and precipices. . .  Both vale and hill are covered with most venerable beeches and other very reverend vegetables that, like most other ancient people, are always dreaming out their old stories to the winds. . .  At the foot of one of these, squats ME, I, (il penseroso) and there grow to the trunk for a whole morning."[22] To Richard West he wrote, in the same year, “Low spirits are my true and faithful companions”; and, in 1742, “Mine is a white Melancholy, or rather Leucocholy, for the most part . . . but there is another sort, black indeed, which I have now and then felt.”

When Gray sees the Eton schoolboys at their sports, he is sadly reminded: 

    “—­how all around them wait
      The ministers of human fate
    And black Misfortune’s baleful train."[23]

“Wisdom in sable garb,” and “Melancholy, silent maid” attend the footsteps of Adversity;[24] and to Contemplation’s sober eye, the race of man resembles the insect race: 

    “Brushed by the hand of rough mischance,
    Or chilled by age, their airy dance
      They leave, in dust to rest."[25]

Will it be thought too trifling an observation that the poets of this group were mostly bachelors and quo ad hoc, solitaries?  Thomson, Akenside, Shenstone, Collins, Gray, and Thomas Warton never married.  Dyer, Mason, and Joseph Warton, were beneficed clergymen, and took unto themselves wives.  The Wartons, to be sure, were men of cheerful and even convivial habits.  The melancholy which these good fellows affected was manifestly a mere literary fashion.  They were sad “only for wantonness,” like the young gentlemen in France.  “And so you have a garden of your own,” wrote Gray to his young friend Nicholls, in 1769, “and you plant and transplant, and are dirty and amused; are you not ashamed of yourself?  Why, I have no such thing, you monster; nor ever shall be either dirty or amused as long as I live.”  Gray never was; but the Wartons were easily amused, and Thomas, by all accounts, not unfrequently dirty, or at least slovenly in his dress, and careless and unpolished in his manners, and rather inclined to broad humor and low society.

Romantically speaking, the work of these Miltonic lyrists marks an advance upon that of the descriptive and elegiac poets, Thomson, Akenside, Dyer, and Shenstone.  Collins is among the choicest of English lyrical poets.  There is a flute-like music in his best odes—­such as the one “To Evening,” and the one written in 1746—­“How sleep the brave,” which are sweeter, more natural, and more spontaneous than Gray’s.  “The Muse gave birth to Collins,” says Swinburne; “she did but give suck to Gray.”  Collins “was a solitary song-bird among many more or less excellent pipers and pianists.  He could put more spirit of color into a single stroke, more breath of music into a single note, than could all the rest of the generation into all the labors of their lives."[26] Collins, like Gray, was a Greek