Latio, "Captive Greece led captive her fierce conqueror and brought the arts to savage Latium."

79. tyrant Power, Imperial Rome. coward Vice, the degeneracy of the Greeks that moved the Roman satirist to scornGraeculus esuriens in caelum iusseris ibit-Juvenal's line, known to English readers in Johnson's brilliant adaptation: "All sciences a fasting Monsieur knows, And bid him go to hell, to hell he goes.'

83. the sun, the sunny South, Greece and Italy.

84. green lap. Cp. Milton, Song on May Morning:

"The flowery May, who from her green lap throws
The yellow cowslip and the pale primrose.

Nature's Darling. Shakespeare is so called as having been taught by Nature, not by the schools. Thus Milton contrasts him with Jonson, L'Allegro (G. T., CXLIV. 131-4):

"Then to the well-trod stage anon,

If Jonson's learned sock be on,

Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child,
Warble his native wood-notes wild."

87. dauntless child. Cp. Horace's description of his own childhood, Odes, III. 4. 20, Non sine dis animosus infans.

88. smiled. Cp. Virgil, Eclogue IV., Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem ("Begin, little child, to recognise thy mother with a smile") addressed to the child whose birth was to inaugurate a new Golden Age.

89. pencil, Lat. penicillus, here used in its original sense, 'the painter's brush.'

90. year, season. Cp. 'sullen year' in No. 1. 17.

93. of horror that. That (key can unlock the gates) of Horror.

94. Cp. πnyàs daкpúwv, 'founts of tears,' Sophocles, Antigone, 803.

95-102. In allusion to Milton's lines about himself, Paradise Lost, VII. 12-14:

"Up led by thee

Into the Heaven of Heavens I have presumed,
An earthly guest, and drawn empyreal air."

95. Cp. "He on the wings of cherub rode sublime," Par. Lost, VI. 771.

96. Extasy, inspiration. Cp. 'rapture in 1. 2.

98. "

"Flammantia moenia mundi, Lucretius, 1. 74" (G.). 99. "For the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels And above the firmament, that was over their heads, was

the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire-stone. This was the appearance of the glory of the Lord-Ezekiel, I. 20, 26, 28" (G.). Cp. also Par. Lost, vI. 758.

"Whereon a sapphire throne, inlaid with pure

Amber, and colours of the showery arch."

101. Cp. Par. Lost, III. 380, "Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear."

102. “Οφθαλμῶν μὲν ἄμερσε· δίδου δ ̓ ἡδεῖαν ἀοιδὴν, Homer, Odyssey, VIII. 64" (G.). "The Muse robbed (the minstrel Demodocus) of his eyes, but she gave him sweet song." Milton himself compares his own case with that of

"Blind Thamyris, and blind Maeonides,

And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old."

(Par. Lost, III. 35.)

He attributed his blindness to his political labours: see the second of his two sonnets To Cyriac Skinner :

"What supports me, dost thou ask?

The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied

In liberty's defence, my noble task,

Of which all Europe rings from side to side."

Gray's line is almost a translation of Virgil, Aeneid, x. 746, In aeternam clauduntur lumina noctem.

105. "The Heroic couplet was first introduced from Italy into England by Chaucer. Between Chaucer and Dryden it was adopted by many poets as their metrical form. The general French adoption of it gave it a new popularity in this country in the latter part of the seventeenth century. In Dryden's hands it assumed a new character; it acquired an amazing power and vigour, and a certain novel rapidity of movement" (Hales).

106. "Hast thou clothed his neck with thunder? Job XXXIX. 19" (G.). The previous line may be a reminiscence of Virgil's currum geminosque iugales Semine ab aetherio, spirantes naribus ignem, Aeneid, VII. 280.

108. We are meant to think of Fancy as an allegorical figure hovering in the air and scattering gifts-i.e. poetic images-from an urn appropriately covered with pictures.

110. "Words that weep, and tears that speak, Cowley” (G.). According to Mr. Gosse the line in Cowley is really "Tears which shall understand and weep."

"I have

Dugald Stewart (Philosophy of Human Mind) says: sometimes thought Gray had in view the two different effects of words already described; the effect of some in awakening the powers of conception and imagination; and that of others in exciting associated emotions."

111. "We have had in our language no other odes of the sublime kind, than that of Dryden on St. Cecilia's Day; for Cowley (who had his merit) yet wanted judgment, style, aud harmony, for such a task. That of Pope is not worthy of so great a man. Mr. Mason indeed of late days has touched the true chords, and with a masterly hand, in some of his choruses,—above all in the last of Caractacus: Hark! heard ye not yon footstep dread? etc." (G.). The ode of Dryden to which Gray refers is Alexander's Feast (G. T., CLI.). It is curious that he does not mention Milton's Nativity Ode, but that may be because he has already spoken of Milton. The Mr. Mason whose work is extolled here is now only remembered as Gray's friend.

112. daring, presumptuous-Gray is speaking of himself. 115. Theban eagle, i.e. Pindar.

“ Διὸς πρὸς ὄρνιχα θεῖον [the divine bird of Zeus], Olymp., II. 159. Pindar compares himself to that bird, and his enemies to ravens that croak and clamour in vain below, while it pursues its flight, regardless of their noise" (G.).

دو

117. azure deep of air. Cp. Shelley, Skylark Ode (G.T., CCLXXXVII. 9), "The blue deep thou wingest. 120. orient, bright, as of the rising sun, but yet “unborrowed of the sun":

"The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration, and the Poet's dream."

