Not sumptuously adorned, nor needing aid
Like homely-featured Night, of clustering gems,
where the compound epithet emphasizes the contrast between the quiet beauty of the twilight skyscape and the star-sprinkled gloom of the night.
Finally, one of the last instances of the personified abstraction to be found in the work of Cowper may perhaps be taken to reflect something of the changes that have been silently working underneath. This is in the lines that suddenly bring “Yardley Oak” to an end:
History not wanted yet
Leaned on her elbow watching Time whose course
Eventful should supply her with a theme.
At first glance we seem to have here but the old conventional figures, but there is an imaginative touch that helps to suggest a new world of romance. “History leaning on her elbow” has something at least of that mysterious power of suggestion that Wordsworth himself was to convey by means of the romantic personification, such as those shadowy figures—Fear and Trembling Hope, and Death the Skeleton, and Time the Shadow—which gathered round and hallowed the shade of the yew trees in Borrowdale.
But even while the old poetry was in its death agony a champion was at hand, daring to maintain a lost cause both by precept and example. This was Erasmus Darwin, whose once-famous work “The Botanic Garden,” with its two parts, “The Loves of the Plants” (1789), and “The Economy of Vegetation” (1791), has earlier been mentioned.
It met with immediate success. Darwin seems to have fascinated his contemporaries, so that even Coleridge was constrained in 1802 to call him “the first literary character in Europe.”[241] He had, however, little real admiration for “The Botanic Garden,” and later expressed his opinion unmistakably.[242] “The Botanic Garden” soon died a natural death, hastened no doubt by the ridicule it excited, but inevitably because of the fact that the poem is an unconscious reductio ad absurdum of a style already doomed.[243] The special matter with which we are concerned in this chapter had for Darwin a marked significance, since it fitted in admirably with his general doctrine or dogma that nothing is strictly poetic except what is presented in visual image. His “theory” was that, just as the old mythologies had created a whole world of personified abstractions to explain or interpret natural phenomena of every description, exactly by the same method the scientific thought and developments of his own age could be poetically expounded so as to captivate both the hearts and minds of his readers. It was his ambition, he said, “to enlist imagination under the banner of science.” This “theory” is expounded in one of the interludes placed between the different cantos. “The poet writes principally to the eye,” and allegory and personifications are to be commended because they give visible form to abstract conceptions.[244] Putting his theory into practice, Darwin then proceeds with great zeal to personify the varied and various scientific facts or hypotheses of physics, botany, etc., metamorphosing the forces of the air and other elements into sylphs and gnomes and so on. Thus,