4. _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_: