'Such incense has perfum'd my throne!
Such eloquence my heart has won!
I think I guess the hand;
I know her wit and beauty too,
But why she sends a prayer so new,
I cannot understand.

To light some flames, and some revive,
To keep some others just alive,
Full oft I am implor'd;

But, with peculiar power to please,
To supplicate for nought but ease—
'Tis odd, upon my word!

'Tell her, with fruitless care I've sought,
And though my realms, with wonders fraught,
In remedies abound,

No grain of cold Indifference

Was ever yet allied to Sense

In all my fairy round.''

Occasionally, but seldom, we find a poet like Robert Nugent (Earl Nugent) trying to make the best of both worlds:

Happy when Reason deigns to guide,
Secure within the Golden Mean,
Who shuns the Stoic's senseless pride,
Nor wallows with the herd obscene.

He, nor with brow severely bent,

Chides Pleasure's smiling train away,

Nor careless of Life's great Intent,

With Folly wastes each heedless day."

Everywhere in the poetry of the earlier eighteenth century, we find this desire for indifference seeking

expression; everywhere in the later part of the century, we find a growing opposition to the Augustan ideal, a new desire for fullness of life.

"Oh Pleasure, come !-and far, far hence
Expel that nun Indifference!-
Where'er she waves her ebon wand,
Drenched in the dull Lethæan deep,
Behold the marble passions stand
Absorb'd in everlasting sleep!

Then from the waste, and barren mind
The Muse's fairy phantoms fly,

They fly, nor leave a wreck behind

Of heaven-descended poesy:

Love's thrilling tumults then are felt no more, Quenched is the generous heat, the rapturous throbs are o'er!"

-so sings James Scott, moved to lyric ecstasy.

John Byrom, doctor, shorthand enthusiast and poet, again and again opposed this worship of reason, in his verses. In Thoughts upon Human Reason he provides an antidote to the previously quoted Reason of Pomfret:

"Sense to discern, and reason to compare,
Are gifts that merit our improving care,
But want an inward light, when all is done,
As seeds and plants do that of outward sun :
Main help rejected, tasteless fruits arise;
And wisdom grows insipid in the wise.

Though all these Reason-worshippers profess
To guard against fanatical excess;
Enthusiastic heat, their favourite theme,
Draws their attention to the cold extreme;
Their fears of torrid fervour freeze a soul;
To shun the Zone, they send it to the Pole."

One final example of this new spirit of acceptance of feeling with its attendant joys and sorrows, and escape from reason, I will give, before quitting the subject. William Whitehead, once Poet Laureate, expressed the new attitude to life in

THE ENTHUSIAST: AN ODE

Once, I remember well the day,
'Twas ere the blooming sweets of May
Had lost their freshest hues,
When every flower on every hill,
In every vale had drunk its fill
Of sunshine and of dews.

'Twas then, beside a green-wood shade,
Which clothed a lawn's aspiring head,
I urged my devious way,
With loitering steps regardless where,
So soft, so genial was the air,
So wondrous bright the day.

These, these are joys alone," I cry;
""Tis here, divine Philosophy,

Thou deign'st to fix thy throne!
Here Contemplation points the road
Through Nature's charms to Nature's God!
These, these are joys alone!

Adieu, ye vain low-thoughted cares,
Ye human hopes, and human fears,
Ye pleasures and ye pains!"
While thus I spake, o'er all my
A philosophic calmness stole,

A stoic stillness reigns.

soul

The tyrant passions all subside;
Fear, anger, pity, shame, and pride,
No more my bosom move;
Yet still I feel, or seem to feel,
A kind of visionary zeal

Of universal love.

When lo! a voice, a voice I hear! 'Twas Reason whispered in my ear

These monitory strains :

"What mean'st thou, man? would'st thou unbind

The ties which constitute thy kind,
The pleasures and the pains?

"The same Almighty Power unseen
Who spreads the gay or solemn scene
To Contemplation's eye,

Fix'd every movement of the soul,
Taught every wish its destined goal,
And quickened every joy.

"He bids the tyrant passions rage,
He bids them war eternal wage,
And combat each his foe:
Till from dissensions concord rise,
And beauties from deformities,

And happiness from woe.

"Art thou not man, and dar'st thou find
A bliss which leans not to mankind?
Presumptuous thought and vain !
Each bliss unshared is unenjoyed,
Each power is weak unless employed
Some social good to gain.

Enthusiast, go, unstring thy lyre,
In vain thou sing'st, if none admire,
How sweet soe'er the strain.
And is not thy o'erflowing mind,
Unless thou mixest with thy kind,
Benevolent in vain?

"Enthusiast, go, try every sense,
If not thy bliss, thy excellence,
Thou yet hast learnt to scan;
At least thy wants, thy weakness know,
And see them all uniting show,

That man was made for man.'

So Reason has changed its very nature, and the advice of reason changes in accord!

Whitehead is no poet of inspiration or imaginative power. Nevertheless his verses reveal the change of spirit which left its mark upon eighteenth-century literature and did so much between 1700 and 1800 to change English poetry.

Those verses, too, clearly show the apparent paradox of the century—that in the Augustan age when the poet lived, a social being amongst his fellows, meeting them daily in coffee-house, salon, theatre and ballroom, he wished most earnestly to retain his own emotional independence, to lock up his deepest feelings in his own breast, while at the close of the century, the poet fleeing from humanity to solitary communion with nature, sings continually of his love for man.

Pope, living amongst his fellow-wits, studied human nature at close quarters, as revealed in the polished society of the Town, in an age of "elegance" that to us of to-day seems often artificial and insincere, and left us his ultimate impression of men: