The highest rank of poets descend on their sublime subjects, like Uriel,
descending alongst his sunbeam on the mountain tops; another order, with
care, and effort, and circumspection, often with

'Labour dire and weary woe,'

reach noble heights, and there wave their hats, and dance in
astonishment at their own perseverance and success. So it is with Pope
in his peroration to the Dunciad, and in many other of the serious and
really eloquent passages of his works. They ARE eloquent, brilliant, in
composition faultless; but the intense self-consciousness of their
author, and their visible elaboration, prevent them from seeming or
being great. Of Pope, you say, "He smells of the midnight lamp;" of
Dante, boys cried out on the street, "Lo! the man that was in hell."
With the very first class of poets, artificial objects become natural,
the "rod" becomes a "serpent;" with Pope, natural objects become
artificial, the "serpent" becomes a "rod." Wordsworth makes a spade
poetical; Pope would have made Skiddaw little better than a mass of
prose.

Let us hear Hazlitt: "Pope saw nature only dressed by art; he judged of
beauty by fashion; he sought for truth in the opinions of the world; he
judged the feelings of others by his own. The capacious soul of
Shakspeare had an intuitive and mighty sympathy with whatever could
enter into the heart of man in all possible circumstances; Pope had an
exact knowledge of all that he himself loved or hated, wished or wanted.
Milton has winged his daring flight from heaven to earth, through Chaos
and old Night; Pope's Muse never wandered in safety, but from his
library to his grotto, or from his grotto into his library, back again.