Chapter 6
3. _Long-expecting_. Waiting long for the spring. Sometimes incorrectly printed "long-expected." Cf. Dryden, _Astræa Redux_, 132: "To flowers that in its womb expecting lie."
4. _The purple year_. Cf. the _Pervigilium Veneris_, 13: "Ipsa gemmis purpurantem pingit annum floribus;" Pope, _Pastorals_, i. 28: "And lavish Nature paints the purple year;" and Mallet, _Zephyr_: "Gales that wake the purple year."
5. _The Attic warbler_. The nightingale, called "the Attic bird," either because it was so common in Attica, or from the old legend that Philomela (or, as some say, Procne), the daughter of a king of Attica, was changed into a nightingale. Cf. Milton's description of Athens (_P. R._ iv. 245):
"where the Attic bird Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long."
Cf. Ovid, _Hal._ 110: "Attica avis verna sub tempestate queratus;" and Propertius, ii. 16, 6: "Attica volucris."
_Pours her throat_ is a metonymy. H. p. 85. Cf. Pope, _Essay on Man_, iii. 33: "Is it for thee the linnet pours her throat?"
6, 7. Cf. Thomson, _Spring_, 577:
"From the first note the hollow cuckoo sings, The symphony of spring."
9, 10. Cf. Milton, _Comus_, 989:
"And west winds with musky wing About the cedarn alleys fling Nard and cassia's balmy smells."
12. Cf. Milton, _P. L._ iv. 245: "Where the unpierc'd shade Imbrown'd the noontide bowers;" Pope, _Eloisa_, 170: "And breathes a browner horror on the woods;" Thomson, _Castle of Indolence_, i. 38: "Or Autumn's varied shades imbrown the walls."
According to Ruskin (_Modern Painters_, vol. iii. p. 241, Amer. ed.) there is no brown in nature. After remarking that Dante "does not acknowledge the existence of the colour of _brown_ at all," he goes on to say: "But one day, just when I was puzzling myself about this, I happened to be sitting by one of our best living modern colourists, watching him at his work, when he said, suddenly and by mere accident, after we had been talking about other things, 'Do you know I have found that there is no _brown_ in nature? What we call brown is always a variety either of orange or purple. It never can be represented by umber, unless altered by contrast.' It is curious how far the significance of this remark extends, how exquisitely it illustrates and confirms the mediæval sense of hue," etc.
14. _O'ercanopies the glade_. Gray himself quotes Shakes. _M. N. D._ ii. 1: "A bank o'ercanopied with luscious woodbine."[1] Cf. Fletcher, _Purple Island_, i. 5, 30: "The beech shall yield a cool, safe canopy;" and Milton, _Comus_, 543: "a bank, With ivy canopied."
[Footnote 1: The reading of the folio of 1623 is:
"I know a banke where the wilde time blowes, Where Oxslips and the nodding Violet growes, Quite ouer-cannoped with luscious woodbine."
Dyce and some other modern editors read,
"Quite overcanopied with lush woodbine."]
15. _Rushy brink_. Cf. _Comus_, 890: "By the rushy-fringed bank."
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."
ODE ON THE DEATH OF A FAVOURITE CAT.
This ode first appeared in Dodsley's _Collection_, vol. ii. p. 274, with some variations noticed below. Walpole, after the death of Gray, placed the china vase on a pedestal at Strawberry Hill, with a few lines of the ode for an inscription.
In a letter to Walpole, dated March 1, 1747, Gray refers to the subject of the ode in the following jocose strain: "As one ought to be particularly careful to avoid blunders in a compliment of condolence, it would be a sensible satisfaction to me (before I testify my sorrow, and the sincere part I take in your misfortune) to know for certain who it is I lament. I knew Zara and Selima (Selima, was it? or Fatima?), or rather I knew them both together; for I cannot justly say which was which. Then as to your handsome Cat, the name you distinguish her by, I am no less at a loss, as well knowing one's handsome cat is always the cat one likes best; or if one be alive and the other dead, it is usually the latter that is the handsomest. Besides, if the point were never so clear, I hope you do not think me so ill-bred or so imprudent as to forfeit all my interest in the survivor; oh no! I would rather seem to mistake, and imagine to be sure it must be the tabby one that had met with this sad accident. Till this affair is a little better determined, you will excuse me if I do not begin to cry,
Tempus inane peto, requiem spatiumque doloris.
"... Heigh ho! I feel (as you to be sure have done long since) that I have very little to say, at least in prose. Somebody will be the better for it; I do not mean you, but your Cat, feuë Mademoiselle Selime, whom I am about to immortalize for one week or fortnight, as follows: [the Ode follows, which we need not reprint here].
"There's a poem for you, it is rather too long for an Epitaph."
2. Cf. Lady M. W. Montagu, _Town Eclogues_:
"Where the tall jar erects its stately pride, With antic shapes in China's azure dyed."
3. _The azure flowers that blow_. Johnson and Wakefield find fault with this as redundant, but it is no more so than poetic usage allows. In the _Progress of Poesy_, i. 1, we have again: "The laughing flowers that round them blow." Cf. _Comus_, 992:
"Iris there with humid bow Waters the odorous banks that blow Flowers of more mingled hue Than her purfled scarf can shew."
4. _Tabby_. For the derivation of this word from the French _tabis_, a kind of silk, see Wb. In the first ed. the 5th line preceded the 4th.
6. _The lake_. In the mock-heroic vein that runs through the whole poem.
11. _Jet_. This word comes, through the French, from Gagai, a town in Lycia, where the mineral was first obtained.
14. _Two angel forms_. In the first ed. "two beauteous forms," which Mitford prefers to the present reading, "as the images of _angel_ and _genii_ interfere with each other, and bring different associations to the mind."
16. _Tyrian hue_. Explained by the "purple" in next line; an allusion to the famous Tyrian dye of the ancients. Cf. Pope, _Windsor Forest_, 142: "with fins of Tyrian dye."
17. Cf. Virgil, _Geo._ iv. 274:
"_Aureus_ ipse; sed in foliis, quae plurima circum Funduntur, violae _sublucet purpura_ nigrae."
See also Pope, _Windsor Forest_, 332: "His shining horns diffus'd a golden glow;" _Temple of Fame_, 253: "And lucid amber casts a golden gleam."
24. In the 1st ed. "What cat's a foe to fish?" and in the next line, "with eyes intent."
31. _Eight times_. Alluding to the proverbial "nine lives" of the cat.
34. _No dolphin came_. An allusion to the story of Arion, who when thrown overboard by the sailors for the sake of his wealth was borne safely to land by a dolphin.
_No Nereid stirr'd_. Cf. Milton, _Lycidas_, 50:
"Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep Closed o'er the head of your lov'd Lycidas?"
35, 36. The reading of 1st ed. is,
"Nor cruel Tom nor Harry heard. What favourite has a friend?"
40. The 1st ed. has "Not all that strikes," etc.
42. _Nor all that glisters gold_. A favourite proverb with the old English poets. Cf. Chaucer, _C. T._ 16430:
"But all thing which that shineth as the gold Ne is no gold, as I have herd it told;"
Spenser, _F. Q._ ii. 8, 14:
"Yet gold all is not, that doth golden seeme;"
Shakes. _M. of V._ ii. 7:
"All that glisters is not gold; Often have you heard that told;"
Dryden, _Hind and Panther_:
"All, as they say, that glitters is not gold."
Other examples might be given. _Glisten_ is not found in Shakes. or Milton, but both use _glister_ several times. See _W. T._ iii. 2; _Rich. II._ iii. 3; _T. A._ ii. 1, etc.; _Lycidas_, 79; _Comus_, 219; _P. L._ iii. 550; iv. 645, 653, etc.
ODE ON A DISTANT PROSPECT OF ETON COLLEGE.
This, as Mason informs us, was the first English[1] production of Gray's that appeared in print. It was published, in folio, in 1747; and appeared again in Dodsley's _Collection_, vol. ii. p. 267, without the name of the author.
[Footnote 1: A Latin poem by him, a "Hymeneal" on the Prince of Wales's Marriage, had appeared in the _Cambridge Collection_ in 1736.]
Hazlitt (_Lectures on English Poets_) says of this Ode: "It is more mechanical and commonplace [than the _Elegy_]; but it touches on certain strings about the heart, that vibrate in unison with it to our latest breath. No one ever passes by Windsor's 'stately heights,' or sees the distant spires of Eton College below, without thinking of Gray. He deserves that we should think of him; for he thought of others, and turned a trembling, ever-watchful ear to 'the still sad music of humanity.'"
The writer in the _North American Review_ (vol. xcvi.), after referring to the publication of this Ode, which, "according to the custom of the time, was judiciously swathed in folio," adds:
"About this time Gray's portrait was painted, at Walpole's request; and on the paper which he is represented as holding, Walpole wrote the title of the Ode, with a line from Lucan:
'Nec licuit populis parvum te, Nile, videre.'
The poem met with very little attention until it was republished in 1751, with a few other of his Odes. Gray, in speaking of it to Walpole, in connection with the Ode to Spring, merely says that to him 'the latter seems not worse than the former.' But the former has always been the greater favourite--perhaps more from the matter than the manner. It is the expression of the memories, the thoughts, and the feelings which arise unbidden in the mind of the man as he looks once more on the scenes of his boyhood. He feels a new youth in the presence of those old joys. But the old friends are not there. Generations have come and gone, and an unknown race now frolic in boyish glee. His sad, prophetic eye cannot help looking into the future, and comparing these careless joys with the inevitable ills of life. Already he sees the fury passions in wait for their little victims. They seem present to him, like very demons. Our language contains no finer, more graphic personifications than these almost tangible shapes. Spenser is more circumstantial, Collins more vehement, but neither is more real. Though but outlines in miniature, they are as distinct as Dutch art. Every epithet is a lifelike picture; not a word could be changed without destroying the tone of the whole. At last the musing poet asks himself, _Cui bono?_ Why thus borrow trouble from the future? Why summon so soon the coming locusts, to poison before their time the glad waters of youth?
'Yet ah! why should they know their fate, Since sorrow never comes too late. And happiness too quickly flies? Thought would destroy their paradise. No more;--where ignorance is bliss, 'Tis folly to be wise.'
So feeling and the want of feeling come together for once in the moral. The gay Roman satirist--the apostle of indifferentism--reaches the same goal, though he has travelled a different road. To Thaliarchus he says:
'Quid sit futurum cras, fuge quaerere: et Quem Fors dierum cumque dabit, lucro Appone.'
The same easy-going philosophy of life forms the key-note of the Ode to Leuconoë:
'Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero;'
of that to Quinctius Hirpinus:
'Quid aeternis minorem Consiliis animum fatigas?'
of that to Pompeius Grosphus:
'Laetus in praesens animus, quod ultra est, Oderit curare.'
And so with many others. 'Take no thought of the morrow.'"
Wakefield translates the Greek motto, "Man is an abundant subject of calamity."
2. _That crown the watery glade_. Cf. Pope, _Windsor Forest_, 128: "And lonely woodcocks haunt the watery glade."
4. _Her Henry's holy shade_. Henry the Sixth, founder of the college. Cf. _The Bard_, ii. 3: "the meek usurper's holy head;" Shakes. _Rich. III._ v. 1: "Holy King Henry;" _Id._ iv. 4: "When holy Harry died." The king, though never canonized, was regarded as a saint.
5. _And ye_. Ye "towers;" that is, of Windsor Castle. Cf. Thomson, _Summer_, 1412:
"And now to where Majestic Windsor lifts his princely brow."
8. _Whose turf, whose shade, whose flowers among_. "That is, the _turf_ of whose _lawn_, the _shade_ of whose _groves_, the _flowers_ of whose mead" (Wakefield). Cf. _Hamlet_, iii. 1: "The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword."
In Anglo-Saxon and Early English prepositions were often placed after their objects. In the Elizabethan period the transposition of the weaker prepositions was not allowed, except in the compounds _whereto_, _herewith_, etc. (cf. the Latin _quocum_, _secum_), but the longer forms were still, though rarely, transposed (see _Shakes. Gr._ 203); and in more recent writers this latter license is extremely rare. Even the use of the preposition after the relative, which was very common in Shakespeare's day, is now avoided, except in colloquial style.
9. _The hoary Thames_. The river-god is pictured in the old classic fashion. Cf. Milton, _Lycidas_, 103: "Next Camus, reverend sire, went footing slow." See also quotation from Dryden in note on 21 below.
10. _His silver-winding way_. Cf. Thomson, _Summer_, 1425: "The matchless vale of Thames, Fair-winding up," etc.
12. _Ah, fields belov'd in vain!_ Mitford remarks that this expression has been considered obscure, and adds the following explanation: "The poem is written in the character of one who contemplates this life as a scene of misfortune and sorrow, from whose fatal power the brief sunshine of youth is supposed to be exempt. The fields are _beloved_ as the scene of youthful pleasures, and as affording the promise of happiness to come; but this promise never was fulfilled. Fate, which dooms man to misery, soon overclouded these opening prospects of delight. That is in vain beloved which does not realize the expectations it held out. No fruit but that of disappointment has followed the blossoms of a thoughtless hope."
13. _Where once my careless childhood stray'd_. Wakefield cites Thomson, _Winter_, 6:
"with frequent foot Pleas'd have I, in my cheerful morn of life, When nurs'd by careless Solitude I liv'd, And sung of Nature with unceasing joy, Pleas'd have I wander'd," etc.
15. _That from ye blow_. In Early English _ye_ is nominative, _you_ accusative (objective). This distinction, though observed in our version of the Bible, was disregarded by Elizabethan writers (Shakes. _Gr._ 236), as it has occasionally been by the poets even to our own day. Cf. Shakes. _Hen. VIII._ iii. 1: "The more shame for ye; holy men I thought ye;" Milton, _Comus_, 216: "I see ye visibly," etc. Dryden, in a couplet quoted by Guest, uses both forms in the same line:
"What gain you by forbidding it to tease ye? It now can neither trouble _you_ nor please ye."
19. Gray quotes Dryden, _Fable on Pythag. Syst._: "And bees their honey redolent of spring."
21. _Say, father Thames_, etc. This invocation is taken from Green's _Grotto_:
"Say, father Thames, whose gentle pace Gives leave to view, what beauties grace Your flowery banks, if you have seen."
Cf. Dryden, _Annus Mirabilis_, st. 232: "Old father Thames raised up his reverend head."
Dr. Johnson, in his hypercritical comments on this Ode, says: "His supplication to Father Thames, to tell him who drives the hoop or tosses the ball, is useless and puerile. Father Thames has no better means of knowing than himself." To which Mitford replies by asking, "Are we by this rule to judge the following passage in the twentieth chapter of _Rasselas_? 'As they were sitting together, the princess cast her eyes on the river that flowed before her: "Answer," said she, "great Father of Waters, thou that rollest thy floods through eighty nations, to the invocation of the daughter of thy native king. Tell me, if thou waterest, through all thy course, a single habitation from which thou dost not hear the murmurs of complaint."'"
23. _Margent green_. Cf. _Comus_, 232: "By slow Mæander's margent green."
24. Cf. Pope, _Essay on Man_, iii. 233: "To Virtue, in the paths of Pleasure, trod."
26. _Thy glassy wave_. Cf. _Comus_, 861: "Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave."
27. _The captive linnet_. The adjective is redundant and "proleptic," as the bird must be "enthralled" before it can be called "captive."
28. In the MS. this line reads, "To chase the hoop's illusive speed," which seems to us better than the revised form in the text.
30. Cf. Pope, _Dunciad_, iv. 592: "The senator at cricket urge the ball."
37. Cf. Cowley, _Ode to Hobbes_, iv. 7: "Till unknown regions it descries."
40. _A fearful joy_. Wakefield quotes _Matt._ xxviii. 8 and _Psalms_ ii. 11. Cf. Virgil, _Æn._ i. 513:
"Obstupuit simul ipse simul perculsus Achates Laetitiaque metuque."
