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Stafford's version of the original in Dryden's Miscellanies: I know thee, Love! on mountains thou wast bred. 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."]
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