The spirit walks of every day deceased
And smiles an angel, or a fury frowns
(ll. 180-181)
or the grief of the poet as he ever meets the shades of joys gone for ever:
The ghosts
Of my departed joys: a numerous train.
Here the poet has come near to achieving that effect which in the hands of the greatest poets justifies the use of personification as a poetic figure. The more delicate process just illustrated is distinct both from the lifeless abstraction and the detailed personification, for in these cases there is a tinge of personal emotion which invests these shadowy figures with something of a true lyrical effect.
The tendency, illustrated in the “Night Thoughts,” to make a purely didactic use of personification and abstraction is found to a much greater extent in Akenside’s “Pleasures of the Imagination,” first published in 1744, to be considerably enlarged in 1767. The nature of Akenside’s subject freely admitted of the use of these devices, and he has not been slow to avail himself of them.
Large portions of the “Pleasures of the Imagination” resolve themselves into one long procession of abstract figures. Very often Akenside contents himself with the usual type of abstraction, accompanied by a conventional epithet: “Wisdom’s form celestial” (I, 69), “sullen Pomp” (III, 216), etc., though sometimes by means of human attributes or characteristics we are given partial personifications such as: