part 25

Some latent grace, and equals art with art; Transported we survey the dubious strife, While each fair image starts again to life.[23] How long, untuned, had Homer's sacred lyre Jarred grating discord, all extinct his fire! 30 This you beheld; and taught by heav'n to sing, Called the loud music from the sounding string. Now waked from slumbers of three thousand years, Once more Achilles in dread pomp appears, Towers o'er the field of death; as fierce he turns, 35 Keen flash his arms, and all the hero burns; With martial stalk, and more than mortal might, He strides along, and meets the gods in fight: Then the pale Titans, chained on burning floors, Start at the din that rends th' infernal shores, 40 Tremble the tow'rs of heav'n, earth rocks her coasts, And gloomy Pluto shakes with all his ghosts. To ev'ry theme responds thy various lay; Here rolls a torrent, there meanders play; Sonorous as the storm thy numbers rise, 45 Toss the wild waves, and thunder in the skies; Or softer than a yielding virgin's sigh, The gentle breezes breathe away and die. Thus, like the radiant god who sheds the day, You paint the vale, or gild the azure way; 50 And while with ev'ry theme the verse complies, Sink without grov'ling, without rashness rise. Proceed, great bard! awake th' harmonious string, Be ours all Homer; still Ulysses sing. How long[24] that hero, by unskilful hands, 55 Stripped of his robes, a beggar trod our lands! Such as he wandered o'er his native coast, Shrunk by the wand, and all the warrior lost; O'er his smooth skin a bark of wrinkles spread; Old age disgraced the honours of his head; 60 Nor longer in his heavy eye-ball shined The glance divine, forth-beaming from the mind. But you, like Pallas, ev'ry limb infold With royal robes, and bid him shine in gold; Touched by your hand his manly frame improves 65 With grace divine, and like a god he moves. Ev'n I, the meanest of the muses' train, Inflamed by thee, attempt a nobler strain; Advent'rous waken the Mæonian lyre, Tuned by your hand, and sing as you inspire: 70 So armed by great Achilles for the fight, Patroclus conquered in Achilles' right: Like theirs, our friendship! and I boast my name To thine united--for thy friendship's fame. This labour past, of heav'nly subjects sing, 75 While hov'ring angels listen on the wing, To hear from earth such heart-felt raptures rise, As, when they sing, suspended hold the skies: Or nobly rising in fair virtue's cause, From thy own life transcribe th' unerring laws: 80 Teach a bad world beneath her sway to bend: To verse like thine fierce savages attend, And men more fierce: when Orpheus tunes the lay, Ev'n fiends relenting hear their rage away.

LORD LYTTELTON.[25]

TO MR. POPE.[26]

_From Rome, 1730._

Immortal bard! for whom each muse has wove The fairest garlands of th' Aonian grove; Preserved, our drooping genius to restore, When Addison and Congreve are no more; After so many stars extinct in night, 5 The darkened age's last remaining light! To thee from Latian realms this verse is writ, Inspired by memory of ancient wit: For now no more these climes their influence boast, Fall'n is their glory, and their virtue lost: 10 From tyrants, and from priests, the muses fly, Daughters of reason and of liberty. Nor Baiæ now, nor Umbria's plain they love, Nor on the banks of Nar, or Mincio rove; To Thames's flow'ry borders they retire, 15 And kindle in thy breast the Roman fire. So in the shades, where cheered with summer rays Melodious linnets warbled sprightly lays, Soon as the faded, falling leaves complain Of gloomy winter's unauspicious reign, 20 No tuneful voice is heard of joy or love, But mournful silence saddens all the grove. Unhappy Italy! whose altered state Has felt the worst severity of fate: Not that barbarian hands her fasces broke 25 And bowed her haughty neck beneath their yoke; Nor that her palaces to earth are thrown, Her cities desert, and her fields unsown; But that her ancient spirit is decayed, That sacred wisdom from her bounds is fled, 30 That there the source of science flows no more, Whence its rich streams supplied the world before. Illustrious names! that once in Latium shined, Born to instruct, and to command mankind; Chiefs, by whose virtue mighty Rome was raised, 35 And poets, who those chiefs sublimely praised! Oft I the traces you have left explore, Your ashes visit, and your urns adore; Oft kiss, with lips devout, some mould'ring stone, With ivy's venerable shade o'ergrown; 40 Those hallowed ruins better pleased to see Than all the pomp of modern luxury. As late on Virgil's tomb fresh flow'rs I strowed, While with th' inspiring muse my bosom glowed, Crowned with eternal bays my ravished eyes 45 Beheld the poet's awful form arise: Stranger, he said, whose pious hand has paid These grateful rites to my attentive shade, When thou shalt breathe thy happy native air, To Pope this message from his master bear: 50 "Great bard! whose numbers I myself inspire, To whom I gave my own harmonious lyre, If high exalted on the throne of wit, Near me and Homer thou aspire to sit, No more let meaner satire dim the rays, 55 That flow majestic from thy nobler bays; In all the flow'ry paths of Pindus stray, But shun that thorny, that unpleasing way; Nor, when each soft engaging muse is thine, Address the least attractive of the nine. 60 "Of thee more worthy were the task to raise A lasting column to thy country's praise, To sing the land, which yet alone can boast That liberty corrupted Rome has lost, Where science in the arms of peace is laid, 65 And plants her palm beneath the olive's shade. Such was the theme for which my lyre I strung, Such was the people whose exploits I sung; Brave, yet refined, for arms and arts renowned, With diff'rent bays by Mars and Phoebus crowned, 70 Dauntless opposers of tyrannic sway, But pleased, a mild AUGUSTUS to obey. "If these commands submissive thou receive, Immortal and unblamed thy name shall live; Envy to black Cocytus shall retire, 75 And howl with furies in tormenting fire; Approving time shall consecrate thy lays, And join the patriot's to the poet's praise."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: The Recommendatory poems addressed to Pope are without exception dull, insipid productions, which never rise above mediocrity, and sometimes fall below it. Only those are reprinted here which he himself prefixed to his works. The first seven appeared in the quarto of 1717, and the remaining two in the octavo of 1736.]

[Footnote 2: Legally speaking, of Buckingham_shire_; for he would not take the title of Buckingham, under a fear that there was lurking somewhere or other a claim to that title amongst the connections of the Villiers family. He was a pompous grandee, who lived in uneasy splendour, and, as a writer, most extravagantly overrated: accordingly, he is now forgotten. Such was his vanity, and his ridiculous mania for allying himself with royalty, that he first of all had the presumption to court the Princess (afterwards Queen) Anne. Being rejected, he then offered himself to the illegitimate daughter of James II. by the daughter of Sir Charles Sedley. She was as ostentatious as himself, and accepted him.--DE QUINCEY.

Pope commenced the interchange of praise with the Duke of Buckingham by celebrating him in the Essay on Criticism. The return verses of the Duke are little better than drivelling. His Essay on Satire and Essay on Poetry are his principal works, but though one was retouched by Dryden and the other by Pope, they are very second-rate performances. The Duke died in February, 1721, aged 72.]

[Footnote 3: Anne, wife of Heneage, fifth Earl of Winchelsea, and daughter of Sir William Kingsmill. She died on Aug. 5, 1720.--CROKER.

She wrote a tragedy called Aristomenes, or the Royal Shepherd, to which Pope may be supposed to allude in his letter to Caryll of Dec. 15, 1713, where he says, "I was invited to dinner to my Lady Winchelsea, and after dinner to hear a play read, at both which I sat in great disorder with sickness at my head and stomach." Pope omitted her rugged, bald, prosaic verses in 1736, probably because they were intrinsically worthless, and because the name of the author had ceased to carry any weight. In 1727 and 1732 they were printed with Pope's poems in Lintot's Miscellany, and doubtless with the sanction of Pope himself.]

[Footnote 4: These verses, with the heading, "To my friend Mr. Pope, on his Pastorals," originally appeared in 1709, in the same volume of Tonson's Miscellany which contained the Pastorals themselves. In the fifth edition of Lintot's Miscellany, 1727, and in the sixth edition, 1732, the poem of Wycherley, who was then dead, is prefixed to Pope's pieces, and bears the title, "To Mr. Pope at sixteen years old, on occasion of his Pastorals." This was untrue, and seems designed to convey a false idea of Pope's precocity. The lines were not addressed to him till he was twenty, as appears from Wycherley's letter of May 18, 1708, in which he says, "I have made a compliment in verse upon the printing your Pastorals which you shall see when you see me." Dennis, and others, accused Pope of being the author of the flattering tribute. The poet appealed in refutation of the charge to Wycherley's letters, and added that the first draught, and corrected copy of the panegyric, which were still extant in the Harley library in Wycherley's handwriting, would show "that if they received any alteration from Mr. Pope it was in the omission of some of his own praises." Documents to which nobody had access proved nothing. Mr. Croker considered that there was strong internal evidence from the smoothness of the rhythm, the antithetical style, and the nature of the commendation, that Pope must have assisted in reducing the lines to their present shape. The mannerism of both authors can be clearly traced in them. They have the stamp of Wycherley, improved by Pope.]

[Footnote 5: If Wycherley had been capable of anything of the kind, this, and the previous couplet, might have been written after the Essay on Criticism, but surely could not have been inspired by a perusal of the manuscript of the Pastorals.--CROKER.]

[Footnote 6: This line was omitted by Pope in 1736.]

[Footnote 7: From Boileau's Art of Poetry, Chant ii. v. 1.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 8: This triplet was omitted by Pope in the edition of 1736.]

[Footnote 9: Francis Knapp, of Chilton, in Berkshire, Gent. He was of St. John's College, Oxford, and afterwards demy of Magdalen College.--CUNNINGHAM.

He graduated M.A. April 30, 1695, and as he could hardly have been an M.A. before he was twenty-five, he would have been forty-five at the date of these verses. There is a rhyming "Epistle to Mr. B----, by Mr. Fr. Knapp, of Magdalen College, in Oxford," in Tonson's Fourth Miscellany.--CROKER.

He died in, or before 1727; for in one of Lintot's advertisements of that year he is described as the "_late_ Rev. Mr. Francis Knapp, Dean of Killala."]

[Footnote 10: There are several lines in this copy of verses, which could not be endured in a common magazine. So much is the public ear, and public taste improved.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 11: The next six lines were left out by Pope in 1736.]

[Footnote 12: Hough was chosen president of Magdalen College in April, 1687, in defiance of the mandate sent by James II. to the fellows, requiring them to elect Farmer, a profligate and a papist. The illegal proceedings of the king in dispossessing the protestants, and filling the college with romanists, alarmed and enraged the country, and contributed largely to the Revolution of 1688. In May, 1690, Hough became Bishop of Oxford. He was translated to Lichfield and Coventry in 1699, and to Worcester in 1717, where he remained till his death in May, 1743, at the age of ninety-three.]

[Footnote 13: By far the most elegant, and best turned compliment of all addressed to our author, happily borrowed from a fine Greek epigram, and most gracefully applied.--WARTON.

There is little merit in borrowing a compliment from the Anthology, and the felicity of its application in the present instance may be questioned, notwithstanding the emphatic praise of Warton. The mythological basis of the lines, which is appropriate in the Greek, becomes childish when adopted by an English poet, and the point of the piece, which turns upon the assumption that Pope's translation was vastly superior to the original, is too extravagant to be pleasing. Fenton was a scholar, and could not have thought what he said.]

[Footnote 14: "I would add," says Dr. Johnson, in his Life of Parnell, "that the description of barrenness in his verses to Pope was borrowed from Secundus, but lately searching for the passage, which I had formerly read, I could not find it." The borrowed description is the only tolerable part of the poem, which is in a clumsy strain, unlike the usual easy style of Parnell.]

[Footnote 15: He was only son to the Lord Chancellor Harcourt, and died in 1720.--ROSCOE.]

[Footnote 16: It was paying pitiful homage to rank to call an indifferent versifier, like the Duke of Buckingham, "great Sheffield," and pretend that he was the instructor and model of Pope.]

[Footnote 17: The comparison of the three Graces, admiring the reflection of themselves in Pope's works, to Narcissus enamoured of his own face in the stream, is a ludicrous conceit, and the execution is on a par with the idea.]

[Footnote 18: This paragraph refers to Pope's Temple of Fame.]

[Footnote 19: Pope's genius was not epic, and the only epic poem he composed was his juvenile effort, Alcander, which he burnt because it was too worthless to be preserved.]

[Footnote 20: This and the concluding verse are from the Temple of Fame.]

[Footnote 21: These lines first appeared in 1726, in the translation of the Odyssey, where they were appended by Broome to the final note. Pope inserted them in the 8vo edition of his works in 1736.]

[Footnote 22: This was a compliment our author could not take much pleasure in reading; for he could not value himself on his edition of Shakespeare.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 23: The comparison on both sides is wanting in truth. The superficial researches, and meagre notes of Pope did not renovate Shakespeare, and no second Raphael has repainted the pictures of Raphael the first. Fitness of praise was a merit which the writers of commendatory verses commonly despised. Their study was to outvie each other in the grossness, and insincerity of their flattery.]

[Footnote 24: Odyssey, lib. xvi.--BROOME.]

[Footnote 25: Pope inserted this tribute among the Recommendatory poems prefixed to the 8vo edition of his works, 1736. Lyttelton was not raised to the peerage till November, 1757, twenty-seven years after the date of his verses.]

[Footnote 26: Warton prefers Fenton's verses, but in my opinion these lines of Lord Lyttelton's are much superior to all the other recommendatory verses. They are as elegant and correct in themselves, as the sentiments they convey appear sincere, and worthy an ingenuous, cultivated, and liberal mind. There is a small inaccuracy in one or two expressions, and perhaps it would have been better if Virgil's speech, which forms the conclusion, had been compressed.--BOWLES.]

TRANSLATIONS.

ADVERTISEMENT.

The following Translations were selected from many others done by the author in his youth; for the most part indeed but a sort of exercises, while he was improving himself in the languages, and carried by his early bent to poetry to perform them rather in verse than prose. Mr. Dryden's Fables came out about that time,[1] which occasioned the translations from Chaucer. They were first separately printed in Miscellanies by J. Tonson and B. Lintot, and afterwards collected in the quarto edition of 1717. The Imitations of English Authors, which are added at the end, were done as early; some of them at fourteen or fifteen years old; but having also got into Miscellanies, we have put them here together to complete this juvenile volume.[2]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: In the year 1700. They were the most popular of Dryden's works, and were in the hands of every reader when Pope was learning his art.]

[Footnote 2: This advertisement was first prefixed by Pope to vol. iii. of his works, 8vo, 1736. The contents of the "juvenile volume" were The Temple of Fame, Sappho to Phaon, Vertumnus and Pomona, The Fable of Dryope, The first book of Statius's Thebais, January and May, The Wife of Bath's Prologue, and the Imitations of English Poets. Pope apologises for printing the Imitations by saying that they had got into Miscellanies, which is an insinuation that the pieces had found their way to the press without his consent. It was he himself who published them. They are inserted in the present edition among the minor poems.]

THE

FIRST BOOK OF STATIUS:

HIS

THEBAIS.

TRANSLATED IN THE YEAR 1703.

The translator hopes he need not apologise for his choice of this piece, which was made almost in his childhood. But finding the version better upon review than he expected from those years, he was easily prevailed on to give it some correction, the rather because no part of this author (at least that he knows of) has been tolerably turned into our language.[1]--POPE.

It was in his childhood only that Pope could make choice of so injudicious a writer as Statius to translate. It were to be wished that no youth of genius were suffered ever to look into Statius, Lucan, Claudian, or Seneca the tragedian,--authors who, by their forced conceits, by their violent metaphors, by their swelling epithets, by their want of a just decorum, have a strong tendency to dazzle, and to mislead inexperienced minds, and tastes unformed, from the true relish of possibility, propriety, simplicity, and nature. Statius had undoubtedly invention, ability, and spirit; but his images are gigantic and outrageous, and his sentiments tortured and hyperbolical. One cannot forbear reflecting on the short duration of a true taste in poetry among the Romans. From the time of Lucretius to that of Statius was no more than about one hundred and forty-seven years; and if I might venture to pronounce so rigorous a sentence, I would say, that the Romans can boast of but eight poets who are unexceptionably excellent,--namely, Terence, Lucretius, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, Propertius, Phædrus. These only can be called legitimate models of just thinking and writing. Succeeding authors, as it happens in all countries, resolving to be original and new, and to avoid the imputation of copying, become distorted and unnatural. By endeavouring to open an unbeaten path, they deserted simplicity and truth; weary of common and obvious beauties, they must needs hunt for remote and artificial decorations.

