There are five and twenty ways

Of constructing tribal lays,

And every single one of them is right.

This new attitude towards rules led to definite changes: 1. Verse broke away from the heroic couplet. We shall find, from the middle of the eighteenth century to the presAbandoning ent, constant experiment in forms of English Heroic Couplet verse, constant increase in the variety of its music. Old forms were revived, new forms were invented. Each poet began to look for the verse that best fitted his subject.

2. Poets felt free to use common words. Augustans had felt that only a limited range of words might be used in Use of Un- poetry. The modern poet does not consider poetic Words whether a word has been used in poetry before. He considers only whether it produces the effect he desires, whether it calls up the right images. He is governed not by rule, but by artistic instinct.

3. Poets felt free to use specific words and to picture details. The classicists had insisted that general terms were Specific more poetic than particular terms. One Words "heightened the language," for instance, by calling a spade an "agricultural implement." Later poets came to see the value of definite picturing words. One can paint a scene imaginatively by treating it mistily; on the other hand, one can appeal to the imagination by depicting details carefully selected. The method must depend upon the end desired.

4. With the couplet went other restrictions. The Ode Abandonment was not abandoned, but was written in a of Figures different spirit. "Figures of Speech" were seen in a new light, not as "decorations" which a poet was

expected to use, but merely the means by which an excited imagination would naturally express itself, means to which Greek rhetoricians had given long names. Formal personifications, "Truth," and "Hope," and "Patience," went out of fashion.

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW

What is meant by the term Romantic Movement?

Outline briefly the "marks" given. Make sure you can explain each in your own words. Has each of the changes pointed out been carried to-day to its extreme? Have any been carried too far? Which do you think should be carried farther?

Point out evidences of the Romantic Movement in American Literature, naming different writers whose works illustrate specific points.

CHAPTER VIII

POETS WHO SHOW THE NEW TENDENCY

JAMES THOMSON (1700-1748) rather stiffly begins the new order of things. In his Seasons, Thomson's 1730, he abandons the heroic couplet for "Seasons" blank verse and describes natural scenery. His poem is dull. Its descriptions still wear the shell of classicism, the adjectives are conventional, the language is stiff with Latinisms.

Just in the dubious point, where with the pool
Is mixed the trembling stream, or where it boils
Around the stone, or from the hollowed bank
Reverted plays in undulating flow,

There throw, nice-judging, the delusive fly.

But he does endeavor, with patience and with real love of nature, to picture the English scenes that he knew. It

is significant not only that he wrote such a poem, but "Castle of that the public received it so well. The Seasons became popular and remained so for a good part of a century. His Castle of Indolence was

Indolence"

THOMAS GRAY

less popular, though it is no less typical. For it, too, abandons the heroic couplet, using the Spenserian stanza instead. It is full of description of nature and of a dreamy idleness.

The following lines give some idea of the Seasons at its best.

The rapid radiance instantaneous strikes

The illumined mountain; through

the forest streams;

Shakes on the floods; and in a yellow mist

Far smoking o'er the interminable
plain,

In twinkling myriads lights the dewy gems.
Moist, bright and green, the landscape lies around,
Full swell the woods; their every music wakes,
'Mixed in wild concert, with the warbling brooks
Increased, the distant bleatings of the hills

And hollow lows respondent from the vales.

We must remember, however little Thomson may interest us as a poet, that he is, like the land birds seen by Columbus, a sign that we are drawing near to new things.

Another writer who shows differences from his age was Thomas Gray (1716-1771). His Elegy need not be

quoted or characterized at length. His work has the marks of his time. His composition is con- Gray

scious and labored. His Elegy, while not in

heroic couplet, is in a meter sanctioned by the rules. His formal odes are full of set personifications and conventional figures of speech. Yet there is much that belongs to a later day.

(c) by The Bibliophile Society, reproduced by special permission.

THE CHURCHYARD OF GRAY'S ELEGY

The awakening love of melancholy and meditation was leading men to appreciate sad scenes.

Gray's poetry contains two elements of romanticisms. There is, in the first place, a gentle melancholy, a seriousness very remote from classic indifference. This is seen, too, in other poets of the day, in Collins, under whose classic Odes one feels a human tenderness. Secondly, there is, especially in Gray's Bard, a new appreciation of wild scenery and of primitive, even barbarous, emotions.

In the Elegy the melancholy is of a stately and reflective type, akin to that of Milton's Il Penseroso,

"Elegy"

With even step and musing gait

And looks commercing with the skies.

Yet there is, what Milton had not, a hint of real melancholy, a touch of personal depression, an anticipation of modern self-questioning and modern self-pity. The personal point of view, the expression of what a poet himself feels, is coming back. Poetry is returning to individual men, leaving "average men" to philosophy.

Norse

One thing that led Gray to his expression of such primitive ideas as we find in the Bard (Golden Treasury, No. Interest in 159) was his interest in Norse poetry and mythology. He did not get the full spirit of these, but what little he did get by way of Latin made him and his readers wish to learn more. Other influences, however, were turning the minds of the eighteenth-century public to the romance of the past.

Two important books appeared, respectively, in 1762 and 1765. Macpherson's Ossian and Percy's Reliques were not all that they pretended to be. But

"Ossian" while the former was largely "sham," the

latter contained many jewels.

James Macpherson's Ossian, purported to consist of the poems "collected" among the islands of western Scotland. They were supposed to be the work of an ancient Gaelic poet. Critics of the day attempted in vain to determine whether Macpherson had collected and translated these poems, or had made them up himself. Modern critics are of the opinion that, inspired by fragments