Pope was not unmindful of Dryden's translation:
I know thee, Love! in deserts thou wert bred,
And at the dugs of savage tigers fed.
He had in view also a passage in the AEneid, iv. 366, and Dryden's
version of it:
But hewn from hardened entrails of a rock,
And rough Hyrcanian tigers gave thee suck.
Nor did our author overlook the parallel passage in Ovid's Epistle of
Dido to AEneas, and Dryden's translation thereof:
From hardened oak, or from a rock's cold womb,
At least thou art from some fierce tigress come;
Or on rough seas, from their foundation torn,
Got by the winds, and in a tempest born.--WAKEFIELD.]
[Footnote 34: Till the edition of Warburton, this couplet was as
follows:
I know thee, Love! wild as the raging main,
More fell than tigers on the Lybian plain.]
[Footnote 35: Were a man to meet with such a nondescript monster as the
following, viz.: "Love out of Mount AEtna by a Whirlwind," he would
suppose himself reading the Racing Calendar. Yet this hybrid creature is
one of the many zoological monsters to whom the Pastorals introduce
us.--DE QUINCY.
Sentiments like these, as they have no ground in nature, are of little
value in any poem, but in pastoral they are particularly liable to
censure, because it wants that exaltation above common life, which in
tragic or heroic writings often reconciles us to bold flights and daring
figures.--JOHNSON.]
[Footnote 36: Virg. Ecl. viii. 59:
Praeceps aerii specula de montis in undas
Deferar.
From yon high cliff I plunge into the main. Dryden.--WAKEFIELD.
This passage in Pope is a strong instance of the abnegation of feeling
in his Pastorals. The shepherd proclaims at the beginning of his chant
that it is his dying speech, and at the end that he has resolved upon
immediate suicide. Having announced the tragedy, Pope treats it with
total indifference, and quietly adds, "Thus sung the shepherds," &c.]
[Footnote 37: Ver. 98, 100. There is a little inaccuracy here; the first
line makes the time after sunset; the second before.--WARBURTON.
Pope had at first written:
Thus sung the swains while day yet strove with night,
And heav'n yet languished with departing light.
"Quaere," he says to Walsh, "if languish be a proper word?" and Walsh
answers, "Not very proper."]
[Footnote 38: Virg. Ecl. ii. 67:
Et sol decedens crescentes duplicat umbras.
The shadows lengthen as the sun grows low. Dryden.--WAKEFIELD.
"Objection," Pope said to Walsh, "that to mention the sunset after
twilight (_day yet strove with night_) is improper. Is the following
alteration anything better?