It is plain that Pope was not blind to the faults of Statius, many of which he points out with judgment and truth, in a letter to Mr. Cromwell, written in 1708{9}. After this censure of Statius's manner, it is but justice to add, that in the Thebais there are many strokes of a strong imagination; and, indeed, the picture of Amphiaraus, swallowed up suddenly by a chasm that opened in the ground, is truly sublime.--WARTON.

Statius was a favourite writer with the poets of the middle ages. His bloated magnificence of description, gigantic images, and pompous diction suited their taste, and were somewhat of a piece with the romances they so much admired. They neglected the gentler and genuine graces of Virgil, which they could not relish. His pictures were too correctly and chastely drawn to take their fancies; and truth of design, elegance of expression, and the arts of composition, were not their object.--T. WARTON.

In this translation there are some excellent passages, particularly those pointed out by Dr. Warton--"O father Phoebus," v. 829, and the exquisite lines descriptive of evening, "'Twas now the time," &c., 474; but some of the most striking images are omitted, some added, and some misunderstood. Let us however confess, that the versification is truly wonderful, considering the age of the author. It would be endless to point out more particularly occasional errors and inaccuracies, in a composition which can be considered no otherwise than as an extraordinary specimen of versification, before the writer's judgment and taste were matured.--BOWLES.

According to the information which Pope gave to Spence, he commenced an epic poem at thirteen, and wrote four books of about a thousand verses each.[2] As his taste and judgment improved, he discovered the crudeness of his early flights, and for a while he almost relinquished his attempts at original composition, "My first taking to imitating," he said, "was not out of vanity, but humility. I saw how defective my own things were; and I endeavoured to mend my manner by copying good strokes from others."[3] "In my rambles through the poets," he said again, "when I met with a passage or story that pleased me more than ordinary, I used to endeavour to imitate it, or translate it into English; and this gave rise to my imitations published so long after."[4] In speaking of Pope's youthful efforts, Spence uses the word "imitation" as synonymous with "translation." "Some of his first exercises," he says, "were _imitations_ of the stories that pleased him most in Ovid, or any other poet that he was reading. I have one of these original exercises now by me in his own hand. It is the story of Acis and Galatea, from Ovid; and was _translated_ when he was but fourteen years old."[5] Pope appears to have sometimes employed the term imitation with the same latitude, and probably meant by it that he endeavoured to imitate, in the English turn of expression, the distinctive beauties of the original Latin or Greek. "In the scattered lessons I used to set myself," he said, "I translated above a quarter of the Metamorphoses, and that part of Statius which was afterwards printed with the corrections of Walsh."[6] The notion, in which Bowles and others acquiesced, that the published translations are a true index of Pope's skill at fourteen, will not bear investigation. Of the Metamorphoses he brought out only two little fragments, which appeared many years later, when they had undergone a thorough revision. The rest of the manuscript would not have been sacrificed if the version had been fit for the public eye without the toil of recasting it. Spence, who possessed the Acis and Galatea, did not think it worth printing as a specimen of Pope's boyish abilities, even when the curiosity respecting his works was at its height. The suppression of all his early pieces, which had not been submitted to a subsequent renovation, is a plain proof of their inferiority. The first translation which he gave to the world was the "Episode of Sarpedon, from the twelfth and sixteenth books of Homer's Iliads." This, and his Pastorals, appeared together, in May, 1709, in Tonson's Sixth Miscellany, and Pope was then twenty-one.

The fragment from Homer included the speech of Sarpedon to Glaucus. "It has," said the poet, "been rendered in English by Sir John Denham, after whom the translator had not the vanity to attempt it for any other reason, than that the episode must have been very imperfect without so noble a part of it." Denham at that period had a much more brilliant reputation than he afterwards retained, and though Pope adopted the language of humility, he must have felt an inward pride in the consciousness that he had distanced so famous a name. His great superiority did not admit of a question, and he must have been well aware that it was his interest to invite a comparison. The specimen was shown in manuscript to Trumbull, who, in his admiration, urged Pope to give a complete translation of the Iliad. The exhortations of Trumbull did not bear fruit till 1713. "I cannot," Pope wrote to him in the November of that year, "deny myself the pleasure of acquainting you how great a proof I have given of my deference to your opinion and judgment, which has at last moved me to undertake the translation of Homer. I can honestly say Sir William Trumbull was not only the first that put this into my thoughts, but the principal encourager I had in it, and though now almost all the distinguished names of quality or learning in the nation have subscribed to it, there is not one of which I am so proud as of yours." When the first volume of the translation appeared in 1715, Pope paid his acknowledgments in the Preface to the eminent men who had specially patronised the work. Not only does he make no mention of Trumbull, but he professes to have yielded to the counsel of a greater authority, and says, "Mr. Addison was the first whose advice determined me to undertake the task." Either the statement in the Preface, or the statement in the letter must be inaccurate, though both Addison and Trumbull may have recommended the scheme.

The "Episode of Sarpedon" is now incorporated in the complete translation to which it led the way. It was not till three years after he had published the fragment from Homer that Pope brought out his translations from the Latin, of which the most ambitious is his version of the first book of the Thebais. He told Spence that in his boyhood "he liked extremely a translation of a part of Statius by some very bad hand." This work bore the title of "An Essay upon Statius, or the five first books of P. P. Statius his Thebais. Done into English verse by T[homas] S[tephens], London, 1648." The verse into which Stephens did his author was for the most part rugged and prosaic, but a few passages are happily turned, and his successor did not disdain to borrow some lines and phrases from him. The principal advantage, however, to Pope of Stephens's attempt was that it enabled him to interpret the original; for his classical education had been defective, and it is clear from his own account, that he could not, without assistance, have construed the Thebais correctly. At eight years of age he was taught his accidence by a priest.[7] He afterwards went to a couple of small schools, where "he lost what he had gained" from his first instructor.[8] "When I came," he said, "from the last of them, all the acquisition I had made was to be able to construe a little of Tully's Offices."[9] For a few months he had another priest for his tutor, and was then left, between twelve and thirteen, to his own resources.[10] The foundation was slight, and he proceeded to raise upon it a hasty superstructure. "I did not," he said, "follow the grammar, but rather hunted in the authors for a syntax of my own; and then began translating any parts that pleased me, particularly in the best Greek and Latin poets. I got the languages by hunting after the stories in the several poets I read, rather than read the books to get the language."[11] He, on another occasion, told Spence that he thought himself the better in some respects for not having had a regular education, since it caused him to read for the sense, whereas schoolboys were taught to read for words.[12] The process was fatal to scholarship. Ignorant, in a great degree, of the rules and idioms of the Latin tongue, it was impossible he should translate with ease or accuracy. But his peculiar training doubtless favoured the early development of his poetic powers. He devoted his boyish years, when the mind was most pliable, to the cultivation of his art, and this incessant practice of versification from childhood was the cause of his precocious excellence.

Pope's admiration for Statius continued throughout his later boyhood, and he preferred him to "all the Latin poets, by much, next to Virgil."[13] He soon began to turn the Thebais into English, and he affirms that his version of the first book was made in 1703. In a note to his letter to Cromwell of Jan. 22, 1709, he placed it earlier still, and declares that it was "done when the author was but fourteen years old." These statements convey an erroneous impression. It appears from the correspondence with Cromwell that more than one-third of the translation was not in existence by January, 1709, when Pope was in his twenty-first year. The piece was not published till 1712, when it came out in Lintot's Miscellany, and the poet at that period was twenty-four. The portions which were not recently translated, were newly corrected, and the whole represents the powers of the man who completed the task, and not of the boy who commenced it.

The translation of the first book of the Thebais must be more highly estimated as a specimen of versification than as an adequate representation of the original. The harmony and phraseology of

## particular passages are delicious, and verse and language throughout are

polished in a high degree. There is one pervading exception to Pope's metrical skill. He has recourse incessantly to an unnatural order of words, and especially he produces his rhymes by placing the verb after the noun it ought to precede. Of this license Dryden says, "We were whipped at Westminster if we used it twice together. I should judge him to have little command of English whom the necessity of a rhyme should force upon this rock, though sometimes it cannot easily be avoided." Pope availed himself of the false construction with a freedom which seriously deforms and enfeebles much of his poetry. He fell into the error before he had discrimination to perceive the blemish, and when his judgment was more mature habit had reconciled him to the distortion.

Warton has not exaggerated the defects of Statius, but he has underrated his merits. The descriptions in the Thebais are vivid, and abound in picturesque circumstances, and natural traits of character. Pope's translation is more vague. His narrative is less perspicuous, less dramatic, less spirited, and less life-like than the original. "There are numberless particulars blameworthy in our author," Pope wrote to Cromwell, "which I have tried to soften in the version."[14] He was not successful in this attempt. Where he departs from his text he seldom tempers an extravagance, and has more often rejected a beauty, or smoothed it down into insipidity. His juvenile taste was for polished generalities, and he shunned circumstantial nature. He had still less relish for primitive simplicity, and he thought that some of the incidents in the Thebais were too humble to be endured.

"When Statius," he says, "comes to the scene of his poem, and the prize in dispute between the brothers, he gives us a very mean opinion of it,--_pugna est de paupere regno_--very different from the conduct of his master, Virgil, who at the entrance of his poem informs the reader of the greatness of his subject."[15] Pope was led astray by the equivocal meaning of a word. There is no connection between the greatness of a kingdom, and the greatness of a theme for poetic purposes. The poverty of Scotland did not detract from the tragic grandeur of Macbeth. When the fugitive princes in the Thebais quarrel in the vestibule, where they have taken shelter from the storm, and fight with their fists, Pope confused the narrative by omitting the whole account as inconsistent with epic dignity, and sacrificed the characteristics of the original to assimilate the manners to modern usages. If his criticisms had been well founded he should yet have kept to his text. "The sense of an author," says Dryden, "is, generally speaking, to be sacred and inviolable. If the fancy of Ovid be luxuriant, it is his character to be so; and, if I retrench it, he is no longer Ovid. It will be replied that he receives advantage by this lopping of his superfluous branches; but I rejoin that a translator has no such right. When a painter copies from the life, I suppose he has no privilege to alter features and lineaments, under pretence that his picture will look better; perhaps the face which he has drawn would be more exact if the eyes or nose were altered; but it is his business to make it resemble the original." Pope has rendered a few passages with equal beauty and truth, but on the whole the antique colouring, the dramatic traits, and picturesque details are very imperfectly preserved.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: This brief introduction is from Lintot's Miscellany. In the edition of his works in 1736 Pope omitted the final clause which follows the word "correction."]

[Footnote 2: Singer's Spence, p. 209, 211.]

[Footnote 3: Spence, p. 211.]

[Footnote 4: Spence, p. 146.]

[Footnote 5: Spence, p. 214.]

[Footnote 6: Spence, p. 210.]

[Footnote 7: Spence, p. 214.]

[Footnote 8: Spence, p. 146.]

[Footnote 9: Spence, p. 204.]

[Footnote 10: Spence, p. 146.]

[Footnote 11: Spence, p. 146, 196.]

[Footnote 12: Spence, p. 211.]

[Footnote 13: Spence, p. 209, 211.]

[Footnote 14: Pope to Cromwell, June 10, 1709.]

[Footnote 15: Pope to Cromwell, Jan. 22, 1709.]

ARGUMENT

Oedipus, King of Thebes, having by mistake slain his father Laius, and married his mother Jocasta, put out his own eyes, and resigned the realm to his sons, Eteocles and Polynices. Being neglected by them, he makes his prayer to the Fury Tisiphone, to sow debate betwixt the brothers. They agree at last to reign singly, each a year by turns, and the first lot is obtained by Eteocles. Jupiter, in a council of the gods, declares his resolution of punishing the Thebans, and Argives also, by means of a marriage betwixt Polynices and one of the daughters of Adrastus, king of Argos. Juno opposes, but to no effect, and Mercury is sent on a message to the shades, to the ghost of Laius, who is to appear to Eteocles, and provoke him to break the agreement. Polynices in the meantime departs from Thebes by night, is overtaken by a storm, and arrives at Argos, where he meets with Tydeus, who had fled from Calydon, having killed his brother. Adrastus entertains them, having received an oracle from Apollo that his daughters should be married to a boar and a lion, which he understands to be meant of these strangers, by whom the hides of those beasts were worn, and who arrived at the time when he kept an annual feast in honour of that god. The rise of this solemnity he relates to his guests, the loves of Phoebus and Psamathe, and the story of Choroebus. He inquires, and is made acquainted with their descent and quality. The sacrifice is renewed, and the book concludes with a hymn to Apollo.

THE FIRST BOOK

OF

STATIUS'S THEBAIS.

Fraternal rage, the guilty Thebes' alarms, Th' alternate reign destroyed by impious arms, Demand our song; a sacred fury fires My ravished breast, and all the muse inspires. O goddess, say, shall I deduce my rhymes 5 From the dire[1] nation in its early times, Europa's rape, Agenor's stern decree, And Cadmus searching round the spacious sea? How with the serpent's teeth he sowed the soil, And reaped an iron harvest of his toil?[2] 10 Or how from joining stones the city sprung, While to his harp divine Amphion sung?[3] Or shall I Juno's hate to Thebes resound, Whose fatal rage th' unhappy monarch found?[4] The sire against the son his arrows drew, 15 O'er the wide fields the furious mother flew, And while her arms a second hope contain, Sprung from the rocks and plunged into the main. But waive whate'er to Cadmus may belong, And fix, O muse! the barrier of thy song 20 At Oedipus: from his disasters trace The long confusions of his guilty race: Nor yet attempt to stretch thy bolder wing, And mighty Cæsar's[5] conqu'ring eagles sing; How twice he tamed proud Ister's rapid flood, 25 While Dacian mountains streamed with barb'rous blood; Twice taught the Rhine beneath his laws to roll, And stretched his empire to the frozen pole; Or long before, with early valour, strove, In youthful arms, t' assert the cause of Jove.[6] 30 And thou, great heir of all thy father's fame, Increase of glory to the Latian name, Oh! bless thy Rome with an eternal reign, Nor let desiring worlds entreat in vain. What though the stars contract their heav'nly space, 35 And crowd their shining ranks to yield thee place; Though all the skies, ambitious of thy sway, Conspire to court thee from our world away; Though Phoebus longs to mix his rays with thine, And in thy glories more serenely shine; 40 Though Jove himself no less content would be To part his throne and share his heaven with thee; Yet stay, great Cæsar! and vouchsafe to reign O'er the wide earth, and o'er the wat'ry main; Resign to Jove his empire of the skies, 45 And people heav'n with Roman deities.[7]

