[45] “Letter to Nichols,” June 24, 1769.

[46] Dryden’s “Annus Mirabilis,” Davenant’s “Gondibert,” and Sir John Davies’ “Nosce Teipsum” were written in this stanza, but the universal currency of Gray’s poem associated it for many years almost exclusively with elegiac poetry.  Shenstone’s collected poems were not published till 1764, though some of them had been printed in Dodsley’s “Miscellanies.”  Only a few of his elegies are dated in the collected editions (Elegy VIII, 1745; XIX, 1743; XXI, 1746), but Graves says that they were all written before Gray’s.  The following lines will recall to every reader corresponding passages in Gray’s “Churchyard”: 

    “O foolish muses, that with zeal aspire
    To deck the cold insensate shrine with bays!

    “When the free spirit quits her humble frame
    To tread the skies, with radiant garlands crowned;

    “Say, will she hear the distant voice of Fame,
    Or hearing, fancy sweetness in the sound?”
               —­Elegy II.

    “I saw his bier ignobly cross the plain.”
               —­Elegy III.

    “No wild ambition fired their spotless breast.”
               —­Elegy XV.

    “Through the dim veil of evening’s dusky shade
    Near some lone fane or yew’s funereal green,” etc.
               —­Elegy IV.

    “The glimmering twilight and the doubtful dawn
    Shall see your step to these sad scenes return,
    Constant as crystal dews impearl the lawn,” etc.
               —­Ibid.

[47] “Life of Akenside.”

[48] “Pleasures of Hope.”

[49] cf. Wordsworth’s

    “Some casual shout that broke the silent air,
    Or the unimaginable touch of time.”
       —­Mutability:  Ecclesiastical Sonnets, XXXIV.

CHAPTER V.

The Miltonic Group

That the influence of Milton, in the romantic revival of the eighteenth century, should have been hardly second in importance to Spenser’s is a confirmation of our remark that Augustan literature was “classical” in a way of its own.  It is another example of that curiously topsy-turvy condition of things in which rhyme was a mark of the classic, and blank verse of the romantic.  For Milton is the most truly classical of English poets; and yet, from the angle of observation at which the eighteenth century viewed him, he appeared a romantic.  It was upon his romantic side, at all events, that the new school of poets apprehended and appropriated him.

This side was present in Milton in a fuller measure than his completed works would show.  It is well known that he, at one time, had projected an Arthuriad, a design which, if carried out, might have anticipated Tennyson and so deprived us of “The Idyls of the King.”  “I betook me,” he writes, “among those lofty fables and romances which recount in solemn cantos the deeds of knighthood."[1] And in the “Epitaphium Damonis” he thus apprised the reader of his purpose: