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.