"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 so solemnly to yonder yew?

And this is Pope's improvement:

What beckoning ghost along the moonlight shade
Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?

But Pope follows this insipid couplet with two lines as exquisitely and
nobly modulated as anything I know in that national metre:

'Tis she! but why that bleeding bosom gored,
Why dimly gleams the visionary sword?

That indeed is "music" in English verse--the counterpart of a great
melody, not of a tune.

The eighteenth century matched its desire for wildness in poetry with a
like craving in gardens. The symmetrical and architectural garden, so
magnificent in Italy, and stately though more rigid and less glorious in