pigram in satire, the maxim in serious work. It became a poetry of
aphorisms, instruction us with Pope that

"Virtue alone is happiness below;"

or, with Young, that

"Procrastination is the thief of time;"

or, with Johnson, that

"Slow rises worth by poverty depressed."

When it attempted to deal concretely with the passions, it found itself
impotent. Pope's "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard" rings hollow: it is
rhetoric, not poetry. The closing lines of "The Dunciad"--so strangely
overpraised by Thackeray--with their metallic clank and grandiose
verbiage, are not truly imaginative. The poet is simply working himself
up to a climax of the false sublime, as an orator deliberately attaches a
sounding peroration to his speech. Pope is always "heard," never
"overheard."

The poverty of the classical period in lyrical verse is particularly
significant, because the song is the most primitive and spontaneous kind
of poetry, and the most direct utterance of personal feeling. Whatever
else the poets of Pope's time could do, they could not sing. They are
the despair of the anthologists.[30] Here and there among the brilliant
reasoners, _raconteurs_, and satirists in verse, occurs a clever
epigrammatist like Prior, or a ballad writer like Henry Carey, whose
"Sally in Our Alley" shows the singing, and not talking, voice, but
hardly the lyric cry. Gay's "Blackeyed Susan" has genuine quality,
though its _rococo_ graces are more than half artificial. Sweet William
is very much such an opera sailor-man as Bumkinet or Grubbinol is a
shepherd, and his wooing is beribboned with conceits like these:

"If to fair India's coast we sail,
Thy eyes are seen in diamonds bright,
Thy breath is Afric's spicy gale,
Thy skin is ivory so white.
Thus every beauteous prospect that I view,
Wakes in my soul some charm of lovely Sue."

It was the same with the poetry of outward nature as with the poetry of
human passion.[31] In Addison's "Letter from Italy," in Pope's
"Pastorals," and "Windsor Forest," the imagery, when not actually false,
is vague and conventional, and the language abounds in classical
insipidities, epithets that describe nothing, and generalities at second
hand from older poets, who may once, perhaps, have written with their
"eyes upon the object." Blushing Flora paints the enameled ground;
cheerful murmurs fluctuate on the gale; Eridanus through flowery meadows
strays; gay g