POPE. 283 



contemplation of outward nature. What Thomson s poetical 

 creed was may be surely inferred from his having modelled his 

 two principal poems ori Milton and Spenser, ignoring rhyme 

 altogether in the ( Seasons, and in the Castle of Indolence re 

 jecting the stiff mould of the couplet. In 1744 came Akenside s 

 Pleasures of Imagination, whose very title, like a guide-post, 

 points away from the level highway of commonplace to moun 

 tain-paths and less domestic prospects. The poem was stiff and 

 unwilling, but in its loins lay the seed of nobler births, and with 

 out it the * Lines written at Tintern Abbey might never have 

 been. Three years later Collins printed his little volume of 

 Odes, advocating in theory and exemplifying in practice the 

 natural supremacy of the imagination (though he called it by its 

 older name of fancy) as a test to distinguish poetry from verse- 

 making. The whole Romantic School, in its germ, no doubt, 

 but yet unmistakably foreshadowed, lies already in the Ode on 

 the Superstitions of the Highlands. He was the first to bring 

 back into poetry something of the antique fervour, and found 

 again the long-lost secret of being classically elegant without 

 being pedantically cold. A skilled lover of music,* he rose from 

 the general sing-song of his generation to a harmony that had 

 been silent since Milton, and in him, to use his own words, 



The force of energy is found, 

 And the sense rises on the wings of sound. 



But beside his own direct services in the reformation of our 

 poetry, we owe him a still greater debt as the inspirer of Gray, 

 whose Progress of Poesy/ in reach, variety, and loftiness of 

 poise, overflies all other English lyrics like an eagle. In spite 

 of the dulness of contemporary ears, preoccupied with the con 

 tinuous hum of the popular hurdy-gurdy, it was the prevailing 

 blast of Gray s trumpet that more than anything else called men 

 back to the legitimate standard.f Another poet, Dyer, whose 



* Milton, Collins, and Gray, our three great masters of harmony, were all 

 musicians. 



t Wordsworth, who recognised forerunners in Thomson, Collins, Dyer, and Burns, 

 and who chimes in with the popular superstition about Chatterton, is always some 

 what niggardly in his appreciation of Gray. Yet he owed him not a little. Without 

 Gray s tune in his ears, his own noblest Ode would have missed the varied modula 

 tion which is one of its main charms. Where he forgets Gray, his verse sinks to 

 something like the measure of a jig. Perhaps the suggestion of one of his own finest 

 lines, 



(The light that never was on and or sea,) 

 was due to Gray s 



Orient hues unborrowed of the sun. 



I believe it has not been noticed that among the verses in Gray s Sonnet on the 

 Death of West, which Wordsworth condemns as of no value, the second 

 And reddening Phrebus lifts his go den fires 



