Want, the grim recompense of truth like thine,Shall now no longer dim thy destined shrine.
The impatient envy, the disdainful air,
The front malignant, and the captious stare,
The furious petulance, the jealous start,
The mist of frailties that obscured thy heart—
Veil'd in thy grave shall unremember'd lie;
For these were parts of Dennis born to die.
But there's a nobler deity behind;
His reason dies not, and has friends to find:
THOMSON'S SEASONS
Address to the Angler to spare the young fish
If yet too young, and easily deceived,
A worthless prey scarce bends your pliant rod,
Him, piteous of his youth, and the short space
He has enjoy'd the vital light of heaven,
Soft disengage, and back into the stream
The speckled infant throw.——
Scott
The praise bestowed on a preceding passage, cannot be justly given to this. There is in it an attempt at dignity above the occasion. Pathos seems to have been intended, but affectation only is produced.
Ritson
It is not affectation, but it is the mock heroic of pathos, introduced purposely and wisely to attract the reader to a proposal, which from the unimportance of the subject—a poor little fish—might else have escaped his attention—as children learn, or may learn, humanity to animals from the mock romantic "Perambulations of a Mouse."
HAYMAKING
——Infant hands
Trail the long rake; or, with the fragrant load
O'er-charged, amid the kind oppression roll.
Scott
"Kind oppression" is a phrase of that sort, which one scarcely knows whether to blame or praise: it consists of two words, directly opposite in their signification; and yet, perhaps, no phrase whatever could have better conveyed the idea of an easy uninjurious weight—
Ritson
—and yet he does not know whether to blame or praise it!
Though here revenge and pride withheld his praise,
No wrongs shall reach him through his future days;
The rising ages shall redeem his name,
And nations read him into lasting fame.
In his defects untaught, his labour'd page
Shall the slow gratitude of Time engage.
Perhaps some story of his pitied woe,
Mix'd in faint shades, may with his memory go,
To touch fraternity with generous shame,
And backward cast an unavailing blame
On times too cold to taste his strength of art,
Yet warm contemners of too weak a heart.
Rest in thy dust, contented with thy lot,
Thy good remember'd, and thy bad forgot.
SHEEP-SHEARING
——By many a dog
Compell'd——
The clamour much of men, and boys, and dogs——
Scott
The mention of dogs twice was superfluous; it might have been easily avoided.
Ritson
Very true—by mentioning them only once.
Scott
Nature is rich in a variety of minute but striking circumstances; some of which engage the attention of one observer, and some that of another.
Ritson
This lover of truth never uttered a truer speech. Give me a lie wth a spirit in it.
Air, earth, and ocean, smile immense.——
Scott
The bombastic "immense smile of air, &c.," better omitted.
Ritson
Qute Miltonic—"enormous bliss"—and both, I presume, alike caviare to the Quaker.
He comes! he comes! in every breeze the power
Of philosophic melancholy comes!
His near approach, the sudden-starting tear,
The glowing cheek, the mild dejected air,
The soften'd feature, and the beating heart,
Pierced deep with many a virtuous pang, declare.
Scott
This fine picture is greatly injured by a few words. The power should have been said to come "upon the breeze;" not "in every breeze;" an expression which indicates a multiplicity of approaches. If he came "in every breeze," he must have been always coming—
Ritson
—and so he was.
——The branching Oronoque
Rolls a brown deluge, and the native drives
To dwell aloft on life-sufficing trees,
At once his dome, his robe, his food, and arms.
Swell'd by a thousand streams, impetuous hurl'd
From all the roaring Andes, huge descends
The mighty Orellana. Scarce the Muse Dares stretch her wing o'er this enormous mass Of rushing water: scarce she dares attempt The sea-like Plata; to whose dread expanse, Continuous depth, and wond'rous length of course, Our floods are rills. With unabated force In silent dignity they sweep along, And traverse realms unknown, and blooming wilds, And fruitful desarts, worlds of solitude, Where the sun smiles, and seasons teem, in vain, Unseen and unenjoy'd. Forsaking
