Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 17.djvu/22

16

Didst thou one end of air's wide curtain hold, And help the bales of Æther to unfold; Say, which cærulean pile was by thy hand unroll'd ?

He measures all the drops with wondrous skill, Which the black clouds, his floating bottles, fill.

God in the wilderness his table spread, And in his airy ovens bak'd their bread.

DOUBT not, but the reader, by this cloud of examples, begins to be convinced of the truth of our assertion, that the bathos is an art, and that the genius of no mortal whatever, following the mere ideas of nature, and unassisted with an habitual, nay laborious peculiarity of thinking, could arrive at images so wonderfully low and unaccountable. The great author, from whose treasury we have drawn all these instances (the father of the bathos, and indeed the Homer of it) has, like that immortal Greek, con-