Note 577 — BOOK IX.
William Julius Mickle translation
The orange here perfumes the buxom air. And boasts the golden hue of Daphne's hair.—
Frequent allusions to the fables of the ancients form a characteristic feature of the poetry of the 16th and 17th centuries. A profusion of it is pedantry; a moderate use of it, however, in a poem of those times pleases, because it discovers the stages of composition, and has in itself a fine effect, as it illustrates its subject by presenting the classical reader with some little landscapes of that country through which he has travelled. The description of forests is a favourite topic in poetry. Chaucer, Tasso, and Spenser, have been happy in it, but both have copied an admired passage in Statius:—
"Cadit ardua fagus, Chaoniumque nemus, brumæque illæsa cupressus; Procumbunt piceæ, flammis alimenta supremis, Ornique, iliceæque trabes, metuandaque sulco Taxus, et infandos belli potura cruores Fraxinus, atque situ non expugnabile robur: Hinc audax abies, et odoro vulnere pinus Scinditur, acclinant intonsa cacumina terræ Alnus amica fretis, nec inhospita vitibus ulmus."
In rural descriptions three things are necessary to render them poetical: the happiness of epithet, of picturesque arrangement, and of little landscape views. Without these, all the names of trees and flowers, though strung together in tolerable numbers, contain no more poetry than a nurseryman or a florist's catalogue. In Statius, in Tasso and Spenser's admired forests (Ger. Liber. c. 3. st. 75, 76, and F. Queen, b. 1 c. 1. st. 8, 9), the poetry consists entirely in the happiness of the epithets. In Camoëns, all the three requisites are admirably attained and blended together.