The time will come, when a diviner flame[8] Shall warm my breast to sing of Cæsar's fame: Meanwhile permit, that my preluding muse In Theban wars an humbler theme may chuse: 50 Of furious hate surviving death, she sings, A fatal throne to two contending kings, And fun'ral flames that, parting wide in air, Express the discord of the souls they bear:[9] Of towns dispeopled, and the wand'ring ghosts 55 Of kings unburied in the wasted coasts; When Dirce's fountain blushed with Grecian blood,[10] And Thetis, near Ismenos'[11] swelling flood, With dread beheld the rolling surges sweep, In heaps, his slaughtered sons into the deep.[12] 60 What hero, Clio! wilt thou first relate?[13] The rage of Tydeus,[14] or the prophet's fate?[15] Or how, with hills of slain on ev'ry side, Hippomedon repelled the hostile tide?[16] Or how the youth[17] with ev'ry grace adorned 65 Untimely fell, to be for ever mourned? Then to fierce Capaneus thy verse extend, And sing with horror his prodigious end.[18] Now wretched Oedipus, deprived of sight, Led a long death in everlasting night; 70 But while he dwells where not a cheerful ray Can pierce the darkness, and abhors the day, The clear reflecting mind presents his sin In frightful views, and makes it day within; Returning thoughts in endless circles roll, 75 And thousand furies haunt his guilty soul: The wretch then lifted to th' unpitying skies Those empty orbs from whence he tore his eyes, Whose wounds, yet fresh, with bloody hands he strook,[19] While from his breast these dreadful accents broke. 80 "Ye gods! that o'er the gloomy regions reign, Where guilty spirits feel eternal pain; Thou, sable Styx! whose livid streams are rolled Through dreary coasts, which I though blind behold: Tisiphone,[20] that oft hast heard my pray'r, 85 Assist, if Oedipus deserve thy care! If you received me from Jocasta's womb,[21] And nursed the hope of mischiefs yet to come: If leaving Polybus, I took my way,[22] To Cirrha's temple[23] on that fatal day, 90 When by the son the trembling father died, Where the three roads the Phocian fields divide: If I the Sphinx's riddles durst explain, Taught by thyself to win the promised reign:[24] If wretched I, by baleful furies led, 95 With monstrous mixture stained my mother's bed, For hell and thee begot an impious brood, And with full lust those horrid joys renewed; Then self-condemned to shades of endless night, Forced from these orbs the bleeding balls of sight: 100 Oh hear! and aid the vengeance I require, If worthy thee, and what thou mightst inspire. My sons their old, unhappy sire despise, Spoiled of his kingdom, and deprived of eyes; Guideless I wander, unregarded mourn, 105 Whilst these exalt their sceptres o'er my urn; These sons, ye gods! who with flagitious pride Insult my darkness, and my groans deride. Art thou a father, unregarding Jove![25] And sleeps thy thunder in the realms above? 110 Thou fury, then some lasting curse entail, Which o'er their children's children shall prevail:[26] Place on their heads that crown distained with gore, Which these dire hands from my slain father tore;[27] Go! and a parent's heavy curses bear; } 115 Break all the bonds of nature, and prepare[28] } Their kindred souls to mutual hate and war. } Give them to dare, what I might wish to see Blind as I am, some glorious villainy! Soon shalt thou find, if thou but arm their hands, 120 Their ready guilt preventing[29] thy commands: Couldst thou some great, proportioned mischief frame, They'd prove the father from whose loins they came." The fury heard, while on Cocytus'[30] brink Her snakes untied, sulphureous waters drink; 125 But at the summons rolled her eyes around, And snatched the starting serpents from the ground. Not half so swiftly shoots along in air The gliding lightning, or descending star. Through crowds of airy shades she winged her flight, 130 And dark dominions of the silent night; Swift as she passed the flitting ghosts withdrew,[31] And the pale spectres trembled at her view: To th' iron gates of Tænarus[32] she flies, There spreads her dusky pinions to the skies. 135 The day beheld, and sick'ning at the sight, Veiled her fair glories in the shades of night. Affrighted Atlas, on the distant shore, Trembled, and shook the heav'ns and gods he bore.[33] Now from beneath Malea's[34] airy height 140 Aloft she sprung, and steered to Thebes her flight; With eager speed the well-known journey[35] took, Nor here regrets the hell she late forsook. A hundred snakes her gloomy visage shade, A hundred serpents guard her horrid head, 145 In her sunk eye-balls dreadful meteors glow:[36] Such rays from Phoebe's bloody circle flow, When lab'ring with strong charms, she shoots from high A fiery gleam, and reddens all the sky. Blood stained her cheeks, and from her mouth there came 150 Blue steaming poisons, and a length of flame: From ev'ry blast of her contagious breath Famine and drought proceed, and plagues, and death. A robe obscene was o'er her shoulders thrown, A dress by fates and furies worn alone. 155 She tossed her meagre arms; her better hand[37] In waving circles whirled a fun'ral brand: A serpent from her left was seen to rear His flaming crest, and lash the yielding air.[38] But when the fury took her stand on high, 160 Where vast Cithæron's top salutes the sky, A hiss from all the snaky tire went round: } The dreadful signal all the rocks rebound, } And through th' Achaian cities send the sound. } Oete, with high Parnassus, heard the voice; 165 Eurotas' banks remurmured to the noise; Again Leucothea shook at these alarms, And pressed Palæmon closer in her arms.[39] Headlong from thence the glowing fury springs, And o'er the Theban palace spreads her wings,[40] 170 Once more invades the guilty dome, and shrouds Its bright pavilions in a veil of clouds. Straight with the rage of all their race possessed, } Stung to the soul, the brothers start from rest, } And all their furies wake within their breast. } 175 Their tortured minds repining envy tears, And hate, engendered by suspicious fears; And sacred thirst of sway; and all the ties Of nature broke;[41] and royal perjuries; And impotent desire to reign alone, 180 That scorns the dull reversion of a throne;[42] Each would the sweets of sov'reign rule devour, While discord waits upon divided power. As stubborn steers by brawny plowmen broke, And joined reluctant to the galling yoke, 185 Alike disdain with servile necks to bear Th' unwonted weight, or drag the crooked share, But rend the reins, and bound[43] a diff'rent way, And all the furrows in confusion lay: Such was the discord of the royal pair, 190 Whom fury drove precipitate to war. In vain the chiefs contrived a specious way, To govern Thebes by their alternate sway: Unjust decree! while this enjoys the state, That mourns in exile his unequal fate, 195 And the short monarch of a hasty year Foresees with anguish his returning heir. Thus did the league their impious arms restrain, But scarce subsisted to the second reign. Yet then, no proud aspiring piles were raised, 200 No fretted roofs with polished metals blazed; No laboured columns in long order placed, No Grecian stone the pompous arches graced; No nightly bands in glitt'ring armour wait[44] Before the sleepless tyrant's guarded gate; 205 No chargers[45] then were wrought in burnished gold, Nor silver vases took the forming mold; Nor gems on bowls embossed were seen to shine, Blaze on the brims, and sparkle in the wine.[46] Say, wretched rivals! what provokes your rage? 210 Say, to what end your impious arms engage? Not all bright Phoebus views in early morn, Or when his ev'ning beams the west adorn, When the south glows with his meridian ray, And the cold north receives a fainter day; 215 For crimes like these, not all those realms suffice,[47] Were all those realms the guilty victor's prize! But fortune now (the lots of empire thrown) Decrees to proud Eteocles the crown: What joys, oh tyrant! swelled thy soul that day, 220 When all were slaves thou couldst around survey,[48] Pleased to behold unbounded power thy own, And singly fill a feared and envied throne! But the vile vulgar, ever discontent,[49] Their growing fears in secret murmurs vent; 225 Still prone to change, though still the slaves of state, And sure the monarch whom they have, to hate; New lords they madly make, then tamely bear, And softly curse the tyrants whom they fear.[50] And one of those who groan beneath the sway 230 Of kings imposed, and grudgingly obey, (Whom envy to the great, and vulgar spite With scandal armed, th' ignoble mind's delight,) Exclaimed--"O Thebes! for thee what fates remain, What woes attend this inauspicious reign? 235 Must we, alas! our doubtful necks prepare, } Each haughty master's yoke by turns to bear, } And still to change whom changed we still must fear? } These now control a wretched people's fate, These can divide, and these reverse the state: 240 Ev'n fortune rules no more!--O servile land, Where exiled[51] tyrants still by turns command. Thou sire of gods and men, imperial Jove! Is this th' eternal doom decreed above? On thy own offspring hast thou fixed this fate, 245 From the first birth of our unhappy state; When banished Cadmus, wand'ring o'er the main, For lost Europa searched the world in vain, And fated in Boeotian fields to found A rising empire on a foreign ground, 250 First raised our walls on that ill-omened plain, Where earth-born brothers were by brothers slain?[52] What lofty looks th' unrivalled[53] monarch bears! How all the tyrant in his face appears! What sullen fury clouds his scornful brow! 255 Gods! how his eyes with threat'ning ardour glow! Can this imperious lord forget to reign, Quit all his state, descend, and serve again? Yet, who, before, more popularly bowed? Who more propitious to the suppliant crowd? 260 Patient of right, familiar in the throne? What wonder then? he was not then alone. O wretched we, a vile, submissive train, Fortune's tame fools, and slaves in ev'ry reign! As when two winds with rival force contend, 265 This way and that, the wav'ring sails they bend, While freezing Boreas, and black Euros blow, Now here, now there, the reeling vessel throw: Thus on each side, alas! our tott'ring state Feels all the fury of resistless fate, 270 And doubtful still, and still distracted stands, While that prince threatens, and while this commands." And now th' almighty father of the gods Convenes a council in the blest abodes: Far in the bright recesses of the skies, 275 High o'er the rolling heav'ns, a mansion lies, Whence, far below, the gods at once survey } The realms of rising and declining day, } And all th' extended space of earth, and air, and sea. } Full in the midst, and on a starry throne, 280 The majesty of heav'n superior shone; Serene he looked, and gave an awful nod,[54] And all the trembling spheres confessed the god. At Jove's assent the deities around In solemn state the consistory crowned.[55] 285 Next a long order of inferior pow'rs Ascend from hills, and plains, and shady bow'rs; Those from whose urns the rolling rivers flow; And those that give the wand'ring winds to blow: Here all their rage, and ev'n their murmurs cease,[56] 290 And sacred silence reigns, and universal peace. A shining synod of majestic gods Gilds with new lustre the divine abodes; Heav'n seems improved with a superior ray, And the bright arch reflects a double day. 295 The monarch then his solemn silence broke, The still creation listened while he spoke, Each sacred accent bears eternal weight, And each irrevocable word is fate. "How long shall man the wrath of heav'n defy, 300 And force unwilling vengeance from the sky! Oh race confed'rate into crimes, that prove Triumphant o'er th' eluded rage of Jove![57] This wearied arm can scarce the bolt sustain, And unregarded thunder rolls in vain: 305 Th' o'erlaboured Cyclops from his task retires, Th' Æolian forge exhausted of its fires.[58] For this, I suffered Phoebus' steeds to stray, And the mad ruler to misguide the day; When the wide earth to heaps of ashes turned, 310 And heaven itself the wand'ring chariot burned. For this, my brother of the wat'ry reign } Released th' impetuous sluices of the main: } But flames consumed, and billows raged in vain. } Two races now, allied to Jove, offend; 315 To punish these, see Jove himself descend. The Theban kings their line from Cadmus trace, From godlike Perseus those of Argive race. Unhappy Cadmus' fate who does not know, And the long series of succeeding woe? 320 How oft the furies, from the deeps of night, Arose, and mixed with men in mortal fight: Th' exulting mother, stained with filial blood;[59] The savage hunter and the haunted wood; The direful banquet why should I proclaim,[60] 325 And crimes that grieve the trembling gods to name? Ere I recount the sins of these profane, } The sun would sink into the western main, } And rising, gild the radiant east again. } Have we not seen (the blood of Laius shed) 330 The murd'ring son ascend his parent's bed, Through violated nature force his way, And stain the sacred womb where once he lay? Yet now in darkness and despair he groans, And for the crimes of guilty fate atones. 335 His sons with scorn their eyeless father view, Insult his wounds, and make them bleed anew. Thy curse, oh Oedipus, just heav'n alarms, And sets th' avenging thunderer in arms. I from the root thy guilty race will tear, 340 And give the nations to the waste of war. Adrastus[61] soon, with gods averse, shall join In dire alliance with the Theban line; Hence strife shall rise, and mortal war succeed; The guilty realms of Tantalus shall bleed; 345 Fixed is their doom; this all-rememb'ring breast Yet harbours vengeance for the tyrant's feast."[62] He said; and thus the queen of heav'n returned; (With sudden grief her lab'ring bosom burned) "Must I, whose cares Phoroneus'[63] tow'rs defend, 350 Must I, oh Jove, in bloody wars contend? Thou know'st those regions my protection claim, Glorious in arms, in riches, and in fame: Though there the fair Egyptian heifer fed, And there deluded Argus slept, and bled;[64] 355 Though there the brazen tower was stormed of old,[65] When Jove[66] descended in almighty gold: Yet I can pardon those obscurer rapes, Those bashful crimes disguised in borrowed shapes; But Thebes, where shining in celestial charms 360 Thou cam'st triumphant to a mortal's arms, When all my glories o'er her limbs were spread, And blazing light'nings danced around her bed;[67] Cursed Thebes the vengeance it deserves, may prove: Ah why should Argos feel the rage of Jove? 365 Yet since thou wilt thy sister-queen control, Since still the lust of discord fires thy soul, Go, raze my Samos, let Mycene fall, And level with the dust the Spartan wall;[68] No more let mortals Juno's pow'r invoke, } 370 Her fanes no more with eastern incense smoke, } Nor victims sink beneath the sacred stroke; } But to your Isis all my rites transfer, Let altars blaze and temples smoke for her; For her, through Egypt's fruitful clime renowned 375 Let weeping Nilus hear the timbrel sound. But if thou must reform the stubborn times, Avenging on the sons the father's crimes, And from the long records of distant age Derive incitements to renew thy rage; 380 Say, from what period then has Jove designed To date his vengeance; to what bounds confined? Begin from thence, where first Alpheus hides } His wand'ring stream, and through the briny tides } Unmixed to his Sicilian river glides.[69] } 385 Thy own Arcadians there the thunder claim, Whose impious rites disgrace thy mighty name;[70] Who raise thy temples where the chariot stood Of fierce Oenomaus, defiled with blood:[71] Where once his steeds their savage banquet found, 390 And human bones yet whiten all the ground. Say, can those honours please; and canst thou love Presumptuous Crete that boasts the tomb of Jove?[72] And shall not Tantalus's kingdoms share Thy wife and sister's tutelary care? 395 Reverse, O Jove, thy too severe decree, Nor doom to war a race derived from, thee;[73] On impious realms and barb'rous kings impose Thy plagues, and curse 'em with such sons[74] as those." Thus, in reproach and pray'r, the queen expressed 400 The rage and grief contending in her breast; Unmoved remained the ruler of the sky, And from his throne returned this stern reply: "'Twas thus I deemed thy haughty soul would bear } The dire, though just, revenge which I prepare } 405 Against a nation thy peculiar care: } No less Dione might for Thebes contend, Nor Bacchus less his native town defend; Yet these in silence see the fates fulfil Their work, and rev'rence our superior will. 410 For by the black infernal Styx I swear, (That dreadful oath which binds the thunderer) 'Tis fixed; th' irrevocable doom of Jove; No force can bend me, no persuasion move. Haste then, Cyllenius,[75] through the liquid air; 415 Go, mount the winds, and to the shades repair; Bid hell's black monarch my commands obey, And give up Laius to the realms of day, Whose ghost yet shiv'ring on Cocytus' sand, Expects its passage to the further strand: 420 Let the pale sire revisit Thebes, and bear These pleasing orders to the tyrant's ear;[76] That from his exiled brother, swelled with pride Of foreign forces, and his Argive bride, Almighty Jove commands him to detain 425 The promised empire, and alternate reign: Be this the cause of more than mortal hate: The rest, succeeding times shall ripen into fate." The god obeys, and to his feet applies Those golden wings that cut the yielding skies. 430 His ample hat his beamy locks o'erspread, And veiled the starry glories of his head. He seized the wand that causes sleep to fly, Or in soft slumbers seals the wakeful eye; That drives the dead to dark Tartarean coasts, 435 Or back to life compels the wand'ring ghosts. Thus, through the parting clouds, the son of May Wings on the whistling winds his rapid way; Now smoothly steers through air his equal flight, Now springs aloft, and tow'rs th' ethereal height; 440 Then wheeling down the steep of heav'n he flies, And draws a radiant circle o'er the skies. Meantime the banished Polynices roves (His Thebes abandoned) through th' Aonian groves, While future realms his wand'ring thoughts delight, 445 His daily vision and his dream by night; Forbidden Thebes appears before his eye, From whence he sees his absent brother fly, With transport views the airy rule his own, And swells on an imaginary throne. 450 Fain would he cast a tedious age away, And live out all in one triumphant day.[77] He chides the lazy progress of the sun, And bids the year with swifter motion run. With anxious hopes his craving mind is tost, 455 And all his joys in length of wishes lost. The hero then resolves his course to bend } Where ancient Danaus' fruitful fields extend,[78] } And famed Mycene's lofty towers ascend, } (Where late the sun did Atreus' crimes detest, 460 And disappeared in horror of the feast.)[79] And now by chance, by fate, or furies led, From Bacchus' consecrated caves he fled, Where the shrill cries of frantic matrons sound, And Pentheus' blood enriched the rising ground.[80] 465 Then sees Cithæron tow'ring o'er the plain, And thence declining gently to the main. Next to the bounds of Nisus' realm repairs, Where treach'rous Scylla cut the purple hairs:[81] The hanging cliffs of Sciron's rock explores, 470 And hears the murmurs of the diff'rent shores:[82] Passes the strait that parts the foaming seas, And stately Corinth's pleasing site surveys. 'Twas now the time when Phoebus yields to night,[83] And rising Cynthia sheds her silver light, 475 Wide o'er the world in solemn pomp she drew Her airy chariot hung with pearly dew;[84] All birds and beasts lie hushed; sleep steals away The wild desires of men, and toils of day, And brings, descending through the silent air, 480 A sweet forgetfulness of human care.[85] Yet no red clouds, with golden borders gay, Promise the skies the bright return of day; No faint reflections of the distant light Streak with long gleams the scatt'ring shades of night: 485 From the damp earth impervious vapours rise, Encrease the darkness, and involve the skies. At once the rushing winds with roaring sound Burst from th' Æolian caves, and rend the ground, With equal rage their airy quarrel[86] try, 490 And win by turns the kingdom of the sky: But with a thicker night black Auster shrouds The heav'ns, and drives on heaps the rolling clouds, From whose dark womb a rattling tempest pours, Which the cold north congeals to haily show'rs. 495 From pole to pole the thunder roars aloud, And broken lightnings flash from ev'ry cloud. Now smoaks with show'rs[87] the misty mountain-ground, And floated fields lie undistinguished round. Th' Inachian streams with headlong fury run, 500 And Erasinus[88] rolls a deluge on: The foaming Lerna swells above its bounds, And spreads its ancient poisons[89] o'er the grounds: Where late was dust, now rapid torrents play, Rush through the mounds, and bear the dams away: 505 Old limbs of trees from crackling forests torn, Are whirled in air, and on the winds are borne: The storm the dark Lycæan groves displayed, And first to light exposed the sacred shade.[90] Th' intrepid Theban hears the bursting sky, 510 Sees yawning rocks in massy fragments fly,[91] And views astonished, from the hills afar, The floods descending, and the wat'ry war,[92] That, driv'n by storms, and pouring o'er the plain, Swept herds, and hinds, and houses to the main.[93] 515 Through the brown horrors of the night he fled, Nor knows, amazed, what doubtful path to tread; His brother's image to his mind appears, Inflames his heart with rage, and wings his feet with fears.[94] So fares a sailor on the stormy main, 520 When clouds conceal Boötes' golden wain, When not a star its friendly lustre keeps, Nor trembling Cynthia glimmers on the deeps; He dreads the rocks, and shoals, and seas, and skies, While thunder roars, and lightning round him flies. 525 Thus strove the chief, on every side distressed, Thus still his courage, with his toils increased; With his broad shield opposed, he forced his way Through thickest woods, and roused the beasts of prey, Till he beheld, where from Larissa's[95] height 530 The shelving walls reflect a glancing light: Thither with haste the Theban hero flies; } On this side Lerna's pois'nous water lies, } On that Prosymna's grove and temple rise:[96] } He passed the gates, which then unguarded lay, 535 And to the regal palace bent his way; On the cold marble, spent with toil, he lies, And waits till pleasing slumbers seal his eyes. Adrastus here his happy people sways, Blest with calm peace in his declining days; 540 By both his parents of descent divine, Great Jove and Phoebus graced his noble line: Heaven had not crowned his wishes with a son, But two fair daughters heired[97] his state and throne. To him Apollo (wondrous to relate! 545 But who can pierce into the depths of fate?) Had sung--"Expect thy sons[98] on Argos' shore, A yellow lion and a bristly boar." This long revolved in his paternal breast, Sate heavy on his heart, and broke his rest; 550 This, great Amphiaraus, lay hid from thee, Though skilled in fate, and dark futurity. The father's care and prophet's art were vain, For thus did the predicting god ordain.[99] Lo hapless Tydeus, whose ill-fated hand 555 Had slain his brother, leaves his native land,[100] And seized with horror in the shades of night, Through the thick deserts headlong urged his flight: Now by the fury of the tempest driv'n, He seeks a shelter from th' inclement heav'n, 560 Till, led by fate, the Theban's steps he treads, And to fair Argos' open court succeeds.[101] When thus the chiefs from diff'rent lands resort T' Adrastus' realms, and hospitable court; The king surveys his guests with curious eyes, 565 And views their arms and habit with surprise. A lion's yellow skin the Theban wears, Horrid his mane, and rough with curling hairs; Such once employed Alcides' youthful toils, Ere yet adorned with Nemea's dreadful spoils.[102] 570 A boar's stiff hide, of Calydonian breed, Oenides' manly shoulders overspread. Oblique his tusks, erect his bristles stood, Alive, the pride and terror of the wood. Struck with the sight, and fixed in deep amaze, 575 The King th' accomplished oracle surveys, Reveres Apollo's vocal caves, and owns The guiding godhead, and his future sons O'er all his bosom secret transports reign, And a glad horror[103] shoots through ev'ry vein. 580 To heav'n he lifts his hands, erects his sight, And thus invokes the silent queen of night. "Goddess of shades, beneath whose gloomy reign Yon spangled arch glows with the starry train: You who the cares of heav'n and earth allay, } 585 Till nature quickened by th' inspiring ray } Wakes to new vigour with the rising day: } Oh thou who freest me from my doubtful state, Long lost and wildered in the maze of fate! Be present still, oh goddess! in our aid; 590 Proceed, and firm[104] those omens thou hast made. We to thy name our annual rites will pay, And on thy altars sacrifices lay; The sable flock shall fall beneath the stroke, And fill thy temples with a grateful smoke. 595 Hail, faithful Tripos! hail, ye dark abodes Of awful Phoebus: I confess the gods!" Thus, seized with sacred fear, the monarch prayed; Then to his inner court the guests conveyed; Where yet thin fumes from dying sparks arise, } 600 And dust yet white upon each altar lies, } The relics of a former sacrifice. } The king once more the solemn rites requires, And bids renew the feasts, and wake the fires.[105] His train obey, while all the courts around 605 With noisy care and various tumult sound. Embroidered purple clothes the golden beds; This slave the floor, and that the table spreads; A third dispels the darkness of the night, And fills depending lamps with beams of light. 610 Here loaves in canisters are piled on high, And there in flames the slaughtered victims fry.[106] Sublime in regal state Adrastus shone, Stretched on rich carpets on his iv'ry throne; A lofty couch receives each princely guest; 615 Around, at awful distance, wait the rest. And now the king, his royal feast to grace, Acestis calls, the guardian[107] of his race, Who first their youth in arts of virtue trained, And their ripe years in modest grace maintained; 620 Then softly whispered in her faithful ear, And bade his daughters at the rites appear. When from the close apartments of the night, The royal nymphs approach divinely bright; Such was Diana's, such Minerva's face; 625 Nor shine their beauties with superior grace, But that in these a milder charm endears, And less of terror in their looks appears. As on the heroes first they cast their eyes, O'er their fair cheeks the glowing blushes rise, 630 Their downcast looks a decent shame confessed, Then on their father's rev'rend features rest. The banquet done, the monarch gives the sign To fill the goblet high with sparkling wine, Which Danaus used in sacred rites of old, 635 With sculpture graced, and rough with rising gold. Here to the clouds victorious Perseus flies, } Medusa seems to move her languid eyes, } And, ev'n in gold, turns paler as she dies.[108] } There from the chace Jove's tow'ring eagle bears, 640 On golden wings, the Phrygian to the stars:[109] Still as he rises in th' ethereal height, His native mountains lessen to his sight; While all his sad companions upward gaze, Fixed on the glorious scene in wild amaze; 645 And the swift hounds, affrighted as he flies, Run to the shade, and bark against the skies. This golden bowl with gen'rous juice was crowned, The first libations sprinkled on the ground, By turns on each celestial pow'r they call; 650 With Phoebus' name resounds the vaulted hall. The courtly train, the strangers, and the rest, Crowned with chaste laurel, and with garlands dressed, While with rich gums the fuming altars blaze, Salute the god in num'rous hymns of praise. 655 Then thus the king: "Perhaps, my noble guests, These honoured altars, and these annual feasts To bright Apollo's awful name designed, Unknown, with wonder may perplex your mind. Great was the cause; our old solemnities 660 From no blind zeal, or fond tradition rise; But saved from death, our Argives yearly pay These grateful honours to the god of day. "When by a thousand darts the Python slain With orbs unrolled lay cov'ring all the plain,[110] 665 (Transfixed as o'er Castalia's streams he hung, And sucked new poisons with his triple tongue)[111] To Argos' realms the victor god resorts, And enters old Crotopus' humble courts. This rural prince one only daughter blest, 670 That all the charms of blooming youth possessed; Fair was her face, and spotless was her mind, Where filial love with virgin sweetness joined. Happy! and happy still she might have proved, Were she less beautiful, or less beloved! 675 But Phoebus loved, and on the flow'ry side Of Nemea's stream, the yielding fair enjoyed: Now, ere ten moons their orb with light adorn, Th' illustrious offspring of the god was born; The nymph, her father's anger to evade, 680 Retires from Argos to the sylvan shade; To woods and wilds the pleasing burden bears, And trusts her infant to a shepherd's cares. "How mean a fate, unhappy child! is thine? Ah how unworthy those of race divine? 685 On flow'ry herbs in some green covert laid, His bed the ground, his canopy the shade,[112] He mixes with the bleating lambs his cries, } While the rude swain his rural music tries } To call soft slumbers on his infant eyes. } 690 Yet ev'n in those obscure abodes to live, Was more, alas! than cruel fate would give, For on the grassy verdure as he lay, And breathed the freshness of the early day, Devouring dogs the helpless infant tore, 695 Fed on his trembling limbs, and lapped the gore. Th' astonished mother, when the rumour came, Forgets her father, and neglects her fame; With loud complaints she fills the yielding air, And beats her breast, and rends her flowing hair; 700 Then wild with anguish to her sire she flies: Demands the sentence, and contented dies. "But touched with sorrow for the dead too late, The raging god prepares t' avenge her fate. He sends a monster, horrible and fell,[113] 705 Begot by furies in the depths of hell.[114] The pest a virgin's face and bosom bears; } High on a crown a rising snake appears, } Guards her black front, and hisses in her hairs: } About the realm she walks her dreadful round, 710 When night with sable wings o'erspreads the ground, Devours young babes before their parents' eyes, And feeds and thrives on public miseries.[115] "But gen'rous rage the bold Choroebus warms, Choroebus, famed for virtue, as for arms; 715 Some few like him, inspired with martial flame, Thought a short life well lost for endless fame. These, where two ways in equal parts divide, } The direful monster from afar descried; } Two bleeding babes depending at her side; } 720 Whose panting vitals, warm with life, she draws, And in their hearts embrues her cruel claws. The youths surround her with extended spears; But brave Choroebus in the front appears, Deep in her breast he plunged his shining sword, 725 And hell's dire monster back to hell restored. Th' Inachians[116] view the slain with vast surprize, Her twisting volumes and her rolling eyes, Her spotted breast, and gaping womb embrued With livid poison, and our children's blood. 730 The crowd in stupid wonder fixed appear, Pale ev'n in joy, nor yet forget to fear. Some with vast beams the squalid corpse engage, And weary all the wild efforts of rage. The birds obscene, that nightly flocked to taste, 735 With hollow screeches fled the dire repast; And rav'nous dogs, allured by scented blood, And starving wolves ran howling to the wood. "But fired with rage, from cleft Parnassus' brow } Avenging Phoebus bent his deadly bow, } 740 And hissing flew the feathered fates below: } A night of sultry clouds involved around The tow'rs, the fields, and the devoted ground: And now a thousand lives together fled, } Death with his scythe cut off the fatal thread,[117] } 745 And a whole province in his triumph led. } "But Phoebus, asked why noxious fires appear, And raging Sirius blasts the sickly year, Demands their lives by whom his monster fell, And dooms a dreadful sacrifice to hell. 750 "Blest be thy dust, and let eternal fame Attend thy manes, and preserve thy name, Undaunted hero![118] who divinely brave, In such a cause disdained thy life to save; But viewed the shrine with a superior look, 755 And its upbraided godhead thus bespoke: "With piety, the soul's securest guard, And conscious virtue, still its own reward, Willing I come, unknowing how to fear; Nor shalt thou, Phoebus, find a suppliant here. 760 Thy monster's death to me was owed alone, And 'tis a deed too glorious to disown. Behold him here, for whom, so many days, Impervious clouds concealed thy sullen rays; For whom, as man no longer claimed thy care, 765 Such numbers fell by pestilential air! But if th' abandoned race of human kind From gods above no more compassion find; If such inclemency in heav'n can dwell, } Yet why must unoffending Argos feel } 770 The vengeance due to this unlucky steel? } On me, on me, let all thy fury fall, Nor err from me, since I deserve it all: Unless our desert cities please thy sight, Or fun'ral flames reflect a grateful light. 775 Discharge thy shafts, this ready bosom rend, And to the shades a ghost triumphant send; But for my country let my fate atone, Be mine the vengeance, as the crime my own. "Merit distressed, impartial heav'n relieves: 780 Unwelcome life relenting Phoebus gives; For not the vengeful pow'r, that glowed with rage, With such amazing virtue durst engage. The clouds dispersed, Apollo's wrath expired, And from the wond'ring god th' unwilling[119] youth retired. 785 Thence we these altars in his temple raise, And offer annual honours, feasts, and praise; These solemn feasts propitious Phoebus please; These honours, still renewed, his ancient wrath appease." "But say, illustrious guest," adjoined the king, 790 "What name you bear, from what high race you spring? The noble Tydeus stands confessed, and known Our neighbour prince, and heir of Calydon. Relate your fortunes, while the friendly night And silent hours to various talk invite." 795 The Theban bends on earth his gloomy eyes, Confused, and sadly thus at length replies: "Before these altars how shall I proclaim, O gen'rous prince! my nation, or my name, Or through what ancient veins our blood has rolled? 800 Let the sad tale for ever rest untold! Yet if propitious to a wretch unknown, You seek to share in sorrows not your own; Know, then, from Cadmus I derive my race, Jocasta's son, and Thebes my native place." 805 To whom the king (who felt his gen'rous breast Touched with concern for his unhappy guest) Replies: "Ah! why forbears the son to name His wretched father, known too well by fame? Fame, that delights around the world to stray, 810 Scorns not to take our Argos in her way. Ev'n those who dwell where suns at distance roll, In northern wilds, and freeze beneath the pole; And those who tread the burning Lybian lands, The faithless Syrtes and the moving sands; 815 Who view the western sea's extremest bounds, Or drink of Ganges in their eastern grounds; All these the woes of Oedipus have known, Your fates, your furies, and your haunted town. If on the sons the parents' crimes descend, 820 What prince from those his lineage can defend? Be this thy comfort, that 'tis thine t' efface, } With virtuous acts, thy ancestor's disgrace, } And be thyself the honour of thy race. } But see! the stars begin to steal away, 825 And shine more faintly at approaching day; Now pour the wine; and in your tuneful lays Once more resound the great Apollo's praise." "O father Phoebus![120] whether Lycia's coast[121] And snowy mountain, thy bright presence boast; 830 Whether to sweet Castalia[122] thou repair, And bathe in silver dews thy yellow hair; Or pleased to find fair Delos float no more, Delight in Cynthus,[123] and the shady shore; Or choose thy seat in Ilion's proud abodes, 835 The shining structures raised by lab'ring gods;[124] By thee the bow and mortal shafts are borne; Eternal charms thy blooming youth adorn: Skilled in the laws of secret fate above, And the dark counsels of almighty Jove, 840 'Tis thine the seeds of future war to know,[125] The change of sceptres, and impending woe, When direful meteors spread, through glowing air, Long trails of light, and shake their blazing hair. Thy rage the Phrygian felt, who durst aspire 845 T' excel the music of thy heav'nly lyre;[126] Thy shafts avenged lewd Tityus' guilty flame, Th' immortal victim of thy mother's fame;[127] Thy hand slew Python, and the dame who lost Her num'rous offspring for a fatal boast.[128] 850 In Phlegyas' doom thy just revenge appears, Condemned to furies and eternal fears; He views his food, but dreads, with lifted eye, The mould'ring rock that trembles from on high.[129] "Propitious hear our prayer, O pow'r divine! 855 And on thy hospitable Argos shine; Whether the style of Titan[130] please thee more, Whose purple rays th' Achæmenes adore; Or great Osiris,[131] who first taught the swain In Pharian fields to sow the golden grain; 860 Or Mitra, to whose beams the Persian bows, And pays, in hollow rocks, his awful vows; Mitra, whose head the blaze of light adorns, Who grasps the struggling heifer's lunar horns."[132]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: "Dire," in the Latin sense of ill-omened.]

