th to a poet. To the satirist the mere outward
motives of life are enough. Vanity, pride, avarice--these, and the
other external vices, are the strings of his unmusical lyre. But the
poet need only unroof his own heart. All that makes happiness or
misery under every roof of the wide world, whether of palace or
hovel, is working also in that narrow yet boundless sphere. On that
little stage the great drama of life is acted daily. There the
creation, the tempting, and the fall, may be seen anew. In that
withdrawing closet, solitude whispers her secrets, and death uncovers
his face. There sorrow takes up her abode, to make ready a pillow and
a resting-place for the weary head of love, whom the world casts out.
To the poet nothing is mean, but every thing on earth is a fitting
altar to the supreme beauty.

"But I am wandering. As for the poets of Queen Anne's reign, it is
enough to prove what a kennel standard of poetry was then
established, that Swift's smutchy verses are not even yet excluded
from the collections. What disgusting stuff, too, in Prior and
Parnell! Yet Swift, perhaps, as the best writer of English whom that
period produced. Witness his prose. Pope treated the English language
as the image-man has served the bust of Shakspeare yonder. To rid it
of some external soils, he has rubbed it down till there is no
muscular expression left. It looks very much as his own 'mockery king
of snow' must have done after it had begun to melt. Pope is for ever
mixing water with the good old mother's milk of our tongue. You
cannot get a straightforward speech out of him. A great deal of his
poetry is so incased in verbiage, that it puts me in mind of those
important-looking packages which boys are fond of sending to their
friends. We unfold envelope after envelope, and at last find a couple
of cherry-stones. But in Pope we miss the laugh which in the other
case follows the culmination of the joke. He makes Homer lisp like
the friar in Chaucer and Ajax and Belinda talk exactly alike.

"_John._--Well, we are not discussing the merits of Pope, but of the
archaisms which have been introduced into modern poetry. What you say
of the Bible has some force in it. The forms of speech used in our
version of it will always impress the mind, even if applied to an
enti