"Here she was wont to go! and here! and here!
Just where those daisies, pinks, and violets grow
The world may find the spring in following her,
For other print her airy steps ne'er left.
Her treading would not bend a blade of grass,
Or shake the downy blow-ball from his stalk!
But like the soft west wind she shot along,
And where she went the flowers took thickest root,
As she had sowed them with her odorous foot."
Milton was a great admirer of Jonson: his "Comus" is written very much in imitation of our poet's masques; but is not so fitted as they are for dramatic action. Some will remember in "Penseroso" these lines:
"Entice the dewy-feathered sleep,
And let some strange mysterious dream
Wave at his wings in airy stream
Of lively portraiture displayed
Softly on my eyelids laid."
Hurd has remarked that it is an imitation of the following passage in Jonson's "Vision of Delight," and Milton has not, we think, improved on the original:
"Break, Phant'sie, from thy cave of cloud,
And spread thy purple wings;
Now all thy figures are allowed,
And various shapes of things,
Create of airy forms a stream,
It must have blood, and nought of phlegm,
And tho' it be a waking dream,
Yet let it like an odour rise
To all the senses here,
And fall like sleep upon their eyes
Or musick in their ear."
As a translator he must not be forgotten. He has left a version of Horace's "Ars Poetica," and a few of the odes. The former is marvellously literal, and not so tame as might therefore be supposed. In the latter there is little to praise; but he has excelled these regular translations in passages of the masques and elsewhere, which he has borrowed from ancient authors and literally rendered. It is strange that Hurd, in his letter to Mason on
