_Speed the soft intercourse_ from soul to soul,
And waft a sigh from _Indus_ to the _Pole_.
_Eloisa_.
There is another passage in "Howell's Letters," which has a great
affinity with a thought of Pope, who, in "the Rape of the Lock," says,
Fair tresses man's imperial race ensnare,
And _beauty draws us with a single hair_.
Howell writes, p. 290, "'Tis a powerful sex:--they were too strong for
the first, the strongest and wisest man that was; they must needs be
strong, when _one hair of a woman can draw more than an hundred pair of
oxen_."
Pope's description of the death of the lamb, in his "Essay on Man," is
finished with the nicest touches, and is one of the finest pictures our
poetry exhibits. Even familiar as it is to our ear, we never examine it
but with undiminished admiration.
The _lamb_, thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?
Pleased to the last he crops the flowery food,
And licks the hand just rais'd to shed his blood.
After pausing on the last two fine verses, will not the reader smile
that I should conjecture the image might originally have been discovered
in the following humble verses in a poem once considered not as
contemptible:
A gentle _lamb_ has rhetoric to plead,
And when she sees the butcher's knife decreed,
Her voice entreats him not to make her bleed.
DR. KING'S _Mully of Mountown_.
This natural and affecting image might certainly have been observed by
Pope, without his having perceived it through the less polished lens of
the telescope of Dr. King. It is, however, a _similarity_, though it
may not be an _imitation_; and is given as an example of that art in
composition which can ornament the humblest conception, like the
graceful vest thrown over naked and sordid beggary.