Frequent allusions to the fables of the ancients form a characteristic feature of the poetry of the 16th and 17th centuries. A profusion of it is pedantry; a moderate use of it, however, in a poem of those times pleases, because it discovers the stages of composition, and has in itself a fine effect, as it illustrates its subject by presenting the classical reader with some little landscapes of that country through which he has travelled. The description of forests is a favourite topic in poetry. Chaucer, Tasso, and Spenser, have been happy in it, but both have copied an admired passage in Statius:—
"Cadit ardua fagus,
Chaoniumque nemus, brumæque illæsa cupressus;
Procumbunt piceæ, flammis alimenta supremis,
Ornique, iliceæque trabes, metuandaque sulco
Taxus, et infandos belli potura cruores
Fraxinus, atque situ non expugnabile robur:
Hinc audax abies, et odoro vulnere pinus
Scinditur, acclinant intonsa cacumina terræ
Alnus amica fretis, nec inhospita vitibus ulmus."
In rural descriptions three things are necessary to render them poetical: the happiness of epithet, of picturesque arrangement, and of little landscape views. Without these, all the names of trees and flowers, though strung together in tolerable numbers, contain no more poetry than a nurseryman or a florist's catalogue. In Statius, in Tasso and Spenser's admired forests (Ger. Liber. c. 3. st. 75, 76, and F. Queen, b. 1 c. 1. st. 8, 9), the poetry consists entirely in the happiness of the epithets. In Camoëns, all the three requisites are admirably attained and blended together.
[578] And stain'd with lover's blood.—Pyramus and Thisbe:—
"Arborei fœtus aspergine cædis in atram
Vertuntur faciem: madefactaque sanguine radix
Puniceo tingit pendentia mora colore.....
At tu quo ramis arbor miserabile corpus
Nunc tegis unius, mox es tectura duorum;
Signa tene cædis: pullosque et lectibus aptos
Semper habe fœtus gemini monumenta cruoris."
Ovid, Met.
[579] The shadowy vale.—Literal from the original,—O sombrio valle—which Fanshaw, however, has translated, "the gloomy valley," and thus has given us a funereal, where the author intended a festive, landscape. It must be confessed, however, that the description of the island of Venus, is infinitely the best part of all of Fanshaw's translation. And indeed the dullest prose translation might obscure, but could not possibly throw a total eclipse over, so admirable an original.
[580] The woe-mark'd flower of slain Adonis—water'd by the tears of love.—The Anemone. "This," says Castera, "is applicable to the celestial Venus, for, according to my theology, her amour with Adonis had nothing in it impure, but was only the love which nature bears to the sun." The fables of antiquity have generally a threefold interpretation, an historical allusion, a physical and a metaphysical allegory. In the latter view, the fable of Adonis is only applicable to the celestial Venus. A divine youth is outrageously slain, but shall revive again at the restoration of the golden age. Several nations, it is well known, under different names, celebrated the Mysteries, or the death and resurrection of Adonis; among whom were the British Druids, as we are told by Dr. Stukely. In the same manner Cupid, in the fable of Psyche, is interpreted by mythologists, to signify the Divine Love weeping over the degeneracy of human nature.
At strife appear the lawns and purpled skies,
Who from each other stole the beauteous dyes.—
On this passage Castera has the following sensible, though turgid, note: "This thought," says he, "is taken from the idyllium of Ausonius on the rose:—