[21] Sweet hour of twilight!—in the solitude
Of the pine forest, and the silent shore
Which bounds Ravenna's immemorial wood,
Rooted where once the Adrian wave flowed o'er,
To where the last Caesarian fortress stood,
Evergreen forest! which Boccaccio's lore
And Dryden's lay made haunted ground to me,
How have I loved the twilight hour and thee!
—Don Juan
[22] I must entirely agree with Monsieur Boileau, that one verse of Vergil is worth all the _clinquant _or tinsel of Tasso.—Spectator, No. 5.
[23] Spectator, No. 419.
[24] See his "Life of Collins."
[25] Spectator, No. 40.
[26] "The Verse": Preface to "Paradise Lost."
[27] Dedicatory epistle to "The Rival Ladies."
[28] Mr. Gosse says that a sonnet by Pope's friend Walsh is the only one "written in English between Milton's in 1658, and Warton's about 1750," Ward's "English Poets," Vol. III, p. 7. The statement would have been more precise if he had said published instead of written.
[29] "History of the Gothic Revival," pp. 49-50 (edition of 1872).
[30] Palgrave says that the poetry of passion was deformed, after 1660, by "levity and an artificial time"; and that it lay "almost dormant for the hundred years between the days of Wither and Suckling and the days of Burns and Cowper," "Golden Treasury" (Sever and Francis edition, 1866). pp. 379-80.