"Dear native stream, wild streamlet of the west—"
as well, perhaps, more remotely Wordsworth's series, "On the River Duddon."
The poem of Milton which made the deepest impression upon the new school of poets was "Il Penseroso." This little masterpiece, which sums up in imagery of "Attic choice" the pleasures that Burton and Fletcher and many others had found in the indulgence of the atrabilious humor, fell in with a current of tendency. Pope had died in 1744, Swift in 1745, the last important survivors of the Queen Anne wits; and already the reaction against gayety had set in, in the deliberate and exaggerated solemnity which took possession of all departments of verse, and even invaded the theater; where Melpomene gradually crowded Thalia off the boards, until sentimental comedy—la comedie larmoyante—was in turn expelled by the ridicule of Garrick, Goldsmith, and Sheridan. That elegiac mood, that love of retirement and seclusion, which have been remarked in Shenstone, became now the dominant note in English poetry. The imaginative literature of the years 1740-60 was largely the literature of low spirits. The generation was persuaded, with Fletcher, that
"Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy."
But the muse of their inspiration was not the tragic Titaness of Dürer's painting:
"The Melencolia that transcends all wit."[16]
rather the "mild Miltonic maid," Pensive Meditation.
There were various shades of somberness, from the delicate gray of the Wartons to the funereal sable to Young's "Night Thoughts" (1742-44) and Blair's "Grave" (1743). Goss speaks of Young as a "connecting link between this group of poets and their predecessors of the Augustan age." His poem does, indeed, exhibit much of the wit, rhetorical glitter, and straining after point familiar in Queen Anne verse, in strange combination with a "rich note of romantic despair."[17] Mr. Perry, too, describes Young's language as "adorned with much of the crude ore of romanticism. . . At this period the properties of the poet were but few: the tomb, an occasional raven or screech-owl, and the pale moon, with skeletons and grinning ghosts. . . One thing that the poets were never tired of, was the tomb. . . It was the dramatic—can one say the melodramatic?—view of the grave, as an inspirer of pleasing gloom, that was preparing readers for the romantic outbreak."[18]
It was, of course, in Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751), that this elegiac feeling found its most perfect expression. Collins, too has "more hearse-like airs than carols," and two of his most heartfelt lyrics are the "Dirge in Cymbeline" and the "Ode on the Death of Mr. Thomson." And the Wartons were perpetually recommending such themes, both by precept and example.[19] Blair and Young, however, are scarcely to be reckoned among the romanticists. They were heavy didactic-moral poets, for the most part, though they touched the string which, in the Gothic imagination, vibrates with a musical shiver to the thought of death. There is something that accords with the spirit of Gothic ecclesiastical architecture, with Gray's "ivy-mantled tower"—his "long-drawn aisle and fretted vault"—in the paraphernalia of the tomb which they accumulate so laboriously; the cypress and the yew, the owl and the midnight bell, the dust of the charnel-house, the nettles that fringe the grave-stones, the dim sepulchral lamp and gliding specters.
"The wind is up. Hark! how it howls! Methinks
Till now I never heard a sound so dreary,
Doors creak and windows clap, and night's foul bird,
Rocked in the spire, screams loud: the gloomy aisles,
Black-plastered and hung 'round with shreds of scutcheons
And tattered coats-of-arms, send back the sound,
Laden with heavier airs, from the low vaults,
The mansions of the dead."[20]