Tis man alone that joy descries
With forward, and reverted eyes."
Gray's Ode on the Pleasure arising from Vicissitude.
In his notes to "Spring," Wakefield gets quite pathetic at the words—
"Poor moralist, and what art thou?
A solitary fly," &c.
I have always believed that Gray was imitating Bishop Jeremy Taylor:
"Marriage is the mother of the world, and preserves kingdoms, and fills cities, and churches, and heaven itself. Celibate, like the fly in the heart of an apple, dwells in a perpetual sweetness, but sits alone, and is confined and dies in singularity."—Sermon XVII. The Marriage Ring, Part I.
If these random notes be interesting to any of your readers, they are only a portion out of many I could send; and any one who doubts Gray's partiality for Cowley may compare his second verse of the "Ode to Spring" with Cowley's lines on "Solitude," found amongst his Essays, especially verses 4. and 5.:
"Here let me careless and unthoughtful lying