"Still green with bays each ancient altar stands,
Above the reach of sacrilegious hands;
Secure from flames, from envy's fiercer rage,
Destructive war, and all-involving age.
Hail, bards triumphant, born in happier days,
Immortal heirs of universal praise!
Whose honours with increase of ages grow,
As streams roll down, enlarging as they flow."
These lines come with double force and beauty on the reader, as they were dictated by the writer's despair of ever attaining that lasting glory which he celebrates with such disinterested enthusiasm in others, from the lateness of the age in which he lived, and from his writing in a tongue, not understood by other nations, and that grows obsolete and unintelligible to ourselves at the end of every second century. But he needed not have thus antedated his own poetical doom—the loss and entire oblivion of that which can never die. If he had known, he might have boasted that "his little bark" wafted down the stream of time,
"———With theirs should sail,
Pursue the triumph and partake the gale"—
if those who know how to set a due value on the blessing, were not the last to decide confidently on their own pretensions to it.
There is a cant in the present day about genius, as every thing in poetry: there was a cant in the time of Pope about sense, as performing all sorts of wonders. It was a kind of watchword, the shibboleth of a critical party of the day. As a proof of the exclusive attention which it occupied in their minds, it is remarkable that in the Essay on Criticism (not a very long poem) there are no less than half a score successive couplets rhyming to the word sense. This appears almost incredible without giving the instances, and no less so when they are given.
"But of the two, less dangerous is the offence,
To tire our patience than mislead our sense."—lines 3, 4.
"In search of wit these lose their common sense,
And then turn critics in their own defence."—l. 28, 29.
"Pride, where wit fails, steps in to our defence,
And fills up all the mighty void of sense."—l. 209, 10.
"Some by old words to fame have made pretence,
Ancients in phrase, mere moderns in their sense."—l. 324, 5.
" 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence;
The sound must seem an echo to the sense."—l. 364, 5.