“Her fate is whispered by the gentle breeze
And told in sighs to all the trembling trees;
The trembling trees, in every plain and wood,
Her fate remurmur to the silver flood:
The silver flood, so lately calm, appears
Swelled with new passion, and o’erflows with tears;
The winds and trees and floods her death deplore
Daphne, our grief! our glory now no more!”
All this is as perfectly professional as the mourning of an undertaker. Still worse, Pope materializes and makes too palpably objective that sympathy which our grief forces upon outward nature. Milton, before making the echoes mourn for Lycidas, puts our feelings in tune, as it were, and hints at his own imagination as the source of this emotion in inanimate things,—
“But, O the heavy change now thou art gone!”
In “Windsor Forest” we find the same thing again:—
“Here his first lays majestic Denham sung,
There the last numbers flowed from Cowley’s tongue;
O early lost, what tears the river shed
When the sad pomp along his banks was led!
His drooping swans on every note expire,
And on his willows hung each muse’s lyre!”
In the same poem he indulges the absurd conceit that,
“Beasts urged by us, their fellow-beasts pursue,
And learn of man each other to undo”;
and in the succeeding verses gives some striking instances of that artificial diction, so inappropriate to poems descriptive of natural objects and ordinary life, which brought verse-making to such a depth of absurdity in the course of the century.
“With slaughtering guns, the unwearied fowler roves
Where frosts have whitened all the naked groves;
Where doves in flocks the leafless trees o’ershade,
And lonely woodcocks haunt the watery glade;
He lifts the tube and levels with his eye,
Straight a short thunder breaks the frozen sky:
Oft as in airy rings they skim the heath,
The clamorous lapwings feel the leaden death;
Oft as the mounting larks their notes prepare,
They fall and leave their little lives in air.”
Now one would imagine that the tube of the fowler was a telescope instead of a gun. And think of the larks preparing their notes like a country choir! Yet even here there are admirable lines,—