Note 140 — THE ART OF PAINTING;
Reading edition
Theb. vi. 400, 401.
Our author’s confession of the difficulty of translating these lines, probably induced Pope to transplant them into his “Windsor Forest,” where they are thus beautifully paraphrased:
The impatient courser pants in every vein, And pawing seems to beat the distant plain; Hills, vales, and floods, appear already crost, And, ere he starts, a thousand steps are lost.
Our author trusted, as usual, to memory; for the first of the lines, quoted from Statius, runs differently:
Stare adeò miserum est——
but he was thinking on a passage in the Third Georgic:
——tum, si qua sonum procul arma dedere, Stare loco nescit: micat auribus, et tremit artus; Conlectumque premens volvit sub naribus ignem.—Malone.