[11] Pope had Waller's Thyrsis and Galatea in his memory:
Made the wide country echo to your moan,
The list'ning trees, and savage mountains groan.—Wakefield.
The groans of the trees and mountains are, in Waller's poem, the echo of the mourner's lamentations, but to this Pope has added that the "moan" made "the rocks weep," which has no resemblance to anything in nature.
[12] The lines from verse 17 to 30 are very beautiful, tender, and melodious.—Bowles.
[13] It was a time-honoured fancy that the "moan" of the turtle-dove was a lament for the loss of its mate. Turtur, the Latin name for the bird, is a correct representation of its monotonous note. The poets commonly call it simply the turtle, but since the term, to quote the explanation of Johnson in his Dictionary, is also "used by sailors and gluttons for a tortoise" the description of its "deep murmurs" as "filling the sounding shores," calls up this secondary sense, and gives an air of ludicrousness to the passage.
[14] This whole passage is imitated from Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, Book iii. p. 712, 8vo ed.:
Earth, brook, flow'rs, pipe, lamb, dove,
Say all, and I with them,
Absence is death, or worse, to them that love.—Wakefield.
[15] Congreve's Mourning Muse of Alexis:
Fade all ye flow'rs, and wither all ye woods.
[16] Virg. Ecl. viii. 52: