His precision and firmness of touch enables him to get the greatest possible meaning into a narrow compass.

He uses only one epithet, but it is the right one, and never boggles and patches or, in his own phrase, "blunders round about a meaning." Warton gives, as a specimen of this power, the lines:-- But errs not nature from this gracious end, From burning suns when livid deaths descend, When earthquakes swallow or when tempests sweep Towns to one grave, whole nations to the deep?
And Mr.Pattison reinforces the criticism by quoting Voltaire's feeble imitation:-- Quand des vents du midi les funestes haleines De semence de mort ont inonde nos plaines, Direz-vous que jamais le ciel en son courroux Ne laissa la sante sejourner parmi nous?
It is true that in the effort to be compressed, Pope has here and there cut to the quick and suppressed essential parts of speech, till the lines can only be construed by our independent knowledge of their meaning.

The famous line-- Man never is but always to be blest, is an example of defective construction, though his language is often tortured by more elliptical phrases.[22] This power of charging lines with great fulness of meaning enables Pope to soar for brief periods into genuine and impressive poetry.

Whatever his philosophical weakness and his moral obliquity, he is often moved by genuine emotion.

He has a vein of generous sympathy for human sufferings and of righteous indignation against bigots, and if he only half understands his own optimism, that "whatever is is right," the vision, rather poetical than philosophical, of a harmonious universe lifts him at times into a region loftier than that of frigid and pedantic platitude.