Streamed like a meteor to the troubled air!
Gray has been severely censured by Johnson for the expression,
Give ample room and verge enough,
The characters of hell to trace.—The Bard.
On the authority of the most unpoetical of critics, we must still hear that the poet has no line so bad.—"ample room" is feeble, but would have passed unobserved in any other poem but in the poetry of Gray, who has taught us to admit nothing but what is exquisite. "Verge enough" is poetical, since it conveys a material image to the imagination. No one appears to have detected the source from whence, probably, the whole line was derived. I am inclined to think it was from the following passage in Dryden:
Let fortune empty her whole quiver on me,
I have a soul that, like an AMPLE SHIELD,
Can take in all, and VERGE ENOUGH for more!
Dryden's Don Sebastian.
Gray in his Elegy has
Even in our ashes live their wonted fires.
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: