uid burnings dreadful colours shew,
Some deeply red, and others faintly blue.

And a war-horse!

His eye-balls burn, he wounds the smoking plain,
And knots of scarlet ribbon deck his mane.

And a demon!

Provoking demons all restraint remove.

Here is more eighteenth-century "propriety":

The hills forget they're fixed, and in their fright
Cast off their weight, and ease themselves for flight.
The woods, with terror winged, out-fly the wind,
And leave the heavy, panting hills behind.

Again, from Nat Lee's _Alexander the Great_:

When Glory, like the dazzling eagle, stood
Perched on my beaver in the Granic flood;
When Fortune's self my standard trembling bore,
And the pale Fates stood 'frighted on the shore.

Of these lines, with another couplet, Dr. Warburton said that they
"contain not only the most sublime but the most judicious imagery that
poetry could conceive or paint." And here are lines from a tragedy, for
me anonymous:

Should the fierce North, upon his frozen wings,
Bear him aloft above the wondering clouds,
And seat him in the Pleiads' golden chariot,
Thence should my fury drag him down to tortures.

Again:

Kiss, while I watch thy swimming eye-balls roll,
Watch thy last gasp, and catch thy springing soul.

It was the age of common-sense, we are told, and truly; but of common-
sense now and then dissatisfied, common-sense here and there ambitious,
common-sense of a distinctively adult kind taking on an innocent tone. I
find this little affectation in Pope's word "sky" where a simpler poet
would have "skies" or "heavens." Pope has "sky" more than once, and
always with a little false air of simplicity. And one instance occurs in
that masterly and most beautiful poem, the "Elegy on an Unfortunate
Lady":

Is there no bright reversion in the sky?

"Yes, my boy, we may hope so," is the reader's implicit mental aside, if
the reader be a man of humour. Let me, however, suggest no disrespect
towards this lovely elegy, of which the last eight lines have an
inimitable greatness, a tenderness and passion which the "Epistle of
Eloisa" makes convulsive movements to attain but never attains. And yet
how could one, by an example, place the splendid seventeenth century in
closer--in slighter yet more significant--comparison with the eighteenth
than thus? Here is Ben Jonson:

What beckoning ghost, besprent with April dew,
Hails me s