[Footnote 32: Aleæus arrived at the promontory of Leucate that very evening, in order to take the leap on her account; but hearing that her body could not be found, he very generously lamented her fall, and is said to have written his 215th ode on that occasion.--WARTON.
[Footnote 33: These two lines have been quoted as the most smooth and mellifluous in our language; and they are supposed to derive their sweetness and harmony from the mixture of so many iambics. Pope himself preferred the following line to all he had written, with respect to harmony:
Lo, where Mæotis sleeps, and hardly flows.--WARTON.
A constant trade-wind will securely blow, And gently lay us on the spicy shore.--WAKEFIELD.]
To those steep cliffs, that ocean must I fly.]
[Footnote 35: In the place of this couplet, there were four lines in the MS.:
If thou return thy Sappho too shall stay, Not all the gods shall force me then away; Nor Love, nor Phoebus, then invoked shall be, For thou alone art all the gods to me.
Wouldst thou return, oh more than Phoebus, fair No god like thee could ease thy Sappho's care.]
[Footnote 36: "Liked" seems a very unsuitable expression in the present day. It was a word, however, among our early writers of greater force and significance:
What I that loved, and you that _liked_, Shall we begin to wrangle? No, no, no; my heart is fixed, And cannot disentangle.
Phaon--_my_ Phaon I almost had said-- Is fled, with Phaon your delights are fled.
Cromwell wrote against the last line "recte, non pulchre," and Pope tried three variations of it before he cast them aside for the version in the text:
Is gone, and with him all your pleasures fled. Is gone, and all that's pleasing with him fled. Is gone, and with him your delights are fled.]
[Footnote 38: Of ver. 242 and v. 244, Pope says in the MS., "So at first as printed, but objected [against] as tautological. _Sic recte_ as [in the] margin, but carried afterwards as at first." "Sighs" was thought to be too nearly synonymous with "prayers," and Pope altered the lines by erasing the expressions "no sighs" and "my sighs," and affixing the epithet "tender" in both verses to numbers.]
Oh, when shall kinder, more auspicious gales, Waft to these eyes thy long-expected sails.