'I come, I come! prepare your roseate bowers, Celestial palms and ever-blooming flowers. Thither, where sinners may have rest, I go, Where flames refined in breasts seraphic glow; Thou, Abelard! the last sad office pay, And smooth my passage to the realms of day; See my lips tremble and my eye-balls roll, Suck my last breath and catch my flying soul! Ah no--in sacred vestments may'st thou stand, The hallowed taper trembling in thy hand, Present the Cross before my lifted eye, Teach me at once and learn of me to die.' The music or the fervour of the poem delighted Porson, famous for his Greek and his potations, and whether drunk or sober he would recite, or rather sing it, from the beginning to the end. The felicity of the versification is incontestable, but at the same time artifice is more visible than nature throughout the Epistle, and this is true also of _The Elegy_, a composition in which Pope's method of treating mournful topics is excellently displayed. The opening lines are suggested by Ben Jonson's _Elegy on the Marchioness of Winchester_, a lady whose death was also lamented by Milton. These we shall not quote, but take in preference a passage which is perhaps as graceful an expression of poetical rhetoric as can be found in Pope's verse. 'By foreign hands thy dying eyes were closed, By foreign hands thy decent limbs composed, By foreign hands thy humble grave adorned, By strangers honoured, and by strangers mourned! What though no friends in sable weeds appear, Grieve for an hour, perhaps, then mourn a year, And bear about the mockery of woe, To midnight dances and the public show? What though no weeping Loves thy ashes grace, Nor polished marble emulate thy face? What though no sacred earth allow thee room, Nor hallowed dirge be muttered o'er thy tomb? Yet shall thy grave with rising flowers be drest, And the green turf lie lightly on thy breast; There shall the morn her earliest tears bestow, There the first roses of the year shall blow; While angels with their silver wings o'ershade The ground, now sacred by thy reliques made.' For some years Pope had been brooding over and slowly labouring at a task which was destined to add greatly to his fame and also to his fortune.