Meanwhile the Moon
Full-orbed and breaking through the scattered clouds,
Shows her broad visage in the crimsoned east.
Turned to the Sun direct, her spotted disk,
Where mountains rise, umbrageous dales descend,
And caverns deep, as optic tube descries,
A smaller Earth, gives all his blaze again,
Void of its flame, and sheds a softer day.

Thomson could not resist the attractions of Milton's stately Latin
vocabulary. Where Milton describes how, in Paradise--

the flowery lap
Of some irriguous valley spread her store;

Thomson follows with--

See where the winding vale its lavish stores
Irriguous spreads.

Where Milton describes how Satan, wounded by Michael--

writhed him to and fro convolved,

Thomson follows with a description of the Spring meadows, where

the sportive lambs
This way and that convolved, in friskful glee
Their frolics play.

The lambs emulating Satan are a kind of epitome and emblem of those
descriptive poets of the eighteenth century who took Milton for their
model.

But perhaps the best example of all is Gray, whose work is full of
Miltonic reminiscence. He frequently borrows; and, like Pope, almost
always spoils in the borrowing. Thus what Milton writes of the
nightingale--

She all night long her amorous descant sung,--

is echoed by Gray in the _Sonnet on the Death of Richard West_:--

The birds in vain their amorous descant join.

Now a "descant" is a variation imposed upon a plain-song. The word
exactly describes the song of the nightingale; but the addition of the
verb "join" robs it of all meaning. Again, the passage in the Second Book
of _Paradise Lost_ where Moloch describes the pains of Hell--

when the scourge
Inexorably, and the torturing hour
Calls us to penance,--

lingered in Gray's memory when he addressed Adversity--

Whose iron scourge and torturing hour
The bad affright, afflict the best.

The "torturing hour" in Gray's line becomes one of the chance possessions
of Adversity, suspended from her belt with the rest of her trinkets.
Observe how the word "hour" has been emptied of its meaning. It affrights
one class of persons, and afflicts another, which anything that is
"torturing" might easily do. In Milton the most awful property of Time is
indicated; the hour "calls--inexorably." Here, then, in two cases, is
plagiarism, which may