Alas! what boots it now thy hives to store,
When thou, that wast all sweetness, art no more.—Wakefield.
[29] In the original draught Pope had again introduced the wolves, and the first four lines of this paragraph stood thus:
No more the wolves, when you your numbers try,
Shall cease to follow, and the lambs to fly:
No more the birds shall imitate your lays,
Or, charmed to silence, listen from the sprays.
[30] The image of the birds listening with their wings suspended in mid-air is striking, and, I trust, new.—Ruffhead.
This circumstance of the lark suspending its wings in mid-air is highly beautiful, because there is a veri similitudo in it, which is not the case where a waterfall is made to be suspended by the power of music.—Bowles.
[31] Oldham's translation of Moschus:
The feathered choir that used to throng
In list'ning flocks to learn his well-tuned song.
The line in the text was the earliest reading in the manuscript, but did not appear in print till the edition of Warburton. The reading in the previous editions was,
No more the nightingales repeat her lays.
This idea of the nightingale repeating the lays is amplified by Philips in his Fifth Pastoral, who copied it, according to Pope in the Guardian, from Strada. Thence also it must have been borrowed by Pope, and he may have restored the primitive version to get rid of the coincidence.