Isaiah xl. 3, 4. "The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord! make straight in the desert a high way for our God! Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain." Chap. xliv. 23. "Break forth into singing, ye mountains! O forest, and every tree therein! for the Lord hath redeemed Israel."—Pope.
The passage from Virgil, in which the shrubs are supposed to cry out "a god, a god," is not from the same Eclogue with the rest of Pope's extracts, and has no reference to the anticipated appearance of a ruler who should regenerate the world. The occasion of the shout is the presumed deification of one Daphnis who is dead.
[23] The repetition is in the true spirit of poetry, "Deus, deus ipse." The whole passage indeed is finely worked up from "lofty Lebanon" to the magnificent and powerful appeal, "Hark! a glad voice."—Bowles.
[24] This line is faulty, for the same reason as given in the remark on "nodding forests." The action is brought too near, and for that reason the image no longer appears grand.—Bowles.
[25] He seems to have had in his eye Cromwell's translation of Ovid, Amor, ii. 16:
Then, as you pass, let mountains homage pay
And bow their tow'ring heads to smooth your way.—Wakefield.
[26] Isaiah xlii. 18.—Pope. "Hear, ye deaf; and look, ye blind, that ye may see."
[27] The sense and language show, that by "visual ray," the poet meant the sight, or, as Milton calls it, indeed, something less boldly, "the visual nerve." And no critic would quarrel with the figure which calls the instrument of vision by the name of the cause. But though the term be just, nay noble, and even sublime, yet the expression of "thick films" is faulty, and he fell into it by a common neglect of the following rule of good writing, that when a figurative word is used, whatsoever is predicated of it ought not only to agree in terms to the thing to which the figure is applied, but likewise to that from which the figure is taken. "Thick films" agree only with the thing to which it is applied, namely, to the sight or eye; and not to that from which it is taken, namely, a ray of light coming to the eye. He should have said "thick clouds," which would have agreed with both. But these inaccuracies are not to be found in his later poems.—Warburton.
Concanen had previously made the same objection in his Supplement to the Profound, and Pope has written in the margin, "Milton," who uses "visual ray," Par. Lost, iii. 620, "visual nerve" xi. 415, and "visual beam," Samson Agonistes, ver. 163; but none of these passages support Pope's misapplication of the phrase "thick films" to rays of light.
[28] Isaiah xxxv. 5.—Pope. "The ears of the deaf shall be unstopped."