Or the debating merchants share the prey, Am I a debtor? Haft thou ever heard And Mine the herds, that graze a thousand hills: At full my huge Leviathan fhall rife, Boaft all his ftrength, and spread his wond'rous fize. And what a deep abyfs between them lies! *This alludes to a cuftom of this creature, which is, when fated. with fish, to come afhore and fleep among the reeds. The crocodile's mouth is exceeding wide. When he gapes, fays Pliny, fit totum os. Martial fays to his old woman, Cùm comparata ritibus tuis ora Niliacus habet crocodilus angufla. So that the expreffion there is barely juft. Mete Mete with thy lance, and with thy plummet found, His bulk is charg'd with fuch a furious foul, When, late awak'd, he rears him from the floods, + Large is his front; and, when his burnish'd eyes Lift their broad lids, the morning seems to rise. In *This too is nearer truth than at firft view may be imagined. The crocodile, say the naturalists, lying long under water, and being there forced to hold its breath, when it emerges, the breath long repreft is hot, and bursts out so violently, that it resembles fire and fmoke. The horse fuppreffes not his breath by any means fo long neither is he fo fierce and animated; yet the most correct of poets ventures to use the fame metaphor concerning him. Collectumque premens volvit fub naribus ignem. By this and the foregoing note I would caution against a falfe opinion of the eastern boldness, from paffages in them ill understood. + His eyes are like the eye-lids of the morning. I think this gives us as great an image of the thing it would express, as can enter the thought In vain may death in various shapes invade, The dart rebounds, the brittle fauchion flies, His paftimes like a cauldron boil the flood, The foam high-wrought, with white divides the green, thought of man. It is not improbable that the Egyptians stole their hieroglyphic for the morning, which is the crocodile's eye, from this paffage, though no commentator, I have feen, mentions it. It is easy to conceive how the Egyptians fhould be both readers and admirers of the writings of Mofes, whom I suppose the author of this poem. I have observed already that three or four of the creatures here described are Egyptian; the two last are notoriously so, they are the river-horse and the crocodile, thofe celebrated inhabitants of the Nile; and on these two it is that our author chiefly dwells. It would have been expected from an author more remote from that river than Mofes, in a catalogue of creatures produced to magnify their Creator, to have dwelt on the two largest works of his hand, viz. the elephant and the whale. This is fo natural an expectation, that fome commentators have rendered behemoth and leviathan, the elephant and whale, though the descriptions in our author will not admit of it; but Mofes being, as we may well fuppose, under an immediate terror of the hippopotamos and crocodile, from their daily mischiefs and ravages around him, it is very accountable why he fhould permit them to take place. His like earth bears not on her fpacious face: Then the Chaldæan eas'd his labʼring breast, « Thou can'ft accomplish All things, Lord of Might: "And ev'ry thought is naked to Thy fight. "But, oh! Thy ways are wonderful, and lie Beyond the deepest reach of mortal eye. "Oft have I heard of Thine Almighty Pow'r; OCEAN. |