o solemnly to yonder yew?

And this is Pope's improvement:

What beckoning ghost along the moonlight shade
Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?

But Pope follows this insipid couplet with two lines as exquisitely and
nobly modulated as anything I know in that national metre:

'Tis she! but why that bleeding bosom gored,
Why dimly gleams the visionary sword?

That indeed is "music" in English verse--the counterpart of a great
melody, not of a tune.

The eighteenth century matched its desire for wildness in poetry with a
like craving in gardens. The symmetrical and architectural garden, so
magnificent in Italy, and stately though more rigid and less glorious in
France, was scorned by the eighteenth-century poet-gardeners. Why?
Because it was "artificial," and the eighteenth century must have
"nature"--nay passion. There seems to be some plan of passion in Pope's
grotto, stuck with spar and little shells.

Truly the age of the "Rape of the Lock" and the "Elegy" was an age of
great wit and great poetry. Yet it was untrue to itself. I think no
other century has cherished so persistent a self-conscious incongruity.
As the century of good sense and good couplets it might have kept
uncompromised the dignity we honour. But such inappropriate pranks have
come to pass in history now and again. The Bishop of Hereford, in merry
Barnsdale, "danced in his boots"; but he was coerced by Robin Hood.

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