A little learning is a dangerous thing,
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring ...
and—
All nature is but art unknown to thee,
All chance, direction which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good;
And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.
It is true that the Augustan school in its decline, which was contemporary with the faint prelude of the Romantic Revival, fell into an extreme artificiality of diction that can hardly have had its model even by suggestion in the common speech of the time. So good a poet as Gray, who was himself one of the preludists, was not blameless in this respect, and could write—