19, 20. These lines, as first printed, read:
"How low, how indigent the proud!
How little are the great!"
22. _The panting herds_. Cf. Pope, _Past._ ii. 87: "To closer shades
the panting flocks remove."
23. _The peopled air_. Cf. Walton, _C. A._: "Now the wing'd people of
the sky shall sing;" Beaumont, _Psyche_: "Every tree empeopled was
with birds of softest throats."
24. _The busy murmur_. Cf. Milton, _P. R._ iv. 248: "bees'
industrious murmur."
25. _The insect youth_. Perhaps suggested by a line in Green's
_Hermitage_, quoted in a letter of Gray to Walpole: "From
maggot-youth through change of state," etc. See on 31 below.
26. _The honied spring_. Cf. Milton, _Il Pens._ 142: "the bee with
honied thigh;" and _Lyc._ 140: "the honied showers."
"There has of late arisen," says Johnson in his Life of Gray, "a
practice of giving to adjectives derived from substantives the
termination of participles, such as the _cultured plain_, the
_daisied bank_; but I am sorry to see in the lines of a scholar like
Gray the _honied_ spring." But, as we have seen, _honied_ is found in
Milton; and Shakespeare also uses it in _Hen. V._ i. 1: "honey'd
sentences." _Mellitus_ is used by Cicero, Horace, and Catullus. The
editor of an English dictionary, as Lord Grenville has remarked,
ought to know "that the ready conversion of our substances into
verbs, participles, and participial adjectives is of the very essence
of our tongue, derived from its Saxon origin, and a main source of
its energy and richness."
27. _The liquid noon_. Gray quotes Virgil, _Geo._ iv. 59: "Nare per
aestatem liquidam."
30. _Quick-glancing to the sun_. Gray quotes Milton, _P. L._ vii.
405:
"Sporting with quick glance,
Show to the sun their waved coats dropt with gold."
31. Gray here quotes Green, _Grotto_: "While insects from the
threshold preach." In a letter to Walpole, he says: "I send you a bit
of a thing for two reasons: first, because it is of one of your
favourites, Mr. M. Green; and next, because I would do justice. The
thought on which my second Ode turns [this Ode, afterwards placed
first by Gray] is manifestly stole from hence; not that I knew it at
the time, but having seen this many years before, to be sure it
imprinted itself on my memory, and, forgetting the Author, I took it
for my own." Then comes the quotation from Green's _Grotto_. The
passage referring to the insects is as follows:
"To the mind's ear, and inward sight,
There silence speaks, and shade gives light:
While insects from the threshold preach,
And minds dispos'd to musing teach;
Proud of strong limbs and painted hues,
They perish by the slightest bruise;
Or maladies begun within
Destroy more slow life's frail machine:
From maggot-youth, thro' change of state,
They feel like us the turns of fate:
Some born to creep have liv'd to fly,
And chang'd earth's cells for dwellings high:
And some that did their six wings keep,
Before they died, been forc'd to creep.
They politics, like ours, profess;
The greater prey upon the less.
Some strain on foot huge loads to bring,
Some toil incessant on the wing:
Nor from their vigorous schemes desist
Till death; and then they are never mist.
Some frolick, toil, marry, increase,
Are sick and well, have war and peace;
And broke with age in half a day,
Yield to successors, and away."
47. _Painted plumage_. Cf. Pope, _Windsor Forest_, 118: "His painted
wings; and Milton, _P. L._ vii. 433:
"From branch to branch the smaller birds with song
Solaced the woods, and spread their painted wings."
See also Virgil, _Geo._ iii. 243, and _Æn._ iv. 525: "pictaeque
volucres;" and Phædrus, _Fab._ iii. 18: "pictisque plumis."
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