Part 15

And,

I dread the light of cruel heav'n to view, And close my eyes once more to dream of you.

Soon as I rise I haunt the caves and groves.--BOWLES.

I find the shades that did our joys conceal, Not him who made me love those shades so well.]

Of Tereus she complains, and I of thee.--WAKEFIELD.

Tereus married Progne, and afterwards fell in love with her sister Philomela. Both sisters conspired to revenge themselves upon him. They killed Itys, his son by Progne, gave him some of the flesh to eat. When, with savage exultation, they revealed the truth to him, and he was about to slay them, Progne was changed into a swallow, and Philomela into a nightingale.]

The entire story was probably a legend.]

Lo, where Mæotis sleeps, and hardly flows.--WARTON.

Dryden in his Annus Mirabilis:

A constant trade-wind will securely blow, And gently lay us on the spicy shore.--WAKEFIELD.]

To those steep cliffs, that ocean must I fly.]

If thou return thy Sappho too shall stay, Not all the gods shall force me then away; Nor Love, nor Phoebus, then invoked shall be, For thou alone art all the gods to me.

Another version ran thus:

Wouldst thou return, oh more than Phoebus, fair No god like thee could ease thy Sappho's care.]

What I that loved, and you that liked, Shall we begin to wrangle? No, no, no; my heart is fixed, And cannot disentangle.

Old Ballad.--BOWLES.]

Phaon--my Phaon I almost had said-- Is fled, with Phaon your delights are fled.

Cromwell wrote against the last line "recte, non pulchre," and Pope tried three variations of it before he cast them aside for the version in the text:

Is gone, and with him all your pleasures fled. Is gone, and all that's pleasing with him fled. Is gone, and with him your delights are fled.]

Oh, when shall kinder, more auspicious gales, Waft to these eyes thy long-expected sails.

"Pleonasm," says a note on the manuscript. "Kinder, and more auspicious, too much."]

Ipse gubernabit residens in puppe Cupido, Ipse dabit tenera vela legetque manu.--BOWLES.

The objection of Bowles would not have applied to the manuscript, where this admirable couplet, which Pope unwisely omitted, follows the lines in the text:

Shall take the rudder in his tender hand, And steer thee safe to this forsaken land.

There is a second, but inferior rendering:

Shall sit presiding on the painted prore, And steer thy ship to this forsaken shore.

Cromwell applied the words of Horace, "quæ desperat nitescere posse, relinquit," which seems intended to intimate that it was impossible to give a poetical translation of the original. Pope deferred to the mistaken criticism.]

THE FABLE OF DRYOPE.