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Part Fourth
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[1275] Or,
“That with heart-weariness and mournful breast
Full many sighs may furnish anxious food.”
[1276] The writer makes “cherubim”—or “cherubin”—singular. I have therefore retained his mistake. What the “hot point”—“calidus apex”—is, is not clear. It may be an allusion to the “flaming sword” (see Gen. iii. 24); or it may mean the top of the flame.
[1277] Or, “origins”—“orsis”—because Cain and Abel were original types, as it were, of two separate classes of men.
[1278] “Perpetuo;” “in process of time,” Eng. ver.; μεθ᾽ ἡμέρας, LXX. in Gen. iv. 3.
[1279] Quæ prosata fuerant. But, as Wordsworth remarks on Gen. iv., we do not read that Cain’s offerings were first-fruits even.
[1280] Quod propter gelida Cain incanduit ira. If this, which is Oehler’s and Migne’s reading, be correct, the words gelida and incanduit seem to be intentionally contrasted, unless incandescere be used here in a supposed sense of “growing white,” “turning pale.” Urere is used in Latin of heat and cold indifferently. Calida would, of course, be a ready emendation; but gelida has the advantage of being far more startling.
4. A Strain of the Judgment of the Lord. (Author Uncertain.)
[1281] The reader is requested to bear in mind, in reading this piece, tedious in its elaborate struggles after effect, that the constant repetitions of words and expressions with which his patience will be tried, are due to the original. It was irksome to reproduce them; but fidelity is a translator’s first law.
[1282] Luciferas.
[1283] Helicon is not named in the original, but it seems to be meant.
[1284] i.e., in another clime or continent. The writer is (or feigns to be) an African. Helicon, of course, is in Europe.
[1285] Virtus.
[1286] Sæculo.
[1287] Mundum.
[1288] Compositis.
[1289] I have endeavoured to give some intelligible sense to these lines; but the absence of syntax in the original, as it now stands, makes it necessary to guess at the meaning as best one may.
[1290] Venturi ævi.
[1291] “But in them nature’s copy’s not eterne.”—Shakespeare, Macbeth, act iii. scene 2.
[1292] Sæcula.
[1293] Sæcula.
[1294] Sermone tenus: i.e., the exertion (so to speak) needed to do such mighty works only extended to the uttering of a speech; no more was requisite. See for a similar allusion to the contrast between the making of other things and the making of man, the “Genesis,” 30–39.
[1295] Dicto.
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