(Wordsworth, G.T., cccxxIII. 15.) Cp. also Shelley's exquisite lines "On a Poet's lips I slept" (G. T., CCCXXIV.).

122. vulgar, common, the fate of the crowd: without the idea of bad taste' that attaches to the word at the present day.

27. When Music, heavenly maid, was young

By its subject this ode recalls three other odes famous in English poetry-Dryden's Song for St. Cecilia's Day and his Alexander's Feast, or, The Power of Music, and Pope's Ode for Music on St. Cecilia's Day. Collins has nothing to fear from a comparison: in greatness of imagination and in richness and variety of melody his Ode unquestionably surpasses its predecessors.

After the manner of its age the poem abounds in personified abstractions. But it is the distinction of Collins that he gives to such abstractions a genuine life:

"But from these create he can

Forms more real than living Man,

Nurslings of Immortality!" (Shelley, G. T., ccCXXIV.). Whether the abstractions should be personified or not does not,

as has been objected in the case of Gray, depend upon the presence or absence of a capital letter. Such an epithet as "Brown Exercise" shows how real the figure was to Collins, and to the sympathetic reader his creations have all the reality of a group of statuary or a painting by a great master. At the same time, Collins' personifications are not like those of the later romantic poets; see introductory note to No. 35.

The Passions was the first of Collins' poems to become popular. It was early found to be suitable for recitation. This very fact is sufficient to show that, fine as it is, it falls below his odes To Simplicity (No. 2) and To Evening (No. 35), masterpieces of quiet beauty, with nothing declamatory about them.

Metre. This is irregular after the fashion set by Cowley, whereas the Pindaric model followed by Gray is perfectly regular, as was explained in the note to No. 8. Observe the effect of the quiet, regular octosyllabics of the prologue (11. 1-16) and epilogue (11. 95-118) in chastening the unrestrained freedom of the intermediate stanzas. The licence of the Passions is aptly typified by licence of metre, but we begin and end with the moderating influence of the Muse.

Probably few readers notice that 1. 45 has no rhyme to it. How many readers of Lycidas know that there are ten unrhymed lines in it, including the first? That can hardly be called a blemish which is so cunningly disguised.

3. shell. See note to No. 26. 15.

6. Possest. The verb possess, like the noun possession, is used specially of the power of a spirit 'entering into a man.'

8. Disturb'd. Cp. "My faltering voice and pausing harp Disturb'd her soul with pity," Coleridge (G. T., ccxi. 68).

11. myrtles. A bough of myrtle was held by each guest at a Greek banquet as his turn for singing came. Cp. the famous Athenian drinking-song, "I'll wreathe my sword in myrtle now" (Εν μύρτου κλαδὶ τὸ ξίφος φορήσω). So Milton in Lycidas associates the myrtle as well as the laurel with song.

14. forceful, the opposite of forceless in No. 2. 39, "her forceless numbers."

16. expressive power, power of expression.

17. Fear, in Collins' conception, is "not cowardice but imaginative and sublime apprehension of the terrible" (Bronson). Collins wrote an ode to Fear and another to Pity.

Cp. with this stanza Sir P. Sidney's lines:

66 A satyre once did runne away for dread

With sound of horne, which he himselfe did blow;
Fearing and fear'd, thus from himself he fled,
Deeming strange evill in that he did not know."

25. See the description of Despair and his cave in Spenser's Faerie Queene, I. ix. 33-36.

32. Cp. the best-remembered line in Campbell's Pleasures of Hope, "Tis distance lends enchantment to the view."

35. So the lady in Comus "calls on Echo" in her song, "Sweet Echo, sweetest nymph, that livest unseen.

43. war-denouncing, threatening and proclaiming war: Lat. denuntiare. Cp. Milton, Paradise Lost, XI. 815, "He of their wicked ways Shall them admonish ... denouncing wrath to come On their impenitence."

45. prophetic, in allusion, perhaps, to the seven trumpets of the Seven Angels in the Book of Revelation, viii. -x.

47. doubling, doubling its sound, echoing. Cp. Pope, "the doubling thunder."

55. veering, turning in different directions, Fr. virer. Throughout its history the word has been used mostly of wind and of the course of ships.

66

58. melancholy. Cp. Milton's Il Penseroso (G.T., CXLV.), especially his love of "close coverts" and "waters murmuring." The expression haunted stream is, however, taken from L'Allegro (G. T., XLIV. 130). "With eyes upraised, as one inspired" recalls

g

"And looks commercing with the skies,

Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes" (Il Penseroso, 39-40).

63. runnels, runlets, streamlets.

64. Observe the alliterations in this line-not merely of initial

and m,

but of l.

69. alter'd, different.

71. Collins was doubtless thinking of Venus disguised as a huntress. Virgil, Aeneid, 1. 318, Namque umeris de more habilem suspenderat arcum Venatrix, "She had slung the ready bow from her shoulders after the fashion of a huntress," and 336-7:

Virginibus Tyriis mos est gestare pharetram
Purpureoque alte suras vincire cothurno,

"Tis the wont of Tyrian maidens to wear the quiver and tie the purple buskin high above the ankle."

72. buskins. See note on No. 8. 128, "buskin'd measures.' 73. that, so that, as in the passage quoted on 1. 94.

74. Fauns were Italian country divinities, attendants of the God Faunus, "imagined as merry, capricious beings, and in particular as mischievous goblins who caused nightmares" (Seyffert). As Faunus was identified by the Romans with the Greek Pan, his attendants were identified with the Greek Satyrs. Dryads (Gk. Spûs, an oak) were forest-nymphs.