Ye variegated children of the Spring,
Ye blossoms blushing with the pearly dew;
Ye birds that sweetly in the hawthorn sing;
Ye flowery meads, lawns of verdant hue.
It can be judged from these examples how a stereotyped mode of expression may depreciate to a large extent the value of much of the work of a poet of real genius. Chatterton is content in most of his avowedly “original” work to turn his poetic thoughts into the accepted moulds, which is all the more surprising when we remember his laborious methods of manufacturing an archaic diction for his mediaeval “discoveries,”[76] even if we may assume that it reflected a strong desire for something fresh and new.
A poet of much less genius, but one who enjoyed great contemporary fame, was William Falconer, whose “Shipwreck,” published in 1762, was the most popular sea-poem of the eighteenth century. The most striking characteristic of the descriptive parts of the poem is the daring and novel use of technical sea-terms, but apart from this the language is purely conventional. The sea is still the same desert-waste, faithless deep, watery way, world, plain, path, or the fluid plain, the glassy plain, whilst the landscape catalogue is as lifeless as any of the descriptive passages of the early eighteenth century:
on every spray
The warbling birds exalt their evening lay,
Blithe skipping o’er yon hill the fleecy train
Join the deep chorus of the lowing plain.