Note 208 — AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM.
Reading edition
A beautiful and poetical illustration. Pope has the art of enlivening his subject continually by images and illustrations drawn from nature, which by contrast have a particularly pleasing effect, and which are indeed absolutely necessary in a didactic poem.—Bowles.
The passage originally stood thus in the manuscript:
Wit, as the sun, such pow'rful beams displays, It draws up vapours that obscures its rays, But, like the sun eclipsed, makes only known The shadowing body's grossness, not its own; And all those clouds that did at first invade The rising light, and interposed a shade, When once transpierced with its prevailing ray Reflect its glories, and augment the day.