Blair's mortuary verse has a certain impressiveness, in its gloomy monotony, not unlike that of Quarles' "Divine Emblems." Like the "Emblems," too, "The Grave," has been kept from oblivion by the art of the illustrator, the well-known series of engravings by Schiavonetti from designs by Wm. Blake.
But the thoughtful scholarly fancy of the more purely romantic poets haunted the dusk rather than the ebon blackness of midnight, and listened more to the nightingale than to the screech-owl. They were quietists, and their imagery was crepuscular. They loved the twilight, with its beetle and bat, solitude, shade, the "darkening vale," the mossy hermitage, the ruined abbey moldering in its moonlit glade, grots, caverns, brooksides, ivied nooks, firelight rooms, the curfew bell and the sigh of the Aeolian harp.[21] All this is exquisitely put in Collins' "Ode to Evening." Joseph Warton also wrote an "Ode to Evening," as well as one "To the Nightingale." Both Wartons wrote odes "To Solitude." Dodsley's "Miscellanies" are full of odes to Evening, Solitude, Silence, Retirement, Contentment, Fancy, Melancholy, Innocence, Simplicity, Sleep; of Pleasures of Contemplation (Miss Whately, Vol. IX. p. 120) Triumphs of Melancholy (James Beattie, Vol. X. p. 77), and similar matter. Collins introduced a personified figure of Melancholy in his ode, "The Passions."
"With eyes upraised, as one inspired,
Pale Melancholy sat retired;
And from her wild, sequestered seat,
In notes by distance made more sweet,
Poured through the mellow horn her pensive soul;
And dashing soft from rocks around,
Bubbling runnels joined the sound;
Through glades and glooms the mingled measure stole,
Or o'er some haunted stream, with fond delay,
Round a holy calm diffusing
Love of peace and lonely musing,
In hollow murmurs died away."
Collins was himself afflicted with a melancholia which finally developed into madness. Gray, a shy, fastidious scholar, suffered from inherited gout and a lasting depression of spirits. He passed his life as a college recluse in the cloistered retirement of Cambridge, residing at one time in Pembroke, and at another in Peterhouse College. He held the chair of modern history in the university, but never gave a lecture. He declined the laureateship after Cibber's death. He had great learning, and a taste most delicately correct; but the sources of creative impulse dried up in him more and more under the desiccating air of academic study and the increasing hold upon him of his constitutional malady. "Melancholy marked him for her own." There is a significant passage in one of his early letters to Horace. Walpole (1737): "I have, at the distance of half a mile, through a green lane, a forest (vulgar call it a common) all my own, at least as good as so, for I spy no human thing in it but myself. It is a little chaos of mountains and precipices. . . Both vale and hill are covered with most venerable beeches and other very reverend vegetables that, like most other ancient people, are always dreaming out their old stories to the winds. . . At the foot of one of these, squats ME, I, (il penseroso) and there grow to the trunk for a whole morning."[22] To Richard West he wrote, in the same year, "Low spirits are my true and faithful companions"; and, in 1742, "Mine is a white Melancholy, or rather Leucocholy, for the most part . . . but there is another sort, black indeed, which I have now and then felt."
When Gray sees the Eton schoolboys at their sports, he is sadly reminded:
"—how all around them wait
The ministers of human fate
And black Misfortune's baleful train."[23]
"Wisdom in sable garb," and "Melancholy, silent maid" attend the footsteps of Adversity;[24] and to Contemplation's sober eye, the race of man resembles the insect race:
"Brushed by the hand of rough mischance,
Or chilled by age, their airy dance
They leave, in dust to rest."[25]
Will it be thought too trifling an observation that the poets of this group were mostly bachelors and quo ad hoc, solitaries? Thomson, Akenside, Shenstone, Collins, Gray, and Thomas Warton never married. Dyer, Mason, and Joseph Warton, were beneficed clergymen, and took unto themselves wives. The Wartons, to be sure, were men of cheerful and even convivial habits. The melancholy which these good fellows affected was manifestly a mere literary fashion. They were sad "only for wantonness," like the young gentlemen in France. "And so you have a garden of your own," wrote Gray to his young friend Nicholls, in 1769, "and you plant and transplant, and are dirty and amused; are you not ashamed of yourself? Why, I have no such thing, you monster; nor ever shall be either dirty or amused as long as I live." Gray never was; but the Wartons were easily amused, and Thomas, by all accounts, not unfrequently dirty, or at least slovenly in his dress, and careless and unpolished in his manners, and rather inclined to broad humor and low society.
Romantically speaking, the work of these Miltonic lyrists marks an advance upon that of the descriptive and elegiac poets, Thomson, Akenside, Dyer, and Shenstone. Collins is among the choicest of English lyrical poets. There is a flute-like music in his best odes—such as the one "To Evening," and the one written in 1746—"How sleep the brave," which are sweeter, more natural, and more spontaneous than Gray's. "The Muse gave birth to Collins," says Swinburne; "she did but give suck to Gray." Collins "was a solitary song-bird among many more or less excellent pipers and pianists. He could put more spirit of color into a single stroke, more breath of music into a single note, than could all the rest of the generation into all the labors of their lives."[26] Collins, like Gray, was a Greek scholar, and had projected a history of the revival letters. There is a classical quality in his verse—not classical in the eighteenth-century sense—but truly Hellenic; a union, as in Keats, of Attic form with romantic sensibility; though in Collins, more than in Keats, the warmth seems to comes from without; the statue of a nymph flushed with sunrise. "Collins," says Gosse, "has the touch of a sculptor; his verse is clearly cut and direct: it is marble pure, but also marble cold."[27] Lowell, however, thinks that Collins "was the first to bring back into poetry something of the antique flavor, and found again the long-lost secret of being classically elegant without being pedantically cold."[28]