See also _Lear_, v. 3: "'Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief."
44. Cf. Pope, _Eloisa_, 209: "Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind;" and _Essay on Man_, iv. 168: "The soul's calm sunshine, and the heartfelt joy."
45. _Buxom_. Used here in its modern sense. It originally meant pliant, flexible, yielding (from A. S. _búgan_, to bow); then, gay, frolicsome, lively; and at last it became associated with the "cheerful comeliness" of vigorous health. Chaucer has "buxom to ther lawe," and Spenser (_State of Ireland_), "more tractable and buxome to his government." Cf. also _F. Q._ i. 11, 37: "the buxome aire;" an expression which Milton uses twice (_P. L._ ii. 842, v. 270). In _L'Allegro_, 24: "So buxom, blithe, and debonaire;" the only other instance in which he uses the word, it means sprightly or "free" (as in "Come thou goddess, fair and free," a few lines before). Cf. Shakes. _Pericles_, i. prologue:
"So buxom, blithe, and full of face, As heaven had lent her all his grace."
The word occurs nowhere else in Shakes. except _Hen. V._ iii. 6: "Of buxom valour;" that is, lively valour.
Dr. Johnson appears to have had in mind the original meaning of _buxom_ in his comment on this passage: "His epithet _buxom health_ is not elegant; he seems not to understand the word."
47. _Lively cheer_. Cf. Spenser, _Shep. Kal._ Apr.: "In either cheeke depeincten lively chere;" Milton, _Ps._ lxxxiv. 27: "With joy and gladsome cheer."
49. Wakefield quotes Milton, _P. L._ v. 3:
"When Adam wak'd, so custom'd; for his sleep Was airy light, from pure digestion bred, And temperate vapours bland."
51. _Regardless of their doom_. Collins, in the _first manuscript_ of his _Ode on the Death of Col. Ross_, has
"E'en now, regardful of his doom, Applauding Honour haunts his tomb."[2]
[Footnote 2: Mitford gives the first line as "E'en now, _regardless_ of his doom;" and just below, on verse 61, he makes the line from Pope read, "The fury Passions from that _flood_ began." We have verified his quotations as far as possible, and have corrected scores of errors in them. Quite likely there are some errors in those we have not been able to verify.]
55. _Yet see_, etc. Mitford cites Broome, _Ode on Melancholy_:
"While round stern ministers of fate, Pain and Disease and Sorrow, wait;"
and Otway, _Alcibiades_, v. 2: "Then enter, ye grim ministers of fate." See also _Progress of Poesy_, ii. 1: "Man's feeble race," etc.
59. _Murtherous_. The obsolete spelling of _murderous_, still used in Gray's time.
61. _The fury Passions_. The passions, fierce and cruel as the mythical Furies. Cf. Pope, _Essay on Man_, iii. 167: "The fury Passions from that blood began."
66. Mitford quotes Spenser, _F. Q._:
"But gnawing Jealousy out of their sight, Sitting alone, his bitter lips did bite."
68. Wakefield quotes Milton, _Sonnet to Mr. Lawes_: "With praise enough for Envy to look wan."
69. _Grim-visag'd, comfortless Despair_. Cf. Shakes. _Rich. III_. i. 1: "Grim-visag'd War;" and _C. of E._ v. 1: "grim and comfortless Despair."
76. _Unkindness' altered eye_. "An ungraceful elision" of the possessive inflection, as Mason calls it. Cf. Dryden, _Hind and Panther_, iii.: "Affected Kindness with an alter'd face."
79. Gray quotes Dryden, _Pal. and Arc._: "Madness laughing in his ireful mood." Cf. Shakes. _Hen. VI._ iv. 2: "But rather moody mad;" and iii. 1: "Moody discontented fury."
81. _The vale of years_. Cf. _Othello_, iii. 3: "Declin'd Into the vale of years."
82. _Grisly_. Not to be confounded with _grizzly_. See Wb.