[84] The river Loddon.—Pope.
[85] The idea of "augmenting the waves with tears" was very common among the earliest English poets, but perhaps the most ridiculous use ever made of this combination, was by Shakespeare:
Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,
And therefore I forbid my tears.—Bowles.
Dryden's translation of the first book of Ovid's Art of Love:
Her briny tears augment the briny flood.
[86] These six lines were added after the first writing of this poem.—Pope.
And in truth they are but puerile and redundant.—Warton.
[87] Eve, looking into the fountain, in Dryden's State of Innocence, Act ii.:
What's here? another firmament below
Spread wide, and other trees that downward grow.—Steevens.
[88] The epithet "absent," employed to denote that the trees were only a reflection in the water, is more perplexing than descriptive, particularly as the "absent trees" are distinguished from the "pendant woods," which must equally have been absent.