SOURCE: Reed, Amy Louise. “The Revolt Against Melancholy.” In The Background of Gray's Elegy, 80-139. New York: Columbia University Press, 1924.

[In the following essay, Reed argues that the birth of Graveyard poetry, such as Thomas Gray's “Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard,” stemmed from a reaction to what some in the seventeenth century claimed was a disease, melancholy, and discusses the influences of the Graveyard poets.]

Seventeenth century writers on melancholy themes continued to be read during the first quarter of the eighteenth. Pomfret, the favorite of the moment, produced in 1700 not only the pleasantly pagan Choice, but also a quite orthodox Prospect of Death. Charles Gildon's New Miscellany, issued in 1701, contained Lady Winchilsea's The Spleen and Death. Roscommon's Prospect of Death, previously known in manuscript only, was first published in 1704. Norris's A Collection of Miscellanies were in their fourth edition in 1706. Oldham was reprinted in 1722. Raleigh's Remains were reissued in 1702, and Drummond's Works, in a beautiful quarto edition, Edinburgh, 1711, brought to mind again A Cypresse Grove. Two elegies which had appeared on the death of Queen Mary in 1695 were still finding readers. One of these, reprinted in 1701 and pirated in 1709, The Temple of Death, by John Sheffield, Marquis of Normanby and Duke of Buckingham, has an opening stanza with a “horrid” description imitated from Aeneid VI, 237-42.

A dreadful Vale lies in a Desart Isle,
On which indulgent Heaven did never smile.
There a thick Grove of Aged Cypress Trees,
Which none without an awful horror sees,
Into its wither'd Arms, depriv'd of Leaves,
Whole Flocks of ill-presaging Birds receives.
Poisons are all the Plants the Soil will bear,
And Winter is the only Season there.
Millions of Graves cover the spacious Field,
And Springs of Blood a thousand Rivers yield:
Whose Streams opprest with Carcasses and Bones,
Instead of gentle Murmurs, pour forth Groans.(1)

The other, Congreve's Mournful Muse of Alexis, reappeared in 1713 in A Select Collection of Modern Poems by Several Hands, Dublin, 1713. Alexis and Menalcas are the speakers; the Queen is called Pastora, and there is a refrain dimly reminiscent of those in Greek pastorals:

I mourn Pastora dead, let Albion mourn,
And Sable clouds her chalky cliffs adorn.

Plants, birds, and beasts of ill omen are forbidden to approach Pastora's burial place:

There may no dismal Yew, nor Cypress grow,
Nor Holly-bush, nor bitter Elder's Bough;
Let each unlucky Bird far build his Nest,
And distant Dens receive each howling Beast;
Let Wolves be gone, and Ravens put to flight,
With hooting Owls, and Bats, that hate the Light,
And let the sighing Doves their Sorrows bring,
And Nightingales in sweet Complainings sing.(2)

The interest in Lucretius continued, so that Creech's translation had a second edition in 1714, with very full notes by another hand, and a third edition in 1722, while the passages Dryden had translated were republished in Tonson's reissue (1702-1709) of Dryden's Miscellany Poems with additions, in six volumes. Lucretius was also thoroughly advertised by Blackmore's attack in Creation, 1712.

The continued controversy over the immortality of the soul, which involved also the question of the right to commit suicide, may have caused the reprinting of John Donne's prose Biathanatos: a Declaration of that Paradox or Thesis that self Homicide is not so naturally Sin, that it may never be otherwise.³ A refutation of Donne's arguments by J. Adams, entitled An Essay concerning Self-Murther, was twice printed in 1700.

Lady Winchilsea was still writing. In 1703 she was moved to describe, in The Hurricane, a great storm⁴ which wrought havoc on land and sea. As Dr. Reynolds observes,⁵ this poem, in spite of the handicap of the Cowleian ode form, has passages of true description, conveying the author's feeling of delighted awe at the mighty massing of clouds and waters and the destructive power of the winds. The edition of her Poems in 1713 made public her best poem according to modern standards, A Nocturnal Reverie. While this descriptive piece is really an expression of joy in the sights and sounds and solitude of night, we must remember that, in her own time, this sort of pleasure would have been reckoned as evidence of a melancholy temperament.

The whole poem conveys perfectly the sense of stillness, and of a half transparent dusk. One feels rather than sees the animals happily bustling about, their presence revealed by sounds only. There are admirable realistic touches—the freshened grass straightening itself, the sounds of the grazing of a horse and the nibbling of sheep, the consciousness of odors unnoticed by day, the cry of the curlew, and the call of the partridge. Conventional, on the other hand, are the references to the zephyr, Philomel, the owl, the moon, the falling waters, the ancient ruin showing through the gloom, the compliment to the Countess of Salisbury, and the turning of the mind to muse on

Something too high for Syllables to speak.

Yet, as Dr. Reynolds notes, this is melancholy with a difference.⁶ In her youth, her personal disappointments had found expression in melancholy poetry in the seventeenth century manner. In later life, her own natural goodness, the kindness of her friends and her husband, and the healing influence of nature brought about a sort of Miltonic calm, a mood pensive but by no means sad or gloomy.

The Poems of Lady Mary Chudleigh (Marissa), published in 1703,⁷ though doubtless written and read in manuscript some years before that, are chiefly of the melancholy sort. In her Preface to The Song of the Three Children Paraphrased she shows much interest in the recently accepted theories of the origin and nature of the universe, combined with a lack of accurate knowledge to which she is, as a mere woman, serenely resigned. The poem is a long (and tiresome) nature rhapsody, including a description of the Day of Judgment. Many of her shorter poems, however, have the charm of personal revelation.

In her Pindaric ode On the Vanities of this Life, she wonders why anyone desires “the trifle Life,” since it is only a succession of miseries. She describes the many futile ways of pursuing happiness, which, she believes, consists in obedience to virtue and serenity of mind, and can therefore be perfectly attained only in Heaven.

Such as a lasting Happiness would have,
          Must seek it in the peaceful Grave,
Where free from Wrongs the Dead remain:
Life is a long continu'd Pain,
          A lingering slow Disease,
Which Remedies a while may ease,
          But cannot work a perfect Cure:
          Musick with its enchanting Lays,
          May for a while our Spirits raise;
                    Honour and Wealth may charm the Sense,
                    And by their pour'ful Influence
                    May gently lull our Cares asleep;
                    But when we think ourselves secure,
And fondly hope we shall no future Ills endure,
                    Our griefs awake again,
And with redoubl'd Rage augment our Pain.

