Page:The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, Volume 3.djvu/163

Rh Panchaia’s odours be their costly feast,
 * And all the pride of Asia’s fragrant year,

Give them the treasures of the farthest East,
 * And what is still more precious, give thy tear.

Surely no blame can fall upon a nymph who rejected a swain of so little meaning.

His verses are not rugged, but they have no sweetness; they never glide in a stream of melody. Why Hammond or other writers have thought the quatrain of ten syllables elegiac, it is difficult to tell. The character of the Elegy is gentleness and tenuity; but this stanza has been pronounced by Dryden, whose knowledge of English metre was not inconsiderable, to be the most magnificent of all the measures which our language affords.