"To know much, and to think we nothing know;
Nothing to have, yet think we have enowe;
In skill to want, and wanting seek for more;
In weale nor want, nor wish for greater store.
Envy ye monarchs, with your proud excesse,
At our low sayle and our high happiness.

Satire 6, Book iv.

Some of Dryden's lines are very forcible and condensed, as:

"Faith is not built on disquisitions vain;

The things we must believe are few and plain.”

Religio Laici.

"Thus man by his own strength to heaven would soar,

And would not be obliged to God for more."— Religio Laici.

THE INSPIRED WRITERS.

"Whence but from heaven could man unskilled in arts,

In several ages born, in several parts,

Weave such agreeing truths? Or how or why

Should all conspire to cheat us with a lie?

Unasked their pains, ungrateful their advice;

Starving their gain, and martyrdom their price."

THE CROSS.

Religio Laici.

"See God descending in thy human frame;
The offended suffering in the offender's name;
All thy misdeeds to him imputed see,

And all his righteousness devolved on thee."

Pope was very fond of involving his meaning in couplets. Whole poems are little else than a collection of couplets;

hence he is often sententious, and sometimes epygramatic without knowing it; as in the following, from the Essay on Man:

"Count all the advantage prosperous vice attains,

"Tis but what virtue flies from and disdains."

Other examples from the same poem are too familiar to be repeated; but he often writes downright epigrams, as when he gives the reply of the profuse Duke of Buckingham to the frugal Sir John Cutler:

66

His grace's fate sage Cutler could foresee,

And well (he thought) advised him, 'Live like me.'
As well his grace replied: Like you, Sir John?

That I can do when all I have is gone.""

MORAL ESSAYS, Epistle iii. lines 315–318.

Dr. Young, though he writes in blank verse, has much of the versified gnome in his poetry, as:

"God is a spirit; spirits cannot strike

Our gross material organs; God by man
As much is seen, as man a God can see."
"Death's terror is the mountain faith removes."

"Like our shadows,

Our wishes lengthen as our sun declines."

"Your learning, like the lunar beam, affords

Light, but not heat; it leaves you undevout,
Frozen at heart, while speculation shines."

The following, from his Satires, is a beautiful epigram
"Pleasures are few, and fewer we enjoy ;

Pleasure, like quicksilver, is bright and coy;
We strive to grasp it with our utmost skill,
Still it eludes us, and it glitters still.

If seized at last, compute your mighty gains, —
What is it but rank poison in your veins ?

Another example:

LOVE OF FAME, Satire 5.

"Phillis and her Damon met;

Eternal love exactly hits her taste;

Phillis demands eternal love at least.

Embracing Phillis, with soft, smiling eyes,

Eternal love I vow, the swain replies.

Another :

But say, my all, my mistress, and my friend,
What day next week the eternity shall end!"
Love of Fame, Satire 5.

"Can wealth give happiness? Look round and see
What gay distress! What splendid misery!
Whatever fortune lavishly can pour

The mind annihilates, and calls for more.
Wealth is a cheat, believe not what it says,
Like any lord it promises and -pays.”

- Satire 5.

Cowper as a moralist, is of course sententious: "Search the least path creative power has trod, How plain the footsteps of the apparent God."

Again:

Again:

"How hard a vicious habit to erase;

Fond of the sin, and blind to the disgrace."

"But haughty still, and loath himself to blame,
He calls on Nature's self to share the shame;
And charged all faults upon the fleshly form
She gave to clog the soul and feast the worm."

This last sentiment was anticipated even by Homer in the Odyssey, Lib. I., line 31–33.

"Perverse mankind, whose wills created free,
Charge all their woes on absolute decree;
All to the dooming gods their guilt translate,
And follies are miscalled the crimes of fate."

The following lines from a poem entitled "The Deity," are eminently beautiful:

"Nor yet thy power thy chosen train forsook,

When through Arabia's sand their way they took;
By day thy cloud was present to the sight,
Thy fiery pillar led the march by night;
Thy hand amid the waste their table spread,

With feathered viands and with heavenly bread;
When the dry wilderness no stream supplied,
Gushed from the yielding rock the vital tide;
What limits can Omnipotence confine?
What obstacles oppose the arm divine?

Since stones and waves their settled laws forego, -
Since seas can harden and since rocks can flow."

Our own poet, Whittier, is far from aiming to write sentences. In him the didactic seems to be lost in the lyrical. He always addresses the heart, and assumes the plainest doctrines, and sings, not their proofs, but their impressions. He is not like the coach-light that flames on the street through which the vehicle rolls, but the red lamp that gleams behind the colored liquid in the apothecary's window. Yet always actuated by a deeply moral tone, he cannot help sometimes deviating into the sententious; as in the following, from the Chapel of the Hermits:

The stone from the mouth of the sepulchre rolled,

And Nature, like Lazarus, rise as of old.

Let our faith, which in darkness and coldness has lain,
Revive with the warmth and the brightness again,

And in blooming of flower and budding of tree,

The symbols and types of our destiny see.

The life of the spring-time, the life of the whole,

And as sun to the sleeping earth, love to the soul." — p. 76.

Again, in the programme of the dedication of the High School, Newbury, Nov. 2, 1849:

"Nor heed the sceptic's puny hand,

While near her school the church-spire stands;
Nor fear the blinded bigot's rule,

While near her church-spire stands the school."

I should be very indiscreet to preface my verses with such fine specimens if I had the least intention of breaking a lance with such accomplished writers. Indeed it is a part of my design that the contrast should be noted. I say at 1 i.e., our State, old Massachusetts, heed not, etc.

once, see how their gold shines over my dross. My aim is to be simple and plain, to present the beauty of naked truth, and to reach the memory through the heart. I allow that the following lines have none of the attention-distracting beauties of true poetry; but that, like an autumnal apple tree, they may be valued for their fruit, though all their blossoms may have fallen to the ground.