from Cowley, or Drayton, or Donne, or the
less familiar of the Elizabethan dramatists;
but for a conscious plagiarist to adopt the
words of Shakespeare, were to court detection.
Hence we cannot but believe that Professor
Aytoun in penning the quatrain, in his Bothwell:

I thought of her as of a star
Within the heavens above,
That such as I might gaze upon
But never dare to love—-

had forgotten that Helena, in All's Well that
Ends Well, employs the same figure in speaking
of Bertram:

It were all one
That I should love a bright particular star
And think to win it: he is so above me.

Lord Byron, probably, wrote the line in his
Bride of Abydos, for which he has been
censured by critics,

The mind, the music breathing from her face,

in forgetfulness of Lovelace's well-known
lines:

O could you view the melody
Of every grace,
And music of her face,
You'd drop a tear,
Seeing more harmony
In her bright eye
Than now you hear.

A similar expression has been used by Lord
Lytton in his Pilgrims of the Rhine.

If ever poet lived, whose fertile imagination
and wealth of lovely words and images render
the idea of plagiarism ridiculous, it is surely
our Laureate. Yet there seems to be an echo
of Antony and Cleopatra,

The April's in her eyes,

in a beautiful and frequently quoted line of
In Memoriam:

Make April of her tender eyes.

And in a passage of the Gardener's Daughter
there is a reproduction of a fine thought in
Serjeant Talfourd's Massacre of Glencoe:

... is joy so hearted
That it can find no colour in the range
Of gladness to express it: so accepts
A solemn hue from grief.

The corresponding passage in Tennyson is:

Sighs
Which perfect Joy, perplex'd for utterance
Stole from her sister Sorrow.

Every one will recollect a passage in the
Princess, when, issuing from the schools of that
fair she-world where the violet-hooded doctors
had led their gentle pupils to all springs of
knowledge, the three intruders discuss the
scenes through which they have just past.
"Why, sirs," exclaims the prince:

"they do all this as well as we!"
"They hunt old trails," said Cyril, " very well,
But when did woman ever yet invent?"

A similar passage in Archbishop Whately is
less familiar: "It does seem that women have
little of inventive power. They learn readily;
but very rarely invent anything of importance.
I have long sought for some instances of
invention or discovery by a woman, and the
best I have been able to find is Thwaites' soda-water."

In this same poem, the Princess, there occurs
a passage which is very suggestive of Otway.
The prince making such excuses as he might
for having ventured within the prescribed
limits, urges the resistless force of the passion
that impelled him:

Who desire you more
Than growing boys their manhood; dying lips,
With many thousand matters left to do,
The breath of life; O more than poor men wealth, &c.

Similarly Polydore, in urging his suit to
Monimia, exclaims,

If to desire you more than misers wealth
Or dying men an hour of added life.

In the Idylls, Guinevere's passion after the
angry interview in which she made such short
work of the great knight's " nine-years'-fought-
for diamonds," is thus described:

Sea was her wrath yet working after storm,

which closely resembles a line in that tragedy
which Dryden, with some self-complacency,
described as " the most correct of his," but
which has long ceased to find readers:

Sorrow in its waning Form:
A working Sea remaining from a Storm.
AURENG-ZEBE. Act. IV., Sc. 1.

An idea which occurs twice in Maud, has
done duty, with variations, for centuries:

Her feet have touch'd the meadows
And left the daisies rosy—-

a magical property which develops itself in a
manner, even more remarkable, somewhat
later. The passage is the most exquisitely
lyrical and probably the best known in the
poem:

He sets the jewel print of your feet
In violets blue as your eyes.

Monimia, in the Orphan, ascribes a similar
virtue to the footsteps of Castalio:

Flowers spring where'er he treads.

In Drayton's Quest of Cynthia, the touch of
the lady's foot, though it did not cause flowers
to spring, imparted to them beauty and
vitality:

The flowers which it had prest
Appeared to my view
More fresh and lovely than the rest
That in the meadows grew.

And similarly, in his Epistle to Fair Rosamond,
King Henry is made to say:

... if thy foot touch hemlock as it goes,
That hemlock's made far sweeter than the rose.

This is, surely, better than deepening the
crimson fringes of the little flower Chaucer
loved so well. The same idea is to be found
in that exquisite fragment, the Sad Shepherd:
doubly precious to us, because it shows that
the rare genius who conceived it, amid the
gloom which surrounded his later years, yet
kept his heart hale and his imagination green: