[Footnote 87: Eve, looking into the fountain, in Dryden's State of
Innocence, Act ii.:
What's here? another firmament below
Spread wide, and other trees that downward grow.--STEEVENS.]
[Footnote 88: The epithet "absent," employed to denote that the trees
were only a reflection in the water, is more perplexing than
descriptive, particularly as the "absent trees" are distinguished from
the "pendant woods," which must equally have been absent.]
[Footnote 89: In every edition before Warburton's it was "spreading
honours." Pope probably considered that "rear," which denoted an upward
direction, could not be consistently conjoined with "spreading." For
"shores," improperly applied in the next line to a river, all the
editions before 1736 had "banks."]
[Footnote 90: "Her" appears for the first time in the edition of
Warburton in the place of "his," and is now the accepted reading, but it
is manifestly a misprint, since "her" has no antecedent. The couplet is
obscure. Pope could hardly intend to assert that the flow of the tide
poured as much water into the Thames as all the other rivers of the
world discharged into the ocean, and he probably meant that all the
navigable rivers of the globe did not send more commerce to the sea than
came from the sea up the Thames. Even in this case it was a wild,
without being a poetical, exaggeration.]
[Footnote 91: In the first edition:
No seas so rich, so full no streams appear.
The epithets "clear," "gentle," "full," which Pope applies to the
Thames, show that he had in his mind the celebrated passage in Cooper's
Hill:
Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without o'er-flowing full.]
[Footnote 92: The ancients gave the name of the terrestrial Eridanus or
Po, to a constellation which has somewhat the form of a winding river.
Pope copied Denham:
Heav'n her Eridanus no more shall boast,
Whose fame in thine, like lesser currents lost,
By nobler streams shall visit Jove's abodes,
To shine amongst the stars and bathe the gods.]
[Footnote 93: Very ill expressed, especially the rivers swelling the
lays.--WARTON.]
[Footnote 94: The original readings were beyond all competition
preferable both in strength and beauty:
Not fabled Po more swells the poet's lays
While through the skies his shining current strays.--WAKEFIELD.]
[Footnote 95: In saying that the Po did not swell the lays of the poet
in the same degree as the Thames, Pope more especially alluded to the
celebrated description of the latter in Cooper's Hill.]
[Footnote 96: In the earlier editions,
Nor all his stars a brighter lustre show,
Than the fair nymphs that gild thy shore below.
The MS. goes on thus:
Whose pow'rful charms enamoured gods may move
To quit for this the radiant court above;
And force great Jove, if Jove's a lover still,
To change Olympus, &c.]
[Footnote 97: Originally:
Happy the man, who to these shades retires,
But doubly happy, if the muse inspires!
Blest whom the sweets of home-felt quiet please;
But far more blest, who study joins with ease.--POPE.
The turn of this passage manifestly proves that our poet had in view
that incomparable encomium of Virgil's second Georgic on philosophy and
a country life.--WAKEFIELD.
In addition to the imitation of the second Georgic, and the translation
of lines in Horace and Lucan, Pope adopted hints, as Warton has
remarked, from Philips's Cider:
He to his labour hies
Gladsome, intent on somewhat that may ease
Unhealthy mortals, and with curious search
Examines all the properties of herbs,
Fossils and minerals, &c.
or else his thoughts
Are exercised with speculations deep,
Of good, and just, and meet, and th' wholesome rules
Of temperance, and ought that may improve
The moral life; &c.]
[Footnote 98: Lord Lansdowne.--CROKER.]
[Footnote 99: This is taken from Horace's epistle to Tibullus:
An tacitum silvas inter reptare salubres,
Curantem quidquid dignum sapiente bonoque est?--WAKEFIELD.
Pope remembered Creech's translation of the passage:
Or dost thou gravely walk the healthy wood,
Considering what befits the wise and good.]
[Footnote 100:
----servare modum, finemque tenere,
Naturamque sequi. Lucan.--WARBURTON.]
[Footnote 101: Dryden's Virgil, Geor. ii. 673:
Ye sacred muses! with whose beauty fired,
My soul is ravished, and my brain inspired.--WAKEFIELD.
Addison in his Letter from Italy has the expression "fired with a
thousand raptures."]
[Footnote 102:
O, qui me gelidis in vallibus Haemi
Sistat, et ingenti ramorum protegat umbra! Virg.--WARBURTON.]
[Footnote 103: Cooper's Hill is the elevation, not deserving the name of
mountain, just over Egham and Runnymede.--CROKER.]
[Footnote 104: It stood thus in the MS.
Methinks around your hold scenes I rove,
And hear your music echoing through the grove:
With transport visit each inspiring shade,
By god-like poets venerable made.--WARBURTON.]
[Footnote 105: From Philips's Cider, ii. 6:
or what
Unrivalled authors by their presence made
For ever venerable.--STEEVENS.]
[Footnote 106: By "first lays," Pope means Cooper's Hill, but Denham had
previously written the Sophy, a tragedy, and translated the second book
of the AEneid.]
[Footnote 107: Dryden says of the Cooper's Hill, "it is a poem which for
_majesty_ of style is, and ever will be, the standard of good writing."
From hence, no doubt, Pope took the word "majestic."--BOWLES.]
[Footnote 108: Mr. Cowley died at Chertsey, on the borders of the
Forest, and was from thence conveyed to Westminster.--POPE.
Pope told Spence that Cowley was killed by a fever brought on by lying
out all night in the fields. He had got drunk, in company with his
friend Dean Sprat, at the house of a neighbour, and they lost their way
in the attempt to walk home. Sprat had long before related that Cowley
caught his last illness in the "meadows," but says it was caused "by
staying too long amongst his labourers in the heat of the summer." The
drunkenness, and the lying out all night, appear to have been the
embellishments of scandal.]
[Footnote 109: Cowley died July 28, 1667, in the 49th year of his age.
Pope's "O early lost!" is copied from the "O early ripe!" of Dryden in
his lines to the Memory of Oldham.]
[Footnote 110: Oldham's Imitation of Moschus:
This, Thames, ah! this, is now thy second loss
For which in tears thy weeping current flows.]
[Footnote 111: On the margin of his manuscript Pope wrote the passage of
Virgil which he imitated:
quae, Tiberine, videbis
Funera, cum tumulum praeterlabere recentem.
The "pomp" was not a poetical exaggeration. Evelyn, who attended the
funeral, says that Cowley's body was "conveyed to Westminster Abbey in a
hearse with six horses, near a hundred coaches of noblemen, and persons
of quality following."]
[Footnote 112: Originally:
What sighs, what murmurs, filled the vocal shore!
His tuneful swans were heard to sing no more.--POPE.]
[Footnote 113: We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst
thereof. Psalm cxxxvii. 2.--WAKEFIELD.
Pope says that "_each_ muse" hung up her lyre because Cowley was thought
to excel in many departments of verse. "He was beloved," said Dr.
Felton, "by every muse he courted, and has rivalled the ancients in
every kind of poetry but tragedy." Dr. Sprat entitled his poem on him an
"Ode to the English Ovid, Anacreon, Pindar, and Virgil."]
[Footnote 114: Warton mentions, that "living lyre" is used by Cowley.]
[Footnote 115: This couplet was a triplet in the manuscript with the
following middle line:
What bard, what angel, tunes the warbling strings?
It is surprising that Pope did not feel the bathos of the expression,
"'Tis yours, my lord," introduced into the midst of the high-flown
adulation.]
[Footnote 116: Philips: