Yet in a note to the Hymn Akenside refers to Milton as "the only modern poet (unless perhaps . . . Spenser) who, in these mysterious traditions of the poetic story, had a heart to feel, and words to express, the simple and solitary genius of antiquity";' furthermore, the poem contains not a few lines as Miltonic, in everything but diction, as any in the Pleasures of Imagination.

The Hymn recalls Collins's best odes, and, had it been no longer than they, might have been almost as good. The two poets, who were born the same year, seem to have drawn more of their classicism from Greece than from Rome (whence contemporary writers derived most of theirs); and each published within twelve months of the other a volume of odes which were unusual for the time and which reveal a fondness for personified abstractions and for Milton's octosyllabics. But, except at rare intervals, Akenside's verse falls far short of Collins's; it is seldom simple, never sensuous or passionate, and, notwithstanding its distinction and elegance, is almost always rhetoric or "eloquence" rather than poetry.

The Hymn to the Naiads, though not published till 1758, was written twelve years earlier and circulated somewhat in manuscript. In this form it came to the attention of William Whitehead shortly before he was made poet laureate, and seems to have inspired his only serious effort in blank verse, a Hymn to the Nymph of Bristol Spring (1751). Whitehead's Hymn reminds one of Akenside's (which it mentions) not only in title but in style and diction. Its four hundred and seventy lines praise the salubrious properties of Bristol waters in as stiltedly Miltonic a fashion as this:

Thee the sable Wretch,

To ease whose burning Entrails swells in vain
The Citron's dewy moisture, thee he hails;
And oft from some steep Cliff at early dawn

In Seas, in Winds, or the vast Void of Heaven
Thy Power unknown adores.2

1 Note to line 83. Lines 82-6 are obviously derived from a passage in Paradise Lost (iv. 275-9) which is quoted in this same note; there is also a quotation from Milton in the note to line 25. Akenside wrote two other pieces of blank verse, The Poet (1737, a parody), and A British Philippic, "occasioned by the Insults of the Spaniards, and the present Preparations for War" (1738, cf. Glover's London, written on the same occasion), which is more direct, simple, and vigorous, and hence less Miltonic, than most of his later blank verse. He also "had made some progress in an Epic poem ... Timoleon" (Gent. Mag., lxiii. 885), in which he would almost certainly have employed the style, diction, and prosody of Paradise Lost.

2 Lines 54-9. The Hymn to the Naiads is commended in lines 103-6 and note. Whitehead's Lyric Muse to Mr. Mason (“Dodsley's Miscellany," 1758, vi. 58–60) suggests Milton's octosyllabics in meter and in the movement of the lines.

The influence of the Pleasures of Imagination is most obviously seen in the imitation of its title by other poets. Warton used it for his Pleasures of Melancholy (written in 1745), Rogers for his Pleasures of Memory (1792), Courtier for his Pleasures of Solitude (1796), Campbell for his Pleasures of Hope (1799), and William Hamilton Drummond for his Pleasures of Benevolence (1835). Rogers's and Campbell's pieces are rimed, but Drummond's thirty-four hundred lines are in the kind of unmistakably Miltonic blank verse that was in vogue a century before he wrote. They touch on almost every aspect of human life, while inculcating the joy and duty of kindness to all creatures, animals as well as men, and insisting on the goodness of God at work through all the evils of the world. To what extent a reading of the poem is one of the pleasures of benevolence may be surmised from these typical lines,

How richly dight with thy magnificence,
Yon star-bespangled concave! Wide expands
Th' immeasurable ether; streams of light,
Bright coruscations of the boreal morn.

1

or from the fact that the copy in the Harvard Library has stood on the shelves for eighty-five years uncut!

The deistic philosophy which inspired the Pleasures of Imagination, as it did much of The Seasons and of the Essay on Man, played no small part in other eighteenth-century poetry. One aspect of it furnished John Gilbert Cooper with the theme of his Power of Harmony (1745), in which he attempted "to shew that a constant attention to what is perfect and beautiful in nature, will by degrees harmonize the soul to a responsive regularity and sympathetic order"; or, as he expressed it in verse,

From these sweet meditations on the charms

Of things external [nature, art, music] . . .

The soul, and all the intellectual train

Of fond Desires, gay Hopes, or threat'ning Fears,
Through this habitual intercourse of sense

Is harmoniz'd within, till all is fair

1 Pages 9-10. I have noticed these Miltonic borrowings: "Siloa's brook" (p. 25, from P. L., i. 11); "Araby the blest" (p. 33, from P. L., iv. 163, in connection with odors in each case); "thro' unfathomed seas, Tempests leviathan" (p. 41, cf. P. L., vii. 412); "the den of loud misrule" (p. 57, cf. P. L., vii. 271–2); "hyacinthine locks" (p. 106, cf. P. L., iv. 301); "winglets of downy gold... Maia's son" (p. 107, cf. P. L., v. 282-5, of an angel in each case);

Sabbaths return, but not to him returns

Rest, or sweet respite

(p. 37, cf. P. L., iii. 41–2). On page 86 is quoted "the drop serene That quenched his orbs" (cf. P. L., iii. 25).

And perfect; till each moral pow'r perceives
Its own resemblance, with fraternal joy,
In ev'ry form compleat, and smiling feels
Beauty and Good the same.1

These lines are simpler, less suggestive of Thomson, than are most of the others; for the poem abounds in compound epithets, in a Latinized vocabulary, - "effuse," "effulgence," "relumes," "obsequious" (prompt to follow), "præenjoy," "tepefying," "invests the boughs," "devolves his . . . stream," "obvious" pebbles,2— and in other objectionable forms of poetic diction. These features, as well as the use of adjectives for adverbs and the elaborate and frequent inversions, Cooper may have derived from Milton, whose octosyllabics he copied a year later3 and whose phrasing he borrowed several times in this poem.4

Why natural beauty has the power of harmonizing the soul was explained in 1751 by Shaftesbury's nephew, James Harris, in the one hundred and seventy Miltonic lines of his Concord. The universal Mind, who is also Beauty, "Himself pour'd forth" through all matter, animate and inanimate:

Hence man, allied to all, in all things meets
Congenial being, effluence of mind.

And as the tuneful spring spontaneous sounds
In answer to his kindred note; so he

The secret harmony within him feels,
When aught of beauty offers."

Many of these deistic ideas were accepted by persons who in general remained orthodox,-like John Duncan, for example, chaplain of the king's own regiment and author of a joy-dispelling Essay on Happiness (1762). Duncan maintains through nearly sixteen hundred lines that the world was originally perfect and completely happy, that it is still better and happier than is commonly

1 Poems on Several Subjects (1764), 83, 119. Cooper may have been influenced by Akenside, to whom he addressed a rimed panegyric, The Call of Aristippus (1758), and whom he praised in his Letters concerning Taste (1754, letter xv).

2 Poems, etc., 97 (cf. 118), 107, 102, 90, 90, 94, 96, 109, 109.

See below, p. 451.

4 For example, "th' Aonian mount" (p. 88, cf. P. L., i. 15); “Chaos reign'd, And elemental Discord; in the womb Of ancient Night, the war of atoms... Anarchy, Confusion... Dissonance, and Uproar" (p. 88, cf. P. L., ii. 150, 894-7, 960-67); "congregated clouds" (p. 110, cf. P. L., vii. 308); "Euphrosyne, heart-easing" (p. 112, cf. Allegro, 12-13); "the flow'ry field Of Enna (p. 113, cf. P. L., iv. 268–9). “The first in the flood A godlike image saw," etc. (pp. 119-20), seems to be derived from Eve's first view of herself (P. L., iv. 455-65). Something of the Allegro-Penseroso structure appears three times in the poem (pp. 87-8, 105-6, 111-12).

man...

Poetical Calendar (1763), xii. 55-6.

conceived, that all evil arises from false self-love, that the happiness and rank of the various orders of beings -God, angels, men — depends upon the degree to which they partake of true love (benevolence), and that happiness is promoted by reason and virtue and is finally established in the love of God. These ideas are, however, derived much more easily from the summaries that precede the four books of the Essay than from the poetry itself, which, perhaps "dark through excessive bright," devolves its maze in this fashion:

Not thus eludes th' angelic eye the grace
On lapsed man residing. Unobscur'd
By low-born mist his comprehensive view
In thy sole essence lost, all-seeing God,
O'er all creation's charms expatiates free.1

The Miltonic character of these lines requires no comment; but attention should be called to a definite mention of Paradise Lost,2 to such borrowings from it as "the gloom of unessential night," "human face divine," "the . . . wealth of Ind," "love-notes wild," to the description of Eden (where "with sprightly glee Gambol'd the fiery pard" and "the smiling hours and seasons led The circling dance" to the songs of the birds), as well as to the effect on nature of the fall of man.5

