borrowed a remarkable epithet from
Milton:

Lo, where the _rosy-bosom'd hours,
Fair Venus' train_, appear.
_Ode to Spring_.

Along the crisped shades and bowers
Revels the spruce and jocund _spring_;
The _graces_ and the _rosy-bosom'd hours_
Thither all their bounties bring.
_Comus_, v. 984.

Collins, in his Ode to _Fear_, whom he associates with _Danger_, there
grandly personified, was I think considerably indebted to the following
stanza of Spenser:

Next him was _Fear_, all arm'd from top to toe,
Yet thought himself not safe enough thereby:
But fear'd each sudden movement to and fro;
And _his own arms_ when glittering he did spy,
Or _clashing heard_, he fast away did fly,
As ashes pale of hue and wingy heel'd;
And evermore on _Danger_ fix'd his eye,
'Gainst whom he always bent a brazen shield,
Which his right hand unarmed fearfully did wield.
_Faery Queen_, B. iii. c. 12, s. 12.

Warm from its perusal, he seems to have seized it as a hint to the Ode
to Fear, and in his "Passions" to have very finely copied an idea here:

First _Fear_, his hand, his skill to try,
Amid the chords bewildered laid,
And _back recoil'd_, he knew not why,
_E'en at the sound himself had made._
_Ode to the Passions_.

The stanza in Beattie's "Minstrel," first book, in which his "visionary
boy," after "the storm of summer rain," views "the rainbow brighten to
the setting sun," and runs to reach it:

Fond fool, that deem'st the streaming glory nigh,
How vain the chase thine ardour has begun!
'Tis fled afar, ere half thy purposed race be run;
Thus it fares with age, &c.

The same train of thought and imagery applied to the same subject,
though the image itself be somewhat different, may be found in the poems
of the platonic John Norris; a writer who has great originality of
thought, and a highly poetical spirit. His stanza runs thus:

So to the unthinking boy the distant sky
Seems on some mountain's surface to relie;
He with ambitious haste climbs the ascent,
_Curious to touch the firmament_;
But when with an unwearied pace,
He is arrived at the long-wish'd-for place,
With sighs the sad defeat he does deplore,
His heaven is still as distant as before!