Page:The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, Volume 4.djvu/438

434 twinkling" was formerly censured as not. analogical; we may say "many-spotted," but scarcely "many-spotting." This stanza, how ever, has something pleasing.

Of the second ternary of stanzas, the first endeavours to tell something, and would have told it, had it not been crossed by Hyperion: the second describes well enough the universal prevalence of Poetry; but I am afraid that the conclusion will not rise from the premises. The caverns of the North and the plains of Chili are not the residences of "Glory and generous Shame." But that Poetry and Virtue go always together is an opinion so pleasing, that I can forgive him who resolves to think it true.

The third stanza sounds big with "Delphi," and "Egean," and "Ilissus," and “Meander," and "hallowed fountains," and "solemn sound;" but in all Gray's odes there is a kind of cumbrous splendour which we wish away. His position is at last false; in the time of Dante and Petrarch, from whom we derive our first school of Poetry, Italy was over-run by "tyrant power" and "coward vice;" nor was our state much better when we first borrowed the Italian arts.  Rh