I know thee, Love! on mountains thou wast bred.
Pope was not unmindful of Dryden's translation:
I know thee, Love! in deserts thou wert bred,
And at the dugs of savage tigers fed.
He had in view also a passage in the Æneid, iv. 366, and Dryden's version of it:
But hewn from hardened entrails of a rock,
And rough Hyrcanian tigers gave thee suck.
Nor did our author overlook the parallel passage in Ovid's Epistle of Dido to Æneas, and Dryden's translation thereof:
From hardened oak, or from a rock's cold womb,
At least thou art from some fierce tigress come;
Or on rough seas, from their foundation torn,
Got by the winds, and in a tempest born.—Wakefield.
[34] Till the edition of Warburton, this couplet was as follows:
I know thee, Love! wild as the raging main,
More fell than tigers on the Lybian plain.
[35] Were a man to meet with such a nondescript monster as the following, viz.: "Love out of Mount Ætna by a Whirlwind," he would suppose himself reading the Racing Calendar. Yet this hybrid creature is one of the many zoological monsters to whom the Pastorals introduce us.—De Quincy.