The younger of the two brothers, Thomas Warton, who by his critical appreciation of Spenser did much in that manner to help forward the Romantic movement, was perhaps still more influenced by Milton. His ode on “The Approach of Summer” shows to what extent he had taken possession of the verse, language, and imagery of Milton:
Haste thee, nymph, and hand in hand
With thee lead a buxom band
Bring fantastic-footed Joy
With Sport, that yellow-tressed boy;
Leisure, that through the balmy sky,
Chases a crimson butterfly.
But nearly all his poems provide numerous instances of personified abstraction, especially the lines “Written at Vale Abbey,” which seems to exhaust, and present as thin abstractions, the whole gamut of human virtues and vices, emotions and desires.[218]
There is a certain irony in the fact that the two men who, crudely, perhaps, but nevertheless unmistakably, adumbrated the Romantic doctrine, should have been among the foremost to indulge in an excess against which later the avowed champion of Romanticism was to inveigh with all his power. This defect was perhaps the inevitable result of the fact that the Wartons had apparently been content in this respect to follow a contemporary fashion as revealed in the swarm of merely mechanical imitations of Milton’s early poems. But their subjects were on the whole distinctly romantic, and this fact, added to their critical utterances, gives them real historical importance. Above all, it is to be remembered that they have for contemporaries the two great poets in whom the Romantic movement was for the first time adequately exemplified—William Collins and Thomas Gray.