If any one be so lamentable a critic as to require the smoothness, the numbers, and the turn of heroic poetry in this poem, I must tell him, that if he has not read Horace, I have studied him, and hope the style of his epistles is not ill imitated here.  The expressions of a poem designed purely for instruction, ought to be plain and natural, and yet majestic:  for here the poet is presumed to be a kind of lawgiver, and those three qualities which I have named, are proper to the legislative style.  The florid, elevated, and figurative way is for the passions; for love and hatred, fear and anger, are begotten in the soul, by showing their objects out of their true proportion, either greater than the life or less:  but instruction is to be given by showing them what they naturally are.  A man is to be cheated into passion, but to be reasoned into truth.

* * * * *

  Dim as the borrow’d beams of moon and stars
  To lonely, weary, wandering travellers,
  Is reason to the soul:  and as on high,
  Those rolling fires discover but the sky,
  Not light us here; so reason’s glimmering ray
  Was lent, not to assure our doubtful way,
  But guide us upward to a better day. 
  And as those nightly tapers disappear
  When day’s bright lord ascends our hemisphere;
  So pale grows reason at religion’s sight; 10
  So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light. 
  Some few, whose lamp shone brighter, have been led
  From cause to cause, to nature’s secret head;
  And found that one first principle must be: 
  But what, or who, that UNIVERSAL HE: 
  Whether some soul encompassing this ball,
  Unmade, unmoved; yet making, moving all;
  Or various atoms’ interfering dance
  Leap’d into form, the noble work of chance;
  Or this Great All was from eternity; 20
  Not even the Stagyrite himself could see;
  And Epicurus guess’d as well as he: 
  As blindly groped they for a future state;
  As rashly judged of providence and fate: 
  But least of all could their endeavours find
  What most concern’d the good of human kind: 
  For happiness was never to be found,
  But vanish’d from them like enchanted ground. 
  One thought Content the good to be enjoy’d—­
  This every little accident destroy’d:  30
  The wiser madmen did for Virtue toil—­
  A thorny, or at best a barren soil: 
  In Pleasure some their glutton souls would steep;
  But found their line too short, the well too deep;
  And leaky vessels which no bliss could keep. 
  Thus anxious thoughts in endless circles roll,
  Without a centre where to fix the soul: 
  In this wild maze their vain endeavours end: 
  How can the less the greater comprehend? 
  Or finite reason reach Infinity? 40
  For what could fathom God were more than He.