[173] Vide Leon Morel, op. cit., Ch. IV, pp. 412 foll., for a detailed examination of Thomson’s compound formations.
[174] It would appear that this epithet had particularly caught the fancy of Collins. He uses it also in the “Ode on the Manners,” this time figuratively, when he writes of “dim-discovered tracts of mind.”
[175] “Works,” op. cit., Vol. IV, p. 203. In point of fact, there is little or no evidence in favour of it. Even the Spenserian imitations that flourished exceedingly at this time have little interest in this respect. Shenstone has very few instances of compounds, but the poems of William Thompson furnish a few examples: “honey-trickling streams” (“Sickness,” Bk. I), “Lily-mantled meads” (ibid.), etc. Gilbert West’s Spenserian poems have no instances of any special merit; but a verse of his Pindar shows that he was not without a gift for happy composition: “The billow-beaten side of the foam-besilvered main.”
[176] “Letters,” Vol. III, p. 97.
[177] Hill, op. cit., Vol. III, p. 437.
[178] Ibid., p. 434.
[179] Vide Edmund Gosse, “Two Pioneers of Romanticism” (Warton Lecture), 1915.
[180] It is a coincidence to find that the N.E.D. assigns the first use of the compound furze-clad to Wordsworth.
[181] Bell’s “Fugitive Poets” (London, 1789), Vol. VI.
[182] Anderson’s “British Poets,” Vol. XI.