FOOTNOTES:
[1] This was the poet's favourite Pastoral.—Warburton.
It is professedly an imitation of Theocritus, whom Pope does not resemble, and whose Idylls he could only have read in a translation. The sources from which he really borrowed his materials will be seen in the notes.
[2] This lady was of ancient family in Yorkshire, and particularly admired by the author's friend Mr. Walsh, who having celebrated her in a Pastoral Elegy, desired his friend to do the same, as appears from one of his letters, dated Sept. 9, 1706. "Your last Eclogue being on the same subject with mine on Mrs. Tempest's death, I should take it very kindly in you to give it a little turn, as if it were to the memory of the same lady." Her death having happened on the night of the great storm in 1703, gave a propriety to this Eclogue, which in its general turn alludes to it. The scene of the Pastoral lies in a grove, the time at midnight.—Pope.
I do not find any lines that allude to the great storm of which the poet speaks.—Warton.
Nor I. On the contrary, all the allusions to the winds are of the gentler kind,—"balmy Zephyrs," "whispering breezes" and so forth. Miss Tempest was the daughter of Henry Tempest, of Newton Grange, York, and grand-daughter of Sir John Tempest, Bart. She died unmarried. When Pope's Pastoral first appeared in Tonson's Miscellany, it was entitled "To the memory of a Fair Young Lady."—Croker.
[3] This couplet was constructed from Creech's translation of the first Idyll of Theocritus:
And, shepherd, sweeter notes thy pipe do fill
Than murm'ring springs that roll from yonder hill.—Wakefield.
[4] Suggested by Virg. Ecl. v. 83:
nec quæ
Saxosas inter decurrunt flumina valles.
For winding streams that through the valley glide. Dryden.—Wakefield.
[5] Milton, Par. Lost, v. 195:
Fountains, and ye that warble, as ye flow,
Melodious murmurs, warbling tune his praise.
[6] Variation:
In the warm folds the tender flocks remain,
The cattle slumber on the silent plain,
While silent birds neglect their tuneful lays,
Let us, dear Thyrsis, sing of Daphne's praise.—Pope.
It was originally,
Now in warm folds the tender flock remains.
Pope. "Objection to the word remains. I do not know whether these following be better or no, and desire your opinion.
Now while the groves in Cynthia's beams are dressed,
And folded flocks in their soft fleeces rest;
While sleeping birds, etc.
Or,
While Cynthia tips with silver all the groves,
And scarce the winds the topmast branches moves.
or
While the bright moon with silver tips the grove,
And not a breeze the quiv'ring branches move."
Walsh. "I think the last the best, but might not even that be mended?"
[7] Garth's Dispensary, Canto iv.:
As tuneful Congreve tries his rural strains,
Pan quits the woods, the list'ning fauns the plains.
Dryden's Virgil, Ecl. vi. 100:
And called the mountain ashes to the plain.
Among the poems of Congreve is one entitled "The Mourning Muse of Alexis, a Pastoral lamenting the death of Queen Mary." This was the "sweet Alexis strain" to which Pope referred, and which the Thames "bade his willows learn."
[8] Virg. Ecl. vi. 83:
Audiit Eurotas, jussitque ediscere lauros.—Pope.
Admitting that a river gently flowing may be imagined a sensible being listening to a song, I cannot enter into the conceit of the river's ordering his laurels to learn the song. Here all resemblance to anything real is quite lost. This however is copied literally by Pope.—Lord Kames.
[9] There is some connection implied between the "kind rains" and the "willows learning the song," but I cannot trace the idea.
[10] Virg. Ecl. v. 41:
mandat fieri sibi talia Daphnis.
[11] Rowe's Ambitious Step-Mother:
And with fresh roses strew thy virgin urn.—Steevens.
[12] Ver. 23, 24, 25. Virg. Ecl. v. 40, 42:
inducite fontibus umbras.... Et tumulum facite, et tumulo superaddite carmen.—Pope.
If the idea of "hiding the stream with myrtles" have either beauty or propriety, I am unable to discover them. Our poet unfortunately followed Dryden's turn of the original phrase in Virgil:
With cypress boughs the crystal fountains hide.—Wakefield.
[13] This image is taken from Ovid's elegy on the death of Tibullus, Amor. iii. 9. 6:
Ecce! puer Veneris fert eversamque pharetram,
Et fractos arcus, et sine luce facem.—Wakefield.
Ovid copied Bion. Idyl. 1. The Greek poet represents the Loves as trampling upon their bows and arrows, and breaking their quivers in the first paroxysm of their grief for Adonis. In place of this natural burst of uncontrollable sorrow, the shepherd, in Pope, invokes the Loves to break their bows at his instigation. When their darts are said in the next line to be henceforth useless, the sense must be that nobody would love any woman again since Mrs. Tempest was dead. Such hyperboles can neither touch the heart nor gratify the understanding. The Pastorals were verse exercises in which every pretence to real emotion was laid aside, for Pope was not even acquainted with the lady of whom he utters these extravagances.
[14] This is imitated from Walsh's Pastoral on the death of Mrs. Tempest in Dryden's Miscellanies, vol. v. p. 323:
Now shepherds! now lament, and now deplore!
Delia is dead, and beauty is no more.—Wakefield.
Congreve's Mourning Muse of Alexis:
All nature mourns; the floods and rocks deplore
And cry with me, Pastora is no more.
[15] Originally thus in the MS.
'Tis done, and nature's changed since you are gone;
Behold the clouds have put their mourning on.—Warburton.
This low conceit, which our poet abandoned for the present reading, was borrowed from Oldham's version of the elegy of Moschus:
For thee, dear swain, for thee, his much-loved son,
Does Phœbus clouds of mourning black put on.—Wakefield.
When Pope submitted the rejected and the adopted reading to Walsh, the critic replied, "Clouds put on mourning is too conceited for pastoral. The second is better, and the thick or the dark I like better than sable." The last verse of the couplet in the text was then
See sable clouds eclipse the cheerful day.
[16] Dryden's pastoral elegy on the death of Amyntas:
'Twas on a joyless and a gloomy morn,
Wet was the grass and hung with pearls the thorn.
So in his version of Virgil, Ecl. x. 20:
And hung with humid pearls the lowly shrub appears.—Wakefield.
[17] Spenser's Colin Clout:
The fields with faded flow'rs did seem to mourn.
[18] Oldham's translation of Moschus:
Each flower fades and hangs its withered head,
And scorns to thrive or live now thou art dead.—Wakefield.
[19] Variation:
For her the flocks the dewy herbs disdain,
Nor hungry heifers graze the tender plain.—Pope.
Dryden's Virg. Ecl. v. 38:
The thirsty cattle of themselves abstained
From water, and their grassy fare disdained.
Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar, November, ver. 123, where
The feeble flocks in field refuse their former food,
because Dido is dead.
[20] Oldham's translation of Moschus:
Ye gentle swans....
In doleful notes the heavy loss bewail
Such as you sing at your own funeral.—Wakefield.
[21] Cowley in his verses on Echo:
Ah! gentle nymph! who lik'st so well
In hollow solitary caves to dwell.—Wakefield.
[22] This expression of "sweet echo" is taken from Comus.—Warton.
[23] Oldham's translation of Moschus:
Sad echo too does in deep silence moan,
Since thou art mute, since thou art speechless grown.—Wakefield.
[24] The couplet was different in the early editions:
Echo no more the rural song rebounds;
Her name alone the mournful echo sounds.
[25] In the MS.
Which but for you did all its incense yield.
This, with the reading in the text, was laid before Walsh, who selected the latter.
[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 passage 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.
[27] Oldham's version of Moschus:
The painful bees neglect their wonted toil.—Wakefield.
[28] The same:
Alas! what boots it now thy hives to store,
When thou, that wast all sweetness, art no more.—Wakefield.
[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.
[30] The image of the birds listening with their wings suspended in mid-air is striking, and, I trust, new.—Ruffhead.
This circumstance 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.
[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 manuscript, 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.
[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.
[33] Dryden's Æneis, vii. 1041:
Yet his untimely fate th' Angitian woods
In sighs remurmured to the Fucine floods.—Wakefield.
[34] This is barbarous: he should have written "swoln."—Wakefield.
[35] Ovid, Met. xi. 47:
lacrimis quoque flumina dicunt
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.
[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 relishing 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 classical, 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 class of inanimate objects as conveying the intelligence to another class 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."
[37] Virg. Ecl. v. 56:
miratur limen Olympi,
Sub pedibusque videt nubes et sidera Daphnis.—Pope.
Dryden thus renders the passage in Virgil:
Daphnis, the guest of heav'n, with wond'ring eyes
Views in the milky way the starry skies.—Wakefield.
[38] In Spenser's November, and in Milton's Lycidas, there is the same beautiful change of circumstances.—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 passage 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 noble 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."
[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.
[40] Milton, Il Penseroso:
When the gust hath blown his fill
Ending on the rustling leaves.
[41] Virg. Ecl. i. 7:
illius aram
Sæpe 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.
[42] Originally thus in the MS.
While vapours rise, and driving snows descend.
Thy honour, name, and praise shall never end.—Warburton.
[43] Virg. Ecl. v. 76:
Dum juga montis aper, fluvios dum piscis amabit,
Dumque thymo pascentur apes, dum rore cicadæ,
Semper honos, nomenque tuum, laudesque manebunt.—Wakefield.
[44] Virg. Ecl. x. 75:
solet esse gravis cantantibus umbra;
Juniperi gravis umbra.—Pope.
Dryden's version of the passage is,
From juniper unwholesome dews distil.—Wakefield.
[45] Virg. Ecl. x. 69:
Omnia vincit amor; et nos cedamus amori.
Vid. etiam Sannazarii Ecl. et Spenser's Calendar.—Warburton.
Dryden's verse is:
Love conquers all, and we must yield to love.—Wakefield.
[46] There is a passage resembling this in Walsh's third eclogue:
Adieu, ye flocks, no more shall I pursue;
Adieu, ye groves; a long, a long adieu.—Wakefield.
[47] These four last lines allude to the several subjects of the four Pastorals, and to the several scenes of them particularized before in each—Pope.
They should have been added by the poet in his own person, instead of being put into the mouth of a shepherd who is not presumed to have any knowledge of the previous pieces. The specific character which Pope ascribes to each of his Pastorals is not borne out by the poems themselves. There is as much about "flocks" in the first Pastoral as in the second; and there is as much about "rural lays and loves" in the second Pastoral as in the first. The third Pastoral contains no mention of a "sylvan crew," but a couple of shepherds are absorbed by the same "rural lays and loves" which occupied their predecessors.