[Footnote 28: The same:
Alas! what boots it now thy hives to store,
When thou, that wast all sweetness, art no more.--WAKEFIELD.]
[Footnote 29: In the original draught Pope had again introduced the
wolves, and the first four lines of this paragraph stood thus:
No more the wolves, when you your numbers try,
Shall cease to follow, and the lambs to fly:
No more the birds shall imitate your lays,
Or, charmed to silence, listen from the sprays.]
[Footnote 30: The image of the birds listening with their wings
suspended in mid-air is striking, and, I trust, new.--RUFFHEAD.
This circumstance of the lark suspending its wings in mid-air is highly
beautiful, because there is a _veri similitudo_ in it, which is not the
case where a waterfall is made to be suspended by the power of
music.--BOWLES.]
[Footnote 31: Oldham's translation of Moschus:
The feathered choir that used to throng
In list'ning flocks to learn his well-tuned song.
The line in the text was the earliest reading in the manuscript, but did
not appear in print till the edition of Warburton. The reading in the
previous editions was,
No more the nightingales repeat her lays.
This idea of the nightingale repeating the lays is amplified by Philips
in his Fifth Pastoral, who copied it, according to Pope in the Guardian,
from Strada. Thence also it must have been borrowed by Pope, and he may
have restored the primitive version to get rid of the coincidence.]
[Footnote 32: The _veri similitudo_, which Bowles commends in the
description of the lark, is not to be found in the notion of the streams
ceasing to murmur that they might listen to the song of Daphne. Milton
does a similar violence to fact and imagination in his Comus, ver. 494,
and many lesser poets, before and after him, adopted the poor conceit.]
[Footnote 33: Dryden's AEneis, vii. 1041:
Yet his untimely fate th' Angitian woods
In sighs remurmured to the Fucine floods.--WAKEFIELD.]
[Footnote 34: This is barbarous: he should have written
"swoln."--WAKEFIELD.]
[Footnote 35: Ovid, Met. xi. 47:
lacrimis quoque flumina dicunt
Increvisse suis.
Oldham's translation of Moschus:
The rivers too, as if they would deplore
Her death, with grief swell higher than before.
Fenton in his pastoral on the Marquis of Blandford's death: