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and proceeds to

From nature’s chain whatever link you strike,
Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.

Pope seems to have caught the idea and image from Waller, whose last verse is as fine as any in the “Essay on Man:”–

The chain that’s fixed to the throne of Jove,
On which the fabric of our world depends,
One link dissolv’d, the whole creation ends.
Of the Danger his Majesty escaped, etc. v. 168.

It has been observed by Thyer, that Milton borrowed the expression imbrowned and brown, which he applies to the evening shade, from the Italian. See Thyer’s elegant note in B. iv., v. 246:

—-And where the unpierced shade
Imbrowned the noon tide bowers.

And B. ix., v. 1086:

—- Where highest Woods impenetrable
To sun or star-light, spread their umbrage broad,
And brown as evening.

Fa l’imbruno is an expression used by the Italians to denote the approach of the evening. Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso, have made a very picturesque use of this term, noticed by Thyer. I doubt if it be applicable to our colder climate; but Thomson appears to have been struck by the fine effect it produces in poetical landscape; for he has

—-With quickened step
Brown night retires.
Summer, v. 51.

If the epithet be true, it cannot be more appropriately applied than in the season he describes, which most resembles the genial clime with the deep serenity of an Italian heaven. Milton in Italy had experienced the brown evening, but it may be suspected that Thomson only recollected the language of the poet.

The same observation may be made on two other poetical epithets. I shall notice the epithet “LAUGHING” applied to inanimate objects; and “PURPLE” to beautiful objects.”

The natives of Italy and the softer climates receive emotions from the view of their WATERS in the SPRING not equally experienced in the British roughness of our skies. The fluency and softness of the water are thus described by Lucretius:–

—-Tibi suaveis Daedala tellus
Submittit flores: tibi RIDENT aequora ponti.

Inelegantly rendered by Creech,

The roughest sea puts on smooth looks, and SMILES.

Dryden more happily,

The ocean SMILES, and smooths her wavy breast.

But Metastasio has copied Lucretius:–

A te fioriscono
Gli erbosi prat:
E i flutti RIDONO
Nel mar placati.

It merits observation, that the Northern Poets could not exalt their imagination higher than that the water SMILED, while the modern Italian, having before his eyes a different Spring, found no difficulty in agreeing with the ancients, that the waves LAUGHED. Modern poetry has made a very free use of the animating epithet LAUGHING. Gray has LAUGHING FLOWERS: and Langhorne in two beautiful lines personifies Flora:–

Where Tweed’s soft banks in liberal beauty lie,
And Flora LAUGHS beneath an azure sky.

Sir William Jones, in the spirit of Oriental poetry, has “the LAUGHING AIR.” Dryden has employed this epithet boldly in the delightful lines, almost entirely borrowed from his original, Chaucer:–

The morning lark, the messenger of day,
Saluted in her song the morning gray;
And soon the sun arose, with beams so bright,
That all THE HORIZON LAUGHED to see the joyous sight.
Palamon and Arcite, B. ii.[1]

It is extremely difficult to conceive what the ancients precisely meant by the word purpureus. They seem to have designed by it anything BRIGHT and BEAUTIFUL. A classical friend has furnished me with numerous significations of this word which are very contradictory. Albinovanus, in his elegy on Livia, mentions Nivem purpureum. Catullus, Quercus ramos purpureos. Horace, Purpureo bibet ore nectar, and somewhere mentions Olores purpureos. Virgil has Purpuream vomit ille animam; and Homer calls the sea purple, and gives it in some other book the same epithet, when in a storm.