Or as Sandys translates it,
Where all that's done, though far removed, appears.
[13] Dryden's translation of Ovid's Met. book xii.:
Confused and chiding, like the hollow roar
Of tides, receding from th' insulted shore;
Or like the broken thunder heard from far
When Jove at distance drives the rolling war.
This is more poetically expressed than the same image in our author. Dryden's lines are superior to the original.—Warton.
Pope copied Dryden's translation of Ovid, and for this reason did not quote the parallel passage from Chaucer's second book of the House of Fame, where the eagle, when they come within hearing of the swell of indistinct voices, holds a colloquy with the poet on the phenomenon:
"And what sound is it like?" quoth he.
"Peter! beating of the sea,"
Quoth I, "against the rockes hollow,
When tempest doth the shippes swallow,
Or elles like the last humbling
After the clap of a thundring."
"Peter" is an exclamation; and the sense is, "By St. Peter it is like the beating of the sea against the hollow rocks." In Pope's poem no cause is assigned for the "wild promiscuous sound." In Chaucer it is produced by the confluence of the talk upon earth, every word of which is conveyed to the House of Fame.
[14] Chaucer's third book of Fame:
It stood upon so high a rock,
Higher standeth none in Spayne—
What manner stone this rock was,
For it was like a lymed glass,
But that it shone full more clere;
But of what congeled matere
It was, I niste redily;
But at the last espied I,
And found that it was every dele,
A rock of ice and not of stele.—Pope.