The Works of Alexander Pope Part 59

[Footnote 26: Oldham's translation of Moschus:

Fair Galatea too laments thy death, Laments the ceasing of thy tuneful breath.

Sedley's Elegy:

Here sportive zephyrs cease their selfish play Despairing now to fetch perfumes away.--WAKEFIELD.

The couplet in the text is the third pa.s.sage in Pope's Pastorals for which Ruffhead claims the merit of originality. The quotations of Wakefield show that the thought and the language are alike borrowed, and the only novelty is the bull, pointed out by Johnson, of making the _zephyrs_ lament in _silence_.]

[Footnote 27: Oldham's version of Moschus:

The painful bees neglect their wonted toil.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 28: The same:

Alas! what boots it now thy hives to store, When thou, that wast all sweetness, art no more.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 29: In the original draught Pope had again introduced the wolves, and the first four lines of this paragraph stood thus:

No more the wolves, when you your numbers try, Shall cease to follow, and the lambs to fly: No more the birds shall imitate your lays, Or, charmed to silence, listen from the sprays.]

[Footnote 30: The image of the birds listening with their wings suspended in mid-air is striking, and, I trust, new.--RUFFHEAD.

This circ.u.mstance of the lark suspending its wings in mid-air is highly beautiful, because there is a _veri similitudo_ in it, which is not the case where a waterfall is made to be suspended by the power of music.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 31: Oldham's translation of Moschus:

The feathered choir that used to throng In list'ning flocks to learn his well-tuned song.

The line in the text was the earliest reading in the ma.n.u.script, but did not appear in print till the edition of Warburton. The reading in the previous editions was,

No more the nightingales repeat her lays.

This idea of the nightingale repeating the lays is amplified by Philips in his Fifth Pastoral, who copied it, according to Pope in the Guardian, from Strada. Thence also it must have been borrowed by Pope, and he may have restored the primitive version to get rid of the coincidence.]

[Footnote 32: The _veri similitudo_, which Bowles commends in the description of the lark, is not to be found in the notion of the streams ceasing to murmur that they might listen to the song of Daphne. Milton does a similar violence to fact and imagination in his Comus, ver. 494, and many lesser poets, before and after him, adopted the poor conceit.]

[Footnote 33: Dryden's aeneis, vii. 1041:

Yet his untimely fate th' Angitian woods In sighs remurmured to the Fucine floods.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 34: This is barbarous: he should have written "swoln."--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 35: Ovid, Met. xi. 47:

lacrimis quoque flumina dic.u.n.t Increvisse suis.

Oldham's translation of Moschus:

The rivers too, as if they would deplore Her death, with grief swell higher than before.

Fenton in his pastoral on the Marquis of Blandford's death:

And, swoln with tears, to floods the riv'lets ride.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 36: Let grief or love have the power to animate the winds, the trees, the floods, provided the figure be dispatched in a single expression, but when this figure is deliberately spread out with great accuracy through many lines, the reader, instead of relis.h.i.+ng it, is struck with its ridiculous appearance.--LORD KAMES.

All this is very poor, and unworthy Pope. First the breeze whispers the death of Daphne to the trees; then the trees inform the flood of it; then the flood o'erflows with tears; and then they all deplore together.

The whole pastoral would have been much more cla.s.sical, correct, and pure, if these lines had been omitted. Let us, however, still remember the youth of Pope, and the example of prior poets.--BOWLES.

Moschus in his third Idyll calls upon the nightingales to tell the river Arethusa that Bion is dead. Oldham in his imitation of Moschus exaggerated his original and commanded the nightingales to tell the news "to _all_ the British floods,"--to see that it was "conveyed to Isis, Cam, Thames, Humber, and utmost Tweed," and these in turn were to be ordered "to waft the bitter tidings on." Pope went further than Oldham, and describes one cla.s.s of inanimate objects as conveying the intelligence to another cla.s.s of inanimate objects till the whole uttered lamentations in chorus. Each succeeding copyist endeavoured to eclipse his predecessor by going beyond him in absurdity. Most of the ideas adopted by Pope in his Winter had been employed by scores of elegiac bards. "The numerous pastorals upon the death of princes or friends," says Dr. Trapp, "are cast in the same mould; read one, you read all. Birds, sheep, woods, mountains, rivers, are full of complaints. Everything in short is wondrous miserable."]

[Footnote 37: Virg. Ecl. v. 56:

miratur limen Olympi, Sub pedibusque videt nubes et sidera Daphnis.--POPE.

Dryden thus renders the pa.s.sage in Virgil:

Daphnis, the guest of heav'n, with wond'ring eyes Views in the milky way the starry skies.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 38: In Spenser's November, and in Milton's Lycidas, there is the same beautiful change of circ.u.mstances.--WARTON.

It was one of the stereotyped common-places of elegiac poems, and was ridiculed in No. 30 of the Guardian. The writer might almost be thought to have had this pa.s.sage of Pope in his mind, if his satire did not equally apply to a hundred authors besides. A shepherd announces to his fellow-swain that Damon is dead. "This," says the Guardian, "immediately causes the other to make complaints, and call upon the lofty pines and silver streams to join in the lamentation. While he goes on, his friend interrupts him, and tells him that Damon lives, and shows him a track of light in the skies to conform to it. Upon this scheme most of the n.o.ble families in Great Britain have been comforted; nor can I meet with any right honourable shepherd that doth not die and live again, after the manner of the aforesaid Damon."]

[Footnote 39: The four opening lines of the speech of Lycidas were as follows in the MS.:

Thy songs, dear Thyrsis, more delight my mind Than the soft whisper of the breathing wind, Or whisp'ring groves, when some expiring breeze Pants on the leaves, and trembles in the trees.

The first couplet of the original reading, and the phrase "trembles in the trees," in the second couplet, were from Dryden's Virg. Ecl. v. 128:

Not the soft whispers of the southern wind, That play through trembling trees, delight me more.]

[Footnote 40: Milton, Il Penseroso:

When the gust hath blown his fill Ending on the rustling leaves.]

[Footnote 41: Virg. Ecl. i. 7:

illius aram Saepe tener, nostris ab ovilibus, imbuet agnus.--POPE.

He partly follows Dryden's translation of his original:

The tender firstlings of my woolly breed Shall on his holy altar often bleed.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 42: Originally thus in the MS.

While vapours rise, and driving snows descend.

Thy honour, name, and praise shall never end.--WARBURTON.]