ginality which his early
works belie. If he had been capable of higher flights, it would have
done him no honour to have employed his melodious verse in piecing
together stale, vapid, and often paltry ideas.

Johnson, to be sure, was of opinion that Pope in his Pastorals had
copied "the poems of antiquity with judicious selection," but this
approbation he does not seem to deserve. A large volume might be
composed consisting solely of faults which had their counterpart in
works of genius. The homage Pope paid to famous names seduced his
immature taste into the admiration of many a vicious passage, and he
endeavoured to emulate or outdo the frigid and hyperbolical conceits of
his prototypes. Throughout the Pastorals, for instance, the phenomena,
which are the effects of the seasons, are ascribed to the presence or
absence of the nymphs whom his minstrels celebrate. In spring, the skies
mourn in showers, the birds are hushed, and the flowers are closed till
Delia smiles, when forthwith the skies brighten, the flowers bloom, and
the birds sing. In summer, the shepherd boasts that the breezes shall
wait upon his heroine, and blow in the places where she walks; that the
trees where she sits shall crowd into a shade; that the flowers shall
rise up from the soil where she treads; and that vegetation shall
flourish where she turns her eyes. In autumn, the birds neglect their
song, the leaves fall from the trees, and the flowers droop because
Delia has gone away. In winter, the heavens are obscured by clouds, the
verdure has withered, the flocks refuse to graze the meadows, the bees
neglect their honey, and the streams overflow with tears because Daphne
is dead. This last pastoral, which was Pope's favourite, turns mainly on
the notion that winter is the consequence of heaven and earth deploring
the death of Mrs. Tempest. "Such," says Sandys, "is the sweetness and
power of poesy, as it makes that appear which were in prose both false
and ridiculous, to resemble the truth." Poetic fancy is separated from
extravagance by narrow boundaries; but there must be some affinity to
truth, or the understanding is repelled instead of the imagination being
captivated. No ideas can have less to recommend them than the hollow
rhapsodies of the Pastorals, for they are at once obvious and absurd.
"Poetry," said Wordsworth, "is the image of man and nature," and Pope's
fantastic superlatives are the image of neither. They never approximate
to the e