subtilized by Cowley; smoothed by Waller; strongly and beautifully modelled by Dryden;—it still wanted the finishing touch, and this, Pope gave. But he was more than an accomplished linguist. A skilful satirist, a touching eulogist, a philosophic tutor, and in fine, in spite of bodily infirmities, a good and amiable man,20 his life was like the passage of a health-infusing river through the sands of the earth. Useful to all within reach of its influence; when the stream curdled in its bed, the loss was deeply felt. And although the poet's works remain among us, it is only as the cedar and palm remain upon the banks of the once living stream. "So good a man was he, his presence doubled their beauty."21
L. L.
20 I have been particular in noticing Pope's goodness of heart, because the devotees of Addison have spoken of him as "twisted in body and mind—as peevish as he was deformed."
21 Surgeons and critics love new subjects, and the latter have so raked up from the dunghills of the forgotten past, poets (God save the mark!) innumerable. To mention in this paper the names of one half would be bringing sad company to old Chaucer and his great successors; however, the other half is made up of no mean names. Lydgate, James I, of Scotland, Skelton, Gawin, Douglass, Lord Rochford, Lord Vaux, Gascoigne, Marlowe, Churchyard, Tuberville, Sir Walter Raleigh, Silvester, (translator of Du Bartal,) Fairfax, Beaumont and Fletcher, Chapman, Carew, Quarles, Drummond, Lovelace, (the cavalier and lover of Althea,) Herrick, Marvel, Cotton, Walton, Lee, Shadwell, and one or two others, I have passed over with regret.
For the Southern Literary Messenger.
HANS PHAALL—A TALE.
BY EDGAR A. POE.
By late accounts from Rotterdam that city seems to be in a singularly high state of philosophical excitement. Indeed phenomena have there occurred of a nature so completely unexpected, so entirely novel, so utterly at variance with pre-conceived opinions, as to leave no doubt on my mind that long ere this all Europe is in an uproar, all Physics in a ferment, all Dynamics and Astronomy together by the ears.