The spectacle of the bleeding ghost of the lady haunting the glade by moonlight suggests to the poet that she may be doing penance for her self-inflicted death. He reasons himself into the conviction that her violence was meritorious, and he concludes that she has been "snatched to the pitying sky." At ver. 47 comes a couplet in which the christian idea of a spirit in heaven is superseded by the pagan notion of an ever "injured shade" to whom nothing can compensate for the loss of the customary funereal rites. Out of his ambition to imitate classic poets Pope jumbled discordant creeds together, and introduced this remnant of an extinct mythology, absurd in itself and offensive in a modern elegy. The passage which follows, from ver. 51 to ver. 68, is the most pleasing part of the poem, though the ten lines from ver. 59 have been severely criticised by Lord Kames. Fictitious topics of consolation were not, he said, "the language of the heart, but of imagination indulging its flights at ease," and were incompatible with "the deeply serious and pathetic."[541] Warburton criticised the criticism. He said it "smelled furiously of old John Dennis," and Bowles allowed that it was "absurd." The tone of Lord Kames is, perhaps, too contemptuous, for the lines have a certain sweetness of sentiment. Yet he was right when he maintained that they were not in harmony with the professions of grief and indignation which follow or go before. All ages and nations have shared the conviction that the omnipotence behind the phenomena of nature deputes them on special occasions to speak in exceptional ways to the affections, hopes, and fears of man. In the rear of these beliefs are numerous cases in which appearances are accepted for a symbolical language, not with an absolute faith, but with a fond acquiescence because they are the just reflection of our thoughts. Wordsworth's exquisite Hart-leap Well,--perfect in its descriptive power, its easy flow of beautiful English, and its mingled strains of animation and pathos--culminates in the creed that the bleakness of the once luxuriant enclosure in which the stag fell dead, is the protest of nature against the palace and bowers erected there by the knight in exultant commemoration of his cruel chase. Wide is the range in this domain of poetry, from sublimity down to prettinesses, from prettinesses to poor conceits. What is legitimate in itself may be wrongly placed, and here is the fault of Pope's lines. Amid the tempest of sorrow and anger he derives consolation from the notion that the first roses of the year will blow on the grave of the unfortunate lady, that the earliest dew-drops of the morning will weep her loss, that the turf will lie light on her insensate corpse, and that angels will overshadow in perpetuity the spot of earth which conceals it. The reveries of fancy may gratify the tranquil mind. They would be mockery to a man absorbed by terrible realities, to a man distracted by the suicide of the woman