in the Iliad, who intermeddle for or against the human characters, Pope
introduced the Sylphs of the Rosicrucian philosophy. We may measure
the distance between imagination and fancy, if we will compare these
little filagree creatures with Shakspere's elves, whose occupation it
was

"To tread the ooze of the salt deep,
Or run upon the sharp wind of the north, . . .
Or on the beached margent of the sea,
To dance their ringlets to the whispering wind."

Very different were the offices of Pope's fays:

"Our humble province is to tend the fair;
Not a less pleasing, though less glorious, care;
To save the powder from too rude a gale,
Nor let the imprisoned essences exhale. . . .
Nay oft in dreams invention we bestow
To change a flounce or add a furbelow."

Pope was not a great poet; it has been doubted whether he was a poet at
all. He does not touch the heart, or stimulate the imagination, as the
true poet always does. In the poetry of nature, and the poetry of
passion, he was altogether impotent. {186} His _Windsor Forest_ and
his _Pastorals_ are artificial and false, not written with "the eye
upon the object." His epistle of _Eloisa to Abelard_ is declamatory
and academic, and leaves the reader cold. The only one of his poems
which is at all possessed with feeling is his pathetic _Elegy to the
Memory of an Unfortunate Lady_. But he was a great literary artist.
Within the cramped and starched regularity of the heroic couplet, which
the fashion of the time and his own habit of mind imposed upon him, he
secured the largest variety of modulation and emphasis of which that
verse was capable. He used antithesis, periphrasis, and climax with
great skill. His example dominated English poetry for nearly a
century, and even now, when a poet like Dr. Holmes, for example, would
write satire or humorous verse of a dignified kind, he turns
instinctively to the measure and manner of Pope. He was not a
consecutive thinker, like Dryden, and cared less about the truth of his
thought than about the pointedness of its expression. His language was
closer-grained than Dryden's. His great art was the art of putting
things. He is more quoted than any other English poet, but Shakspere.
He struck the average intelligence, the common sense of English
readers, and furnished it with neat, portable formulas, so that it no
longer needed to "vent its observation in mangled terms," but could
pour itself out com