“Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young,”

and the answer,

“I think not so:  her infelicity
 Seemed to have years too many,”

or so subtle in its suggestion, sense echoing back to primeval terrors and despairs, as this from Macbeth: 

“Stones have been known to move and trees to speak;
 Augurs and understood relations have
 By magot-pies, and choughs, and rooks brought forth
 The secret’st man of blood.”

or so intoxicating to the imagination and the senses as an ode of Keats or a sonnet by Rossetti.  But you will find eloquent and pointed statements of thoughts and feelings that are common to most of us—­the expression of ordinary human nature—­

“What oft was thought but ne’er so well exprest,”

“Wit and fine writing” consisting, as Addison put it in a review of Pope’s first published poem, not so much “in advancing things that are new, as in giving things that are known an agreeable turn.”

Though in this largest sense the “classic” writers eschewed the vagueness of romanticism, in another and more restricted way they cultivated it.  They were not realists as all good romanticists have to be.  They had no love for oddities or idiosyncrasies or exceptions.  They loved uniformity, they had no use for truth in detail.  They liked the broad generalised, descriptive style of Milton, for instance, better than the closely packed style of Shakespeare, which gets its effects from a series of minute observations huddled one after the other and giving the reader, so to speak, the materials for his own impression, rather than rendering, as does Milton, the expression itself.

Every literary discovery hardens ultimately into a convention; it has its day and then its work is done, and it has to be destroyed so that the ascending spirit of humanity can find a better means of self-expression.  Out of the writing which aimed at simplicity and truth to nature grew “Poetic Diction,” a special treasury of words and phrases deemed suitable for poetry, providing poets with a common stock of imagery, removing from them the necessity of seeing life and nature each one for himself.  The poetry which Dryden and Pope wrought out of their mental vigour, their followers wrote to pattern.  Poetry became reduced, as it never was before and has never been since, to a formula.  The Elizabethan sonneteers, as we saw, used a vocabulary and phraseology in common with their fellows in Italy and France, and none the less produced fine poetry.  But they used it to express things they really felt.  The truth is it is not the fact of a poetic diction which matters so much as its quality—­whether it squares with sincerity, whether it is capable of expressing powerfully and directly one’s deepest feelings.  The history of literature can show poetic dictions—­special vocabularies and forms for poetry—­that have these qualities; the diction, for instance, of the Greek choruses, or of the Scottish poets who followed Chaucer, or of the troubadours.  That of the classic writers of an Augustan age was not of such a kind.  Words clothe thought; poetic diction had the artifice of the crinoline; it would stand by itself.  The Romantics in their return to nature had necessarily to abolish it.