She remarks with great common sense that the exercise of reason will not dispel real grief.

The most that Reason can, is to persuade the Mind
                    Its Troubles decently to bear,
And not permit a Murmur or a Tear,
To tell th' inquiring World that any such are there.

Books, too, are unsatisfactory, because there is always so much more to know than one can possibly get at by reading. In short,

The Phoenix Truth wrapt up in Mists doth lie,
Not to be clearly seen before we die;

The Resolution asserts her intention to retire to a loved retreat and give herself up to the delights and the improving influence of reading. The Resolve is another Retirement poem. Solitude begins:

Happy are they who when alone
                    Can with themselves converse,
Who to their Thoughts are so familiar grown,
They cou'd with silent Joy think all their Hours away,
And still think on, till the confining Clay,
                    Fall off, and nothing's left behind
Of drossy Earth, nothing to clog the Mind.

But very few persons (as Cowley, following Cicero, remarked) are fit for solitude.

“Taken as a whole,” says Dr. Reynolds,⁸ “the poems bitterly inveigh against life with its blighting sorrows, its fleeting, unreal joys, its injustice, its black despairs. The only break in the gloom comes in short periods of absorption in books, or in occasional religious ecstasies.”

On Matthew Prior, Lady Winchilsea's more famous contemporary, personal misfortune had the effect of driving him into melancholy. He was naturally of a buoyant temperament, and in the greater part of his work,⁹ consisting of love poems, official “odes,” compliments to friends, and satiric tales or fables, his acknowledged master is Horace. Yet as early as 1702, he had translated the Emperor Hadrian's Animula blandula vagula, calling his version The Dying Christian to his Soul;¹⁰ he admired Dr. Sherlock's Practical Discourse Concerning Death, and, in the 1718 edition of his Poems, published for the first time two long poems on serious subjects, the composition of which had occupied him a number of years.

In Alma, a poem in three cantos, the Hudibrastic manner prevents real consideration of the theme, the nature and origin of the soul, although one can feel that Prior is genuinely speculating on the subject. But Solomon on the Vanity of the World, a poem in three books, is serious reflection of a most melancholy kind. One of its “mottoes,” from Bacon's Advancement of Learning, states that “The bewailing of Man's Miseries hath been elegantly and copiously set forth by Many, in the Writings as well of Philosophers, as Divines. And it is both a pleasant and a profitable Contemplation.” Prior's Preface echoes the utterances of Cowley, Dennis, and the other reformers of poetry in preferring scriptural to classic themes. His own effort has been to collect out of the great treasure-house of the books commonly attributed to Solomon “such Observations, and Apothegms, as most particularly tend to the proof of that great Assertion, laid down in the beginning of the Ecclesiastes, All Is Vanity.” Thus the general tenor of his poem is that “The Pleasures of Life do not compensate the Miseries: Age steals upon us unawares; and Death, as the only Cure of our Ills, ought to be expected but not feared.” This is, of course, simply a restating of Lucretius's Complaint of Life, and lines 110 and following in Book III of Solomon are actually a direct paraphrase of Lucretius. The only really beautiful lines are certain lyric passages in the third book which recall Fletcher and the late Elizabethans rather than his scriptural models (lines 575 ff.).

This change of tone in Prior may be attributed partly to the change of taste in the society around him, which demanded of its poets first of all orthodox piety, and partly to his own personal misfortunes, his downfall, imprisonment, and enforced withdrawal from public life, which increased the seriousness latent beneath his gaiety.¹¹ His earlier poetry had been lightly lyrical but the Preface to Solomon, with its references to Homer, Virgil, Tasso, Ronsard, and Spenser, indicates that, like other men of his time, he yearned to make an impression as an epic writer. He seems uncertain whether his work, which is cast in three soliloquies with narrative introductions, is actually “didascalic, or heroic.” We of today are in no doubt that it is an extremely dull, didactic poem, in pseudo-epic style. Prior's reverse of fortune has apparently thrown him back into the religious vein of the seventeenth century, and into the epic form of expression.

Meantime, John Philips, one of Pope's circle, had done something both to stimulate admiration for Milton's versification, and to excite ridicule for pensive poetry by his clever parody, The Splendid Shilling. This piece,¹² in fluent blank verse, with Miltonic phrases and imagery, is in its plan a burlesque of Il Penseroso, describing one long, unhappy day in the life of a poet in hourly expectation of being arrested for debt. Its imitation of Milton was, however, so skilful as to call attention to the excellence of blank verse as a medium for reflective poetry.

                                                  But when Nocturnal Shades
This World invelop, and th' inclement Air
Persuades Men to repel benumming Frosts
With pleasant Wines, and crackling blaze of Wood;
Me Lonely sitting, nor the glimm'ring Light
Of Make-weight Candle, nor the joyous Talk
Of lovely Friend delights; distress'd, forlorn,
Amid the horrors of the tedious Night,
Darkling I sigh, and feed with dismal Thoughts
My anxious Mind; or sometimes mournful Verse
Indite, and sing of Groves, and Myrtle Shades.

By such pleasing irreverence Philips sounded the first note of the anti-melancholy movement in poetry, but for the time being there were no new themes to take the place of those old and tried subjects of poetical meditation, the evils of life, the terrors (or perhaps the charms) of death, the happiness and profit of retirement.¹³ Moreover, the old themes were given a fresh impulse by a new poet of genuine, if limited talent, in the person of Isaac Watts, whose Horae Lyricae appeared in 1706.

In his Preface, Watts makes deliberate pretensions to be a serious poet filling a long-felt want for noble lyric.¹⁴ He approves Dennis's Proposal of Criticism for the reform of poetry. He considers that Cowley and Blackmore by their sacred epics have proved “that the obstacles of attempting Christian Poesy are broken down, and the vain pretence of its being impracticable is experimentally confuted.” He believes that lyrics on sacred subjects would be equally possible, and would be effective aids to the preacher in diffusing virtue and alluring souls to God. The shorter odes of Cowley and Blackmore, and a few of Norris's “essays in verse” are cited as successful efforts in this direction.¹⁵ He asserts that poets are in duty bound to furnish pleasure of a safe kind for young ladies and gentlemen who like poetry, and who may for lack of legitimate amusement be driven to the “dangerous diversions of the stage and impure sonnets.” His own Poems Sacred to Virtue are so intended, for he says, “I thought it lawful to take hold of any Handle of the Soul to lead it away betimes from vicious Pleasures.”

The Pindaric odes and other lyrics that follow are quite in the seventeenth century religious vein. The influence of the Georgics is traceable in the descriptive parts of the poem, Divine Judgments, the theme of which is that all good or ill comes to man by order of God. God sends the intense cold winter, when

The grazing Ox lows to the Gelid Skies,
Walks o'er the Marble Meads with withering Eyes,
Walks o'er the solid Lakes, snuffs up the wind, and
          dies.

The poem then makes a flight to the polar world, and there mourns the death by cold of prisoners in chaingangs.¹⁶ Even the atheist must tremble at the thought of God's omnipotence. Drought, disease, and dearth are also God's weapons. The poet exults in the thought of the terrible exhibitions of divine power against guilt.

Hail, Whirlwinds, Hurricanes and Floods,
                    That all the leafy Standards strip,
                    And bear down with a mighty sweep,
The Riches of the Fields, and Honours of the Woods.
                    Storms that ravage o'er the Deep,
                    And bury Millions in the Waves;(17)
                    Earthquakes, that in Midnight-Sleep
Turn Cities into Heaps, and make our Beds our
          Graves.

The poem ends with the aspiration that God will reassure him as to his own fate. In Death and Eternity we have the usual seventeenth century emphasis on the sovereignty of Death.

The Tyrant, how he triumphs here,
          His Trophies spread around!
And Heaps of Dust and Bones appear
          Thro' all the hollow ground.
These Skulls what ghastly Figures now!
          How loathsome to the Eyes!
These are the Heads we lately knew
          So beauteous and so wise.

But what of the fate of the soul, embarked upon “that Sea without a Shore?” There it must sink or swim. Some friend, mourning our loss, shall remember that he too must die, and thus our very bones shall teach,

For Dust and Ashes loudest preach
                              The infinite Concern.

Watts's The Day of Judgment is too well known to need quotation. Its rhythmic sweep makes it an impressive poem, in spite of its grotesque images. After the manner of the milder religionists, Watts pauses at the brink of Hell and, without dwelling upon the torments of the damned, ends his poem peacefully and joyously with the song of the redeemed.

His poems on the vanity of life are numerous, but not especially noteworthy. Seeking A Divine Calm in a Restless World, imitated from Casimir Sobieski¹⁸ (IV, 28), ends with the thought,

Earth's but an Atom: Greedy Swords
Carve it amongst a thousand Lords. …

He also versifies “Remember thy Creator” from Ecclesiastes XII. The Hero's School of Morality recommends “A Turn among the Tombs” as a cure for ambition and an incitement to virtue, for tombs and monuments

Tell me a thousand mournful things
                    In melancholy Silence.

The Mourning Piece begins with a ghastly presentation of the old idea that all the world is a stage:

Life's a long Tragedy: This Globe the Stage,
Well fix'd, and well adorn'd with strong Machines,
Gay Fields, and Skies, and Seas: The Actors many;
The Plot immense: A Flight of Daemons sit
On every sailing Cloud with fatal Purpose;
And shoot across the Scene ten thousand Arrows,
Perpetual and unseen, headed with Pain,
With Sorrow, Infamy, Disease and Death.
The pointed Plagues fly silent through the Air,
Nor twangs the Bow, yet sure and deep the Wound.(19)

The idea of the poem as a whole is that the single man and woman run less risk of sorrow than those who are married. The latter suffer through each other and through their children. The second part of this poem is entitled The Bright Vision and presents the reverse argument, picturing the bliss of marriage, like that in Eden before the Fall.²⁰ The poet confesses that when he wrote the gloomy first part,

                                                  Melancholy's hateful Form
Stood by in sable Robe.

When he surveyed the bright scene of life, she made him look through a dark, long tube with a deceitfully colored glass. Now Urania breaks the glass, and he sees marriage as it is, a happy state. In the third part, the accounts are balanced. The married lover must enjoy wedlock in moderation, not forgetting that ill may come.

Watts gives his own peculiar pietistic turn to the themes of contemplation and retirement. Meditation in a Grove is a sort of religious pastoral. In this grove, there is no Phyllis. Instead, the poet's passion for Jesus is carved on the bark of every tree for swains to admire. True Riches shows the influence of Milton's Il Penseroso both in meter and in idea. The poet cares not what to-morrow may bring. He longs not for riches, for he has treasures that cannot be taken away.

I'm a Kingdom of my own.

Then follows a description of the garden of his soul, where all delights are.

Yet the silly wand'ring Mind,
Loath to be too much confin'd,
Roves and takes her dayly Tours,
Coasting round the narrow Shores,
Narrow Shores of Flesh and Sense,
Picking Shells and Pebbles thence:
Or she sits at Fancy's Door,
Calling Shapes and Shadows t' her,
Foreign Visits still receiving,
And t' herself a Stranger living.
Never, never would she buy
Indian Dust or Tyrian Dye,
Never trade abroad for more
If she saw her native Store,
If her inward worth were known
She might ever live alone.

The Adventurous Muse is inspired by Milton's epic though in form it is a Pindaric ode.

Urania takes her morning Flight
…
Nor Rapin gives her Rules to fly,
Nor Purcell Notes to sing.

She flies straight to the Celestial Land, without even angelic guidance. While little skiffs humbly coast along mortal shores, afraid to lose sight of it, or of one another, Urania's poet cries:

Give me the Chariot whose divine Wheels
          Mark their own Rout, and unconfin'd
          Bound o'er the everlasting Hills,
And lose the Clouds below, and leave the Stars
          behind. …

His Muse

                    Pursues an unattempted Course,
                    Breaks all the Criticks' Iron Chains,
And bears to Paradise the raptur'd Mind.

There Milton dwells:

                                        The Mortal sung
Themes not presum'd by Mortal Tongue.

The poem ends with praise of Milton.

The enormous popularity of Watts,²¹ especially of The Judgment Day, is sufficient evidence of the continuance into the eighteenth century of the seventeenth century emphasis on the vanity of life and the horrors of death and judgment. While Watts consistently offset these ideas by the thought of the saving power of Jesus and the bliss of the good in heaven, popular imagination seized most readily upon the gruesome parts of his poetry, and fed therewith that religious melancholy which Burton had described in the Anatomy. We may suppose that the new edition of The Day of Doom²² by Michael Wigglesworth in 1711 was for the benefit of English readers, since there were by this time plenty of facilities for publishing in his New England home. This poem, in swinging ballad metre, describes with crude power the terrors of the great day. It takes the extreme Calvinist position in the determination of the elect, picturing with gusto the separation of friends and relatives, and the removal of unbaptized infants to “the easiest room in hell.”

It is evident that Edward Young's first poem, The Last Day, 1713,²³ merely continues the seventeenth century tradition, though the usual themes are expanded at much greater length than by Flatman, Roscommon, Pomfret, Wigglesworth, or Watts. Nor is it necessary to look farther for his inspiration than to these poets, to Milton, and to the usual funeral and judgment day sermons.²⁴

The poem, in three books, has a very rambling plan. In the opening lines of the first book, the poet prays for divine help to equal his theme.²⁵ He calls upon man to view the wonder and the beauty of the universe, but reminds him that, at the terrible sound of the last trump, all this beauty will be destroyed. And if the earth, once so beautifully rolling in state through space, shall in an instant become “one universal ruin,” what of man himself? He must bow his proud head, acknowledge that he is made of clay,

                                        and curse his form
That speaks distinction from his sister-worm.(26)

He must beg God, who once sweat blood to save him, to defend him at this supreme moment.²⁷ The wicked will beg the universe to hide them from the divine wrath,²⁸ but the universe will cast them forth to meet their doom, as the ports hurl back a fleeing traitor to execution. But the good man will be cared for, as the leviathan cared for Jonah, when he was cast into the sea. Here follows an elaborate retelling, with long descriptions, of the whole story of Jonah, the excuse for which is the analogy with God's redemption of man.²⁹

The greater part of the second book is taken up by the description of the way in which the graves give up their dead, the scattered bones rejoin each other, and the souls find their proper bodies. The poet here seems unnecessarily literal!

Now charnels rattle; scatter'd limbs and all
The various bones, obsequious to the call,
Self-mov'd, advance; the neck perhaps to meet
The distant head; the distant legs, the feet.
Dreadful to view, see thro' the dusky sky
Fragments of bodies in confusion fly.(30)

Westminster Abbey gives up its royal dead, and bodies arise from beneath other great buildings, for

The most magnificent and costly dome
Is but an upper chamber to a tomb.
No spot on earth but has supply'd a grave,
And human skulls the spacious ocean pave.(31)

Young describes the miscellaneous throng of Christians, Jews, Turks, and pagans before the judgment seat. None approach with more confidence than the philanthropists. Here Young inserts compliments to sundry benefactors mentioned by name, together with the pious hope that he, too, may be found among the saved.

The Judge now comes to judgment. The rest of the book consists of descriptions of the Son enthroned and contrasting descriptions of his lowly birth and humble life. The poet ranges from general pious aspirations and exclamations to detailed pictures like that of the unfurling of a great flag on which is a red cross which flushes the hills and dyes the ocean with red. At the end, he represents himself as kneeling in prayer for guidance in the right way through life.

The third book resumes the description of the judgment. The seal is broken, the book opened, the throngs divided into two parts; the seats of bliss above are described, and the boiling sulphurous furnace below. The condemned soul utters a cry of agony.

Who burst the barriers of my peaceful grave?
…
And cast me out into the wrath of God;
Where shrieks, the roaring flame, the rattling chain,
And all the dreadful eloquence of pain,
Our only song?

The guilty soul acknowledges his sin, but prays that the punishment may not be forever. If he had never been born, he could not have sinned.

Father of mercies! why from silent earth
Didst thou awake and curse me into birth?
Tear me from quiet, ravish me from night,
And make a thankless present of thy light!
Push into being a reverse of thee,
And animate a clod with misery?(32)
                    The beasts are happy! they come forth, and keep
Short watch on earth, and then lie down to sleep:
Pain is for man …(33)

He asks whether God can bear to

                    see me plunging in the dark abyss?
Calling thee Father in a sea of fire?
Or pouring blasphemies at thy desire?

He begs that God will not exalt himself by the misery of so insignificant a creature, and makes one last, small request:

When I have wept a thousand lives away;
When torment is grown weary of its prey;
When I have rav'd ten thousand years in fire,
Ten thousand thousand, let me then expire.

But his plea is in vain, for it comes too late.³⁴ The blessed move to heaven to fill the places left vacant by the fall of Satan and his angels. Here the poet's strength fails him. He descends from the regions of bliss to paint

Dissolving elements and worlds in flame.

The world perishes like bubbles on a stream, or sparks scattered from a fire.³⁵

In conclusion, the poet admonishes his readers that all this prospective dissolution is for man's sake, to put him in his proper place in a newly created and greater universe. Man, therefore, must begin now to look on himself with new respect, and live in a manner worthy of his great destiny. For his sake God hung the sun in the sky. When that service is done, “its beams shall fade away, And God shine forth in one eternal day.”³⁶

The path marked out in the seventeenth century and pursued in the eighteenth by the dissenter, Watts, and the Anglican clergyman, Young, was followed presently by Aaron Hill, a man most influential in the world of letters at the moment, as friend of Pope and Swift, and much concerned with publishing enterprises.³⁷ Hill was kind-hearted, serious-minded, and devoid of literary taste, just the man to foster, in secular and middle-class circles, the tendency to the free, the diffuse expression of the melancholy mood. Perhaps directly inspired by Young, whom he knew personally, and whose poem, The Last Day, was then in its second edition, Hill in 1721 wrote The Judgment Day.

The course of thought in the first four sections of this poem is precisely like Young's. Common to both are (1) the poet's claim that he is treating a subject far greater than those usually found in poetry, his sense of insufficiency for his task, and his calling upon the Lord for aid; (2) admiration of the beauty of the universe and pathos at the thought that it must all perish in the last day; (3) the description of the sound of the first trump and of the wandering of the disembodied spirits through space in answer to its call. At this point the resemblance ceases, and even up to this point, it is plain that Hill, although his poem is more logically constructed than Young's, has none of the emotional power of the latter.

The greater part of Hill's poem is taken up with a description, all too detailed and pseudo-scientific, of the destruction of the material universe. He has a very definite idea of the precise manner in which this is to happen. The sound of the first trump dissolves the world. The valleys heave upward, the forests are torn from their roots, the hills leap into the air, the rivers spout up, hissing as they meet the descending lightnings. Cities tumble in ruins, the mountains crumble, and the ocean swallows everything. This ocean then falls into the earth's center, which is so hot that the flood boils and recoils as steam. The steam rising towards the stars is followed by gigantic waves of liquid flame, which meet the sun, stars, and planets, throwing them into confusion. At the sound of the second and last trump, all these bodies clash and burn together in one great conflagration. The dark, cold planets, “hills of ice,” dance about in the fire like huge hail-stones, until they too are melted. At last the whole subsides into the burning lake of damnation and there is a horrible silence. Now, above all, arches the region of heaven, a great dome shining in gorgeous colors, silver, azure, black, red, and gold.

The voice of the Eternal is heard, bringing about the resurrection. Scattered atoms come together, forming new and everlasting bodies, and the souls, which, since the

Far, above all, thro' the dome's op'ning crown,
Broad, as a world, the almighty's Eye looks down.

death of the earthly body, have been wanderers through space, descend to enter these. Adam now beholds his whole race; Caesar and Cato meet, as do the martyred Charles and his murderers.³⁸ Here the poet's “fancy” evidently fails him, and he hurries his conclusion. The Saviour calls the righteous to bliss; they obey and pass beyond the poet's sight. The close is didactic. Virtuous action is better than poetical composition; let action then be henceforth the author's sphere.

All has been said, that's worth a wise man's ear,
But much may be performed that's greatly new.

The grotesqueness of all this to modern readers is apparent. The poem is verbally lurid without being really terrible. Especially absurd are the lions riding about the hot ocean on floating oaks, the elephants swimming desperately, and the indignation of the whales when they find out that the water they have sucked in is “no cooling flood” and angrily spout the boiling liquid to heaven. On the other hand there are a few—a very few—bits that are effective in almost a Dantesque manner.

Thin troops of naked ghosts, long stript of clay,
That, wand'ring 'twixt the spheres …
Start, in loose shoals, and glide, like mists, away. …

The birds, skimming in frightened clouds over a darkening earth, are

Wind-shaken, scorch'd, and wash'd by driving rains
          . …

There is an absence of allegorical personages, and no dominant influence of any previous poet, not even Milton, is seen throughout most of the poem. Hill's imagination, such as it is, is his own. It is noticeable that he omits the torments of the damned, in contrast to Watts and Young, and that he does not much emphasize the fears of the human race. In fact, he seems in the midst of his terrific relation to take a certain pleasure in contemplating destruction on so grand a scale.

The rest of Hill's poetry shows, amidst the usual epistolary compliment, occasional verse, satire, and mildly gallant love verses, the usual variations. That is, he makes the orthodox Apology for Death, in which death is declared to be really a blessing, and writes one poem on Solitude, and one on The Happy Man. He has a number of scriptural paraphrases, and sends his imagination roaming in The Excursion of Fancy: A Pindaric Ode. None of these has any distinction. They are mentioned merely as indications of the kinds of reflective poems which were sure to be tried by any poet of the day. One bit of Hill's verse which has found its way into a modern anthology is entitled A Retrospect and represents his highest level. It is a Complaint of Life.

Oh life! deceitful lure of lost desires,
How short thy period, yet how fierce thy fires!
Scarce can a passion start, we change so fast
Ere new lights strike us, and the old are past.
Schemes following schemes, so long life's taste
          explore,
That ere we learn to live, we live no more.
Who then can think, yet sigh to part with breath,
Or shun the healing hand of friendly death?(39)

The plague at Marseilles in 1720 frightened England thoroughly and may have united with the ever prevalent smallpox to bring the subjects of disease, death, and the uncertainty of the life of man prominently into mind. Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (1722) recalls in some of its details the descriptions of the plague at Athens in Lucretius. The new edition of Creech's Lucretius in 1722 has notes which call attention to Sprat's poem, The Plague at Athens.⁴⁰

If we may accept the date assigned to William Broome's Melancholy: An Ode,⁴¹ it was written in 1723 though not published till 1729.⁴² The occasion was the death of a beloved daughter. Its opening and closing lines and its meter are evidently influenced by Milton's Il Penseroso. It has one line taken pretty directly from Hamlet, while stanzas five and six recall Job.

Open thy marble jaws, O tomb,
Thou earth, conceal me in thy womb!
And you, ye worms, this frame confound;
Ye brother reptiles of the ground!
O life, frail offspring of a day!
'T is puff'd with one short gasp away!
Swift as the short-lived flower it flies,
It springs, it blooms, it fades, it dies.

The remainder of the poem is a moralization on the certainty of unhappiness, and the natural depravity of man. “All is show,” says the poet,

All, to the coffin from our birth,
In this vast toy-shop of the earth.

At the end the poet renews his invocation to melancholy and bids adieu to the vain world.

In Broome's Poem on Death, Virgil and Milton furnish some of the descriptive detail. The opening lines are a description of Death enthroned.

High on a trophy, raised of human bones,
Swords, spears, and arrows, and sepulchral stones,
In horrid state she reigns! attendant ills
Besiege her throne, and when she frowns she kills;
Through the thick gloom the torch red-gleaming burns,
O'er shrouds, and sable palls, and mouldering urns;
While flowing stoles, black plumes, and scutcheons
          spread
An idle pomp around the silent dead:
Unawed by power, in common heap she flings
The scrips of beggars, and the crowns of kings:
Here gales of sighs, instead of breezes, blow,
And streams of tears for ever murmuring flow:
The mournful yew with solemn horror waves
His baleful branches, saddening even the graves:
Around, all birds obscene loud screaming fly,
Clang their black wings, and shriek along the sky.

The poet shudders with horror. An angel appears, and rebukes him for wishing to avoid the common fate when his “Saviour deigned to die.” The poet, abashed, reflects that life is

A breath, one single gasp must puff away
A short-lived flower. …

that existence is really not worth while, and that “the poor reptile, man,” is more blessed to die than to live, since by death

He mounts triumphant to eternal day.

In spite of the fact that histories of literature seldom mention Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe (Philomela—a pen name intended to remind readers of her patronym, Singer), both her prose and her poetry undoubtedly gratified popular taste throughout the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth.⁴³

Her first book appeared in 1696; while most of her verse was not published until after her death in 1737, it was evidently passed about in manuscript among a considerable circle much earlier. Her friend, Dr. Watts, paid her a poetical tribute in 1706 On her Divine Poems, and, in editing her Devout Exercises of the Heart, wrote a laudatory preface defending the “soft and passionate turn” of her religious meditations,⁴⁴ and condoning the occasional confusion of her style. Her somewhat sensational prose work, Friendship in Death: in Twenty Letters from the Dead to the Living, was published in 1728 with a dedication to Young, whose Last Day and Paraphrase on part of the book of Job she admired, and whose tone in the Night Thoughts she curiously anticipates at times in her prose.

She was the daughter of a nonconformist and herself a Calvinist in belief; nevertheless she declined to be classed intellectually and socially with dissenters,⁴⁵ and she had warm friends among Anglicans. Although herself a very quiet person, she knew some people of fashion. The Countess of Hertford⁴⁶ was her chief correspondent, but her circle included also Lady Winchilsea, the Earl of Orrery, the poet Prior (who, tradition says, wished to marry her), Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, and Bishop Thomas Ken of Bath and Wells, besides Watts and Young already mentioned. The variety of these intimacies is one of the indications that the love of melancholy literature was a tie that bound together persons of very different birth, breeding, beliefs, and tastes.

Her temperament in youth was serious and pious, and became positively morbid after the death of her husband, Thomas Rowe, who was thirteen years younger than she, and to whose memory she was romantically devoted. She was fond of the retired life, of reading, drawing, music, and of writing, especially poems and letters. As a reader she showed a capacity equal to that of Jaques for sucking melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs. In fact from her wide reading, she selects for quotation in letters to friends solely the melancholy element, which she finds everywhere. She writes a letter explaining that Shakespeare's Henry the Fifth “gives the most solemn image in the world of the end of human greatness.” She recommends Cowley's Essays (Misc. Works, vol. II, p. 67) and copies out the soliloquy from Dryden's Aurengzebe (ibid. p. 240; ante p. 46). She finds nourishment for melancholy in Pascal and is much interested in Milton (pp. 58, 62).

Among her contemporaries she quotes the soliloquy in Addison's Cato, which in her Friendship in Death (p. 13) she says she is sure the author repents having written, since it influences people to commit suicide. She quotes also “Mr. Pope's poem on death,” i.e., The Dying Christain to his Soul (Misc. Works, vol. II, p. 178), admires William Law (p. 67), Watts's sermons and poems (pp. 68, 98, 113, 116) and Blackmore's lines,

What are distinction, honor, wealth and state,
The pomp of courts and triumphs of the great;
…
If dread of death still unsubdu'd remains,
And secret o'er the vanquish'd victor reigns,
Th' illustrious slave in endless thraldom bears,
A heavier chain than his led captive wears.

(p. 57)

Nicholas Rowe's tragedy of Jane Grey comes in for praise and quotation.

My soul grows out of tune, it loathes the world,
Sickens at all the noise and folly of it;
And I could sit me down in some dull shade,
Where lonely contemplation keeps her cave,
And dwells with hoary hermite; there forget myself,
There fix my stupid eyes upon the earth,
And muse away an age in deepest melancholy.

(pp. 36, 38)

She copies out a long poem by her friend Mr. Birch, On the Death of a Beloved Wife; written by her husband on her coffin (pp. 126-30), and another by Mr. Grove, On the Author's Recovery out of Sickness, containing descriptions of his state of mind on the approach of death, and such reflections as

Sure life is but a huddled dream,
And time a swift, deceitful stream,
This vain world a shining bubble
Only full of wind and trouble.

She is in raptures over Thomson's Seasons and Solitude (pp. 55, 79, 102, 178) and even over Sophonisba, “a noble tragedy; I can't help preferring it to Mr. Addison's Cato” (p. 111). Most of all perhaps, she took delight in Young's poetry (pp. 61, 106, 107), although she died before the publication of the Night Thoughts. She is enchanted by Shaftesbury's Moralists (p. 44), and versifies a part of it (vol. I, p. 143, On Love), although she confesses to not quite understanding it.⁴⁷ These are only a few illustrations out of very many melancholy passages. Over and over again, she protests with Sophonisba,

I want to be alone, to find some shade,
Some solitary gloom; there to shake off
This weight of life, this tumult of mankind. …

Her own poetry, entirely negligible today except as it indicates tendency, includes Despair (Misc. Works, vol. I, p. 71), which is characteristic:

Oh! lead me to some solitary gloom,
Where no enliv'ning beams, nor chearful echoes come;
…
There, in a melting, solemn, dying strain,
Let me, all day, upon my lyre complain,
And wind up all its soft, harmonious strings,
To noble, serious, melancholy things.
…
Here to my fatal sorrows let me give
The short remaining hours I have to live,
Then, with a sullen, deep-fetch'd groan expire,
And to the grave's dark solitude retire.

Two other Retirement poems are in lighter vein, To Chloe, and To Mrs. Arabella Fermor in the Country (ibid., pp. 84, 106). Two express her grief for her husband (pp. 115, 118-120). In these and in other elegies she calls upon the world of nature to mourn with her (pp. 75, 115, 116). In some translations from Tasso, there are “horror” passages. She turns Revelations, ch. XVI into verse (p. 78), and also writes The Conflagration (p. 86), another judgment day ode full of grotesque effects imitated from Young, but unlike Young, Watts, and Hill, ending with the descent of the wicked into hell

Where, without intermission, without end,
Howling and lamentations loud ascend;
With flames and hellish smother, which appear
To form about the globe a dreadful atmosphere.

Her personal letters more often than not take the form of smoothly flowing little essays on the vanity of life, on retirement, on the necessity of preparation for death (vol. II, pp. 44, 69-70, 77, 80). In fact, she warns her correspondents that if they forget their latter end it will not be her fault. When she herself is ill, or hears that there is an epidemic in the neighborhood, she takes pleasure in writing letters of solemn farewell to her friends. Many such letters were found in her cabinet when she died. She was well aware that her manner of life might be criticised as “the effects of melancholy,” ill-nature, or selfishness, but she often insisted that she chose retirement not because she was “in the spleen,” but for the sake of improving her reason and her morals.

It was natural enough to a woman of this temperament to project her imagination beyond the life of this world, and to conceive a series of letters supposed to be addressed to the living from the dead. Some of these are intended to be of a consolatory nature, but most of them are awful warnings, and they usually follow some sort of startling or romantic situation in a story cut short by death. Fifty years later, Mrs. Rowe would probably have written novels in letter form; as it is, her little book seems to be inspired by Drelincourt and Young in combination with her own ardent but rather commonplace imagination.

In Letter II, Leonora, who has seen her ghostly correspondent, is assured by her brother that the apparition is “the effect of spleen.” In Letter I, a ghost appears in correct ghostly surroundings, which would have suited Young.

The hour was come; the clock from a neighboring steeple struck one; no human voice was heard to break the awful silence; the moon and stars shone clear in their midnight splendor, and glimmered through the trees, which in lofty rows led to the centre of a grove, where I was engaged to meet you.

Letter XII is given up to describing the terror with which a libertine meets his end and suggests, though feebly, some of Dr. Young's warnings to Lorenzo in Night Thoughts. In Letter XVI a dead brother warns a living, “you have but a few weeks more to live. … It is a serious thing, My Lord, to die.” The series ends with a translation of Thoughts on Death from the Moral Essays of Messieurs de Port-Royal, containing an effective paragraph on what a man loses in death:

When a man dies, he loses not only what is called his wealth, but the firmament, the sun, the stars, the air, the earth, and all the rest of nature: he loses his body, and all those sensations that gave him pleasure; he loses his relations, his friends, and all mankind; he loses all relief, all support, and in short, all the objects of his senses and passions.

Mrs. Rowe's Letters Moral and Entertaining, usually included with Friendship in Death, repeat many of the same effects. The most definitely “melancholy” are a meditation among the tombs in Westminster Abbey (Part III, Letter IX) and a poetical letter from “the abandoned Amoret,” in hell, who writes thence to assure a friend that it is a very real place (Part III).⁴⁸

Not only was the melancholy mood of the seventeenth century perpetuated by poets of religious training, such as Watts, Young, and Mrs. Rowe, but the secular group of Queen Anne writers, who were just beginning to depend on editors and the general public rather than on patrons and the court, showed themselves sensitive to the prevailing taste for melancholy themes. We find, in fact, that for a period of about ten years, between 1709 and 1719, each of the writers whose best work may be described as neoclassic and optimistic, paid his court in one fashion or another to Melancholy. To modern readers, it is evident that, for these writers, the melancholy mood lacked reality and intensity enough to find for itself original expression or true form. Hence they contented themselves largely with repetitions and imitations, variations upon a very few themes. We are conscious of a narrow range of subjects and a want of sincerity, of emotional depth, and of philosophic insight. Nevertheless it is interesting to observe that they did, for a time, play or experiment with the old melancholy themes.

Steele and Addison, both of whom were sincere Christians and orthodox Anglicans, seem to have been in sympathy with Burton's views on religious melancholy. To them, the fanaticism of religious enthusiasts and the indifference of atheism or materialism were equally an evidence of an unsound state of mind. With the weapons both of ridicule and of persuasion, they set themselves to defining the limits and illustrating the uses of the melancholy mood in human life and in literature.

Steele, a man who flung himself heartily into the business of living, appears to have thought that a little melancholy musing was good for the system, like a dose of spring medicine. In The Tatler no. 181 (1710) he has a meditation on death, to which is prefixed a quotation from Aeneid V, 49.

                    Dies ni fallor, adest, quem semper acerbum
Semper honoratum (sic di voluistis), habebo.

He begins:

When we are advanced in years, there is not a more pleasing entertainment, than to recollect in a gloomy moment the many we have parted with that have been dear and agreeable to us, and to cast a melancholy thought or two after those with whom, perhaps, we have indulged ourselves in whole nights of mirth and jollity. With such inclinations in my heart I went to my closet yesterday in the evening, and resolved to be sorrowful. … With tempers too much given to pleasure, it is almost necessary to revive the old places of grief in our memory, and ponder step by step on past life, to lead the mind into that sobriety of thought which poises the heart, and makes it beat with due time, without being quickened with desire, or retarded with despair, from its proper and equal motion.

He then, in a famous passage, describes his feeling at the death of his father, at the death of friends in the army, at the death of his first love. But far from calming himself, he simply works himself into a perfect passion of tender feeling, when he is interrupted by the arrival of a present of a hamper of wine. He calls in some friends, and the evening ends in a drinking bout, “rather cheerful than frolicsome.”

Spectator no. 133 (1711), by Steele, plays again upon the idea of mingled terror, delight, and sorrow to be found in such contemplations.

Addison's position is really the same though more thoughtfully taken. He believed that religion ought to be cheerful, and made fun of fanatics who were so exclusively concerned with the preparation for death that they ignored fitness for life and daily business (Spectator no. 494, 1712). Religious meditation in the solitude of the country, far from producing in his mind sad thoughts, led him to “actual sensations” of God, as his own phrase is (Spectator no. 465, 1712). The poetry that resulted was the hymn,

The spacious firmament on high,
With all the blue ethereal sky,
And spangled heav'ns, a shining frame,
Their great Original proclaim.(49)

Although his prose Meditations in Westminster Abbey (Spectator no. 26, 1711) has prefixed the familiar “motto” from Horace's Odes,

Pallida mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas
Regumque turris. …

Addison's thought does not take either of the characteristic Horatian turns. Horace's train of thought in connection with death would have been either, “Spring is here, let us enjoy it, for death is coming soon,”⁵⁰ or, “Strive not for wealth or high place, for death will presently bestow upon another the fruit of your efforts.”⁵¹ Addison's mind is as well balanced in the presence of tombs as is Horace's. “I know,” he says, “that entertainments of this nature are apt to raise dark and dismal thoughts in timorous minds and gloomy imaginations; but for my own part, though I am always serious, I do not know what it is to be melancholy; and can therefore take a view of nature in her deep and solemn scenes, with the same pleasure as in her most gay and delightful ones.” In fact the “kind of melancholy, or rather thoughtfulness” produced by such a place is “not unpleasing.” He reflects on the worthlessness of some lives, the promiscuity in burial, the special appropriateness of some epitaphs, but his leading idea is that a visit to such a place is a sort of moral tonic. It kills envy and inordinate desire, at the same time softening the heart and bringing about a more just conception of the relative values of human actions and desires. Thus Addison makes a distinction between unwholesome melancholy, which is mere self-indulgence in emotion, and wholesome melancholy, in which the mind is active for self-improvement.⁵² In Spectator no. 289 (1712) he again expresses the idea of the moral usefulness of meditations upon death.

The famous soliloquy in Addison's Cato (1713), though it advocates suicide in a special case, does so not in the “melancholy” manner of a desperate man drawn on to self-murder, but on grounds of pure reason.

