Quid brevi fortes jaculamur aevo
Multa?
Why do we aim, with eager strife,
At things beyond the mark of life? FRANCIS.
when our life is of so short duration, why we form such numerous designs? But Horace, as well as Tully, might discover that records are needful to preserve the memory of actions, and that no records were so durable as poems; either of them might find out that life is short, and that we consume it in unnecessary labour.
There are other flowers of fiction so widely scattered and so easily cropped, that it is scarcely just to tax the use of them as an act by which any particular writer is despoiled of his garland; for they may be said to have been planted by the ancients in the open road of poetry for the accommodation of their successors, and to be the right of every one that has art to pluck them without injuring their colours or their fragrance. The passage of Orpheus to hell, with the recovery and second loss of Eurydice, have been described after Boetius by Pope, in such a manner as might justly leave him suspected of imitation, were not the images such as they might both have derived from more ancient writers.
Quae sontes agitant metu,
Ultrices scelerum deæ
Jam masta: lacrymis madent,
Non Ixionium caput
Velox præcipitat rota.
The pow'rs of vengeance, while they hear,
Touch'd with compassion, drop a tear:
Ixion's rapid wheel is bound,
Fix'd in attention to the sound. F. LEWIS.
Thy stone, O Sysiphus, stands still,
Ixion rests upon the wheel,
And the pale spectres dance!
The furies sink upon their iron beds. POPE
Tandem, vincimur, arbiter
Umbrarum, miserans, ait—
Donemus, comitem viro,
Emtam carmine, conjugem.
Subdu'd at length, Hell's pitying monarch cry'd,
The song rewarding, let us yield the bride. F. LEWIS.
He sung; and hell consented
To hear the poet's prayer;
Stern Proserpine relented,
And gave him back the fair. POPE