nd vivification of the hearing
soul, which this perpetual music infuses, united to the same simplicity of
the thought and the words, will not easily be found in English. Again,
rhyme seems wanted to the richness of the harmony. Yet how shall rhyme
allow that utmost freedom and range in the flow of the thought which marks
the now majestically, now impetuously sweeping, Homeric river? That
measure, so _measured_, and yet so free; large, various, capacious--that
hexameter is despair. Meanwhile no nation concludes to forego the
incorporation of the great foreign works of literature into its own,
merely for such discouragement, merely because the adequate representation
lies wholly out of reach. We have gained much in bringing over the
powerful matter, if we must leave the style behind, and yet the style is
almost a part of the matter.

Homer is out of hand--Iliad and Odyssey. The Maeonian sun has ripened the
powers of the occidental poet. And Pope--_aged thirty-seven_--declares
that henceforward he will write _from_, as well as _to_, his own mind.
The "ESSAY ON MAN" follows. It expresses that graver study of the
universal subject, MAN, which appeared to Pope, now self-known, to be, for
the time of poetical literature to which he came, the most
practicable--for his own ability the aptest; and it embodies that part of
anthropology which doubtless was the most congenial to his own
inclination--the philosophical contemplation of man's nature, estate,
destiny.

The success of this enterprise was astonishing. Be the philosophy what and
whose it may, the poem revived to the latest age of poetry the phenomenon
of the first, when precept and maxim were modulated into verse, that they
might write themselves in every brain, and live upon every tongue.

The spirit and sweetness of the verse, the lucid and vivid expression, the
pregnant brevity of the meanings, the marrying of ardent and lofty
poetical imagings to moral sentiments and reflections, of which every
bosom is the birth-home, the pious will of the argument, which humbles the
proud and rebellious human intellect under the absolute rectitude and
benevolence of the Deity--nor least of all, the pleasure of receiving
easily, as in a familiar speech, thoughts that _were_ high, and _might be_
abstruse, that, at all events, wore a profound and philosophical air--with
strokes intervening of a now playful, now piercing, but always adroit
wit--and with touches, here and there strewn b