[Footnote 2: When Jupiter had carried off Europa, her father, Agenor, sent her brother Cadmus to seek her, and commanded him not to return without his sister. Unable to find her he settled at Thebes, and built the city. He slew the dragon, which guarded a neighbouring well, and a portion of the armed men, who sprung up from its teeth, were reputed to be the ancestors of the Thebans.]

[Footnote 3: A second legend ascribed the building of the city to the wonder-working music of Amphion, which caused the stones to pile themselves together. Both legends were subsequently blended, and Cadmus had the credit of the upper part of the city, and Amphion of the lower.]

[Footnote 4: Juno visited Athamas, king of Thebes, with madness, and in his frenzy he shot his own son, Learchus, whom he took for a young lion. Upon this his wife, Ino, who was a daughter of Cadmus, fled with her second son, Melicertes, and threw herself and her boy into the sea.]

[Footnote 5: Domitian. The panegyric on this timid and cruel tyrant was disgraceful flattery. The boasted victories over the Dacian's were in reality defeats. They compelled the emperor to sue for an inglorious peace which was only purchased by the promise of an immediate ransom and an annual tribute. Most of his pretended triumphs were of a similar character, and led Pliny the younger to remark, that they were always the token of some advantage obtained by the enemies of Rome.]

[Footnote 6: During the contest between Vespasian and Vitellius for the empire, Domitian, at the age of eighteen, took refuge in the temple of the Capitol to escape from the fury of the soldiers opposed to his father. It was self-preservation and not daring which impelled him, and when the temple of Jupiter was set on fire he again fled, and hid himself until the party of Vespasian prevailed.]

[Footnote 7: This line is very obscure. There is nothing corresponding to it in the Latin.]

[Footnote 8: From the translation of Stephens:

The time may come when a divinor rage.]

[Footnote 9: Pope is closer to Stephens than to the original:

funeral flames Divided, like the souls they carry.

The rival brothers ultimately engaged in single combat, and both fell. The body of Polynices was placed by mistake upon the funeral pile of Eteocles, and the flames rose upwards in diverging currents.]

[Footnote 10: Stephens's translation:

When Dirce blushed, being stained with Grecian blood.]

[Footnote 11: The dirce ran on one side of Thebes, the Ismenus on the other, and they afterwards united in a common stream. Both were mere watercourses, which were only filled by the rains of winter.]

[Footnote 12: The Thebans are subsequently represented by Statius as driven into the Ismenus by the Greeks, and the hosts which were killed or drowned were carried by the river into the sea.]

[Footnote 13: What hero, that is, of the famous seven who went up against Thebes to dispossess Eteocles for violating the compact to reign alternately with Polynices. The five persons whom Statius enumerates as joining with Polynices and Adrastus, king of Argos, are Tydeus, Amphiaraus, Hippomedon, Parthenopæus, and Capaneus.]

[Footnote 14: When Tydeus had received his death-wound from a javelin hurled by Menalippus, he gathered up his failing strength, and flung a dart by which he mortally wounded Menalippus in turn. Full of revengeful spite Tydeus begged that the head of Menalippus might be brought to him. He grasped it with his dying hand, gazed at it with malignant joy, gnawed it in his frenzy, and refused to relinquish his hold. This was "the rage of Tydeus," which Statius says the Greeks themselves condemned as exceeding the recognised latitude of hate.]

[Footnote 15: The prophet was Amphiaraus, who predicted that all who took part in the expedition, except Adrastus, would be destroyed. The earth opened while Amphiaraus was fighting, and swallowed up him and his chariot. Statius paints him sinking calmly into the yawning gulf, without dropping his weapons or the reins, and with his eyes fixed on the heavens.]

[Footnote 16: Hippomedon is made by Statius the hero of the conflict in the river Ismenus, where he at last succumbs to the god of the river. The piles of dead formed a dike, which turned back the waters.]

[Footnote 17: Parthenopæus.--POPE.]

[Footnote 18: He declared that Jupiter himself should not keep him from ascending the walls of Thebes. Jupiter punished his defiance by setting him on fire with lightning on the scaling ladder, and he was burnt to death.]

[Footnote 19: Oedipus did not strike his wounds. He struck the ground, which was the usage in invoking the infernal deities, since their kingdom was in the bowels of the earth.]

[Footnote 20: One of the three principal furies or avengers of crime, who inhabited the world of condemned spirits.]

[Footnote 21: The great difference between raising horror and terror is perceived and felt from the reserved manner in which Sophocles speaks of the dreadful incest of Oedipus, and from the manner in which Statius has enlarged and dwelt upon it, in which he has been very unnaturally and injudiciously imitated by Dryden and Lee, who introduce this most unfortunate prince not only describing but arguing on the dreadful crime he had committed.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 22: Laius, king of Thebes, warned by the oracle that he would be killed by his own offspring, exposed his son Oedipus on Mount Cithæron. The infant was found by a shepherd, and carried to Polybus, king of Corinth, who adopted him. Arrived at man's estate, he too was informed by the oracle that he would take the life of his father, and commit incest with his mother. Believing that the king and queen who brought him up were his parents, he determined not to go back to Corinth, and in attempting to avert his destiny, he fulfilled it. As he journeyed towards Thebes he met his real father, Laius, and slew him in a conflict which grew out of a dispute with his charioteer.]

[Footnote 23: Or the temple at Delphi, where Oedipus went to consult the oracle.]

[Footnote 24: The Sphinx sat upon a rock near Thebes propounding a riddle to every one who passed by, and destroying all who were unable to explain it. The Thebans proclaimed that whoever would rid the kingdom of this scourge should marry the widow of Laius, and succeed to the vacant throne. Oedipus, by solving the riddle, drove the Sphinx to commit suicide, and in accepting the reward, he unconsciously verified the remainder of the oracle.]

[Footnote 25: Oedipus behaves with the fury of a blustering bully, instead of that patient submission and pathetic remorse which are so suited to his condition.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 26: In the first edition he had written

Which shall o'er long posterity prevail.

The more forcible phrase which he substituted for "long posterity," was from Dryden's Virg. Æn. iii. 132:

And children's children shall the crown sustain.]

[Footnote 27: This couplet follows closely the translation of Stephens:

Put on that diadem besmeared with gore Which from my father's head these fingers tore.]

[Footnote 28: Dryden's Virg. Æn. iii. 78:

Broke ev'ry bond of nature and of truth]

[Footnote 29: Pope uses "preventing" in the then common but now obsolete sense of "anticipating."]

[Footnote 30: A river in the lower world.]

[Footnote 31: Great is the force and the spirit of these lines down to verse 183; and indeed they are a surprising effort in a writer so young as when he translated them. See particularly lines 150 to 160.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 32: The entrance to the infernal regions was said to be through a cave in the Tænarian promontory, which formed the southern extremity of Greece.]

[Footnote 33: Pope has judiciously tamed the bombast image "caligantes animarum examine campos," "the plains darkened with a swarm of ghosts." "Lucentes equos," he translates, "fair glories," omitting the image entirely. To mount Atlas he has added an idea which makes the passage more ridiculous than sublime. It is poorly expressed in the original; in the translation it is ludicrous; "and shook the heavens _and gods he bore_." There are many images which if indistinctly seen are sublime; if

## particularised they become quite the contrary. However, the translation

is certainly wonderful, when the age of the author is considered. It shows his powers of metrical language, at so early a period of his poetical studies, though it is very unfaithful in particular passages.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 34: Pope's acquaintance with Latin prosody, from his confined education, was probably very small, or he would not have used Mal[=e]a, instead of Mal[)e]a, with the line of Statius before him.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 35: "Well-known," because the Fury had before visited the Theban palace to instigate the crimes and passions of which it had been the scene. The haste with which she goes, and her preference for the terrestrial journey, even over the haunts of her own Tartarus, indicate the signal malevolence of the mission. Hence the delight she takes in it.]

[Footnote 36: The original is more forcible and less extravagant. The sunken eyes of the Fury glared with a light like that of red-hot iron--_ferrea lux_.]

[Footnote 37: This expression, which is not in Statius, is common with Dryden, as in his Virg. Æn. x. 582:

And from Strymonius hewed his better hand.]

[Footnote 38: Statius depicts the frenzied virulence of the Fury, by saying that she lashed the air with the serpent. Pope has marred the description by representing the lashing of the air as the act of the serpent itself.]

[Footnote 39: After Ino had drowned herself and her son Melicertes, they became marine divinities, and their names were changed to Leucothea and Palæmon. Statius is more picturesque than Pope. When the apparition of the Fury announced terrible evils to come, the sea was stirred to its depths. On the outburst of the tempest, Palæmon was sailing about on the back of a dolphin, and it was then that his mother snatched him up in her alarm, and pressed him to her bosom. To convey an idea of the tremendous nature of the storm, Statius says that the Corinthian isthmus could hardly resist the violence of the waves which dashed against each of its shores. This circumstance is justly styled by Pope "most extravagantly hyperbolical," but a translator should not have omitted it.]

[Footnote 40: A great image, and highly improved from the original, "assueta nube."--WARTON.

The first edition had a feeble prosaic line in place of the image which Warton admired:

Headlong from thence the fury urged her flight, And at the Theban palace did alight.]

[Footnote 41: "Ruptæque vices" in the original, which Pope translates, "and all the ties of nature broke," but by _vices_ is indicated the alternate reign of the two brothers, as ratified by mutual oaths, and subsequently violated by Eteocles.--DE QUINCEY.]

[Footnote 42: The felicities of this translation are at times perfectly astonishing, and it would be scarcely possible to express more nervously or amply the words,--

jurisque secundi Ambitus impatiens, et summo dulcius unum Stare loco,--

than by Pope's couplet, which most judiciously, by reversing the two clauses, gains the power of fusing them into connection.--DE QUINCEY.]

[Footnote 43: "Bound" is an improper verb as applied to "steers"; besides the simile is not exactly understood. There is nothing about "reins" or "bounding" in the original. What is meant is that the steers do not draw even. Pope confounded the image of the young bullocks with that of a horse, and he therefore introduces "reins" and "bounding."--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 44: For "armour wait," the first edition had "arms did wait."]

[Footnote 45: "Charger" is used in its old sense of a dish.]

[Footnote 46: Statius, to point the folly of the criminal ambition, goes on to represent, that the contest was only for naked unadorned dominion in a poverty-stricken kingdom,--a battle for which should cultivate the barren territory on the banks of a petty stream,--and for this empty privilege the brothers sacrificed everything which was of good report in life or death. Pope weakened the moral of Statius, and the lines which follow to the end of the paragraph are also very inferior in force to the original.]

[Footnote 47: In the first edition,

Not all those realms could for such crimes suffice.

Pope might have done more to improve this prosaic couplet.]

[Footnote 48: Pope borrowed from the translation of Stephens:

How wast thou lost In thine own joys, proud tyrant then, when all About thee were thy slaves.]

[Footnote 49: It should be "discontented."--WARTON.]

[Footnote 50: This couplet was interpolated by Pope and seems to have been suggested by his hostility to the revolution of 1688. Nor does Statius call the populace "vile," or say that they are always "discontented," or that they are "still prone to change, though still the slaves of state." Neither does he say that they "are sure to hate the monarch, they have," but he says that their custom is to love his successor, which is a sentiment more in accordance with experience.]

[Footnote 51: "Exiled" because the king who was not reigning had to leave the country during his brother's year of power.]

[Footnote 52: The warriors who were the produce of the dragon's teeth sown by Cadmus fought among themselves till only five were left.]

[Footnote 53: "Unrivalled," as the context shows, is not here a term of commendation, but merely signifies that the monarch had no equal in rank or power.]

[Footnote 54: "Placido quatiens tamen omnia vultu," is the common reading. I believe it should be "nutu," with reference to the word "quatiens."--POPE.]

[Footnote 55: Pope was manifestly unable to extract any sense from the original. It is there said that Jupiter at his first entrance seats himself upon his starry throne, but that the other gods did not presume to sit down "protinus," that is, in immediate succession to Jupiter, and interpreting his example as a tacit license to do so, until, by a gentle wave of his hand, the supreme father signifies his express permission to take their seats. In Pope's translation, the whole picturesque solemnity of the celestial ritual melts into the vaguest generalities.--DE QUINCEY.

De Quincey was mistaken in his inference that Pope was unable to understand the passage, for he had the assistance of the translation of Stephens, which gives the meaning correctly:

Anon He sets him down on his bespangled throne. The rest stand and expect: not one presumed To sit till leave was beckoned.]

[Footnote 56: The winds would have been inconvenient members of a deliberative assembly if they had taken to howling, whistling, and sighing. Nevertheless their propensity to blow was so inveterate that, in Statius, they are only kept quiet by their fear of Jove.]

[Footnote 57: Our author is perpetually grasping at the wonderful and the vast, but most frequently falls gradually from the terrible to the contemptible.--WARTON.

By "our author" Warton meant Statius, and the expression, he criticised as hyberbolical was the "eluded rage of Jove,"--an exaggeration for which Pope alone was responsible.]

[Footnote 58: Hiera, one of the Æolian islands in the neighbourhood of Sicily, was supposed to be the workshop of Vulcan. The island was volcanic, and the underground noises were ascribed to Vulcan, and his assistants, the Cyclopes, as they plied their trade. The circumstance that the fires of the Æolian forge were exhausted was doubtless introduced by Statius because in his day the eruptions had ceased in Hiera.]

[Footnote 59: Agave, the daughter of Cadmus. Her son Pentheus appeared among the women who were celebrating the Bacchic revelries on Mount Cithæron, and his mother, mistaking him in her frenzy for a wild beast, like a wild beast tore him to pieces.]

[Footnote 60: There is no mention of "the direful banquet" in the original. "The savage hunter" alludes to Athamas chasing and slaying his son under the delusion that he was a lion.]

[Footnote 61: The king of Argos.]

[Footnote 62: Tantalus, king of Argos, invited the gods to a banquet, and served up the boiled flesh of his own son, Pelops.]

[Footnote 63: Phoroneus was commonly reputed to have been the founder of the city of Argos.]

[Footnote 64: Juno employed Argus to keep guard over Io, transformed by Jupiter into a cow. Mercury, being sent by Jupiter to rescue Io, lulled Argus to sleep by melodious airs on the flute, and then cut off his head.]

[Footnote 65: An oracle announced to Acrisius, king of Argos, that he would die by the hands of his grandson. The king endeavoured to escape his fate by imprisoning his daughter, Danae, in a brazen tower, but Jupiter obtained access to her in the shape of a shower of gold, and she became the mother of Perseus, who fulfilled the prediction, according to the established legendary usage.]

[Footnote 66: The force of this taunt is weakened in Pope's translation by the change from the second person to the third, as though the invectives of Juno had not been addressed to Jupiter himself.]

[Footnote 67: Jupiter visited Semele, the daughter of Cadmus, in all the majesty of the thunderer, and she was consumed by the lightning.]

[Footnote 68: Homer makes Juno say that there are three cities pre-eminently dear to her--Argos, Sparta, and Mycenæ. Samos had no less title to the distinction. It was one of the localities which contended for the renown of having given her birth, and was, with Argos, the principal seat of her worship. Virgil ranks Samos second among the places she delighted to honour.]

[Footnote 69: The river Alpheus, which takes its rise in Arcadia, loses itself underground in parts of its course, and again reappears. This suggested the fiction that it ran in a subterranean channel, below the bottom of the sea, to the fountain of Arethusa in Sicily, where it once more emerged to day. Pope had less regard to the text of Statius than to Dryden's translation of Virgil's lines on the same legend in Ecl. x. 5:

So may thy silver streams beneath the tide, Unmixed with briny seas, securely glide.]

[Footnote 70: The Arcadians celebrated the worship of Jupiter with human sacrifices.]

[Footnote 71: He was king of Pisa in Elis, where was the celebrated Olympia, with its temple of Jupiter. Oenomaus had ascertained from an oracle that he would perish by the agency of his son-in-law, and he was anxious, in self-defence, to keep his daughter, Hippodamia, from marrying. As he possessed the swiftest horses in the world he required her suitors to contend with him in a chariot-race, which allowed them no chance of success. The prize of victory was to be his daughter; the penalty of defeat was death, and the bones which laid unburied in the neighbourhood of Jupiter's temple were those of the lovers of Hippodamia.]

[Footnote 72: The Cretans claimed to possess both the birth-place and burial-place of Jupiter.]

[Footnote 73: "Derived from Jove," inasmuch as Perseus, one of the kings of Argos, was the son of Jupiter and Danae.]

[Footnote 74: Eteocles and Polynices.--POPE.]

[Footnote 75: Mercury, so called because he was born upon Mount Cyllene.]

[Footnote 76: Eteocles.]

[Footnote 77: Stephens's translation:

This were such a day He'd spend an age to see 't.]

[Footnote 78: To Argos, of which Danaus had been king, whence the Argives were also called Danai.]

[Footnote 79: Atreus, king of Mycenæ, murdered the two sons of his brother Thyestes, and feasted their father with dishes made of their flesh.]

[Footnote 80: Bacchus forced the Theban women to assemble, and give loose to the wild rites by which he was celebrated. It was on this occasion that Pentheus was massacred by his mother.]

[Footnote 81: Nisus was king of Megara when it was besieged by Minos. The king's daughter, Scylla, conceived a passion for Minos, and to ensure him the victory she plucked from her father's head a purple hair upon which depended the preservation of himself and the city.]

