ic as to require the smoothness, the
numbers, and the turn of heroic poetry in this poem, I must tell him,
that if he has not read Horace, I have studied him, and hope the style
of his epistles is not ill imitated here. The expressions of a poem
designed purely for instruction, ought to be plain and natural, and yet
majestic: for here the poet is presumed to be a kind of lawgiver, and
those three qualities which I have named, are proper to the legislative
style. The florid, elevated, and figurative way is for the passions; for
love and hatred, fear and anger, are begotten in the soul, by showing
their objects out of their true proportion, either greater than the life
or less: but instruction is to be given by showing them what they
naturally are. A man is to be cheated into passion, but to be reasoned
into truth.

* * * * *

Dim as the borrow'd beams of moon and stars
To lonely, weary, wandering travellers,
Is reason to the soul: and as on high,
Those rolling fires discover but the sky,
Not light us here; so reason's glimmering ray
Was lent, not to assure our doubtful way,
But guide us upward to a better day.
And as those nightly tapers disappear
When day's bright lord ascends our hemisphere;
So pale grows reason at religion's sight; 10
So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light.
Some few, whose lamp shone brighter, have been led
From cause to cause, to nature's secret head;
And found that one first principle must be:
But what, or who, that UNIVERSAL HE:
Whether some soul encompassing this ball,
Unmade, unmoved; yet making, moving all;
Or various atoms' interfering dance
Leap'd into form, the noble work of chance;
Or this Great All was from eternity; 20
Not even the Stagyrite himself could see;
And Epicurus guess'd as well as he:
As blindly groped they for a future state;
As rashly judged of providence and fate:
But least of all could their endeavours find
What most concern'd the good of human kind:
For happiness was never to be found,
But vanish'd from them like enchanted ground.
One thought Content the good to be enjoy'd--
This every little accident destroy'd: 30
The wiser madmen did for Virtue toil--
A thorny, or at best a barren soil:
In Pleasure some their glutton souls would steep;
But found their line too short, t