Gray rarely attempts to characterize his figures other than by the occasional use of a conventional epithet, and only here and there has the personification been to any extent filled in so as to form at least an outline picture. In the “Hymn to Adversity,” Wisdom is depicted in sable garb arrayed Immersed in rapturous thought profound, whilst other slight human touches are to be found here and there: as in “Moody Madness, laughing wild” (“Ode on a Distant Prospect”). His personifications, however, have seldom the clear-cut outlines we find in Collins, nor do they possess more than a tinge of the vividness and vitality the latter could breathe into his abstractions. Yet now and then we come across instances of the friezes in which Collins excels, moving figures depicted as in Greek plastic art Antic sports and blue-eyed Pleasures, Frisking light in frolic measures (“Progress of Poesy”) or the beautiful vision in the “Bard,” Bright Rapture calls and soaring as she sings, Waves in the eyes of heaven her many-coloured wings. And in the “Ode on Vicissitude” Gray has one supreme example of the embryonic personification, when the powers or orders of nature are invested with human attributes, and thus brought before us as living beings, in the form of vague but suggestive impressions that leave to the imagination the task of filling in the details: Now the golden Morn aloft Waves her dew-bespangled wing With vernal cheek and whisper soft She woos the tardy spring.