[Footnote 82: Statius says that when Polynices was in the middle of the isthmus of Corinth he could hear the waves beat against both its shores. "This," remarked Pope, "could hardly be; for the isthmus of Corinth is full five miles over," and he calls the introduction of the circumstance "a geographical error." It was his own geography that was at fault. The width of the isthmus is only three miles and a half. Pope spoilt the incident when he transferred it to the Scironian rock. Sciron was a robber and murderer, who compelled his victims to wash his feet upon the cliff, and while they were engaged in the operation he kicked them over into the sea.]

[Footnote 83: "We have scarcely in our language eight more beautiful lines than these, down to human care," ver. 481.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 84: Pope owed some happy expressions to the translation of Stephens:

The silent world does view Her airy chariot pearled with drops of dew.]

[Footnote 85: He again borrowed from Stephens:

And nodding through the air brings down in haste A sweet forgetfulness of labour passed.]

[Footnote 86: A very faulty expression; as also below, verse 501,--"rolls a deluge on."--WARTON.

He copied Dryden's Virg. Æn. iv. 638:

As when the winds their airy quarrel try.

He was indebted to a second couplet in the same translation, Æn. ii. 565:

Thus, when the rival winds their quarrel try, Contending for the kingdom of the sky.]

[Footnote 87: "Showers" is an inappropriate word to denote the deluge of rain which flooded the earth, and "swept herds, and hinds, and houses to the main."]

[Footnote 88: The Inachus, and the Erasinus were rivers in the plain of Argos.]

[Footnote 89: The waters of the Lerna were infected by the venom from the serpent Hydra, which Hercules slew.]

[Footnote 90: The storm, by blowing down trees or branches, made an opening in the dense foliage through which the sun had never penetrated.]

[Footnote 91: In the first edition:

The prince with wonder did the waste behold, While from torn rocks the massy fragments rolled.]

[Footnote 92: Dryden's Virg. Æn. ii. 413:

The shepherd climbs the cliff, and sees from far The wasteful ravage of the wat'ry war.]

[Footnote 93: Dryden's Virg. Geor. i. 652:

Bore houses, herds, and lab'ring hinds away.]

[Footnote 94: Statius represents Polynices as terrified by the tempest. Pope appears to have thought that this was derogatory to the character of the fugitive king, and he calls him, when gazing on the ravages caused by the storm, "the intrepid Theban," which conveys the impression that he was undaunted by the spectacle. In the same spirit Pope at ver. 527, has the line, "Thus still his _courage_ with his toils increased," where the original says that the stimulus which urged him on was fear. But while Pope has obliterated the alarm which was generated by the tempest he has introduced in its place an alarm which had no existence. In the midst of the havoc worked by the elements the recollection of his brother "wings the feet" of the intrepid Theban "with fears," though he is beyond his brother's reach, and has no suspicion at present that he designs to break the compact to reign alternately. The influence which the remembrance of Eteocles exercised over the mind of the wanderer is expressly distinguished by Statius from the fear, and means no more than that since Polynices was an exile from Thebes, he was compelled to proceed onwards till he could find an asylum in another state.]

[Footnote 95: A mountain on which stood the citadel of Argos.]

[Footnote 96: The temple at Prosymna was dedicated to Juno.]

[Footnote 97: Pope took the expression from Dryden, Virg. Æn. vii. 79:

One only daughter heired the royal state.

And ver. 367:

Only one daughter heirs my crown and state.]

[Footnote 98: Strictly his sons-in-law.]

[Footnote 99: That is, he ordained that the oracles should be incapable of interpretation before it was fulfilled.]

[Footnote 100: Calydon, of which his father Oeneus was king.]

[Footnote 101: The mode in which the two fugitives became known to the king and gained admission to the palace, is not told by Pope, who has left upwards of seventy lines untranslated, and by the mutilation rendered the incidents improbable. Polynices reaches the palace first and lies down, worn out, on the pavement of the vestibule. Tydeus arrives at the same spot, and Polynices is unwilling that he should share the shelter. A quarrel ensues, and from words they proceed to blows. The king is disturbed by the uproar; he issues forth from the palace with attendants and torches to ascertain the cause; explanations follow, and these result in Tydeus and Polynices becoming the guests of Adrastus. "There is an odd account," Pope says to Cromwell, "of an unmannerly battle at fisty-cuffs between the two Princes on a very slight occasion, and at a time when, one would think, the fatigue of their journey, in so tempestuous a night, might have rendered them very unfit for such a scuffle. This I had actually translated, but was very ill satisfied with it, even in my own words, to which an author cannot but be partial enough of conscience."]

[Footnote 102: Before the victory of Hercules over the Nemean lion, he is said by Statius to have worn the skin of a lion which he slew in the neighbourhood of Mount Temessus.]

[Footnote 103: "Horror" at the thought of the dreadful forebodings which had been suggested by the literal language of the oracle; "glad" because of the manner in which the prediction was verified. Jortin, in a note on another passage of the Thebais, says, "Statius could not help falling into his beloved fault of joining contraries together. He is too apt to seek this opposition in his words. He never indeed misses this favourite figure when he can bring it in."]

[Footnote 104: "Firm" for confirm was sanctioned by the frequent example of Dryden, from whose translation of Virg. Æn. viii. 107, Pope has borrowed the entire couplet:

But oh! be present to thy people's aid, And firm the gracious promise thou hast made.]

[Footnote 105: In the first edition this verse was an Alexandrine, ending with "and wake the sleeping fires," which Pope took from Dryden, Virg. Æn. viii, 720:

And on his altars waked the sleeping fires.]

[Footnote 106: "Fry" was the reading of all the editions till that of 1736, when "fly" was substituted by an evident error of the press, and has been retained ever since.]

[Footnote 107: "Tutress" in the first edition. Acestis had been the nurse, and was now the duenna of the two daughters of Adrastus.]

[Footnote 108: The gorgon, Medusa, changed every one who saw her to stone. Perseus avoided the penalty by only looking at her reflection in a mirror as he cut off her head while she slept. Being the grandson of a king of Argos he was an Argive hero, whence his triumph was engraved upon the royal goblet. The artist had selected the moment when Perseus is darting into the air with the head of the gorgon, which, newly separated from the body, still retained the traces of expiring life.]

[Footnote 109: On account of the beauty of Ganymede, Jove sent an eagle to convey him from the earth to the habitations of the gods. There he was appointed cup-bearer, which rendered the incident appropriate to a drinking-vessel.]

[Footnote 110: He has omitted some forcible expressions of the original: Septem--atris--terentem--nigro--centum per jugera,--all of them picturesque epithets.--WARTON.

Statius says, that the huge serpent while alive encircled Delphi seven times with its dark coils, and that when dead and barely unrolled, its body spread over a hundred acres.]

[Footnote 111: The water was not itself poisonous, but it turned to venom in the serpent.]

[Footnote 112: Stephens is more literal, and at the same time more poetical:

earth prepares thy room Garnished with flow'ry beds, and thatched above With oaken leaves close woven; whilst the grove Lends bark to make thy garments.]

[Footnote 113: Much superior to the original.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 114: Sandy's translation of Ovid's Met. bk. vi.

And calls the furies from the depth of hell.]

[Footnote 115: Pope copied Stephens:

devouring some With rav'nous jaws before their parents' eyes, And fats herself with public miseries.]

[Footnote 116: Inachus, according to one tradition, built the city of Argos. After his descendants had reigned for some generations, the throne was seized by Danaus.]

[Footnote 117: Death cutting off the fatal thread with a scythe, is not a very sublime or congruous image. Pope has blended modern ideas with classical: in the original it is "ense metit;"--"_mows_ with his _sword_." Pope has introduced a "_scythe_," to preserve more accurately the metaphor, but it has a bad effect.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 118: Choroebus.]

[Footnote 119: Statius states that Choroebus withdrew, having obtained his end, and says nothing of his being "unwilling," by which Pope seems to mean that he was unwilling to accept his life. This deviation from the original destroys the generous heroism of Choroebus, for if he was weary of his existence there was no merit in his braving death. Statius, indeed, had previously said that Apollo granted Choroebus the "sad boon of life" out of admiration for his magnanimity; but this phrase only signifies that life is sorrowful, and not that Choroebus would have preferred to die.]

[Footnote 120: Some of the most finished lines he has ever written, down to verse 854.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 121: Apollo was specially worshipped by the Lycians.]

[Footnote 122: The celebrated fountain sacred to Apollo on Parnassus.]

[Footnote 123: Apollo was surnamed the Cynthian, from Mount Cynthus in the island of Delos, which was the place of his birth, and the most revered of all the localities set apart for his worship. The island, which had previously floated over the ocean, was, according to one version of the legend, rendered stationary by Jupiter when Apollo was born; according to another version, it was subsequently fixed by Apollo himself.]

[Footnote 124: The walls of Troy were the work of Apollo and Neptune.]

[Footnote 125: In the first edition it was

Thou dost the seeds of future wars foreknow.]

[Footnote 126: The Phrygian was Marsyas, who contended on the flute against Apollo with his lyre. When the umpires decided in favour of the god, he flayed Marsyas for his presumption.]

[Footnote 127: Tityus assaulted the mother of Apollo, and her son shot the offender.]

[Footnote 128: Niobe, because she had seven sons and seven daughters, thought herself superior to Latona, who had only one son, and one daughter,--Apollo and Diana. These divinities, in revenge, destroyed the fourteen children of Niobe.]

[Footnote 129: In the first edition:

He views his food, would taste, yet dares not try, But dreads the mould'ring rock that trembles from on high.

Apollo intrigued with Coronis, the daughter of Phlegyas. Her enraged father retaliated by firing the temple of Apollo, and was consigned for his rebellion to perpetual torture in the infernal regions. His terror lest the impending rock should crush him is a circumstance interpolated by Pope from Virgil's description of the punishment of Pirithous and Ixion, and the expression "mould'ring rock" is taken from Dryden's translation of the passage, Æn. vi. 816:

High o'er their heads a mould'ring rock is placed That promises a fall, and shakes at ev'ry blast.

The revolting nature of the food itself is the reason assigned by Statius why Phlegyas forebore to partake of it, and preferred to endure the pangs of hunger.]

[Footnote 130: After Apollo, in the later mythology, had been identified with the sun, all the names personifying the sun, of which Titan was one, became applicable to Apollo.]

[Footnote 131: Diodorus maintained that the Osiris of the Egyptians was their god of the sun, and Statius has adopted this erroneous view. According to the statement of Herodotus, Osiris answered to the Grecian Bacchus, and there is little doubt that the old historian was right.]

[Footnote 132: Mithras was the Persian god of the sun. He was worshipped in caves, or, as Pope has it, in "hollow rocks," because the spherical form of the cave symbolised the universe, of which Mithras was the maker. The "blaze of light which adorns his head" in Pope's version, makes no part of the description in the original. The final line is explained by several ancient works of art, in which a man, wearing a Phrygian cap, is depicted cutting the throat of a bull he has flung to the ground. The man is said by an old scholiast on Statius to typify the sun, the bull the moon, and the intention, he states, is to represent the superiority of the sun over the moon. Statius speaks of the bull as indignant at being compelled to follow Mithras,--an idea which suits ill with the tranquil aspect of the moon as it floats through the heavens.]

TRANSLATIONS

FROM

OVID.

Great is the change in passing from Statius to Ovid; from force to facility of style; from thoughts and images which are too much studied and unnatural to such as are obvious, careless, and familiar. Ovid seems to have had the merit of inventing this beautiful species of writing epistles under feigned names. It is a high improvement on the Greek elegy, to which its dramatic form renders it much superior. The judgment of the writer must chiefly appear by opening the complaint of the person introduced, just at such a period of time, as will give occasion for the most tender sentiments, and the most sudden, and violent turns of passion to be displayed. Ovid may perhaps be blamed for a sameness of subjects in these epistles of his heroines; and his epistles are likewise too long, which circumstance has forced him into a repetition and languor in the sentiments. On the whole the epistle before us is translated by Pope with faithfulness and with elegance, and much excels any Dryden translated in the volume he published, several of which were done by some "of the mob of gentlemen that wrote with ease,"--that is, Sir C. Scrope, Caryll, Pooly, Wright, Tate, Buckingham, Cooper, and other careless rhymers. Lord Somers translated Dido to Æneas, and Ariadne to Theseus. Though I regret the hours our poet spent in translating Ovid and Statius, yet it has given us an opportunity of admiring his good sense and judgment, in not suffering his taste and style, in his succeeding works, to be infected with the faults of these two writers.--WARTON.

Warton says, "The judgment of the writer must chiefly appear by opening the complaint of the person introduced at such a period of time as will give occasion for the most tender sentiments." How beautifully is this displayed in Pope's Epistle to Abelard, a poem that has another most interesting circumstance, which Ovid appears, as well as our Drayton, to have neglected,--I mean the introduction of appropriate and descriptive imagery, which relieves and recreates the fancy by the pictures, and by the landscapes which accompany the characters. Ovid, in this Epistle, seems not insensible to the effect of the introduction of such scenes; and the Leucadian rock, the _antra nemusque_, the aquatic lotus, the sacred pellucid fountain, and particularly the genius of the place, the Naiad, addressing the despairing Sappho (which circumstance Pope has beautifully imitated and improved in Eloisa), are in the genuine spirit of poetical taste. Dr. Warton observes that this translation is superior to any of Dryden's. If, indeed, we compare Pope's translations with those of any other writer, their superiority must be strikingly apparent. There is a finish in them, a correctness, a natural flow, and a tone of originality, added to a wonderful propriety and beauty of expression and language. If he ever fails, it is where he generalises too much. This is particularly objectionable, where in the original there is any marked, distinct, and beautiful picture. So, ver. 253, Pope only says,

Cupid for thee shall spread the swelling sail;

whereas in Ovid, Cupid appears before us in the very act of guiding the vessel, seated as the pilot, and with his _tender_ hand (_tenerâ manu_) contracting, or letting flow the sail. I need not point out another beauty in the original,--the repetition of the word _Ipse_.--BOWLES.

Richardson has appended this note to the Epistle of Sappho to Phaon in his copy of the quarto of 1717: "Corrected by the first copy, written out elegantly (as all his MSS.) to show friends, with their remarks in the margin; the present reading for the most part the effect of them." The remarks in the margin are mere exclamations, such as "pulchre," "bene," "optime," "recte," "bella paraphrasis," "longe præstas Scrope meo judicio," "minus placet," &c. They are doubtless from the pen of Cromwell, since it appeals from Pope's letter to him on June 10, 1709, that he had jotted down the same phrases on the margin of the translation of Statius. Bowles having quoted the observation of Warton, "that he had seen compositions of youths of sixteen years old far beyond the Pastorals in point of genius and imagination," adds, "I fear not to assert that he never could have seen any compositions of boys of that age so perfect in versification, so copious, yet so nice in expression, so correct, so spirited, and so finished," as the translation of the Epistle of Sappho to Phaon. The remark was made by Bowles in the belief that the version was the production of the poet's fourteenth year. Pope himself records on his manuscript that it was "written first 1707." He was then nineteen, and when the Epistle was published in 1712, in Tonson's Ovid, he was twenty-four.

"Ovid," says Dryden, "often writ too pointedly for his subject, and made his persons speak more eloquently than the violence of their passions would admit." Passion is sometimes highly eloquent; feeling strongly it expresses itself forcibly, and Dryden meant that the characters in Ovid, by their numerous strokes of studied brilliancy, seemed to be carried away less by their emotions than by the ambition to shine. These glittering artifices were formerly called wit, and Dryden complains that Ovid "is frequently witty out of season," but they are not wit in our present sense of the word. Occasionally they are the far-fetched or affected prettinesses which are properly called conceits; and more commonly they consist in terse antithesis, and a sparkle of words produced by the balanced repetition of a phrase. They are often as appropriate as they are showy, and if they are among the blemishes they are conspicuous among the beauties of Ovid. His writings are marked by opposite qualities. He is sometimes too artificial in his expression of the passions, and sometimes he is natural, glowing, and pathetic. He abounds in pointed sentences, and is not less distinguished for the easy, spontaneous flow of his language. He is at once prolix and concise, indulging in a single vein of thought till the monotony becomes tedious, and yet enunciating his ideas with sententious brevity. The condensation of the Latin in many places cannot be preserved in the diffuser idioms of our English tongue, but, if we overlook a few weak couplets, Pope has translated the Epistle of Sappho to Phaon with rare felicity, and notwithstanding the inevitable loss of some happy turns of expression, he has managed to retain both the passion and the poetry. Effusions of sentiment were better adapted to his genius than the heroic narrative of the Thebais; and his limpid measure, which neither resembled the numerous and robuster verse of Statius, nor was suited to an epic theme, accorded with the sweetness and uniformity of Ovid's verse, and with the outpourings of grief and tenderness which are the staple of these epistolary strains. There is no ground for the regret of Warton that Pope should have spent a little time in translating portions of Ovid and Statius. It would be as reasonable to lament that he stooped to the preliminary discipline which made him a poet. He has related that he did not take to translation till he found himself unequal to original composition, and, like all who excel in any department, he learnt, by copying his predecessors, to rival them.

SAPPHO TO PHAON.[1]

Say, lovely youth,[2] that dost my heart command, Can Phaon's eyes forget his Sappho's hand? Must then her name the wretched writer prove, To thy remembrance lost, as to thy love? Ask not the cause that I new numbers choose, 5 The lute neglected, and the lyric muse;[3] Love taught my tears in sadder notes to flow. And tuned my heart to elegies of woe. I burn, I burn, as when through ripened corn By driving winds the spreading flames are borne![4] 10 Phaon to Ætna's scorching fields retires, While I consume with more than Ætna's fires![5] No more my soul a charm in music finds; Music has charms alone for peaceful minds.[6] Soft scenes of solitude no more can please, 15 Love enters there, and I'm my own disease. No more the Lesbian dames my passion move, Once the dear objects of my guilty love; All other loves are lost in only thine, Ah youth ungrateful to a flame like mine! 20 Whom would not all those blooming charms surprise, Those heav'nly looks, and dear deluding eyes? The harp and bow would you like Phoebus bear, A brighter Phoebus Phaon might appear; Would you with ivy wreathe your flowing hair, 25 Not Bacchus' self with Phaon could compare: Yet Phoebus loved, and Bacchus felt the flame, One Daphne warmed, and one the Cretan dame;[7] Nymphs that in verse no more could rival me, Than ev'n those gods contend in charms with thee.[8] 30 The muses teach me all their softest lays, And the wide world resounds with Sappho's praise. Though great Alcæus more sublimely sings, And strikes with bolder rage the sounding strings, No less renown attends the moving lyre, 35 Which Venus tunes, and all her loves inspire; To me what nature has in charms denied, Is well by wit's more lasting flames supplied. Though short my stature, yet my name extends To heav'n itself, and earth's remotest ends. 40 Brown as I am, an Ethiopian dame[9] Inspired young Perseus with a gen'rous flame; Turtles and doves of diff'ring hues unite, And glossy jet is paired with shining white. If to no charms thou wilt thy heart resign, 45 But such as merit, such as equal thine, By none, alas! by none thou can'st be moved, Phaon alone by Phaon must be loved! Yet once thy Sappho could thy cares employ, Once in her arms you centered all your joy: 50 No time the dear remembrance can remove, For oh! how vast a memory has love?[10] My music, then, you could for ever hear, And all my words were music to your ear. You stopped with kisses my enchanting tongue, 55 And found my kisses sweeter than my song.[11] In all I pleased, but most in what was best; And the last joy was dearer than the rest.[12] Then with each word, each glance, each motion fired, You still enjoyed, and yet you still desired, 60 Till all dissolving in the trance we lay, And in tumultuous raptures died away. The fair Sicilians now thy soul inflame; Why was I born, ye gods, a Lesbian dame? But ah! beware, Sicilian nymphs! nor boast 65 That wand'ring heart which I so lately lost; Nor be with all those tempting words abused, Those tempting words were all to Sappho used. And you that rule Sicilia's happy plains, Have pity, Venus,[13] on your poet's pains! 70 Shall fortune still in one sad tenor run, And still increase the woes so soon begun? Inured to sorrow from my tender years, My parent's ashes drank my early tears; My brother next, neglecting wealth and fame, 75 Ignobly burned in a destructive flame:[14] An infant daughter late my griefs increased, And all a mother's cares distract my breast.[15] Alas! what more could fate itself impose, But thee, the last and greatest of my woes? 80 No more my robes in waving purple flow, Nor on my hand the sparkling diamonds glow; No more my locks in ringlets curled diffuse The costly sweetness of Arabian dews, Nor braids of gold the varied tresses bind, 85 That fly disordered with the wanton wind: For whom should Sappho use such arts as these? He's gone, whom only she desired to please! Cupid's light darts my tender bosom move, Still is there cause for Sappho still to love: 90 So from my birth the sisters fixed my doom, And gave to Venus all my life to come; Or, while my muse in melting notes complains, My yielding heart keeps measure to my strains. By charms like thine which all my soul have won, 95 Who might not--ah! who would not be undone? For those Aurora Cephalus[16] might scorn, And with fresh blushes paint the conscious morn. For those might Cynthia lengthen Phaon's sleep, And bid Endymion[17] nightly tend his sheep. 100 Venus for those had rapt thee to the skies, But Mars on thee might look with Venus' eyes. O scarce a youth, yet scarce a tender boy! O useful time for lovers to employ! Pride of thy age, and glory of thy race, 105 Come to these arms, and melt in this embrace! The vows you never will return, receive; And take at least the love you will not give.[18] See, while I write, my words are lost in tears![19] The less my sense, the more my love appears. 110 Sure 'twas not much to bid one kind adieu, (At least to feign was never hard to you,)[20] Farewell, my Lesbian love, you might have said; Or coldly thus, "Farewell, O Lesbian maid!" No tear did you, no parting kiss receive, 115 Nor knew I then how much I was to grieve. No lover's gift your Sappho could confer,[21] And wrongs and woes were all you left with her. No charge I gave you, and no charge could give, But this, "Be mindful of our loves, and live." 120 Now by the Nine, those pow'rs adored by me, And Love, the god that ever waits on thee, When first I heard (from whom I hardly knew) That you were fled, and all my joys with you, Like some sad statue[22], speechless, pale I stood, 125 Grief chilled my breast, and stopped my freezing blood; No sigh to rise, no tear had pow'r to flow, Fixed in a stupid lethargy of woe: But when its way th' impetuous passion found, I rend my tresses, and my breast I wound; 130 I rave, then weep; I curse, and then complain; Now swell to rage, now melt in tears again. Not fiercer pangs distract the mournful dame, Whose first-born infant feeds the fun'ral flame. My scornful brother with a smile appears, 135 Insults my woes, and triumphs in my tears; His hated image ever haunts my eyes; "And why this grief? thy daughter lives," he cries. Stung with my love, and furious with despair,[23] All torn my garments, and my bosom bare, 140 My woes, thy crimes, I to the world proclaim; Such inconsistent things are love and shame! 'Tis thou art all my care and my delight, My daily longing, and my dream by night:[24] Oh night more pleasing than the brightest day, 145 When fancy gives what absence takes away, And, dressed in all its visionary charms, Restores my fair deserter to my arms! Then round your neck in wanton wreaths I twine, Then you, methinks, as fondly circle mine: 150 A thousand tender words I hear and speak; A thousand melting kisses give, and take:[25] Then fiercer joys, I blush to mention these, Yet, while I blush, confess how much they please. But when, with day, the sweet delusions fly, 155 And all things wake to life and joy, but I, As if once more forsaken, I complain, And close my eyes to dream of you again:[26] Then frantic rise, and like some fury rove Through lonely plains,[27] and through the silent grove, 160 As if the silent grove, and lonely plains, That knew my pleasures, could relieve my pains. I view the grotto, once the scene of love, The rocks around, the hanging roofs above, That charmed me more, with native moss o'ergrown, 165 Than Phrygian marble, or the Parian stone; I find the shades that veiled our joys before; But, Phaon gone, those shades delight no more.[28] Here the pressed herbs with bending tops betray Where oft entwined in am'rous folds we lay; 170 I kiss that earth which once was pressed by you, And all with tears the with'ring herbs bedew. For thee the fading trees appear to mourn, And birds defer their songs till thy return: Night shades the groves, and all in silence lie, 175 All but the mournful Philomel and I: With mournful Philomel I join my strain, Of Tereus she, of Phaon I complain.[29] A spring there is, whose silver waters show, Clear as a glass, the shining sands below: 180 A flow'ry lotos spreads its arms above, Shades all the banks, and seems itself a grove; Eternal greens the mossy margin grace, Watched by the sylvan genius of the place: Here as I lay, and swelled with tears the flood,[30] 185 Before my sight a wat'ry virgin stood: She stood and cried, "O you that love in vain! Fly hence, and seek the fair Leucadian main; There stands a rock, from whose impending steep Apollo's fane surveys the rolling deep; 190 There injured lovers, leaping from above, Their flames extinguish, and forget to love.[31] Deucalion once with hopeless fury burned, In vain he loved, relentless Pyrrha scorned: But when from hence he plunged into the main, 195 Deucalion scorned, and Pyrrha loved in vain. Haste, Sappho, haste, from high Leucadia throw Thy wretched weight, nor dread the deeps below!"[32] She spoke, and vanished with the voice--I rise, And silent tears fall trickling from my eyes. 200 I go, ye nymphs! those rocks and seas to prove; How much I fear, but ah, how much I love! I go, ye nymphs, where furious love inspires; Let female fears submit to female fires. To rocks and seas I fly from Phaon's hate, 205 And hope from seas and rocks a milder fate. Ye gentle gales, beneath my body blow, And softly lay me on the waves below![33] And thou, kind Love, my sinking limbs sustain, } Spread thy soft wings, and waft me o'er the main, } 210 Nor let a lover's death the guiltless flood profane! } On Phoebus' shrine my harp I'll then bestow, And this inscription shall be placed below, "Here she who sung, to him that did inspire, Sappho to Phoebus consecrates her lyre; 215 What suits with Sappho, Phoebus, suits with thee; The gift, the giver, and the god agree." But why, alas, relentless youth, ah! why To distant seas must tender Sappho fly?[34] Thy charms than those may far more pow'rful be, 220 And Phoebus' self is less a god to me.[35] Ah! canst thou doom me to the rocks and sea, Oh! far more faithless and more hard than they? Ah! canst thou rather see this tender breast Dashed on these rocks, than to thy bosom pressed? 225 This breast which once, in vain! you liked so well;[36] Where the loves played, and where the muses dwell. Alas! the muses now no more inspire, Untuned my lute, and silent is my lyre. My languid numbers have forgot to flow, 230 And fancy sinks beneath a weight of woe. Ye Lesbian virgins, and ye Lesbian dames, Themes of my verse, and objects of my flames, No more your groves with my glad songs shall ring, No more these hands shall touch the trembling string: 235 My Phaon's fled, and I those arts resign: (Wretch that I am, to call that Phaon mine!)[37] Return, fair youth, return, and bring along Joy to my soul, and vigour to my song: Absent from thee, the poet's flame expires; 240 But ah! how fiercely burn the lover's fires! Gods! can no prayers, no sighs, no numbers move One savage heart, or teach it how to love? The winds my prayers, my sighs, my numbers bear,[38] The flying winds have lost them all in air! 245 Oh when, alas! shall more auspicious gales To these fond eyes restore thy welcome sails![39] If you return--ah why these long delays? Poor Sappho dies, while careless Phaon stays. O launch the bark, nor fear the wat'ry plain; 250 Venus for thee shall smooth her native main. O launch thy bark, secure of prosp'rous gales; Cupid for thee shall spread the swelling sails.[40] If you will fly--(yet ah! what cause can be, Too cruel youth, that you should fly from me?) 255 If not from Phaon I must hope for ease, Ah let me seek it from the raging seas: To raging seas unpitied I'll remove, And either cease to live or cease to love!

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: The ancients have left us little further account of Phaon than that he was an old mariner, whom Venus transformed into a very beautiful youth, whom Sappho and several other Lesbian ladies, fell passionately in love with.--FENTON.]

[Footnote 2: Mrs. Behn's translation:

Say, lovely youth, why would'st thou thus betray.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 3: In the MS.:

These mournful numbers suit a mournful muse.]

[Footnote 4: Our poet has not varied much here from the couplet of his predecessor, Sir Carr Scrope:

I burn, I burn, like kindled fields of corn, When by the driving winds the flames are borne.--WAKEFIELD.

The first version in Pope's manuscript, though not so closely copied from Scrope, is decidedly inferior to the text:

I burn, I burn, as when fierce whirlwinds raise The spreading flames, and crackling harvests blaze.]

[Footnote 5: A childish, false thought.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 6: Scrope's couplet exceeds this in simplicity, and to my taste, on the whole, is preferable:

My muse, and lute can now no longer please; These are th' employments of a mind at ease.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 7: As Ovid tells the story in his Metamorphoses, Apollo fell in love with Daphne and pursued her. When he was gaining upon her in the race she was transformed, at her own request, into a laurel. The Cretan dame was Ariadne. Bacchus was smitten with her extraordinary beauty, and married her.]

[Footnote 8: This happy line, which is not too extravagant for a lover, belongs to Pope.]

[Footnote 9: Andromeda, the daughter of Cepheus, an Æthiopian king. Her mother thought herself superior in beauty to the Nereids, which excited their jealousy, and through their influence a sea-monster was sent to prey upon man and beast in the dominions of Cepheus. To atone for her mother's vanity, and rid the land of the scourge, Cepheus agreed to offer up Andromeda to the monster. She was chained to a rock on the coast, where Perseus saw her at the critical moment when she was about to be devoured. Captivated by her charms he engaged and slew the monster, and made Andromeda his wife.]

[Footnote 10: This is very inferior to the conciseness, and simplicity of the original, "memini (meminerunt omnia amantes)." Sir Carr Scrope's translation is nearer the original, and more natural as well as elegant:

For they who truly love remember all.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 11: This line is another of the embellishments which Pope engrafted on the original.]

[Footnote 12: The first line of this couplet is faulty in point of versification, and, to use our bard's own remark, ten low words creep in one dull line. As to the last line, it is wholly redundant, and has no place in the original.--RUFFHEAD.]

[Footnote 13: In the original, Erycina, which was a surname of Venus from Mount Eryx, in Sicily, where a celebrated temple was dedicated to her.]

[Footnote 14: He has here left four lines untranslated, which are thus rendered in the MS.:

My ruined brother trades from shore to shore, And gains as basely as he lost before: Me too he hates, advised by me in vain, So fatal 'tis to be sincere and plain.

Of the last couplet the MS. contains a second version:

He hates his sister for a sister's care, So unsuccessful 'tis to be sincere.]

[Footnote 15: In the MS.:

An infant now my hapless fortunes shares, And this sad breast feels all a mother's cares.]

[Footnote 16: Cephalus tells the story poetically in Sandys' translation of Ovid's Met. vii. 701. He was a hunter, who was setting his nets in early dawn,

When grey Aurora, having vanquished night, Beheld me on the ever-fragrant hill Of steep Hymettus, and against my will, As I my toils extended, bare me thence.]

[Footnote 17: Cynthia prolonged the sleep of Endymion, a shepherd of singular beauty, that she might kiss him without his knowledge.]

[Footnote 18: Scrope is pleasing here:

Oh! let me once more see those eyes of thine! Thy love I ask not; do but suffer mine.--WAKEFIELD.

Pope's couplet was as follows in the MS.:

Thy love I ask not to forsaken me, All that I ask is but to doat on thee.

"Scrope melius hic," wrote Cromwell, and though Pope altered the lines the remark of Cromwell remains true.]

[Footnote 19: Ruffhead observes, that this line is superior to the original,

Aspice, quam sit in hoc multa litura loco;

which he thinks flat and languid: but the simplicity of the appeal to the blot on her paper is admirable, and should be only mentioned as a fact. The imitator has destroyed the whole beauty of the line, by a quaint antithesis, and a laboured arrangement of words, which are not natural in affliction. Scrope's translation again excels Pope's:

My constant falling tears the paper stain, And my weak hand, etc.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 20: "The parenthesis is an interpolation," says a note transcribed by Richardson from Pope's manuscript, and the remark is equally applicable to the next line.]

[Footnote 21: In the first edition,

No gift on thee thy Sappho could confer.

The original couplet in the MS. was

No pledge you left me, faithless and unkind! Nothing with me but wrongs was left behind.

"Jejune, flat, and ill expressed," is written against the last line in the manuscript, and Pope profited by the criticism.]

[Footnote 22: This image is not in the original, but it is very pleasingly introduced.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 23: The ten next verses are much superior to the original.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 24: From Dryden's Ovid, Epist. vii.:

Their daily longing, and their nightly dream.

It was at first thus in Pope's MS.:

Thou art at once my anguish and delight, Care of my day, and phantom of my night.

[Footnote 25: In the MS.:

Thy kisses then, thy words my soul endear. Glow on my lips, and murmur in my ear.

[Footnote 26: Of this couplet there are two other versions in the MS.:

The charming phantom flies, and I complain, As if thyself forsook me once again.

And,

I dread the light of cruel heav'n to view, And close my eyes once more to dream of you.

[Footnote 27: "Antra nemusque" are not well rendered by "through lonely plains." Ovid is concise and specific, Pope general. Better rendered by Scrope:

Soon as I rise I haunt the caves and groves.--BOWLES.

