'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: