"Vital spark of heavenly flame,
Quit, oh! quit this mortal frame;
Trembling, hoping, lingering, flying—
Oh! the pain, the bliss of dying!
Cease, fond Nature, cease thy strife,
And let me languish into life.

"Hark! they whisper; angels say,
Sister spirit, come away.

What is this absorbs me quite-
Steals my senses, shuts my sight,
Drowns my spirits, draws my breath?
Tell me, my soul, can this be death?
The world recedes, it disappears!
Heaven opens on my eyes; my ears
With sounds seraphic ring;

Lend, lend your wings! I mount, I fly!

O Grave, where is thy victory?

O Death, where is thy sting?"

You will notice in reading Pope for the first time how many familiar lines are found in his poetry; lines, perhaps, you have heard without knowing from whence they came. There are few writers so much quoted, and I think it can be proven that a volume of Pope furnishes more familiar quotations than any other in our language except the Bible and Shakspeare. This is because the lines are so even and flowing that they are apt to stick in the memory, as well as because they are so witty and full of point.

Pope's influence on his own age and on the whole century in which he lived was very great. During his life he was a poetical oracle, and he put poesy into a bondage from which it was not freed for a hundred years. Almost every poet up to the last of the eighteenth century, was a follower of Pope. During all these years poetry kept a dead level of correctness until a few men of strong and original genius arose who broke its bonds, and gave it again some of the free and untamed spirit that had inspired it in the Elizabethan Age.

Died 1721.

TALK XXXVI.

ON PRIOR, GAY AND PARNELL.

FAR below Pope, in rank, come Prior, Gay and Parnell, all of whom were his friends or acquaintances. Matthew Prior, a man of the world, and a politician who held Born 1664. several fat offices, found leisure to write a great many lines and in a variety of styles-lyrics, narrative poems, epitaphs, epistles and others. He wrote a dull poem on Solomon on the Vanities of the World, and another, equally tiresome, called Alma, or the Progress of the Mind. We shall probably never get further in our knowledge of these than the titles. His best poems are his shortest ones, and I shall dismiss Prior with one of the prettiest of these short lyrics.

"The pride of every grove I chose

The violet sweet and lily fair,
The dappled pink and blushing rose
To deck my charming Chloe's hair.
"At morn the nymphs vouchsafed to place
Upon her brows the various wreath,
The flower less blooming than her face,

66

The scent less fragrant than her breath.

The flowers she wore along the day,
And every nymph and shepherd said
That in her hair they looked more gay
Than glowing in their native bed.
"Undressed at evening, when she found
Their odours lost, their colours past,
She changed her look, and on the ground
Her garland and her eyes she cast.

"That eye dropped sense distinct and clear
As any muse's tongue could speak,

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When from its lid a pearly tear

Ran trickling down her beauteous cheek.
Dissembling what I knew foo well,

'My life, my love,' I said, 'explain
This change of humour; prithee tell-
This falling tear-what does it mean?'
“She sighed, she smiled; and to the flowers
Pointing, the lovely moralist said,
See, friend, in some few fleeting hours,
See, yonder, what a change is made.'
"Ah! me, the blooming pride of May
And that of beauty are but one:

At morn both flourish bright and gay,
Both fade at evening, pale and gone.
"At dawn poor Stella laughed and sung;
The amorous youth around her bowed;
At night her fatal knell was rung.
I saw, and kissed her in her shroud.
"Such as she is, who died to-day,
Such I, alas, may be to-morrow.
Go, Damon, bid thy muse display
The justice of thy Chloe's sorrow."

Died 1732.

John Gay, born in the same year with Pope, much beloved by him in life and mourned by him at his death, was one of the most amiable of all these Born 1688. poets, and was known as a man too good-natured for his own advantage. He began by writing pastoral poems, which really contained some natural pictures of country life, in contrast to most pastorals, which are as stiff and unlike nature as possible. After these, Gay wrote, in contrast to his earlier works, a long epic called Trivia, or The Art of Walking the Streets of London, in which he describes city scenes. This last poem is to me exceedingly dull, the only merit I find in it being that the street scenes it paints are interesting as a study of the times. After these achievements in verse he began to write dramas, none of them drawing much attention till he wrote the Beggars' Opera, which brought him both fame and money. The

characters in this were highwaymen and thieves, the lowest characters in Newgate prison, but they were depicted with humor, accompanied by a biting satire against follies which were found to exist as well in the highest society as among thieves. The hero is the highwayman, Macheath, who narrowly escapes hanging. In one place he says: "As to conscience and nasty morals, I have as few drawbacks upon my pleasures as any man of quality in England; in these I am not in the least vulgar," and Polly, the heroine, says pertly, "A woman knows how to be mercenary, though she has never been in a court or an assembly." Besides such hits as these at the follies and vice of the age, some of the lines contain a vast deal of cynical wisdom. One of the rogues exclaims over his cups, "The present time is ours, and nobody alive has more." "Well I forgive you," says Mrs. Peachum to Polly, "as far as one woman can forgive another."

After the great success of The Beggars' Opera, Gay wrote a sequel called Polly, which, as almost always happens when one tries to repeat a success, was greatly inferior to the first. Yet he made money by it, and was able to retire in comfortable circumstances, leading a life of retirement the rest of his days. His latest works were fables in rhyme, inclosing a shrewd and wholesome moral. Here is one of the best:

When bordering pinks and roses bloom,
And every garden breathes perfume-
When peaches glow with sunny dyes,
Like Laura's cheek when blushes rise;
When with huge figs the branches bend;
When clusters from the vine depend,
The snail looks round on flower and tree,
And cries All these were made for me.'
"What dignity's in human nature?'
Says Man, the most conceited creature,
As from a cliff he cast his eye
And viewed the sea and arched sky.
The sun was sunk beneath the main;
The moon and all the starry train
Hung the vast vault of heaven, the man
His contemplation thus began:

"When I behold this glorious show
And the wide watery world below,
The scaly people of the main.

The beasts that range the woods of plain,
The wing'd inhabitants of air,

The night, the day, the various year,

And know all these by Heaven designed

As gifts to pleasure human-kind,

I cannot raise my voice too high

One of the prettiest things Gay ever wrote is the ballad of Black Eyed Susan, which gave a later writer, Douglas Jerrold, the title for a comedy. And let us note here that one thing for which Gay deserves credit is, that he did not write like so many of his compeers about Dukes and Duchesses, but that in the Beggar's Opera he contrives to wake an interest in the human nature common to all men and women,