76. _Unkindness' altered eye_. "An ungraceful elision" of the possessive inflection, as Mason calls it. Cf. Dryden, _Hind and Panther_, iii.: "Affected Kindness with an alter'd face." 79. Gray quotes Dryden, _Pal. and Arc._: "Madness laughing in his ireful mood." Cf. Shakes. _Hen. VI._ iv. 2: "But rather moody mad;" and iii. 1: "Moody discontented fury." 81. _The vale of years_. Cf. _Othello_, iii. 3: "Declin'd Into the vale of years." 82. _Grisly_. Not to be confounded with _grizzly_. See Wb. 83. _The painful family of death_. Cf. Pope, _Essay on Man_, ii. 118: "Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of Pain;" and Dryden, _State of Innocence_, v. 1: "With all the numerous family of Death." On the whole passage cf. Milton, _P. L._ xi. 477-493. See also Virgil, _Æn._ vi. 275. 86. _That every labouring sinew strains_. An example of the "correspondence of sound with sense." As Pope says (_Essay on Criticism_, 371), "The line too labours, and the words move slow." 90. _Slow-consuming Age_. Cf. Shenstone, _Love and Honour_: "His slow-consuming fires." 95. As Wakefield remarks, we meet with the same thought in _Comus_, 359: "Peace, brother, be not over-exquisite To cast the fashion of uncertain evils; For grant they be so, while they rest unknown What need a man forestall his date of grief, And run to meet what he would most avoid?" 97. _Happiness too swiftly flies_. Perhaps a reminiscence of Virgil, _Geo._ iii. 66: "Optima quaeque dies miseris mortalibus aevi Prima fugit." 98. _Thought would destroy their paradise_. Wakefield quotes Sophocles, _Ajax_, 554: [Greek: En tôi phronein gar mêden hêdistos bios] ("Absence of thought is prime felicity"). 99. Cf. Prior, _Ep. to Montague_, st. 9: "From ignorance our comfort flows, The only wretched are the wise." and Davenant, _Just Italian_: "Since knowledge is but sorrow's spy, it is not safe to know." [Illustration: WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM THE END OF THE LONG WALK.] [Illustration: HOMER ENTHRONED.] THE PROGRESS OF POESY. This Ode, as we learn from one of Gray's letters to Walpole, was finished, with the exception of a few lines, in 1755. It was not published until 1757, when it appeared with _The Bard_ in a quarto volume, which was the first issue of Walpole's press at Strawberry Hill. In one of his letters Walpole writes: "I send you two copies of a very honourable opening of my press--two amazing odes of Mr. Gray. They are Greek, they are Pindaric, they are sublime, consequently I fear a little obscure; the second particularly, by the confinement of the measure and the nature of prophetic vision, is mysterious. I could not persuade him to add more notes." In another letter Walpole says: "I found Gray in town last week; he had brought his two odes to be printed. I snatched them out of Dodsley's hands, and they are to be the first-fruits of my press." The title-page of the volume is as follows: