"I thank you heartily for the new idea of life you there gave me; it will remain long with me, for it is very strongly impressed upon my imagination."

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)


Place of Publication
London
Publisher
Printed by J. Wright
Date
1737
Metaphor
"I thank you heartily for the new idea of life you there gave me; it will remain long with me, for it is very strongly impressed upon my imagination."
Metaphor in Context
I can't return from so agreeable an entertainment as yours in the country without acknowledging it. I thank you heartily for the new idea of life you there gave me; it will remain long with me, for it is very strongly impressed upon my imagination. I repeat the memory of it often, and shall value that faculty of the mind now more than ever, for the power it gives me of being entertained in your villa, when absent from it. As you are possessed of all the pleasures of the country, and as I think of a right mind, what can I wish you but health to enjoy them? This I so heartily do, that I should be even glad to hear your good old mother might lose all her present pleasures in her unwearied care of you, by your better health convincing her it is unnecessary.
(From Mr. Digby, Aug. 14, 1723, L140, pp. 192-3)
Categories
Provenance
Reading in Google Books
Citation
Text from Letters of Mr. Alexander Pope, and Several of his Friends (London: Printed by J. Wright, 1737). <Link to Google Books>

See also earlier printings of Pope's letters. Pope famously tricked Curll into pirating his correspondence in 1735 under the title Mr. Pope's Literary Correspondence for Thirty Years; from 1704 to 1734, before he issued an authorized edition of his own in 1737 as Letters of Mr. Alexander Pope, and Several of his Friends. See also Curll's Miscellanea of 1727 which also includes letters written by Pope to Henry Cromwell. On Pope's stratagem and the 1737 text, see Raymond Stephanson's "Letters of Mr. Alexander Pope and the Curious Case of Modern Scholarship and the Vanishing Text" Eighteenth-Century Life 31:1 (2007): 1-21. <Link to ECL>
Date of Entry
07/08/2013

The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.