The ghost of the unfortunate lady imparted no information to Pope, for he avows his ignorance of everything relating to her ghostly condition. A passage in Milton's Comus, separated from the context, might seem to countenance the indiscriminate use of the epithet "beckoning," as if it were a general characteristic of spectres. A thousand fantasies Begin to throng into my memory, Of calling shapes, and beck'ning shadows dire, And airy tongues that syllable men's names On sands, and shores, and desert wildernesses.[537] A superstition attached to "desert wildernesses," where the wanderer who lost sight of his associates could seldom strike into their track on the pathless waste, was made known to Milton by the travels of Marco Polo. "If," says the old Venetian, in his account of the great Asiatic desert, Lop or Gobi, "any one at night stays behind, or diverges from his company, he hears, when he wishes to rejoin it, spirits speaking in the air, who seem to be his comrades, and sometimes call him by his name, beguiling him out of the right road, so that many continue to go astray and perish."[538] The lady in Comus was in a like situation. She was benighted, she had lost her way, she heard "the tumult of loud mirth," and when she reached the spot from whence the merriment proceeded she found "nought but darkness." Then the "calling shapes, and beck'ning shadows dire," that lure poor wanderers to destruction, rushed into her thoughts, and she conceived she might be the dupe of malignant phantoms.[539] Pope's beckoning ghost was not of this class of "dire" counterfeit "shadows." She is represented as an honest, sympathising spirit, who could never have designed to entice her lover or friend into the glade with a murderous intent. Warton quotes the commencement of Ben Jonson's Epitaph on Lady Winchester, which Pope must have had in his mind when he wrote his Elegy. The ghost beckoned Jonson to pluck a garland from the yew tree.[540] A spirit could not have revisited the world, for a more frivolous purpose, but at least the poet felt that he must assign a cause for the beckoning. The omission in Pope arose from a frequent source of misapplied language. Isolated lines and phrases, which had the sanction of classic authors, lingered in his memory, and he forgot the accompaniments to which they owed their fitness.