| “Sweet to the sight is Zabran’s flowery plain, And once by nymphs and shepherds loved in vain! No more the virgins shall delight to rove By Sargis’ banks, or Irwan’s shady grove; On Tarkie’s mountain catch the cooling gale, Or breathe the sweets of Aly’s flowery vale.” |
Nevertheless, in this delightful landscape there is an obvious fault; there is no distinction between the plain of Zabran and the vale of Aly; they are both flowery, and consequently undiversified. This could not proceed from the poet’s want of judgment, but from inattention: it had not occurred to him that he had employed the epithet flowery twice within so short a compass; an oversight which those who are accustomed to poetical, or, indeed, to any other species of composition, know to be very possible.
Nothing can be more beautifully conceived, or more pathetically expressed, than the shepherd’s 117 apprehensions for his fair countrywomen, exposed to the ravages of the invaders:
| “In vain Circassia boasts her spicy groves, For ever famed for pure and happy loves: In vain she boasts her fairest of the fair, Their eyes’ blue languish, and their golden hair! Those eyes in tears their fruitless grief shall send; Those hairs the Tartar’s cruel hand shall rend.” |
There is certainly some very powerful charm in the liquid melody of sounds. The editor of these poems could never read or hear the following verse repeated, without a degree of pleasure otherwise entirely unaccountable:
| “Their eyes’ blue languish, and their golden hair.” |
Such are the Oriental Eclogues, which we leave with the same kind of anxious pleasure we feel upon a temporary parting with a beloved friend.