Deistic writings like these, including as they did many of the leading productions of the time in prose as well as in verse, caused no small disturbance among the narrowly orthodox. One of the pens wielded as a cudgel in defence of the older theology was that of the Presbyterian divine, John Ogilvie, who entitled his last work The Triumphs of Christianity over Deism (1805). Forty years earlier he had, to his own satisfaction at least, established the faith of all doubting Thomases and crushed the skepticism of such bolder spirits as his fellow-Scotsman Hume, in the three thousand lines of his inflated, blank-verse Providence, an Allegorical Poem (1764). Only persons already convinced, or those with feeble doubts, could have been impressed by the work; men of real thought, like Hume, must have sneered at Ogilvie's solemn elucidation of the obvious, as well as at

1 Pages 72-3. On page 12 Duncan refers with approval to the deists Shaftesbury and Hutcheson.

2 Page 40, and note.

3 Pages 24 (cf. P. L., ii. 438–9, of chaos in each case), 31 (cf. P. L., iii. 44), 51 (cf. P. L., ii. 2), 45 (cf. Allegro, 134).

Pages 30-31 (cf. P. L., iv. 340-50, 264-8).

• Pages 40 (earth "groan'd . . . with grief" at the picking of the forbidden fruit, cf. P. L., iv. 780-84), 43–4 (cf. P. L., x. 651-714, and note that in each poem the animals "glared" on Adam).

the anthropomorphism of his selfish, petty deity who delayed the coming of Christ lest man should arrogate to himself the discovery of His teachings, and who revealed the true religion to "a favour'd Few" in order that they might be properly grateful.1

The poem attempts to prove, through a series of visions expounded by allegorical personages, that without divine revelation the human mind is incapable of evolving a satisfactory religion, that there is a beneficent Providence behind floods, droughts, volcanic eruptions, excessive heat and cold, and the like, as well as behind the prosperity of the wicked and the afflictions of the righteous. To elucidate these matters would have been sufficiently difficult even if Ogilvie had not hampered himself with "the vain stiffness of a letter'd Scot," 2 with a style and diction often more absurdly Miltonic than in these lines:

Rash alike thou deem'st

Of wisdom or injustice. Grant that Heav'n

Submiss, to Nature's glimmering search had lent
Internal light...

Then had thy thought elate disdain'd to own

The boon conferr'd; thine all the work had been.3

But it is unnecessary to comment on a poem that was so well characterized by a brilliant and merciless contemporary:

Under dark allegory's flimsy veil

Let them with Ogilvie spin out a tale

Of rueful length; let them plain things obscure,
Debase what's truly rich, and what is poor
Make poorer still by jargon most uncouth . . .
With bloated style, by affectation taught,
With much false colouring, and little thought...
With words, which nature meant each other's foe,

1 See ii. 813-48,931-42.

2 Charles Churchill, The Journey, 148.

3 ii. 814-22. A more interesting but less typical passage is i. 653-65, which pictures "the romantic wild... mountains piled Sublime in horrid grandeur to the sky." It was to Ogilvie that Johnson said, "The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England" (Boswell's Life, ed. Hill, i. 425, and see 421). There appear to be some borrowings from Milton, such as "shagg'd with... hills, Rocks, desarts, woods, dales," etc. (i. 58-9, cf. Comus, 429, and P. L., ii. 621), “with contiguous shades” (i. 245, cf. P. L., vi. 828), "with downy gold” (i. 258, cf. P. L., v. 282), “the griesly shape" (i. 326, cf. P. L., ii. 704), “floats on the gale redundant” (i. 1022, cf. P. L., ix. 502-3), "face That glow'd celestial” (ii. 240-1, cf. P. L., viii. 618–19), “hurl'd them headlong" (ii. 617, cf. P. L., i. 45), "back th' astonish'd thought Recoil’d” (ii. 681–2, cf. P. L., ii. 759, vi. 194), “smit with the dust of earth” (ii. 690, cf. P. L., iii. 29), “bedrop'd with" (ii. 720, cf. P. L., x. 527, of the ground in each case), "mazes intricate" (iii. 178, cf. P. L., v. 622), "balmy as the citron grove" (iii. 787, cf. P. L., v. 22–3), “tinctured with the dies of heav'n " (iii.912-13, cf. P. L., v. 283-5)," innumerable wings... fann'd the undulating air” (iii. 916–17, cf. P. L., vii. 431-2). Four of Ogilvie's odes are Miltonic (see Bibl. II, 1762, 1769), as is his epic Britannia (see pp. 302-3 above).