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Animal Rights History Timeline » [1660-1785] Enlightenment » Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope

Essay on Man

Epistle IV: Nature-State of Man with Respect to Happiness

[1733-1734] Alexander Pope, "Epistle IV—Of the Nature and State of Man with Respect to Happiness" in An Essay on Man in Four Epistles [First Published: 1733-1734] in English Poetry I: From Chaucer to Gray, vol. XL in The Harvard Classics (New York, 1909-14; Online at Bartleby.com, 2001).

Grasp the whole worlds of reason, life, and sense,
In one close system of benevolence:
Happier as kinder, in whate'er degree,
And height of bliss but height of charity.
God loves from whole to parts: but human soul
Must rise from individual to the whole.
Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake
As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake;
The centre mov'd, a circle strait succeeds,
Another still, and still another spreads;
Friend, parent, neighbour, first it will embrace;
His country next, and next all human race;
Wide and more wide, th' o'erflowings of the mind
Take ev'ry creature in, of ev'ry kind;
Earth smiles around, with boundless bounty blest,
And Heav'n beholds its image in his breast. (Lines 357-372)