You took her up a _little tender flower_,
---- and with a careful loving hand
_Transplanted_ her into your own fair _garden_,
Where the _sun_ always shines.
The origin of the following imagery is undoubtedly Grecian; but it is
still embellished and modified by our best poets:--
----While universal _Pan_,
Knit with the _graces_ and the _hours, in dance
Led_ on th' eternal spring.
_Paradise Lost_.
Thomson probably caught this strain of imagery:
Sudden to heaven
Thence weary vision turns, where _leading soft
The silent hours_ of love, with purest ray
Sweet _Venus_ shines.
_Summer_, v. 1692.
Gray, in repeating this imagery, has borrowed a remarkable epithet from
Milton:
Lo, where the _rosy-bosom'd hours,
Fair Venus' train_, appear.
_Ode to Spring_.
Along the crisped shades and bowers
Revels the spruce and jocund _spring_;
The _graces_ and the _rosy-bosom'd hours_
Thither all their bounties bring.
_Comus_, v. 984.
Collins, in his Ode to _Fear_, whom he associates with _Danger_, there
grandly personified, was I think considerably indebted to the following
stanza of Spenser:
Next him was _Fear_, all arm'd from top to toe,
Yet thought himself not safe enough thereby:
But fear'd each sudden movement to and fro;
And _his own arms_ when glittering he did spy,
Or _clashing heard_, he fast away did fly,
As ashes pale of hue and wingy heel'd;
And evermore on _Danger_ fix'd his eye,
'Gainst whom he always bent a brazen shield,
Which his right hand unarmed fearfully did wield.
_Faery Queen_, B. iii. c. 12, s. 12.
Warm from its perusal, he seems to have seized it as a hint to the Ode
to Fear, and in his "Passions" to have very finely copied an idea here:
First _Fear_, his hand, his skill to try,
Amid the chords bewildered laid,
And _back recoil'd_, he knew not why,
_E'en at the sound himself had made._
_Ode to the Passions_.
The stanza in Beattie's "Minstrel," first book, in which his "visionary
boy," after "the storm of summer rain," views "the rainbow brighten to
the setting sun," and runs to reach it:
Fond fool, that deem'st the streaming glory nigh,
How vain the chase thine ardour has begun!
'Tis fled afar, ere half thy purposed race be run;
Thus it fares with age, &c.
The same train of thought and imagery applied to the same subject,
though the image itself be somewhat different, may be found in the poems
of the platonic John Norris; a writer who has great originality of
thought, and a highly poetical spirit. His stanza runs thus:
So to the unthinking boy the distant sky
Seems on some mountain's surface to relie;
He with ambitious haste climbs the ascent,
_Curious to touch the firmament_;
But when with an unwearied pace,
He is arrived at the long-wish'd-for place,
With sighs the sad defeat he does deplore,
His heaven is still as distant as before!
_The Infidel_, by JOHN NORRIS.
In the modern tragedy of _The Castle Spectre_ is this fine description
of the ghost of Evelina:--"Suddenly a female form glided along the
vault. I flew towards her. My arms were already _unclosed to clasp
her,--when suddenly her figure changed_! Her face grew pale--a stream of
blood gushed from her bosom. While speaking, her form withered away;
_the flesh fell from her bones_; a skeleton loathsome and meagre clasped
me in her _mouldering arms_. Her infected breath was mingled with mine;
her _rotting fingers_ pressed my hand; and my face was covered with her
kisses. Oh! then how I trembled with disgust!"
There is undoubtedly singular merit in this description. I shall
contrast it with one which the French Virgil has written, in an age
whose faith was stronger in ghosts than ours, yet which perhaps had less
skill in describing them. There are some circumstances which seem to
indicate that the author of the _Castle Spectre_ lighted his torch at
the altar of the French muse. Athalia thus narrates her dream, in which
the spectre of Jezabel, her mother, appears:
C'étoit pendant l'horreur d'une profonde nuit,
Ma mère Jezabel devant moi s'est montrée,
Comme au jour de sa mort, pompeusement paree.--
---- En achevant ces mots epouvantables,
Son ombre vers mon lit a paru se baisser,
Et moi, je lui tendois les mains pour l'embrasser,
Mais _je n'ai plus trouvé qu'un horrible mélange
D'os et de chair meurtris_, et trainée dans la fange,
_Des lambeaux pleins de sang et des membres affreux_.
