Horace says happily, “Post equitem sedet atra Cura.” See how this thought degenerates by being divided, like the former, into a number of minute parts:
Un fou rempli d’erreurs, que le trouble accompagne
Et malade à la ville ainsi qu’à la campagne,
En vain monte à cheval pour tromper son ennui,
Le Chagrin monte en croupe et galope avec lui.
The following passage is, if possible, still more faulty.
Her fate is whisper’d by the gentle breeze,
And told in sighs to all the trembling trees;
The trembling trees, in ev’ry plain and wood,
Her fate remurmur to the silver flood;
The silver flood, so lately calm, appears
Swell’d 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.
Pope’s Pastorals, iv. 61.
Let grief or love have the power to animate the winds, the trees, the floods, provided the figure be dispatched in a single expression. Even in that case, the figure seldom has a good effect; because grief or love of the pastoral kind, are causes rather too faint for so violent an effect as imagining the winds, trees, or floods, to be sensible beings. But when this figure is deliberately spread out with great regularity and accuracy through many lines, the reader, instead of relishing it, is struck with its ridiculous appearance.
SECT. II.
APOSTROPHE.
THIS figure and the former are derived from the same principle. If, to gratify a plaintive passion, we can bestow a momentary sensibility upon an inanimate object, it is not more difficult to bestow a momentary presence upon a sensible being who is absent.
Hinc Drepani me portus et illætabilis ora
Accipit. Hic, pelagi tot tempestatibus actus,
Heu! genitorem, omnis curæ casusque levamen,
Amitto Anchisen: hic me pater optime fessum
Deseris, heu! tantis nequiequam erepte periclis.
Nec vates Helenus, cum multa horrenda moneret,
Hos mihi prædixit luctus; non dira Celæno.
Æneid. iii. 707.
This figure is sometimes joined with the former: things inanimate, to qualify them for listening to a passionate expostulation, are not only personified, but also conceived to be present.