| “In fair Circassia, where, to love inclined, Each swain was blest, for every maid was kind.” |
To give the circumstance of the dialogue a more affecting solemnity, he makes the time midnight, 115 and describes the two shepherds in the very act of flight from the destruction that swept over their country:
| “Sad o’er the dews, two brother shepherds fled, Where wildering fear and desperate sorrow led.” |
There is a beauty and propriety in the epithet wildering, which strikes us more forcibly, the more we consider it.
The opening of the dialogue is equally happy, natural, and unaffected; when one of the shepherds, weary and overcome with the fatigue of flight, calls upon his companion to review the length of way they had passed. This is certainly painting from nature, and the thoughts, however obvious, or destitute of refinement, are perfectly in character. But as the closest pursuit of nature is the surest way to excellence in general, and to sublimity in particular, in poetical description, so we find that this simple suggestion of the shepherd is not unattended with magnificence. There is a grandeur and variety in the landscape he describes:
| “And first review that long extended plain, And yon wide groves, already past with pain! Yon ragged cliff, whose dangerous path we tried! And, last, this lofty mountain’s weary side!” |
There is, in imitative harmony, an act of expressing a slow and difficult movement by adding to 116 the usual number of pauses in a verse. This is observable in the line that describes the ascent of the mountain:
| And last || this lofty mountain’s || weary side ||. |
Here we find the number of pauses, or musical bars, which, in an heroic verse, is commonly two, increased to three.
The liquid melody, and the numerous sweetness of expression, in the following descriptive lines, is almost inimitably beautiful: