Page:Studies of a Biographer 4.djvu/141

 Thomson, says Professor Raleigh, is like a man trying to win a wager by describing the country without giving the plain name to a single object. Birds, for example, become 'the feathered nations.' Pope, as afterwards Gray, often laid hands upon Milton, though both were well enough read in poetry to convey spoils from many other authors. Gray's excessive use of personification—the practice which culminated in Coleridge's favourite 'Inoculation, heavenly maid'—illustrates the process in another way. When Voltaire set up as an epic poet, he had to use for his 'machinery' such personages as 'La Discorde,' 'La Politique,' and 'Le Fanatisme,' instead of Satan and Beelzebub. Milton's famous precept, that poetry should be 'simple, sensuous, and passionate,' became impossible when passion had to be made logical and the abstract concept took the place of the 'sensuous' imagery. The peculiar jargon of Ossian which especially irritated Wordsworth might suggest other illustrations of the difficulty of 'raising the language.' The tendency of poetry to fall into the dead flat of rhymed prose was so strong that men who, like Thomson, had true poetic feeling, had to catch at some distinguishing mark, and used an artifice which could be adopted