Note 69 — CANTO II. CONJURATIONS!
Reading edition
“A Wilderness of suns!”
This “proud” passage, together with “O thou!”—“GENIUS or MUSE!”—and “CATARACT OF LIGHT!”—are the legitimate offspring of that prince of poets, who rose to such a towering pitch of poetry,
“That oft Hibernian optics bright Beheld him fairly out of sight!”
I should have been happy to have fascinated your worships with further specimens of the same sort of sublimity, could I have retained them in memory. I have been so solicitous for your gratification in this particular, that I have made a painful, though bootless search, throughout the metropolis and its suburbs, for these more than sybiline oracles. Indeed, I have reason to fear, that all Della Crusca’s effusions are irretrievably lost, except the few fragments which I have here pickled for the behoof of posterity.