idered; and I hope not to be looked on
as an enemy to his name if I confess that I contemplate it with less
pleasure than his Life. His ode "On Spring" has something poetical, both
in the language and the thought; but the language is too luxuriant, and
the thoughts have nothing new. There has of late arisen a practice
of giving to adjectives derived from substantives the termination of
participles; such as the CULTURED plain, the DAISIED bank; but I was
sorry to see, in the lines of a scholar like Gray, the HONIED Spring.
The morality is natural, but too stale; the conclusion is pretty.

The poem "On the Cat" was doubtless by its author considered as a
trifle, but it is not a happy trifle. In the first stanza, "the azure
flowers THAT blow" show resolutely a rhyme is sometimes made when it
cannot easily be found. Selima, the cat, is called a nymph, with some
violence both to language and sense; but there is no good use made of it
when it is done; for of the two lines

"What female heart can gold despise?
What cat's averse to fish?"

the first relates merely to the nymph, and the second only to the cat.
The sixth stanza contains a melancholy truth, that "a favourite has no
friend;" but the last ends in a pointed sentence of no relation to the
purpose. If WHAT GLISTERED had been GOLD, the cat would not have gone
into the water; and if she had, would not less have been drowned.

"The Prospect of Eton College" suggests nothing to Gray which every
beholder does not equally think and feel. His supplication to Father
Thames to tell him who drives the hoop or tosses the ball is useless and
puerile. Father Thames has no better means of knowing than himself. His
epithet "buxom health" is not elegant; he seems not to understand the
word. Gray thought his language more poetical as it was more remote from
common use. Finding in Dryden "honey redolent of spring," an expression
that reaches the utmost limits of our language, Gray drove it a little
more beyond common apprehension by making "gales" to be "redolent of joy
and youth."

Of the "Ode on Adversity," the hint was at first taken from "O Diva,
gratum quae regis Antium;" but Gray has excelled his original by the
variety of his sentiments, and by their moral application. Of this
piece, at once poetical and rational, I will not by slight objections
violate the dignity.

My process has now brought me to the WONDERFUL "Wonder of Wonders,"
the two Sister Odes, by whic