Blair’s mortuary verse has a certain impressiveness, in its gloomy monotony, not unlike that of Quarles’ “Divine Emblems.”  Like the “Emblems,” too, “The Grave,” has been kept from oblivion by the art of the illustrator, the well-known series of engravings by Schiavonetti from designs by Wm. Blake.

But the thoughtful scholarly fancy of the more purely romantic poets haunted the dusk rather than the ebon blackness of midnight, and listened more to the nightingale than to the screech-owl.  They were quietists, and their imagery was crepuscular.  They loved the twilight, with its beetle and bat, solitude, shade, the “darkening vale,” the mossy hermitage, the ruined abbey moldering in its moonlit glade, grots, caverns, brooksides, ivied nooks, firelight rooms, the curfew bell and the sigh of the Aeolian harp.[21] All this is exquisitely put in Collins’ “Ode to Evening.”  Joseph Warton also wrote an “Ode to Evening,” as well as one “To the Nightingale.”  Both Wartons wrote odes “To Solitude.”  Dodsley’s “Miscellanies” are full of odes to Evening, Solitude, Silence, Retirement, Contentment, Fancy, Melancholy, Innocence, Simplicity, Sleep; of Pleasures of Contemplation (Miss Whately, Vol.  IX. p. 120) Triumphs of Melancholy (James Beattie, Vol.  X. p. 77), and similar matter.  Collins introduced a personified figure of Melancholy in his ode, “The Passions.”

    “With eyes upraised, as one inspired,
    Pale Melancholy sat retired;
    And from her wild, sequestered seat,
    In notes by distance made more sweet,
    Poured through the mellow horn her pensive soul;
      And dashing soft from rocks around,
      Bubbling runnels joined the sound;
    Through glades and glooms the mingled measure stole,
      Or o’er some haunted stream, with fond delay,
        Round a holy calm diffusing
        Love of peace and lonely musing,
      In hollow murmurs died away.”

Collins was himself afflicted with a melancholia which finally developed into madness.  Gray, a shy, fastidious scholar, suffered from inherited gout and a lasting depression of spirits.  He passed his life as a college recluse in the cloistered retirement of Cambridge, residing at one time in Pembroke, and at another in Peterhouse College.  He held the chair of modern history in the university, but never gave a lecture.  He declined the laureateship after Cibber’s death.  He had great learning, and a taste most delicately correct; but the sources of creative impulse dried up in him more and more under the desiccating air of academic study and the increasing hold upon him of his constitutional malady.  “Melancholy marked him for her own.”  There is a significant passage in one of his early letters to Horace.  Walpole (1737):  “I have, at the distance of half a mile, through a green lane, a forest (vulgar call it a common) all my own, at least as good as so, for I spy no human thing in it but myself.  It is a little chaos of mountains