every maid was kind."

To give the circumstance of the dialogue a more affecting solemnity, he
makes the time midnight, and describes the two shepherds in the very
act of flight from the destruction that swept over their country:

"Sad o'er the dews, two brother shepherds fled,
Where wildering fear and desperate sorrow led."

There is a beauty and propriety in the epithet wildering, which strikes
us more forcibly, the more we consider it.

The opening of the dialogue is equally happy, natural, and unaffected;
when one of the shepherds, weary and overcome with the fatigue of
flight, calls upon his companion to review the length of way they had
passed. This is certainly painting from nature, and the thoughts,
however obvious, or destitute of refinement, are perfectly in character.
But as the closest pursuit of nature is the surest way to excellence in
general, and to sublimity in particular, in poetical description, so we
find that this simple suggestion of the shepherd is not unattended with
magnificence. There is a grandeur and variety in the landscape he
describes:

"And first review that long extended plain,
And yon wide groves, already past with pain!
Yon ragged cliff, whose dangerous path we tried!
And, last, this lofty mountain's weary side!"

There is, in imitative harmony, an act of expressing a slow and
difficult movement by adding to the usual number of pauses in a verse.
This is observable in the line that describes the ascent of the
mountain:

And last || this lofty mountain's || weary side ||.

Here we find the number of pauses, or musical bars, which, in an heroic
verse, is commonly two, increased to three.

The liquid melody, and the numerous sweetness of expression, in the
following descriptive lines, is almost inimitably beautiful:

"Sweet to the sight is Zabran's flowery plain,
And once by nymphs and shepherds loved in vain!
No more the virgins shall delight to rove
By Sargis' banks, or Irwan's shady grove;
On Tarkie's mountain catch the cooling gale,
Or breathe the sweets of Aly's flowery vale."

Nevertheless, in this delightful landscape there is an obvious fault;
there is no distinction between the plain of Zabran and the vale of Aly;
they are both flowery, and consequently undiversified. This could not
proceed from the poet's want of judgment, but from inattention: it had
not occurred to him that he had employed the epithet flowery twice
within so short a co