'And she I cherished _turned her wheel_
Beside an English fire.'"

23. _No children run_, etc. Hales quotes Burns, _Cotter's Saturday
Night_, 21:

"Th' expectant wee-things, toddlin, stacher through
To meet their Dad, wi' flichterin noise an' glee."

24. Among Mitford's MS. variations we find "coming kiss." Wakefield
compares Virgil, _Geo._ ii. 523:

"Interea dulces pendent circum oscula nati;"

and Mitford adds from Dryden,

"Whose little arms about thy legs are cast,
And climbing for a kiss prevent their mother's haste."

Cf. Thomson, _Liberty_, iii. 171:

"His little children climbing for a kiss."

26. _The stubborn glebe_. Cf. Gay, _Fables_, ii. 15:

"'Tis mine to tame the stubborn glebe."

_Broke_=broken, as often in poetry, especially in the Elizabethan
writers. See Abbott, _Shakes. Gr._ 343.

27. _Drive their team afield_. Cf. _Lycidas_, 27: "We drove afield;"
and Dryden,_ Virgil's Ecl._ ii. 38: "With me to drive afield."

28. _Their sturdy stroke_. Cf. Spenser, _Shep. Kal._ Feb.:

"But to the roote bent his sturdy stroake,
And made many wounds in the wast [wasted] Oake;"

and Dryden, _Geo._ iii. 639:

"Labour him with many a sturdy stroke."

30. As Mitford remarks, _obscure_ and _poor_ make "a very imperfect
rhyme;" and the same might be said of _toil_ and _smile_.

33. Mitford suggests that Gray had in mind these verses from his
friend West's _Monody on Queen Caroline_:

"Ah, me! what boots us all our boasted power,
Our golden treasure, and our purple state;
They cannot ward the inevitable hour,
Nor stay the fearful violence of fate."

Hurd compares Cowley:

"Beauty, and strength, and wit, and wealth, and power,
Have their short flourishing hour;
And love to see themselves, and smile,
And joy in their pre-eminence a while:
Even so in the same land
Poor weeds, rich corn, gay flowers together stand;
Alas! Death mows down all with an impartial hand."

35. _Awaits_. The reading of the ed. of 1768, as of the Pembroke (and
probably the other) MS. _Hour_ is the subject, not the object, of the
verb.

36. Hayley, in the Life of Crashaw, _Biographia Britannica_, says
that this line is "literally translated from the Latin prose of
Bartholinus in his Danish Antiquities."

39. _Fretted_. The _fret_ is, strictly, an ornament used in classical
architecture, formed by small fillets intersecting each other at
right angles. Pa