were written between 1700 and 1726 by Addison himself,
Pope, Lady Winchilsea, Gay, Parnell, Dyer, and many others. Nature
worshippers they were not. Nature lovers they can be justly styled,--if
such love may discriminate between the beautiful and the ugly aspects
of the natural. It is characteristic that Berkeley, in his _Prospect of
Planting Arts and Learning in America_, does not indulge the fancy that
the wilderness is of itself uplifting; it requires, he assumes, the aid
of human culture and wisdom,--"the rise of empire and of arts,"--to
develop its potentialities.

A generation which placidly adhered to the orthodox sentiments of its
predecessors was of course not moved to revolutionize poetical theories
or forms. Its theories are authoritatively stated in Pope's _Essay on
Criticism_; they embrace principles of good sense and mature taste which
are easier to condemn than to confute or supersede. In poetical diction
the age cultivated clearness, propriety, and dignity: it rejected words
so minutely particular as to suggest pedantry or specialization; and
it refused to sacrifice simple appropriateness to inaccurate vigor of
utterance or meaningless beauty of sound. Its favorite measure, the
decasyllabic couplet, moulded by Jonson, Sandys, Waller, Denham, and
Dryden, it accepted reverently, as an heirloom not to be essentially
altered but to be polished until it shone more brightly than ever. Pope
perfected this form, making it at once more artistic and more natural. He
discountenanced on the one hand run-on lines, alexandrines, hiatus, and
sequence of monosyllables; on the other, the resort to expletives and the
mechanical placing of caesura. If his verse does not move with the "long
resounding pace" of Dryden at his best, it has a movement better suited
to the drawing-room: it is what Oliver Wendell Holmes terms

The straight-backed measure with the stately stride.

Thus in form as in substance the poetry of the period voiced the mood,
not of carefree youth, nor yet of vehement early manhood, but of still
vigorous middle age,--a phase of existence perhaps less ingratiating than
others, but one which has its rightful hour in the life of the race as of
the individual. The sincere and artistic expression of its feelings will
be denied poetical validity only by those whose capacity for appreciating
the varieties of poetry is limited by their lack of experience or by
narrowness of sympathetic imagination.

II. ORT