Shines a broad mirror through the shadowy cave;
Where lingering drops from mineral roofs distill,
And pointed crystals break the sparkling rill;
Unpolished gems no ray on pride bestow,
And latent metals innocently glow;
Approach! great Nature studiously behold,
And eye the mine without a wish for gold.
Approach; but awful! Lo! the Egerian grot,
Where, nobly pensive, St. John sat and thought;
Where British sighs from dying Wyndham stole,
And the bright flame was shot through Marchmont's soul.
Let such, such only, tread this sacred floor,
Who dare to love their country, and be poor."
But it was not merely in forming this grotto that Pope employed himself; it was in building and extending his house, which was in a Roman style, with columns, arcades, and porticoes. The designs and elevations of these buildings may be seen by his own hand in the British Museum, drawn in his usual way on backs of letters. The following passage, in a letter to Mr. Digby, will be sufficient to give us his idea of both his Thamesward garden and his house in a summer view: "No ideas you could form in the winter could make you imagine what Twickenham is in this warm summer. Our river glitters beneath the unclouded sun, at the same time that its banks retain the verdure of showers; our gardens are offering their first nosegays; our trees, like new acquaintance brought happily together, are stretching their arms to meet each other, and growing nearer and nearer every hour. The birds are paying their thanksgiving songs for the new habitations I have made them. My building rises high enough to attract the eye and curiosity of the passenger from the river, where, upon beholding a mixture of beauty and ruin, he inquires, What house is falling, or what church is rising? So little taste have our common Tritons for Vitruvius; whatever delight the poetical gods of the river may take in reflecting on their streams, my Tuscan porticoes, or Ionic pilasters."
Pope's architecture, like his poetry, has been the subject of much and vehement dispute. On the one hand, his grottoes and his buildings have been vituperated as most tasteless and childish; on the other, applauded as beautiful and romantic. Into neither of these disputes need we enter. In both poetry and architecture a bolder spirit and a better taste have prevailed since Pope's time. With all his foibles and defects, Pope was a great poet of the critical and didactic kind, and his house and place had their peculiar beauties. He was himself half inclined to suspect the correctness of his fancy in such matters, and often rallies himself on his gimcracks and crotchets in both verse and prose. Thus, in his first epistle of his first book of Horace, addressed to Bolingbroke:
"But when no prelate's lawn with haircloth lined
Is half so incoherent as my mind;
When—each opinion with the next at strife,
An ebb and flow of follies all my life—
I plant, root up; I build, and then confound;
Turn round to square, and square again to round;
You never change one muscle of your face;
You think this madness but a common case."
Pope's building madness, however, had method in it. Unlike the great romancer and builder of our time, he never allowed such things to bring him into debt. He kept his mind at ease by such prudence, and soothed and animated it under circumstances of continued evil by working among his trees, and grottoes, and vines, and at his labors of poetry and translation. At the period succeeding the rebellion of 1715, when that event had implicated and scattered so many of his highest and most powerful friends, here he was laboring away at his Homer with a progress which astonished every one. Removed at once from the dissipations and distractions of London, and from the agreeable interruptions of such society, he found leisure and health enough here to give him vigor for exertions astonishing for so weak a frame. The tastes he indulged here, if they were not faultless according to our notions, were healthy, and they endured. To the end of his life he preserved his strong attachment to his house and grounds. In 1736, writing to Swift, he says: "I wish you had any motive to see this kingdom. I could keep you, for I am rich; that is, I have more room than I want. I can afford room for myself and two servants. I have, indeed, room enough; nothing but myself at home. The kind and hearty housewife is dead! The agreeable and instructive neighbor is gone! Yet my house is enlarged, and the gardens extend and flourish, as knowing nothing of the guests they have lost. I have more fruit-trees and kitchen garden than you have any thought of; nay, I have melons and pine-apples of my own growth. I am as much a better gardener as I am a worse poet than when you saw me; but gardening is more akin to philosophy, for Tully says, 'Agricultura proxima sapientiæ.'" And toward the end of the same year he says, in a letter to Ralph Allen, "I am now as busy planting for myself as I was lately in planting for another; and I thank God for every wet day and for every fog that gives me the headache, but prospers my works. They will indeed outlive me, but I am pleased to think my trees will afford fruit and shade to others when I shall want them no more. And it is no sort of grief to me that those others will not be things of my own poor body; but it is enough that they are creatures of the same species, and made by the same hand that made me."
In 1743, the last year of his life, he was still inspired by the same tastes, and occupied in the same pursuits. "I have lived," says he, March 24th, 1743, "much by myself of late, partly through ill health, and partly to amuse myself with little improvements in my gardens and house, to which, possibly, I shall, if I live, be much more confined."
Of the mode of Pope's life here we have, from the letters of himself and his friends, a pretty tolerable notion. He was near enough town to make occasional visits to it, and his friends there near enough to visit him. His friends and acquaintances were every distinguished man and woman of the time, whether literary characters or statesmen. The greater part of them may be set down as his guests here, at one period or another. He delighted to have his most intimate friends near him, and some one or more of them with him. Bishops Atterbury and Warburton, the Duke and Duchess of Queensbury, Gay's great patrons; Sheffield, duke of Buckingham, Lady Suffolk, Lord and Lady Hervey, Lords Bathurst, Halifax, Oxford, Bolingbroke, Burlington, Lady Scudamore, the Countess of Winchilsea, Lord-chancellor Harcourt, and his son Sir Simon Harcourt, the Duke of Chandos, Lords Carlton, Peterborough, and Lansdowne, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Addison, Steele, Swift, Parnell, Gay, Rowe, and all the literary men of the age. What an array of those who wrote, and of those who admired letters, were the frequenters of Twickenham. In fact, in a letter to Swift in 1736, Pope says, "I was the other day recollecting twenty-seven great ministers, or men of wit and learning, who are all dead, and all of my acquaintance within twenty years past."
But Pope loved to get those he most delighted to converse with to reside near him. Bolingbroke settled at Dawley, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu at Twickenham itself. The latter remarkable woman was a little too near. All the world is familiar with Pope's intense admiration of her, his having her picture drawn by Sir Godfrey Kneller to gaze on every day, his worship of her, and their quarrel, which knew no reconciliation.
But Pope's attachments were, for the most part, strong and enduring. Except in the case of the flattered, spoiled, and satirical Lady Mary, there is scarcely a friend of Pope's who was not a friend for life. With the Blounts, the Allens,
"And honest, hatless Cromwell, with red breeches,"
people who could confer no distinction, but had qualities worth loving, he maintained the most steady friendship to the last. On Martha Blount, the woman who above all others he most loved, he has conferred an immortality as enduring as his own.
But his three most intimate friends, after all, were Swift, Bolingbroke, and Gay. These congenial souls were here much, often, and for long times together. With Pope they not only entered into literary plans, read together, wrote together, and joked and feasted together, but with him they worked at his grotto and in his garden. They helped him to construct his quincunx; to plant, to sort spars and stones, and to fix them in the wall. Lord Peterborough, who had run so victorious a career in Spain, did not disdain to lay