"About this time Gray's portrait was painted, at Walpole's request; and on the paper which he is represented as holding, Walpole wrote the title of the Ode, with a line from Lucan: 'Nec licuit populis parvum te, Nile, videre.' The poem met with very little attention until it was republished in 1751, with a few other of his Odes. Gray, in speaking of it to Walpole, in connection with the Ode to Spring, merely says that to him 'the latter seems not worse than the former.' But the former has always been the greater favourite--perhaps more from the matter than the manner. It is the expression of the memories, the thoughts, and the feelings which arise unbidden in the mind of the man as he looks once more on the scenes of his boyhood. He feels a new youth in the presence of those old joys. But the old friends are not there. Generations have come and gone, and an unknown race now frolic in boyish glee. His sad, prophetic eye cannot help looking into the future, and comparing these careless joys with the inevitable ills of life. Already he sees the fury passions in wait for their little victims. They seem present to him, like very demons. Our language contains no finer, more graphic personifications than these almost tangible shapes. Spenser is more circumstantial, Collins more vehement, but neither is more real. Though but outlines in miniature, they are as distinct as Dutch art. Every epithet is a lifelike picture; not a word could be changed without destroying the tone of the whole. At last the musing poet asks himself, _Cui bono?_ Why thus borrow trouble from the future? Why summon so soon the coming locusts, to poison before their time the glad waters of youth? 'Yet ah! why should they know their fate, Since sorrow never comes too late. And happiness too quickly flies? Thought would destroy their paradise. No more;--where ignorance is bliss, 'Tis folly to be wise.' So feeling and the want of feeling come together for once in the moral. The gay Roman satirist--the apostle of indifferentism--reaches the same goal, though he has travelled a different road. To Thaliarchus he says: 'Quid sit futurum cras, fuge quaerere: et Quem Fors dierum cumque dabit, lucro Appone.' The same easy-going philosophy of life forms the key-note of the Ode to Leuconoë: 'Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero;' of that to Quinctius Hirpinus: 'Quid aeternis minorem Consiliis animum fatigas?' of that to Pompeius Grosphus: 'Laetus in praesens animus, quod ultra est, Oderit curare.' And so with many others. 'Take no thought of the morrow.'" Wakefield translates the Greek motto, "Man is an abundant subject of calamity." 2. _That crown the watery glade_. Cf. Pope, _Windsor Forest_, 128: "And lonely woodcocks haunt the watery glade."