Where Tweed’s soft banks in liberal beauty lie,
    And Flora LAUGHS beneath an azure sky.

Sir William Jones, in the spirit of Oriental poetry, has “the LAUGHING AIR.”  Dryden has employed this epithet boldly in the delightful lines, 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.[25]

It is extremely difficult to conceive what the ancients precisely meant by the word purpureus.  They seem to have designed by it anything 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 ore 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 AEneas—­

    ——­Lumenque Juventae
    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 eys 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 had 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.