[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:
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"Sporting with quick glance, Show to the sun their waved coats dropt with gold." |