Part 39

A faithful swain, whom Love had taught to sing, Bewailed his fate beside a silver spring; Where gentle Thames his winding waters leads Through verdant forests, and through flow'ry meads.--POPE.]

To which the savage lynxes list'ning stood; The rivers stood on heaps, and stopped the running flood.

Milton, Comus, 494:

Thyrsis, whose artful strains have oft delayed The puddling brook to hear his madrigal.--WAKEFIELD.

Garth, in his Dispensary, canto iv., says that, when Prior sings,

The banks of Rhine a pleased attention show, And silver Sequana forgets to flow.]

That dumb things shall be moved to sympathise.--STEEVENS.

In the tears of Amaryllis for Amyntas, Congreve says of the tigers and wolves, that

They dumb distress and new compassion show.]

Jupiter et læto descendet plurimus imbri.--POPE.

In the original manuscript the couplet was slightly different:

Relenting Naïads wept in ev'ry bow'r, And Jove consented in a silent show'r.

Pope. "Objection, that the Naïads weeping in bowers is not so proper, being water nymphs, and that the word consented is doubted by some to whom I have shown these verses. Alteration:

The Naïads wept in ev'ry wat'ry bow'r, And Jove relented in a silent show'r.

Quære. Which of these do you like best?" Walsh. "The first. Upon second thoughts I think the second is best." Pope ended by adopting the first line of the second version, and the second line of the first.]

Dryden's translation, ver. 17:

Amidst thy laurels let this ivy twine, Thine was my earliest muse.

Ivy, with the Romans, was the emblem of literary success, and the laurel crown was worn by a victorious general at a triumph. As Pollio, to whom Virgil addressed his eighth eclogue, was both a conqueror and a poet, the double garland allotted to him was appropriate, but there was no fitness in the application of the passage to Garth.]

Non canimus surdis: respondent omnia sylvæ.--POPE.

Ogilby's translation of the verse in Virgil:

Nor to the deaf do we our numbers sing, Since woods, in answ'ring us, with echoes ring.--WAKEFIELD.]

The creaking locusts with my voice conspire, They fried with heat, and I with fierce desire.

This is Virgil's:

Sole sub ardenti resonant arbusta cicadis.

And Pope had the imitation in his eye, not the original.--BOWLES.]

hiulca siti findit Canis æstifer arva.

"Gassendi has well remarked," says Arnauld in his Logic, "that nothing could be less probable than the notion that the dog-star is the cause of the extraordinary heat which prevails in what are called the dog days, because as Sirius is on the other side of the equator, the effects of the star should be greatest at the places where it is most perpendicular, whereas the dog days here are the winter season there. Whence the inhabitants of those countries have much more reason to believe that the dog-star brings cold than we have to believe that it causes heat."]

Such rage as winter's reigneth in my heart.]