Where’er you find ‘the cooling western breeze,’
In the next line ‘it whispers through the trees’;
If crystal streams ‘with pleasing murmurs creep,’
The reader’s threatened, not in vain, with ‘sleep.’”
Yet Pope himself was addicted to these circumlocutions and to threadbare mythological allusions, quite as much as the small wits whom he ridiculed. The manly genius of Cowper broke through these traditionary fetters, and relieved poetry from the spell in which Pope and his imitators had bound its phraseology and rhythm. Expressing his contempt for the “creamy smoothness” of such verse, in which sentiment was so often
“Sacrificed to sound,
And truth cut short to make a period round,”
he cried:
“Give me the line that ploughs its stately course,
Like a proud swan, conquering the stream by force;