And streak’d with red a troubled colour show:
That sullen mixture shall at once declare
Winds, rain, and storms, and elemental war:
What desperate madman then would venture o’er
The frith, or haul his cables from the shore?
Dryden.
[120] Black ocean.] Οινοπι ποντω, wine-coloured. This evidently means black: as the Greek poets apply the epithet black to wine. Hesiod has αιθοπα οινοι, black coloured wine. The sense of this latter epithet is deduced from the blackness caused by burning: as αιθω is to burn.
[121] In summer irksome.] This inconvenience arose from the site of the place: as the scholiasts Proclus and Tzetzes relate: for by the neighbourhood of so high a mountain as Helicon, the breezes, which might have alleviated the summer heat, were intercepted: and in winter, the rays of the sun were excluded from the village; which was also exposed to torrents from the melting of the snow. Robinson.
[122] Decline a slender bark.] Αινειν, commend. This passage is quoted by Plutarch in illustration of words used in a different sense from what they seem to import. Praise means refuse. The same idiom occurs in Virgil’s second Georgic:
Commend the large excess