[36] Let grief or love have the power to animate the winds, the trees, the floods, provided the figure be dispatched in a single expression, but when this figure is deliberately spread out with great accuracy through many lines, the reader, instead of relishing it, is struck with its ridiculous appearance.—Lord Kames.
All this is very poor, and unworthy Pope. First the breeze whispers the death of Daphne to the trees; then the trees inform the flood of it; then the flood o'erflows with tears; and then they all deplore together. The whole pastoral would have been much more classical, correct, and pure, if these lines had been omitted. Let us, however, still remember the youth of Pope, and the example of prior poets.—Bowles.
Moschus in his third Idyll calls upon the nightingales to tell the river Arethusa that Bion is dead. Oldham in his imitation of Moschus exaggerated his original and commanded the nightingales to tell the news "to all the British floods,"—to see that it was "conveyed to Isis, Cam, Thames, Humber, and utmost Tweed," and these in turn were to be ordered "to waft the bitter tidings on." Pope went further than Oldham, and describes one class of inanimate objects as conveying the intelligence to another class of inanimate objects till the whole uttered lamentations in chorus. Each succeeding copyist endeavoured to eclipse his predecessor by going beyond him in absurdity. Most of the ideas adopted by Pope in his Winter had been employed by scores of elegiac bards. "The numerous pastorals upon the death of princes or friends," says Dr. Trapp, "are cast in the same mould; read one, you read all. Birds, sheep, woods, mountains, rivers, are full of complaints. Everything in short is wondrous miserable."
[37] Virg. Ecl. v. 56:
miratur limen Olympi,
Sub pedibusque videt nubes et sidera Daphnis.—Pope.
Dryden thus renders the passage in Virgil:
Daphnis, the guest of heav'n, with wond'ring eyes
Views in the milky way the starry skies.—Wakefield.
[38] In Spenser's November, and in Milton's Lycidas, there is the same beautiful change of circumstances.—Warton.
It was one of the stereotyped common-places of elegiac poems, and was ridiculed in No. 30 of the Guardian. The writer might almost be thought to have had this passage of Pope in his mind, if his satire did not equally apply to a hundred authors besides. A shepherd announces to his fellow-swain that Damon is dead. "This," says the Guardian, "immediately causes the other to make complaints, and call upon the lofty pines and silver streams to join in the lamentation. While he goes on, his friend interrupts him, and tells him that Damon lives, and shows him a track of light in the skies to conform to it. Upon this scheme most of the noble families in Great Britain have been comforted; nor can I meet with any right honourable shepherd that doth not die and live again, after the manner of the aforesaid Damon."
[39] The four opening lines of the speech of Lycidas were as follows in the MS.: