With headlong weight a fiercer blast descends, And with sharp whirring crafh the main-fail rends; Of arm robufteft, and of firmeft knee, Can guide the starting rudder; from their hands So roar'd the winds: high o'er the rest upborne At times difcover'd by the lightnings blue, As As if the folid heavens together crush'd, C High o'er the deluged hills. Along the shore The The balcyons, mindful of their fate, deplore.Ceyx, king of Trachinia, fon of Lucifer, married Alcyone, the daughter of Eolus. On a voyage to confult the Delphic oracle he was fhipwrecked. His corpfe was thrown ashore in the view of his fpoufe, who, in the agonies of her love and despair, threw herself into the fea. The gods, in pity of her pious fidelity, metamorphofed them into the birds which bear her name. The halcyon is a little bird, about the fize of a thrufh, its plumage of a beautiful sky blue, mixed with some traits of white and carnation. It is vulgarly called the King, or Martin Fisher. The halcyons very seldom appear but in the finest weather, whence they are fabled to build their nefts on the waves. The female is no lefs remarkable than the turtle, for her conjugal affection. She nourishes and attends the male when fick, and furvives his death but a few days. When the halcyons are furprifed in a tempeft, they fly about as in the utmost terror, with the most lamentable and doleful cries. To introduce them therefore in the picture of a ftorm, is a proof both of the tafte and judgment of Camoëns. & With fhrill faint voice th' untimely ghost complains. -It may not perhaps be unentertaining to cite Madam Dacier, and Mr. Pope, on the voices of The amorous dolphins to their deepest caves The the dead. It will, at least, afford a critical observation, which appears to have escaped them both. "The shades of the fuitors (observes Dacier) "when they are summoned by Mercury out of the palace of Ulysses, emit a "feeble, plaintive, inarticulate found, Tir, ftrident: whereas Aga66 memnon, and the fhades that have been long in the ftate of the dead, "speak articulately. I doubt not but Homer intended to fhew, by the "former description, that when the soul is separated from the organs of the "body, it ceases to act after the fame manner as while it was joined to it; "but how the dead recover their voices afterwards is not easy to under❝ftand. In other respects Virgil paints after Homer: Pars tollere vocem Exiguam inceptus clamor fruftratur biantes." To this Mr. Pope replies, "But why should we suppose with Dacier, that "these fhades of the fuitors (of Penelope) have loft the faculty of speaking? "I rather imagine that the founds they uttered were signs of complaint "and discontent, and proceeded not from an inability to speak. After "Patroclus was flain, he appears to Achilles, and speaks very articulately to "him; yet to express his forrow at his departure, he acts like these fuitors; for Achilles Like a thin smoke beholds the spirit fly, And hears a feeble, lamentable cry. "Dacier conjectures, that the power of speech ceases in the dead, till they "are admitted into a state of reft; but Patroclus is an instance to the con"trary in the Iliad, and Elpenor in the Odyfey, for they both speak before "their funereal rites are performed, and confequently before they enter "into a state of repofe amongst the fhades of the happy." The critic, in his fearch for diftant proofs, often omits the most material one immediately at hand. Had Madam Dacier attended to the episode of the fouls of the fuitors, the world had never feen her ingenuity in these mythological conjectures; nor had Mr. Pope any need to bring the cafe of Patroclus or Elpenor to overthrow her fyftem. Amphimedon, one of the fuitors, in the very episode which gave birth to Dacier's conjecture, tells his story very articu 7 The pine and oak's huge finewy roots uptorn, And rowls his eyes to heaven, and fpreads his hands, Who, articulately to the fhade of Agamemnon, though he had not received the funereal rites: Our mangled bodies now deform'd with gore, Odyff. xxiv. On the whole, the defence of Pope is almoft as idle as the conjectures of Dacier. The plain truth is, poetry delights in perfonification: every thing in it, as Ariftotle fays of the Iliad, has manners; poetry must therefore perfonify according to our ideas. Thus in Milton: Tears, fuch as angels weep, burst forth And thus in Homer, while the fuitors are conducted to hell; Trembling the fpectres glide, and plaintive vent Thin, hollow fcreams, along the deep descent : and, unfettered with mythological diftinctions, either fhriek or articulately talk, according to the most poetical view of their supposed circumstances. |