Читать книгу The Collected Works of Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb - Charles Lamb - Страница 102

——The pilgrim oft

At dead of night 'mid his oraison hears

Aghast the voice of time disparting towers,

Tumbling all precipitate down-dashed,

Rattling around, loud-thund'ring to the moon;

While murmurs sooth each awful interval

Of ever-falling waters.

Scott

There is a very bold transposition in this passage. A superficial reader, not attending to the sense of the epithet ever, might be ready to suppose that the intervals intended were those between the falling of the waters, instead of those between the falling of the towers.

Ritson

A beauty, as in Thomson's Winter—

——Cheerless towns, far distant, never blest,

Save when its annual course the caravan

Bends to the golden coast of rich Cathay,

With news of human kind.[43] ——Where the broad-bosom'd hills, Swept with perpetual clouds, of Scotland rise, Me fate compels to tarry.

A superficial person—Mr. Scott, for instance, would be apt to connect the last clause in this period with the line foregoing—"bends to the coast of Cathay with news," &c. But has a reader nothing to do but to sit passive, while the connexion is to glide into his ears like oil?

[43] May I have leave to notice an instance of the same agreeable discontinuity in my friend Lloyd's admirable poem on Christmas?