[Footnote 28: In the first edition:

I find the shades that did our joys conceal, Not him who made me love those shades so well.]

[Footnote 29: Scrope's translation:

Of Tereus she complains, and I of thee.--WAKEFIELD.

Tereus married Progne, and afterwards fell in love with her sister Philomela. Both sisters conspired to revenge themselves upon him. They killed Itys, his son by Progne, gave him some of the flesh to eat. When, with savage exultation, they revealed the truth to him, and he was about to slay them, Progne was changed into a swallow, and Philomela into a nightingale.]

[Footnote 30: The Sappho of Ovid only says that she laid down upon the bank worn out with weeping. Pope is answerable for the extravagant conceit of "her swelling the flood with her tears." In the next verse Pope calls the Naiad "a watery virgin,"--an expression which borders on the ludicrous.]

[Footnote 31: There was a promontory in Acarnania called Leucate, on the top of which was a little temple dedicated to Apollo. In this temple it was usual for despairing lovers to make their vows in secret, and afterwards to fling themselves from the top of the precipice into the sea; for it was an established opinion that all those who were taken up alive would be cured of their former passion. Sappho tried the remedy, but perished in the experiment.--FAWKES.]

[Footnote 32: Aleæus arrived at the promontory of Leucate that very evening, in order to take the leap on her account; but hearing that her body could not be found, he very generously lamented her fall, and is said to have written his 215th ode on that occasion.--WARTON.

The entire story was probably a legend.]

[Footnote 33: These two lines have been quoted as the most smooth and mellifluous in our language; and they are supposed to derive their sweetness and harmony from the mixture of so many iambics. Pope himself preferred the following line to all he had written, with respect to harmony:

Lo, where Mæotis sleeps, and hardly flows.--WARTON.

Dryden in his Annus Mirabilis:

A constant trade-wind will securely blow, And gently lay us on the spicy shore.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 34: In the MS.:

To those steep cliffs, that ocean must I fly.]

[Footnote 35: In the place of this couplet, there were four lines in the MS.:

If thou return thy Sappho too shall stay, Not all the gods shall force me then away; Nor Love, nor Phoebus, then invoked shall be, For thou alone art all the gods to me.

Another version ran thus:

Wouldst thou return, oh more than Phoebus, fair No god like thee could ease thy Sappho's care.]

[Footnote 36: "Liked" seems a very unsuitable expression in the present day. It was a word, however, among our early writers of greater force and significance:

What I that loved, and you that _liked_, Shall we begin to wrangle? No, no, no; my heart is fixed, And cannot disentangle.

_Old Ballad._--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 37: In the MS.:

Phaon--_my_ Phaon I almost had said-- Is fled, with Phaon your delights are fled.

Cromwell wrote against the last line "recte, non pulchre," and Pope tried three variations of it before he cast them aside for the version in the text:

Is gone, and with him all your pleasures fled. Is gone, and all that's pleasing with him fled. Is gone, and with him your delights are fled.]

[Footnote 38: Of ver. 242 and v. 244, Pope says in the MS., "So at first as printed, but objected [against] as tautological. _Sic recte_ as [in the] margin, but carried afterwards as at first." "Sighs" was thought to be too nearly synonymous with "prayers," and Pope altered the lines by erasing the expressions "no sighs" and "my sighs," and affixing the epithet "tender" in both verses to numbers.]

[Footnote 39: In the MS.:

Oh, when shall kinder, more auspicious gales, Waft to these eyes thy long-expected sails.

"Pleonasm," says a note on the manuscript. "_Kinder_, and _more auspicious_, too much."]

[Footnote 40: This image is very inferior to the original, as it is more vague and general: the picture in the original is strikingly beautiful. The circumstances which make it so, are omitted by Pope:

Ipse gubernabit residens in puppe Cupido, Ipse dabit tenera vela legetque manu.--BOWLES.

The objection of Bowles would not have applied to the manuscript, where this admirable couplet, which Pope unwisely omitted, follows the lines in the text:

Shall take the rudder in his tender hand, And steer thee safe to this forsaken land.

There is a second, but inferior rendering:

Shall sit presiding on the painted prore, And steer thy ship to this forsaken shore.

Cromwell applied the words of Horace, "quæ desperat nitescere posse, relinquit," which seems intended to intimate that it was impossible to give a poetical translation of the original. Pope deferred to the mistaken criticism.]

THE FABLE OF DRYOPE.[1]

FROM THE NINTH BOOK OF OVID'S METAMORPHOSES.

She[2] said, and for her lost Galanthis sighs, When the fair consort of her son[3] replies: Since you a servant's ravished form bemoan,[4] And kindly sigh for sorrows not your own, Let me (if tears and grief permit) relate 5 A nearer woe, a sister's stranger fate. No nymph of all Oechalia could compare For beauteous form with Dryope the fair,[5] Her tender mother's only hope and pride, (Myself the offspring of a second bride.) 10 This nymph compressed by him who rules the day, Whom Delphi and the Delian isle obey, Andræmon loved; and, blessed in all those charms That pleased a god, succeeded to her arms.[6] A lake there was, with shelving banks around, 15 Whose verdant summit fragrant myrtles crowned. These shades, unknowing of the fates, she sought, And to the naiads flow'ry garlands brought; Her smiling babe (a pleasing charge) she pressed Within her arms, and nourished at her breast. 20 Nor distant far a wat'ry lotos grows, The spring was new, and all the verdant boughs, Adorned with blossoms, promised fruits that vie In glowing colours with the Tyrian dye: Of these she cropped to please her infant son, 25 And I myself the same rash act had done: But lo! I saw (as near her side I stood,) The violated blossoms[7] drop with blood; Upon the tree I cast a frightful look; The trembling tree with sudden horror shook. 30 Lotis the nymph (if rural tales be true) As from Priapus' lawless lust she flew, Forsook her form; and fixing here, became A flow'ry plant, which still preserves her name. This change unknown, astonished at the sight, 35 My trembling sister strove to urge her flight: And first the pardon of the nymphs implored, And those offended sylvan pow'rs adored: But when she backward would have fled, she found Her stiff'ning feet were rooted in the ground: 40 In vain to free her fastened feet she strove, And, as she struggles, only moves above; She feels th' encroaching bark around her grow By quick degrees, and cover all below: Surprized at this, her trembling hand she heaves 45 To rend her hair; her hand is filled with leaves: Where late was hair the shooting leaves are seen To rise, and shade her with a sudden green. The child Amphissus, to her bosom pressed, Perceived a colder and a harder breast, 50 And found the springs, that ne'er till then denied Their milky moisture, on a sudden dried. I saw, unhappy! what I now relate, And stood the helpless witness of thy fate, Embraced thy boughs, thy rising bark delayed, 55 There wished to grow, and mingle shade with shade. Behold Andræmon and th' unhappy sire Appear, and for their Dryope inquire: A springing tree for Dryope they find, And print warm kisses on the panting rind; 60 Prostrate, with tears their kindred plant bedew, And close embrace, as[8] to the roots they grew. The face was all that now remained of thee, No more a woman, nor yet quite a tree;[9] Thy branches hung with humid pearls appear,[10] 65 From ev'ry leaf distils a trickling tear, And straight a voice, while yet a voice remains, Thus through the trembling boughs in sighs complains. If to the wretched any faith be giv'n, I swear by all th' unpitying pow'rs of heav'n,[11] 70 No wilful crime this heavy vengeance bred; In mutual innocence[12] our lives we led: If this be false, let these new greens decay, } Let sounding axes lop my limbs away, } And crackling flames on all my honours prey.[13] } 75 But from my branching arms this infant bear, Let some kind nurse supply a mother's care: And to his mother let him oft be led, Sport in her shades, and in her shades be fed; Teach him, when first his infant voice shall frame 80 Imperfect words, and lisp his mother's name, To hail this tree, and say with weeping eyes, Within this plant my helpless parent lies; And when in youth he seeks the shady woods, Oh! let him fly the crystal lakes and floods, 85 Nor touch the fatal flow'rs; but, warned by me, Believe a goddess shrined in ev'ry tree. My sire, my sister, and my spouse, farewell![14] If in your breasts or love or pity dwell, Protect your plant, nor let my branches feel 90 The browzing cattle or the piercing steel. Farewell! and since I cannot bend to join My lips to yours, advance at least to mine. My son, thy mother's parting kiss receive, While yet thy mother has a kiss to give. 95 I can no more; the creeping rind invades My closing lips,[15] and hides my head in shades; Remove your hands, the bark shall soon suffice Without their aid to seal these dying eyes. She ceased at once to speak, and ceased to be; 100 And all the nymph was lost within the tree; Yet latent life through her new branches reigned, And long the plant a human heat retained.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Upon occasion of the death of Hercules, his mother Alcmena recounts her misfortunes to Iole, who answers with a relation of those of her own family, in particular the transformation of her sister Dryope, which is the subject of the ensuing fable.--POPE.]

[Footnote 2: Alcmena. Galanthis was one of her female servants.]

[Footnote 3: Iole was not the consort of Alcmena's son, Hercules, but of her grandson, Hyllus.]

[Footnote 4: Out of jealousy that Alcmena should bear a child to Jupiter, Juno employed Lucina to hinder the birth of Hercules. The malevolence of the goddess was defeated through the ingenuity of Galanthis, who was straightway turned into a weasel by the baffled and irritated Lucina.]

[Footnote 5: Sandys' translation:

Of all the Oechalides For form few might with Dryope compare.]

[Footnote 6: This flowing couplet he has transferred into more places than one of his version of Homer.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 7: Dryden, Æn. iii. 54:

The violated myrtle ran with gore.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 8: "As" is put for "as though."]

[Footnote 9: Cowley's transformation of Lot's wife, Davideis, iii. 254:

No more a woman, nor yet quite a stone.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 10: Dryden's Virg. Ecl. x. 20:

And hung with humid pearls the lowly shrub appears.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 11: Sandys' translation:

If credit to the wretched may be giv'n, I swear by all the pow'rs embowered in heav'n.]

[Footnote 12: This translation is faulty. "Patior sine crimine, et viximus innocuæ," is but one and the same person,--a testimony of her own innocence, but not of the mutual concord between her relations.--BOWYER.]

[Footnote 13: "New greens," from its equivocal meaning, is a burlesque expression. "Sounding" is a feeble epithet to be applied to the axe by Dryope, who was thinking of the wounds it would inflict upon her; and it is still more inappropriate to make her call her transformation, "my honours," when she regarded the metamorphose with dismay. How superior to Pope's diluted version is the brief and simple language of the original,--"et cæsa securibus urar." Sandys is better than Pope in the same proportion that he is more literal:

Or if I lie, may my green branches fade; And felled with axes on the fire be laid.]

[Footnote 14: It is worth quoting the parallel line of Sandys, to show how much more touching are the household words "husband" and "father" than the "sire" and "spouse" substituted by Pope:

Dear husband, sister, father, all farewell.]

[Footnote 15: Dryden's version of Ovid, Met. viii.:

At once th' encroaching rinds their closing lips invade.--WAKEFIELD.]

VERTUMNUS AND POMONA.[1]

FROM THE FOURTEENTH BOOK OF OVID'S METAMORPHOSES.

The fair Pomona flourished in his reign;[2] Of all the virgins of the sylvan train, None taught the trees a nobler race to bear, Or more improved the vegetable care.[3] To her the shady grove, the flow'ry field, 5 The streams and fountains no delights could yield; 'Twas all her joy the ripening fruits to tend, And see the boughs with happy burthens bend. The hook she bore instead of Cynthia's spear, To lop the growth of the luxuriant year, 10 To decent form the lawless shoots to bring, And teach th' obedient branches where to spring. Now the cleft rind inserted graffs receives, And yields an offspring more than nature gives; Now sliding streams[4] the thirsty plants renew, 15 And feed their fibres with reviving dew. These cares alone her virgin breast employ, Averse from Venus and the nuptial joy. Her private orchards, walled on ev'ry side, To lawless sylvans all access denied. 20 How oft the satyrs and the wanton fauns, Who haunt the forests, or frequent the lawns, The god[5] whose ensign scares the birds of prey, And old Silenus, youthful in decay, Employed their wiles, and unavailing care, 25 To pass the fences, and surprise the fair? Like these, Vertumnus owned his faithful flame, Like these, rejected by the scornful dame. To gain her sight a thousand forms he wears; And first a reaper from the field appears; 30 Sweating he walks, while loads of golden grain O'ercharge the shoulders of the seeming swain. Oft o'er his back a crooked scythe is laid, And wreaths of hay his sun-burnt temples shade: Oft in his hardened hand a goad he bears, 35 Like one who late unyoked the sweating steers. Sometimes his pruning-hook corrects the vines, And the loose stragglers to their ranks confines. Now gath'ring what the bounteous year allows, He pulls ripe apples from the bending boughs. 40 A soldier now, he with his sword appears; A fisher next, his trembling angle bears; Each shape he varies, and each art he tries, On her bright charms to feast his longing eyes. A female form at last Vertumnus wears, } 45 With all the marks of rev'rend age appears, } His temples thinly spread with silver hairs; } Propped on his staff, and stooping as he goes, A painted mitre[6] shades his furrowed brows. The god in this decrepid form arrayed, } 50 The gardens entered, and the fruit surveyed; } And "Happy you!" (he thus addressed the maid) } "Whose charms as far all other nymphs outshine, As other gardens are excelled by thine!" Then kissed the fair; (his kisses warmer grow 55 Than such as women on their sex bestow[7]); Then placed beside her on the flow'ry ground, Beheld the trees with autumn's bounty crowned. An elm was near, to whose embraces led, The curling vine her swelling clusters spread: 60 He viewed her twining branches with delight, And praised the beauty of the pleasing sight. Yet this tall elm, but for his vine (he said) Had stood neglected, and a barren shade; And this fair vine, but that her arms surround 65 Her married elm, had crept along the ground. Ah! beauteous maid, let this example move Your mind, averse from all the joys of love. Deign to be loved, and ev'ry heart subdue! What nymph could e'er attract such crowds as you? 70 Not she whose beauty urged the Centaur's arms,[8] Ulysses' queen, nor Helen's fatal charms. Ev'n now, when silent scorn is all they gain, A thousand court you, though they court in vain, A thousand sylvans, demigods, and gods, 75 That haunt our mountains and our Alban woods. But if you'll prosper, mark what I advise, Whom age and long experience render wise, And one whose tender care is far above All that these lovers ever felt of love, 80 (Far more than e'er can by yourself be guessed) Fix on Vertumnus, and reject the rest. For his firm faith I dare engage my own; Scarce to himself, himself is better known. To distant lands Vertumnus never roves; 85 Like you, contented with his native groves: Nor at first sight, like most, admires the fair; } For you he lives; and you alone shall share } His last affection, as his early care. } Besides, he's lovely far above the rest, 90 With youth immortal, and with beauty blest. Add, that he varies ev'ry shape with ease, And tries all forms that may Pomona please. But what should most excite a mutual flame, Your rural cares and pleasures are the same: 95 To him your orchards' early fruits are due, (A pleasing off'ring when 'tis made by you;) He values these; but yet, alas! complains, That still the best and dearest gift remains. Not the fair fruit that on yon branches glows 100 With that ripe red th' autumnal sun bestows; Nor tasteful herbs that in these gardens rise, Which the kind soil with milky sap supplies; You, only you, can move the god's desire: Oh crown so constant and so pure a fire! 105 Let soft compassion touch your gentle mind; Think, 'tis Vertumnus begs you to be kind! So may no frost, when early buds appear, Destroy the promise of the youthful year; Nor winds, when first your florid orchard blows, 110 Shake the light blossoms from their blasted boughs! This, when the various god had urged in vain, He straight assumed his native form again; Such, and so bright an aspect now he bears, As when through clouds th' emerging sun appears, 115 And thence exerting his refulgent ray, Dispels the darkness and reveals the day. Force he prepared, but checked the rash design; For when, appearing in a form divine, The nymph surveys him, and beholds the grace 120 Of charming features, and a youthful face, In her soft breast consenting passions move, And the warm maid confessed a mutual love.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: This fragment was first published in 1712, in Lintot's Miscellany.]

[Footnote 2: The reign of Procas, one of the fabulous kings of Alba Longa.]

[Footnote 3: Pope, in his youth, was not averse to affected phrases; but it is surprising that he could bring himself to call a garden "the vegetable care."]

[Footnote 4: "Sliding" is a very happy expression.--BOWLES.

Pope borrowed it from the corresponding passage of Sandys--"Soft-sliding springs."]

[Footnote 5: Priapus.]

[Footnote 6: A broad band of cloth worn by women round the head.]

[Footnote 7: Sandys' Ovid,