Daniel has, as quoted in Cooper's Muses' Library,
And _in himself with sorrow_, does complain
The misery of DARK FORGETFULNESS.
A line of Pope's, in his Dunciad, "High-born Howard," echoed in the ear
of Gray, when he gave, with all the artifice of alliteration,
High-born Hoel's harp.
Johnson bitterly censures Gray for giving to adjectives the termination
of participles, such as the _cultured_ plain; the _daisied_ bank: but he
solemnly adds, I was sorry to see in the line of a scholar like Gray,
"the _honied_ spring." Had Johnson received but the faintest tincture of
the rich Italian school of English poetry, he would never have formed so
tasteless a criticism. _Honied_ is employed by Milton in more places
than one.
Hide me from day's garish eye
While the bee with HONIED thigh
_Penseroso_, v. 142.
The celebrated stanza in Gray's Elegy seems partly to be borrowed.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd eaves of ocean bear:
Full many a _flower_ is torn to blush _unseen,_
And _waste its sweetness in the desert air_.
Pope had said:
There kept by charms conceal'd from mortal eye,
Like _roses_ that in _deserts bloom_ and _die_.
_Rape of the Lock._
Young says of nature:
In distant wilds by human eye _unseen_
She rears her _flowers_ and spreads her velvet green;
Pure gurgling rills the lonely _desert_ trace,
And _waste their music_ on the savage race.