Along the crisped shades and bowers
Revels the spruce and jocund spring;
The graces and the rosy-bosom’d hours
Thither all their bounties bring.

          
                                                  Comus, v. 984.

Collins, in his Ode to Fear, whom he associates with Danger, there grandly personified, was I think considerably indebted to the following stanza of Spenser: 

Next him was Fear, all arm’d from top to toe,
Yet thought himself not safe enough thereby: 
But fear’d each sudden movement to and fro;
And his own arms when glittering he did spy,
Or clashing heard, he fast away did fly,
As ashes pale of hue and wingy heel’d;
And evermore on Danger fix’d his eye,
’Gainst whom he always bent a brazen shield,
Which his right hand unarmed fearfully did wield.

                                                  Faery Queen, B. iii. c. 12, s. 12.

Warm from its perusal, he seems to have seized it as a hint to the Ode to Fear, and in his “Passions” to have very finely copied an idea here: 

First Fear, his hand, his skill to try,
Amid the chords bewildered laid,
And back recoil’d, he knew not why,
E’en at the sound himself had made.
Ode to the Passions.

The stanza in Beattie’s “Minstrel,” first book, in which his “visionary boy,” after “the storm of summer rain,” views “the rainbow brighten to the setting sun,” and runs to reach it: 

    Fond fool, that deem’st the streaming glory nigh,
    How vain the chase thine ardour has begun! 
    ’Tis fled afar, ere half thy purposed race be run;
    Thus it fares with age, &c.

The same train of thought and imagery applied to the same subject, though the image itself be somewhat different, may be found in the poems of the platonic John Norris; a writer who has great originality of thought, and a highly poetical spirit.  His stanza runs thus: 

So to the unthinking boy the distant sky
Seems on some mountain’s surface to relie;
He with ambitious haste climbs the ascent,
Curious to touch the firmament;
But when with an unwearied pace,
He is arrived at the long-wish’d-for place,
With sighs the sad defeat he does deplore,
His heaven is still as distant as before!
The Infidel, by JOHN NORRIS.

In the modern tragedy of The Castle Spectre is this fine description of the ghost of Evelina:—­“Suddenly a female form glided along the vault.  I flew towards her.  My arms were already unclosed to clasp her,—­when suddenly her figure changed!  Her face grew pale—­a stream of blood gushed from her bosom.  While speaking, her form withered away; the flesh fell from her bones; a skeleton loathsome and meagre clasped me in her mouldering arms.  Her infected breath was mingled with mine; her rotting fingers pressed my hand; and my face was covered with her kisses.  Oh! then how I trembled with disgust!”