Te veniente die, te decedente canebat.
Virg. Geor. 4.
Th’ unhappy husband, now no more,
Did on his tuneful harp his loss deplore,
And sought his mournful mind with music to restore.
On thee, dear Wife, in deserts all alone,
He call’d, sigh’d, sung; his griefs with day begun,
Nor were they finish’d till the setting sun.
The three verbs, call’d, sigh’d, sung, are here substituted, with peculiar infelicity, for the repetition of the pronoun; a change which converts the pathetic into the ludicrous.
In the same episode, the poet compares the complaint of Orpheus to the wailing of a nightingale, robb’d of her young, in those well-known beautiful verses: