And B. IX. v. 1086,

"Where highest woods impenetrable

To sun or star-light, spread their umbrage broad
And brown as evening.”

Fa l'imbruno is an expression used by the Italians to denote the approach of the evening. Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, have made a very picturesque use of this term, noticed by Thyer. I doubt if it be applicable to our colder climate; but Thomson appears to have been struck by the fine effect it produces in poetical landscape; for

he has

With quickened step

Brown night retires."

Summer, v. 51.

If the epithet be true, it cannot be more appropriately applied than in the season he describes, which most resembles the genial clime with the deep serenity of an Italian heaven. Milton in Italy had experienced the brown evening, but it may be suspected that Thomson only recollected the language of the poet.

The same observation may be made on two other poetical epithets. I shall notice the epithet LAUGHING," applied to inanimate objects; and "PURPLE" to beautiful objects.

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The natives of Italy and the softer climates receive emotions from the view of their WATERS in the SPRING not equally experienced in the British roughness of our skies. The fluency and softness of the water are thus described by Lucretius:

"Tibi suaveis Dædala tellus

Submittit flores; tibi RIDENT æquora ponti."

Inelegantly rendered by Creech,

"The roughest sea puts on smooth looks, and SMILES.”

Dryden more happily,

"The ocean SMILES, and smooths her wavy breast."

But Metastasio has copied Lucretius:

"A te fioriscono

Gli erbosi prati :

E i flutti RIDONO

Nel mar placati."

It merits observation, that the Northern Poets could not exalt their imagination higher than that the water SMILED, while the modern Italian, having before his eyes a different spring, found no difficulty in agreeing with the ancients, that the waves LAUGHED. Of late modern poetry has made a very free use of the animating epithet

LAUGHING. Gray has the LAUGHING FLOWERS; and Langhorne in two beautiful lines exquisitely personifies Flora :

"Where Tweed's soft banks in liberal beauty lie,

And Flora LAUGHS beneath an azure sky."

Sir William Jones, with all the spirit of Oriental poetry, has "the LAUGHING AIR." It is but justice, however, to Dryden, to acknowledge that he has employed this epithet very boldly in the following delightful lines, which are almost entirely borrowed from his original, Chaucer :

"The morning lark, the messenger of day,

Saluted in her song the morning gray;

And soon the sun arose, with beams so bright, That all THE HORIZON LAUGHED to see the joyous sight."

Palamon and Arcite, B. ii.

It is extremely difficult to conceive what the ancients precisely meant by the word purpureus. They seem to have designed by it any thing BRIGHT and BEAUTIFUL. A classical friend has furnished me with numerous significations of this word which are very contradictory. Albinovanus, in his elegy on Livia, mentions Nivem purpureum. Catullus, Quercus ramos purpureos. Horace purpureo bibet nectar, and somewhere mentions Olores purpureos. Virgil has purpuream vomit ille animam; and Homer calls the sea purple, and gives

it in some other book the same epithet, when in a

storm.

The general idea, however, has been fondly adopted by the finest writers in Europe. The PURPLE of the ancients is not known to us. What idea, therefore, have the moderns affixed to it? Addison in his vision of the Temple of Fame describes the country as "being covered with a kind of PURPLE LIGHT." Gray's beautiful line is well known:

"The bloom of young desire and purple light of love."

And Tasso, in describing his hero Godfrey, says, Heaven

"Gli empie d'onor la faccia, e vi riduce

Di Giovinezza, il bel purpureo lume."

Both Gray and Tasso copied Virgil, where Venus gives to her son Æneas

"Lumenque Juventæ

Purpureum."

Dryden has omitted the purple light in his version, nor is it given by Pitt; but Dryden expresses the general idea by

"With hands divine,

Had formed his curling locks and made his temples shine, And given his rolling eyes a sparkling grace."

It is probable that Milton has given us his idea of what was meant by this purple light, when applied to the human countenance, in the felicitous expression of

"CELESTIAL ROSY-RED."

Gray appears to me to be indebted to Milton for a hint for the opening of his elegy: as in the first line he has Dante and Milton in his mind, he perhaps might also in the following passage have recollected a congenial one in Comus, which he altered. Milton, describing the evening, marks it out by

"What time the laboured ox

In his loose traces from the furrow came,
And the swinkt hedger at his

supper sat."

Gray has,

"The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,

The plowman homeward plods his weary way."

Warton has made an observation on this passage in Comus; and observes further that it is a classical circumstance, but not a natural one, in an English landscape, for our ploughmen quit their work at noon. I think therefore the imitation is still more evident; and as Warton observes, both Gray and Milton copied here from books, and not from life.