While sea-born gales their gelid wings expand,
and
Fall blunted from each indurated heart.
Dr. Johnson, who represented the extreme classicist position with regard to blank verse and other tendencies of the Romantic reaction, had a good deal to say in the aggregate about the poetical language of his predecessors and contemporaries. But the latinism of the time, which was widespread enough to have attracted his attention, does not seem to have provoked from him any critical comment. His own poetical works, even when we remember the “Vanity of Human Wishes,” where plenty of instances of Latin idiom are to be found, are practically free from this kind of diction, though this does not warrant the inference that he disapproved of it. We know that his prose was latinized to a remarkable extent, so that his “sesquipedalian terminology” has been regarded as the fountain-head of that variety of English which delights in “big,” high-sounding words. But his ideal, we may assume, was the polished and elegant diction of Pope, and his own verse is as free from pedantic formations as is “The Lives of the Poets,” which perhaps represents his best prose.
It is in the works of a poet who, though he continues certain aspects of neo-classicism, yet announces unmistakably the coming of the new age, that we find a marked use of a deliberately latinized diction. Cowper has always received just praise for the purity of his language; he is, on the whole, singularly free from the artificialities and inversions which had marked the accepted poetic diction, but, on the other hand, his language is latinized to an extent that has perhaps not always been fully realized.
This is, however, confined to “The Task” and to the translation of the “Iliad.” In the former case there is first a use of words freely formed on Latin roots, for most of which Cowper had no doubt abundant precedents,[114] but which, in some cases, must have been coined by him, perhaps playfully in some instances; twisted form vermicular, the agglomerated pile, the voluble and restless earth, etc. Other characteristics of this latinized style are perhaps best seen in continuous passages such as
he spares me yet
These chestnuts ranged in corresponding lines;
And, though himself so polished, still reprieves
The obsolete prolixity of shade