A te fioriscono
Gli erbosi prat:
E i flutti RIDONO
Nel mar placati.
It merits observation, that the _Northern Poets_ could not exalt their
imagination higher than that the water SMILED, while the modern Italian,
having before his eyes _a different Spring_, found no difficulty in
agreeing with the ancients, that the waves LAUGHED. Modern poetry has
made a very free use of the animating epithet LAUGHING. Gray has
LAUGHING FLOWERS: and Langhorne in two beautiful lines personifies
Flora:--
Where Tweed's soft banks in liberal beauty lie,
And Flora LAUGHS beneath an azure sky.
Sir William Jones, in the spirit of Oriental poetry, has "the LAUGHING
AIR." Dryden has employed this epithet boldly in the delightful lines,
almost entirely borrowed from his original, Chaucer:--
The morning lark, the messenger of day,
Saluted in her song the morning gray;
And soon the sun arose, with beams so bright,
That all THE HORIZON LAUGHED to see the joyous sight.
_Palamon and Arcite_, B. ii.[25]
It is extremely difficult to conceive what the ancients precisely meant
by the word _purpureus_. They seem to have designed by it anything
BRIGHT and BEAUTIFUL. A classical friend has furnished me with numerous
significations of this word which are very contradictory. Albinovanus,
in his elegy on Livia, mentions _Nivem purpureum_. Catullus, _Quercus
ramos purpureos_. Horace, _Purpureo bibet ore nectar_, and somewhere
mentions _Olores purpureos_. Virgil has _Purpuream vomit ille animam_;
and Homer calls the sea _purple_, and gives it in some other book the
same epithet, when in a storm.
The general idea, however, has been fondly adopted by the finest writers
in Europe. The PURPLE of the ancients is not known to us. What idea,
therefore, have the moderns affixed to it? Addison, in his Vision of the
Temple of Fame, describes the country as "being covered with a kind of
PURPLE LIGHT." Gray's beautiful line is well known:--
The bloom of young desire and _purple light_ of love.