What can be more natural, or more moving, than the circumstances in which
he describes the behaviour of those women who had lost their husbands on
this fatal day?
Next day did many widows come
Their husbands to bewail;
They wash'd their wounds in brinish tears,
But all would not prevail.
Their bodies bathed in purple blood,
They bore with them away;
They kiss'd them dead a thousand times,
When they were clad in clay.
Thus we see how the thoughts of this poem, which naturally arise from the
subject, are always simple, and sometimes exquisitely noble; that the
language is often very sounding, and that the whole is written with a
true poetical spirit.
If this song had been written in the Gothic manner which is the delight
of all our little wits, whether writers or readers, it would not have hit
the taste of so many ages, and have pleased the readers of all ranks and
conditions. I shall only beg pardon for such a profusion of Latin
quotations; which I should not have made use of, but that I feared my own
judgment would have looked too singular on such a subject, had not I
supported it by the practice and authority of Virgil.