Nothing can be better.
TALBOYS.
"'Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight.' Here the incident, instead of being progressive, falls back, and makes the picture confused and inharmonious." Confused and inharmonious! By no manner of means. Nothing of the sort. There is no retrogression—the day has been unwilling to die—cannot believe she is dying—and cannot think 'tis for her the curfew is tolling; but the Poet feels it is even so; the glimmering and the fading, beautiful as they are, are sure symptoms—she is dying into Evening, and Evening will soon be the dying into Night; but to the Poet's eye how beautiful the transmutations! Nor knows he that the Moon has arisen, till, at the voice of the nightbird, he looks up the ivied church-tower, and there she is, whether full, waning, or crescent, there are not data for the Astronomer to declare.
NORTH.
My friend Mr Mitford says of the line, "No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed"—That "here the epithet lowly, as applied to bed, occasions an ambiguity, as to whether the Poet means the bed on which they sleep, or the grave in which they are laid;" and he adds, "there can be no greater fault in composition than a doubtful meaning."
TALBOYS.
There cannot be a more touching beauty. Lowly applies to both. From their lowly bed in their lowly dwellings among the quick, those joyous sounds used to awaken them; from their lowly bed in their lowly dwellings among the dead, those joyous sounds will awaken them never more: but a sound will awaken them when He comes to judge both the quick and the dead; and for them there is Christian hope—from
"Many a holy text around them strewed
That teach the rustic moralist to die."
NORTH.
"Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe hath broke;
How jocund did they drive their team afield!
How bowed the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!"