than his life. His ode on Spring has something poetical, both
in the language and the thought; but the language is too luxuriant, and
the thoughts have nothing new. There has, of late, arisen a practice of
giving to adjectives derived from substantives, the termination of
participles; such as the _cultured_ plain, the _daisied_ bank; but I was
sorry to see, in the lines of a scholar like Gray, the _honied_ spring.
The morality is natural, but too stale; the conclusion is pretty.

The poem on the Cat was, doubtless, by its author, considered as a
trifle; but it is not a happy trifle. In the first stanza, "the azure
flowers that blow" show resolutely a rhyme is sometimes made when it
cannot easily be found. Selima, the cat, is called a nymph, with some
violence both to language and sense; but there is no good use made of it
when it is done: for of the two lines,

What female heart can gold despise?
What cat's averse to fish?

The first relates merely to the nymph, and the second only to the cat.
The sixth stanza contains a melancholy truth, that "a favourite has no
friend;" but the last ends in a pointed sentence of no relation to the
purpose; if _what glistered_ had been _gold_, the cat would not have
gone into the water; and, if she had, would not less have been drowned.

The Prospect of Eton College suggests nothing to Gray which every
beholder does not equally think and feel. 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[197] His epithet, "buxom health," is not elegant; he seems not
to understand the word. Gray thought his language more poetical as it
was more remote from common use; finding in Dryden "honey redolent of
spring," an expression that reaches the utmost limits of our language,
Gray drove it a little more beyond common apprehension, by making
"gales" to be "redolent of joy and youth."

Of the Ode on Adversity, the hint was, at first, taken from "O Diva,
gratum quae regis Antium;" but Gray has excelled his original by the
variety of his sentiments, and by their moral application. Of this
piece, at once poetical and rational, I will not, by slight objections,
violate the dignity.

My process has now brought me to the _wonderful wonder of wonders_, the
two sister odes; by which, though either vulgar ignorance or common
sense at first universally re