This page has been validated.
HAMMOND.
159
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.
