Each gift of nature, and each grace of art,

do not yield their full intention to the running reader. One line,
indeed,--the eighth from the end (361)--has perhaps never been
satisfactorily explained by any commentator. (The eighteenth paragraph of
Johnson's first sermon might go far to clarify it.) But such difficulties
are worth the effort they demand, because there is always a rational and
unesoteric solution to be gained.

The work as a whole has form, is shapely, even dramatic; but it is
discontinuous and episodic in its conduct, and is most memorable in its
separate parts. No one can forget the magnificent "set pieces" of Wolsey
and Charles XII; but hardly less noteworthy are the two parallel
invocations interspersed, the one addressed to the young scholar, the
other to young beauties "of rosy lips and radiant eyes",--superb
admonitions both, each containing such felicities of grave, compacted
statement as will hardly be surpassed. The assuaging, marmoreal majesty of
the concluding lines of the poem are a final demonstration of the virtue
of this formal dignity in poetry. If it did not appear invidious, one
would like to quote by way of contrast some lines oddly parallel, but on a
pitch deliberately subdued to a less rhetorical level, from what is
indubitably one of the very greatest poems written in our own century, Mr.
Eliot's _Four Quartets_:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.