POPE. 387 



nature. "What Thomson's poetical creed was may be 

 surely inferred fi-om his having modelled his two pi-in- 

 cipal poems on Milton and Spenser, ignoring rhjone 

 altogether in the " Seasons," and in the " Castle of 

 Indolence " rejecting 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 mountain-paths and 

 less domestic prospects. The poem was stiff' and unwil- 

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

 without 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 ex- 

 emplifying in practice the natural supremacy of the 

 miagination (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 fervor, and found again the long-lost seci'et 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 Eng- 

 lish lyrics like an eagle. In spite of the dulncss of con- 

 temporary ears, preoccupied with the continuous hum 



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

 were all musicians. 



