You took her up a _little tender flower_, ---- and with a careful loving hand _Transplanted_ her into your own fair _garden_, Where the _sun_ always shines. The origin of the following imagery is undoubtedly Grecian; but it is still embellished and modified by our best poets:-- ----While universal _Pan_, Knit with the _graces_ and the _hours, in dance Led_ on th' eternal spring. _Paradise Lost_. Thomson probably caught this strain of imagery: Sudden to heaven Thence weary vision turns, where _leading soft The silent hours_ of love, with purest ray Sweet _Venus_ shines. _Summer_, v. 1692. Gray, in repeating this imagery, has 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: