Another way in which they affect him is where, without direct imitation, they colour passages and poems as in _Œnone_, _The Lotos Eaters_, _Tithonus_, _Tiresias_, _The Death of Œnone_, _Demeter and Persephone_, the passage beginning “From the woods” in _The Gardener’s Daughter_, which is a parody of Theocritus, _Id._, vii., 139 _seq._, while the Cyclops’ invocation to Galatea in Theocritus, _Id._, xi., 29-79, was plainly the model for the idyll, “Come down, O Maid,” in the seventh section of _The Princess_, just as the tournament in the same poem recalls closely the epic of Homer and Virgil. Tennyson had a wonderful way of transfusing, as it were, the essence of some beautiful passage in a Greek or Roman poet into English. A striking illustration of this would be the influence of reminiscences of Virgil’s fourth _Æneid_ on the idyll of _Elaine and Guinevere_. Compare, for instance, the following: he is describing the love-wasted Elaine, as she sits brooding in the lonely evening, with the shadow of the wished-for death falling on her:— But when they left her to herself again, Death, like a friend’s voice from a distant field, Approaching through the darkness, call’d; the owls Wailing had power upon her, and she mix’d Her fancies with the sallow-rifted glooms Of evening and the moanings of the wind. How exactly does this recall, in a manner to be felt rather than exactly defined, a passage equally exquisite and equally pathetic in Virgil’s picture of Dido, where, with the shadow of her death also falling upon her, she seems to hear the phantom voice of her dead husband, and “mixes her fancies” with the glooms of night and the owl’s funereal wail:— Hinc exaudiri voces et verba vocantis Visa viri, nox quum terras obscura teneret; Solaque culminibus ferali carmine bubo Sæpe queri, et longas in fletum ducere voces. —_Æn._, iv., 460.) (From it she thought she clearly heard a voice, even the accents of her husband calling her when night was wrapping the earth with darkness; and on the roof the lonely owl in funereal strains kept oft complaining, drawing out into a wail its protracted notes.) Similar passages, though not so striking, would be the picture of Pindar’s Elysium in _Tiresias_, the sentiment pervading _The Lotos Eaters_ transferred so faithfully from the Greek poets, the scenery in _Œnone_ so crowded with details from Homer, Theocritus and Callimachus. Sometimes we find similes suggested by the classical poets, but enriched by touches from original observation, as here in _The Princess_:— As one that climbs a peak to gaze O’er land and main, and sees a great black cloud Drag inward from the deeps, a wall of night Blot out the slope of sea from verge to shore. ... And quenching lake by lake and tarn by tarn Expunge the world, which was plainly suggested by Homer, iv., 275:—