ires.

This line is so obscure that it is difficult to apply it to what
precedes it. Mason in his edition in vain attempts to derive it from a
thought of Petrarch, and still more vainly attempts to amend it;
Wakefield expends an octavo page to paraphrase this single verse. From
the following lines of Chaucer, one would imagine Gray caught the
recollected idea. The old Reve, in his prologue, says of himself, and of
old men,

For whan we may not don than wol we speken;
Yet in our ASHEN cold is FIRE yreken.
TYRWHIT'S _Chaucer_, vol. i. p. 153, v. 3879.

Gray has a very expressive _word_, highly poetical, but I think not
common:

FOR WHO TO DUMB FORGETFULNESS a prey--

Daniel has, as quoted in Cooper's Muses' Library,

And _in himself with sorrow_, does complain
The misery of DARK FORGETFULNESS.

A line of Pope's, in his Dunciad, "High-born Howard," echoed in the ear
of Gray, when he gave, with all the artifice of alliteration,

High-born Hoel's harp.

Johnson bitterly censures Gray for giving to adjectives the termination
of participles, such as the _cultured_ plain; the _daisied_ bank: but he
solemnly adds, I was sorry to see in the line of a scholar like Gray,
"the _honied_ spring." Had Johnson received but the faintest tincture of
the rich Italian school of English poetry, he would never have formed so
tasteless a criticism. _Honied_ is employed by Milton in more places
than one.

Hide me from day's garish eye
While the bee with HONIED thigh
_Penseroso_, v. 142.

The celebrated stanza in Gray's Elegy seems partly to be borrowed.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd eaves of ocean bear:
Full many a _flower_ is torn to blush _unseen,_
And _waste its sweetness in the desert air_.

Pope had said:

There kept by charms conceal'd from mortal eye,
Like _roses_ that in _deserts bloom_ and _die_.
_Rape of the Lock._

Young says of nature:

In distant wilds by human eye _unseen_
She rears her _flowers_ and spreads her velvet green;
Pure gurgling rills the lonely _desert_ trace,
And _waste their music_ on the savage race.

And Shenstone has--

And like the _desert's lily_ bloom to fade!
Elegy iv.

Gray was so fond of this pleasing imagery, that he repeats it in his Ode
to the I