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Addison has done in the following coup

let:

I bridle in my struggling muse with pain,
That longs to launch into a nobler strain.'

XIV.

Of the melancholy truth, that great parts are often kept from expansion, by the influence of poverty and ignorance, the fourteenth stanza seems to promise the illustration, by reference made to analogous depressions of excellence in the material and vegetable kingdoms. But more is promised than performed. The examples are made up of shewy images; but they are not examples in point. Non erat his locus.

The proposition to be illustrated was, "That latent possibilities of perfection, " which favourable situations an cir

I Letter from Italy

"cumstances might have brought out, "are, sometimes, by circumstances of an "untowardly kind, prevented from be

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ing duly unfolded." Of this position illustrations might easily have been found, had not Gray confounded it with another, equally true, yet altogether distinct. That other position is, “ That, of per"fections already unfolded, there may

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occur extrinsic causes to prevent the "beneficial display."

It is of this latter position, that Gray has given the illustration, in the images of " the gem, whose brightness is hid by "its depth in the sea;" and of "the

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flower, whose beauty and fragrance are "lost, on account of the solitude of the "desert in which it grows." It is nothing to the illustration of the former position, that the flower blushes unseen; or that the gem may grow where no hand can reach it. Had the bright

ness of the gem remained folded up in the crust; or the flower been frostnipt in the bud, the images had been in point.

Of the images themselves I have already allowed the merit. They are both, however, to be found in Thomson, from whom Gray seems to have borrowed more than he thought fit to acknowledge. Speaking of the influence of the sun, and the universal operation of light; he says, in the way of address to the great operator,

The unfruitful rock itself, impregn'd by thee,

In dark retirement forms the lucid stone.
The lively diamond drinks thy purest rays;
Collected light compact.

And, describing the retirement of a rural beauty,'

As, in the hollow breast of Apennine,
Beneath the shelter of encircling hills,

[blocks in formation]

A myrtle rises, far from human eye,

And breathes its balmy fragrance o'er the wild;
So flourish'd, blooming, and unseen by all,
The sweet Lavinia.

In the former example, the "diamond" of Thomson becomes the "gem" of Gray. Both are formed in retirement; though Gray has changed the place; and transplanted the diamond into the sea, for causes that do not appear, and with a propriety of which criticism entertains a doubt. Both stones are of " purest ray."

Of the latter image, the identity is still more obvious; although it has been disguised by the change of a myrtle into a flower; and, perhaps, by a shifting of the scene from Italy to Arabia Deserta. Why a flower was thought more eligible than a myrtle, or a desert more proper than a shelter'd waste, for rearing a tender plant, we are not informed. To see the sense of justice return, is pleasant, even when the return is late. Gray, to

wards the end of his life, dived for the gem; and, having brought it up, replanted it in the earth, to be "raised," (not disloyally I hope) to grace a diadem. To the myrtle he made also signal amends, for its long transformation into a flower, by a supplicat, through the chancellor of his university, to have it raised from its metamorphosis to the dignity of the

mitre.

Thy liberal heart, thy judging eye,
The flower unheeded shall descry,
And bid it round Heaven's altar shed
The fragrance of its blushing head;
Shall raise from earth the latent gem,
To glitter on the diadem.'

Thomson's myrtle "breathes its balmy fragrance o'er the wild;" Gray's flower "wastes its sweetness on the desert air." "Wastes," in place of "breathes," is an improvement; though, whether one air

Installation Ode.

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