[632] Abelard to Heloisa: "I saw your eyes when you spoke your last farewell fixed upon the cross." Heloisa to Abelard: "It was your command only, and not a sincere vocation, as is imagined, that shut me up in these cloisters." The two passages combined suggested the line in the text.
[633] Heloisa to Abelard: "You may see me, hear my sighs, and be a witness of all my sorrows, without incurring any danger, since you can only relieve me with tears and words."
[634] Roscoe remarks that the lines which follow cannot be justified by anything in the letters of Eloisa. Sentiments equally gross are however expressed both in the original Latin and in the adulterated translation which was Pope's authority.
[635] Concannen's Match at Football, Canto iii.:
And drank in poison from her lovely eye.
Creech, at the beginning of his Lucretius:
Where on thy bosom he supinely lies,
And greedily drinks love at both his eyes.—Wakefield.
Smith's Phædra and Hippolytus, Act i.:
Drank gorging in the dear delicious poison.—Steevens.
[636] "If thou canst forget me, think at least upon thy flock," says Wakefield, in explanation of the train of thought; and he adds a passage from a letter of Eloisa in which she terms the monastery Abelard's "new plantation," and assures him that frequent watering is essential to the tender plants.