RACINE'S _Athalie_, Acte ii. s. 5.
Goldsmith, when, in his pedestrian tour, he sat amid the Alps, as he
paints himself in his "Traveller," and felt himself the solitary
neglected genius he was, desolate amidst the surrounding scenery,
probably at that moment applied to himself the following beautiful
imagery of Thomson:
As in the hollow breast of Apennine
Beneath the centre of encircling hills,
A myrtle rises, far from human eyes,
And breathes its balmy fragrance o'er the wild.
_Autumn_, v. 202.
Goldsmith very pathetically applies a similar image:
E'en now where Alpine solitudes ascend,
I sit me down a pensive hour to spend,
Like yon _neglected shrub_ at random cast,
That shades the steep, and sighs at every blast.
_Traveller_.
Akenside illustrates the native impulse of genius by a simile of
Memnon's marble statue, sounding its lyre at the touch of the sun:
For as old Memnon's image, long renown'd
By fabling Nilus, to the quivering touch
Of Titan's ray, with each repulsive string
Consenting, sounded through the warbling air
Unbidden strains; even so did nature's hand, &c.
It is remarkable that the same image, which does not appear obvious
enough to have been the common inheritance of poets, is precisely used
by old Regnier, the first French satirist, in the dedication of his
Satires to the French king. Louis XIV. supplies the place of nature to
the courtly satirist. These are his words:--"On lit qu'en Ethiope il y
avoit une statue qui rendoit un son harmonieux, toutes les fois que le
soleil levant la regardoit. Ce même miracle, Sire, avez vous fait en
moi, qui touché de l'astre de Votre Majesté, ai reçu la voix et la
parole."
In that sublime passage in "Pope's Essay on Man," Epist. i. v. 237,
beginning,
Vast chain of being! which from God began,
and proceeds to
From nature's chain whatever link you strike,
Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.
Pope seems to have caught the idea and image from Waller, whose last
verse is as fine as any in the "Essay on Man:"--
The chain that's fixed to the throne of Jove,
On which the fabric of our world depends,
One link dissolv'd, the whole creation ends.
_Of the Danger his Majesty escaped_, &c. v. 168.
It has been observed by Thyer, that Milton borrowed the expression
_imbrowned_ and _brown_, which he applies to the evening shade, from the
Italian. See Thyer's elegant note in B. iv., v. 246:
----And where the unpierced shade
_Imbrowned_ the noon tide bowers.
And B. ix., v. 1086:
---- Where highest Woods impenetrable
To sun or star-light, spread their umbrage broad,
And _brown as evening_.
_Fa l'imbruno_ is an expression used by the Italians to denote the
approach of the evening. Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso, have made a very
picturesque use of this term, noticed by Thyer. I doubt if it be
applicable to our colder climate; but Thomson appears to have been
struck by the fine effect it produces in poetical landscape; for he has
----With quickened step
_Brown night_ retires.
_Summer_, v. 51.
If the epithet be true, it cannot be more appropriately applied than in
the season he describes, which most resembles the genial clime with the
deep serenity of an Italian heaven. Milton in Italy had experienced the
_brown evening_, but it may be suspected that Thomson only recollected
the language of the poet.
The same observation may be made on two other poetical epithets. I shall
notice the epithet "LAUGHING" applied to inanimate objects; and "PURPLE"
to beautiful objects."
The natives of Italy and the softer climates receive emotions from the
view of their WATERS in the SPRING not equally experienced in the
British roughness of our skies. The fluency and softness of the water
are thus described by Lucretius:--
----Tibi suaveis Dædala tellus
Submittit flores: _tibi_ RIDENT _æquora ponti_.
Inelegantly rendered by Creech,
The roughest sea puts on smooth looks, and SMILES.
Dryden more happily,
The ocean SMILES, and smooths her wavy breast.