^{Note 1 in page 1088} The Poems of Mr. Gray (London, 1786), p. 169 [177].—Strangely enough, neither Wakefield nor Prof. W. L. Phelps {Selections from the Poetry and Prose of Thomas Gray [Boston, 1894], p. 194) noticed the former's oversight in ascribing the Lucretian passage to Book iv, I. 907. That the error was really an oversight is virtually certain, since Wakefield's own edition of Lucretius (1796–99) contained the passage in question in Book iii.

^{Note 2 in page 1088} The Background of Gray's Elegy (New York, 1924), pp. 162–163.

^{Note 3 in page 1088} Collins (Oxford, 1928), p. 36. See also E. G. Ainsworth's more recent study of the poet, Poor Collins (Ithaca, 1937), pp. 61n., 127n.

^{Note 4 in page 1088} Pope's The Iliad of Homer (Boston, 1899), p. 128n.

^{Note 5 in page 1088} H. W. Garrod quotes this repetitious excerpt in his essay, “Vergil,” as the epitome of Vergilian “frustration” (English Literature and the Classics, collected by G. S. Gordon [Oxford, 1912], p. 166). Professor John Sparrow's conclusion that the passage in Book II is “interpolated” and that that in Book vi is a “tibicen” (Half Lines and Repetitions in Virgil [Oxford, 1931], p. 150) does not alter the very important fact that the passages and even their repetition are altogether characteristic of Vergil.

^{Note 6 in page 1089} It may be objected that the lines immediately following this passage show Lucretius' underlying irony concerning this “melancholy”:

I am obliged, however, to omit these lines—rather arbitrarily, perhaps—in order to examine Lucretius' “melancholy” in its freest possible state. Too, the ironic theme is altogether different from that in which we are interested, and excepting in the translations of the passage, does not persist in the poems noted here.

^{Note 7 in page 1089} Cf. Shorey, op. cit., p. 128 n.; S. H. Butcher, “The Melancholy of the Greeks,” Some Aspects of the Greek Genius (London, 1893), pp. 133–176; G. D. Hadzsits, Lucretius and His Influence (New York, 1935), pp. 136–137; George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets (Cambridge, 1910), p. 44; E. E. Sikes, Lucretius: Poet and Philosopher (Cambridge, 1936), pp. 130–131. See also for suggestive treatments of Latin and English melancholy: Gertrude G. Cronk, “Lucretius and Thomson's Autumnal Fogs,” American Journal of Philology, li (1930), 233–242; Reed, op. cit., pp. 34n., 36n., 126, etc.; R. D. Havens, “Literature of Melancholy,” MLN, xxiv (1909), 226–227.

^{Note 8 in page 1089} See for example William A. Merrill, “Parallels and Coincidences in Lucretius and Virgil,” University of California Publications in Classical Philology, iii (1919), 176; Otto Zippel, Entstehungs- und Entwicklungsgeschichte von Thomson's, Winter” (Berlin, 1907), p. 45; cf. Zippel, Thomson's Seasons (Berlin, 1908), pp. xxxviii, 232, 321–322.

^{Note 9 in page 1090} English poets of the period perhaps followed Vergil's method of accompanying the spirit with the word (Vida, Pope, Dr. Johnson on sound and sense?). One may see this in Vergil in examining the passages in his poetry which contain “frustra” or “nequiquam” (see M. N. Wetmore, Index Verborum Vergilianus [New Haven, 1911], pp. 187, 317). To be sure, the actual word or phrase need not accompany the spirit of frustra. Dryden's method of phrasing his “skepticism” frequently illustrates this point (e.g., Religio Laici, 11. 40–41; The Hind and the Panther, Part i, 11. 104–105).—Similarly Milton, whose position in the Vergilian tradition is a separate problem which is yet to be determined adequately, can achieve the mood of nequiquam with exquisite poignancy, as in the Epitaphium Damonis, without once using the word itself in the poem, or for that matter in any of his Latin verse; see Lane Cooper, A Concordance of the Latin, Greek, and Italian Poems of John Milton (Halle, 1923). “Lycidas,” too, occasionally expresses the mood without the word (e.g., 11. 37–38, 57). On the other hand, these same phrases represent in English the more obvious Miltonic “tags”; see “Hymn,” 11. 204, 208, 219; “Lycidas,” 11. 43, 165; Paradise Lost, especially iii, 446–468, 601–605.

^{Note 10 in page 1090} So too ibid., 11. 15–16, 26–28.—Other illustrations of this Vergilian theme may be found in Thomas Gray's “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” 11. 11-12; “The Bard,” i, 3, 1–4; “Dante,” 11. 72–80; the entire “Sonnet on the Death of Richard West.” See also James Hervey's Meditations among the Tombs (e.g., in the 1792 edition of his Meditations and Contemplations, pp. 9–10, 21, 43); and William Shenstone's Elegies—xi, 3; xii, 1, 2; xiv, 3; xxii, 3–4.

^{Note 11 in page 1091} See the inadequate but useful list of translations in Dwight L. Durling, Georgic Tradition in English Poetry (New York, 1935), pp. 219–223. For a discussion of these works and others in the seventeenth century see Charles T. Harrison, “The Ancient Atomists and English Literature of the Seventeenth Century,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology xlv (1934), 1–79, in which the remarkable growth of the Lucretian influence in England is clearly indicated; cf. J. E. Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship (Cambridge, 1908), ii, 332–358, 401–439.

^{Note 12 in page 1092} A MS poem quoted in John W. Draper, The Funeral Elegy and the Rise of English Romanticism (New York, 1929), p. 190.

^{Note 13 in page 1092} Gentleman's Magazine, x (1740), 256.—Both Myra Reynolds (The Treatment of Nature in English Poetry bet-ween Pope and Wordsworth [Chicago, 1909], p. 78 n.) and Amy L. Reed (op. cit., p. 153, n.) cite this interesting poem in connection with their discussions of nature and melancholy poetry, respectively, in the eighteenth century. Worthy of mention, too, is Dr. John Armstrong's winter poem, “Imitations of Shakespeare” (written like Riccaltoun's poem before 1725), with its not un-Lucretian contrast of the hearth and the outdoors.

^{Note 14 in page 1093} A further example of the diffusion of the general Lucretian influence may well be the following lines, so reminiscent of Gray's, in George Crabbe's The Village (1783), Book i, 11. 270 ff.:

The similarity in both poems of the metrical scheme and initial word-pattern of each line is suggestive.