Shall canopy the shrine. There's not a flower, And plain them in these branches. Larks and finches Will I fright hence, nor aught shall dare approach This pensive spot, save solitary things That love to mourn as I do. How cold and lifeless are these pretty lines, when compared to the "wench-like words," of the young princes, which suggested them. If he be gone he'll make his grave a bed Arv. With fairest flow'rs, Whilst summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele, Yea, and furr'd moss besides, when flowers are none, This is grief, seeking to relieve and forget itself in fiction and fancy; the other, though the occasion required an expression of deeper sorrow, is a mere pomp of feeling. His blank verse in the English Garden has not the majesty of Akenside, the sweetness of Dyer, or the terseness of Armstrong. Its characteristic is delicacy; but it is a delicacy approaching nearer to weakness than to grace. It has more resemblance to the rill that trickles over its fretted channel, than to the stream that winds with a full tide, and “ warbles as it flows." The practice of cutting it into dialogue had perhaps crippled him. As he has made the characters in his plays too attentive to the decorations of the scene-painter, so in the last book of the English Garden he has turned his landscape into a theatre, for the representation of a play. The story of Nerina is too long and too complicated for an episode in a didactic poem. He will seldom bear to be confronted with those writers whom he is found either by accident or design to resemble. His picture of the callow young in a bird's-nest is, I think, with some alteration, copied from Statius. Her young meanwhile Callow and cold, from their moss-woven nest Their famish'd plaint importunately shrill. (English Garden, b. 3.) Volucrum sic turba recentum, Cum reducem longo prospexit in æthere matrem, Oppian's imitation of this is happier. Ως δ' οπότ' ἀπτήνεσσι φέρει βόσιν δ ̓ ὀρταλίχοισι (Halieut. l. iii. 248.) Hurd, in the letter he addressed to him on the Marks of Imitation, observed, that the imagery with which the Ode to Memory opens, is borrowed from Strada's Prolusions. The chorus in Elfrida, beginning Hail to thy living light, Ambrosial morn ! all hail thy roseate ray : is taken from the Hymnus in Auroram, by Flaminio. His Sappho, a lyrical drama, is one of the few attempts that have been made to bring amongst us that tuneful trifle, the modern Opera of the Italians. It has been transferred by Mr. Mathias into that language, to which alone it seemed properly to belong. Mr. Glasse has done as much for Caractacus by giving it up to the Greek. Of the two Odes, which are all, excepting some few fragments, that remain to us of the Lesbian poetess, he has introduced Translations into his drama. There is more glitter of phrase than in the versions made, if I recollect right, by Ambrose Phillips, which are inserted in the Spectator, No. 222 and 229; but much less of that passionate emotion which marks the original. Most of my readers will remember that which begins, Blest as the immortal Gods is he, It is thus rendered by Mason: The youth that gazes on thy charms, But trembling awe my bosom heaves, When placed those heavenly charms among; The sight my voice of power bereaves, And chains my torpid tongue. Through every thrilling fibre flies The subtle flame; in dimness drear Death's chilly dew my limbs o'erspreads, The rudest language, in which there was anything of natural feeling, would be preferable to this cold splendour. In the other ode, he comes into contrast with Akenside. But lo! to Sappho's melting airs Descends the radiant queen of love; Her suppliant's plaintive measures move. Akenside, b. 1, Ode 13. This, though not unexceptionable, and particularly in the last verse, has yet a tenderness and spirit utterly wanting in Mason. What from my power would Sappho claim? |