felicities of grave, compacted
statement as will hardly be surpassed. The assuaging, marmoreal majesty of
the concluding lines of the poem are a final demonstration of the virtue
of this formal dignity in poetry. If it did not appear invidious, one
would like to quote by way of contrast some lines oddly parallel, but on a
pitch deliberately subdued to a less rhetorical level, from what is
indubitably one of the very greatest poems written in our own century, Mr.
Eliot's _Four Quartets_:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

From _The Vanity of Human Wishes_:

Still raise for good the supplicating voice,
But leave to heav'n the measure and the choice,
Safe in his pow'r, whose eyes discern afar
The secret ambush of a specious pray'r.
Implore his aid, in his decisions rest,
Secure whate'er he gives, he gives the best....
Pour forth thy fervours for a healthful mind,
Obedient passions, and a will resign'd;
For love, which scarce collective man can fill;
For patience sov'reign o'er transmuted ill;
For faith, that panting for a happier seat,
Counts death kind Nature's signal of retreat:
These goods for man the laws of heav'n ordain,
These goods he grants, who grants the pow'r to gain;
With these celestial wisdom calms the mind,
And makes the happiness she does not find.

_The Vanity of Human Wishes_ is reproduced from a copy in the William
Andrews Clark Memorial Library; the _Rambler_ papers from copies in
possession of Professor E.N. Hooker. The lines from T.S. Eliot's _Four
Quartets_ are quoted with the permission of Harcourt, Brace and Company.

_Bertrand H. Bronson
University of California
Berkeley_

THE VANITY OF HUMAN WISHES.

THE
Tenth Satire of _Juvenal_,
IMITATED
By _SAMUEL JOHNSON_.

LONDON:

Printed for R. DODSLEY at Tully's Head in Pall-Mall,
and Sold by M. COOPER in Pater-noster Row.

M.DCC.XLIX.

THE
TENTH SATIRE
OF
_JUVENAL_.

Let[a] Observation with extensive View,
Survey Mankind, from _China_ to _Peru_;
Remark each anxious Toil, each eager Strife,
And watch the busy Scenes of crouded Life;
Then say ho