FullReads

Voltaire, a great reader of Pope, seems to have borrowed part of the expression:–

Scandale d’Eglise, et des rois le modele.

De Caux, an old French poet, in one of his moral poems on an hour-glass, inserted in modern collections, has many ingenious thoughts. That this poem was read and admired by Goldsmith, the following beautiful image seems to indicate. De Caux, comparing the world to his hour-glass, says beautifully,

C’est un verre qui luit,
Qu’un souffle peut detruire, et qu’un souffle a produit.

Goldsmith applies the thought very happily–

Princes and lords may flourish or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made.

I do not know whether we might not read, for modern copies are sometimes incorrect,

A breath unmakes them, as a breath has made.

Thomson, in his pastoral story of Palemon and Lavinia, appears to have copied a passage from Otway. Palemon thus addresses Lavinia:–

Oh, let me now into a richer soil
Transplant thee safe, where vernal suns and showers
Diffuse their warmest, largest influence;
And of my garden be the pride and joy!

Chamont employs the same image when speaking of Monimia; he says–

You took her up a little tender flower,
—- and with a careful loving hand
Transplanted her into your own fair garden,
Where the sun always shines.

The origin of the following imagery is undoubtedly Grecian; but it is still embellished and modified by our best poets:–

—-While universal Pan,
Knit with the graces and the hours, in dance
Led on th’ eternal spring.
Paradise Lost.

Thomson probably caught this strain of imagery:

Sudden to heaven
Thence weary vision turns, where leading soft
The silent hours of love, with purest ray
Sweet Venus shines.
Summer, v. 1692.

Gray, in repeating this imagery, has borrowed a remarkable epithet from Milton:

Lo, where the rosy-bosom’d hours,
Fair Venus’ train, appear.
Ode to Spring.

Along the crisped shades and bowers
Revels the spruce and jocund spring;
The graces and the rosy-bosom’d hours
Thither all their bounties bring.
Comus, v. 984.

Collins, in his Ode to Fear, whom he associates with Danger, there grandly personified, was I think considerably indebted to the following stanza of Spenser:

Next him was Fear, all arm’d from top to toe,
Yet thought himself not safe enough thereby:
But fear’d each sudden movement to and fro;
And his own arms when glittering he did spy,
Or clashing heard, he fast away did fly,
As ashes pale of hue and wingy heel’d;
And evermore on Danger fix’d his eye,
‘Gainst whom he always bent a brazen shield,
Which his right hand unarmed fearfully did wield.
Faery Queen, B. iii. c. 12, s. 12.

Warm from its perusal, he seems to have seized it as a hint to the Ode to Fear, and in his “Passions” to have very finely copied an idea here:

First Fear, his hand, his skill to try,
Amid the chords bewildered laid,
And back recoil’d, he knew not why,
E’en at the sound himself had made.
Ode to the Passions.

The stanza in Beattie’s “Minstrel,” first book, in which his “visionary boy,” after “the storm of summer rain,” views “the rainbow brighten to the setting sun,” and runs to reach it:

Fond fool, that deem’st the streaming glory nigh,
How vain the chase thine ardour has begun!
‘Tis fled afar, ere half thy purposed race be run;
Thus it fares with age, etc.

The same train of thought and imagery applied to the same subject, though the image itself be somewhat different, may be found in the poems of the platonic John Norris; a writer who has great originality of thought, and a highly poetical spirit. His stanza runs thus: