"Soft-footed winds with tuneful voices there
Dance through the perfumed air,
There silver rivers through enamel'd meadows glide,
And golden trees enrich their side."
_Translation of Pindar's Second Olympic Ode._
Or let him compare Gray's Latin and English verses upon the death of his
friend Mr. West with Cowley's upon the death of Mr. William Harvey and
Mr. Crashaw:
"Hail, Bard Triumphant! and some care bestow
On us the Poets Militant below," &c.
Cowley _on Mr. Crashaw_.
"At Tu, sancta anima, et nostri non indiga luctus," &c.
_Gray._
To these lines on Crashaw Pope is indebted for a sentiment which in his
hands assumes a very infidel form:
"For modes of faith let senseless bigots fight;
His can't be wrong whose life is in the right."
Crashaw had become a Roman Catholic, and was a canon of Loretto when he
died; but Cowley's Protestant feelings could not blind him to his worth,
and he says:
"His _Faith_ perhaps in some nice tenets might
Be wrong; his _Life_, his soul were _in the Right_."
How much the two last-mentioned poems of Gray's owe to Milton's "Lines
to Mansus" and his "Epitaphium Damonis," any one acquainted with them
may remember. I have only been alluding to Gray's reproductions of
Cowley.