ought never to be mentioned but as a fable in any serious poem:
————Virtue giv'n for lost,
Deprest, and overthrown, as seem'd,
Like that self-begotten bird
In the Arabian woods embost
That no second knows, nor third,
And lay ere while a holocaust;
From out her ashy womb now teem'd
Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most
When most unactive deem'd,
And though her body die, her fame survives
A secular bird ages of lives.
Another species of impropriety is the unsuitableness of thoughts to the general character of the poem. The seriousness and solemnity of tragedy necessarily reject all pointed or epigrammatical expressions, all remote conceits and opposition of ideas. Samson's complaint is therefore too elaborate to be natural:
As in the land of darkness, yet in light,
To live a life half dead, a living death,
And bury'd; but O yet more miserable!
Myself my sepulchre, a moving grave!
Bury'd, yet not exempt,
By privilege of death and burial,
From worst of other evils, pains and wrongs.
All allusions to low and trivial objects, with which contempt is usually associated, are doubtless unsuitable to a species of composition which ought to be always awful, though not always magnificent.