The case of Pope is different from that of Addison and Steele. In his earliest work, he seems to have had an inclination towards the melancholy genre of the seventeenth century. The first poem of his which can be certainly dated is the Ode on Solitude, 1709,⁵³ which sets forth after the manner of Martial the pleasures of a country life, but ends with a plaintive wish for obscurity:

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown,
Thus unlamented let me die,
Steal from the world and not a stone
Tell where I lie.

In 1712 he made a prose translation bringing out the full pathos of the death-bed utterance of the Emperor Hadrian, Animula blandula vagula.

Alas, my soul! thou pleasing companion of this body, thou fleeting thing that art now deserting it! Whither art thou flying? to what unknown region? Thou art all trembling, fearful, and pensive. Now what is become of thy former wit and humour? thou shalt jest and be gay no more!⁵⁴

He later made a poetical version in three stanzas, expanding the theme as it might shape itself in the mind, not of a pagan emperor, but of a dying Christian. This was published in Lewis's Miscellany, 1730, and in a revised form in the authorized edition of Pope's Works in 1737. By this time, the poem has become entirely non-melancholy through its orthodox Christian conclusion, expressed with an emotional fervor not found in Pope's more characteristic work. The dying man calls to the angels,

Lend, lend your wings! I mount! I fly!
O Grave! Where is thy Victory?
                    O Death! Where is thy Sting?(55)

The fervor, however, is caught from the models Pope had been reading, Flatman,⁵⁶ Prior, and the Scriptures.

Pope's early translation of The First Book of Statius: his Thebias (published 1712 in Lintot's Miscellaneous Poems) shows that he was for the moment pleased with the sensationalism of “horror” passages. Typical lines are the description of the Fury, Tisiphone:

Swift as she passed, the flitting ghosts withdrew,
And the pale spectres trembled at her view:
…
Blood stain'd her cheeks, and from her mouth there
          came
Blue steaming poisons, and a length of flame.

Or these:

The birds obscene, that nightly flock to taste,
With hollow screeches fled the dire repast;
And rav'nous dogs, allur'd by scent of blood,
And starving wolves, ran howling to the wood.(57)

Windsor Forest, 1713, also has a conventionally melancholy description of the ruined countryside about New Forest.

The levelled towns with weeds lie covered o'er;
The hollow winds through naked temples roar;
Round broken columns clapping ivy twined;
O'er heaps of ruin stalked the stately hind;
The fox obscene to gaping tombs retires,
And savage howlings fill the sacred choirs.

There is, also, in the same poem a passage on the happiness of retired country life, which vaguely recalls, as Pope's various commentators remark, Virgil's second Georgic, Horace, Lucan, or John Philips's Cider.

In 1717 Pope published two poems, each of which turns upon the fate of a woman unfortunate in love. The Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady is a lament over the death by suicide of a young lady whose ghost haunts the moonlit glade. She is represented as dying in a foreign land, alone,⁵⁸ and as refused Christian burial rites.⁵⁹ At the end, after the manner of an epitaph, a pathetic picture is drawn of the unmarked grave.

So peaceful rests, without a stone, a name,
What once had beauty, titles, wealth, and fame.
How loved, how honoured once, avails thee not,
To whom related, or by whom begot;
A heap of dust alone remains of thee;
'Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be.

The closing lines anticipate the death of the poet himself, when the muse shall be forgotten “and thou beloved no more.”

The famous Eloisa to Abelard has many a melancholy touch in the description of Eloisa's surroundings.

In these deep solitudes and awful cells,
Where heav'nly-pensive contemplation dwells,
And ever-musing melancholy reigns. …
…
Ye grots and caverns, shagged with horrid thorn,
Shrines! where their vigils pale-eyed virgins keep,
…
In these lone walls (their day's eternal bound),
These moss-grown domes with spiry turrets crowned,
Where awful arches make a noon-day night,
And the dim windows shed a solemn light. …
But o'er the twilight groves and dusky caves,
Long-sounding aisles and intermingled graves,
Black Melancholy sits, and round her throws
A death-like silence, and a dread repose.
…
methinks we wand'ring go
Through dreary wastes, and weep each other's woe,
Where round some mould'ring tow'r pale ivy creeps,
And low-browed rocks hang nodding o'er the deeps.(60)

All this is quite in the seventeenth century manner. But it is the end of pensiveness, pathos, and of any hint of love-melancholy in Pope. The Works collected and published by Lintot in 1717 contained poems of a very different kind which had been even more admired than these, namely An Essay on Criticism and The Rape of the Lock (first published 1712). Moreover Pope was at the moment immensely occupied with the translation of Homer. His later references to death occur chiefly in his imitations of Horace, and quite in the Horatian vein. Philosophically his attitude towards life and death is the deistic optimism of Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke, later the orthodox position of Warburton. But from 1709 to 1717 there is an evident inclination towards melancholy of the pensive kind, and towards pathetic description, owing to influences transmitted from the seventeenth century.

Swift's poems belong in the anti-melancholy group to be discussed later (ch. V).

In order to understand the work of Thomas Parnell, the poet of the Night Piece on Death, we must constantly bear in mind that he was a man of little originality, dependent in his literary work as in the conduct of his life on the advice of his friends, especially Swift and Pope. In religion, he was quite orthodox, and he suffered from a sense of personal unworthiness which he liked to pour out in the long, pious poems which were perhaps the literary form he would have found most natural if left to himself. These, however, were successfully suppressed by his friends,⁶¹ and, with two exceptions, Parnell's poems, as published in Steele's Poetical Miscellanies (April, 1713) and in the collection made by Pope in 1721 after Parnell's death in 1718, are “occasional,” or didactic, or are directly imitative of wellknown classic models of the non-melancholy sort.

The two exceptions are in the manner called melancholy by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but which we should term simply reflective, or perhaps pensive. One of them is the Hymn to Contentment, or Hymn on Contemplation, by which and by the didactic poem, The Hermit, Parnell was best known to his own century up to the appearance of Goldsmith's Life of Parnell in 1776.⁶² The Hymn⁶³ is evidently, in phrasing and metre, inspired by Parnell's reading of Il Penseroso, but in idea it is opposed to Milton's thought, for it condemns solitude as leading to restlessness and skepticism, unless solitary meditation is deliberately turned into religious channels.

The silent heart which Grief assails,
Treads soft and lonesome o'er the Vales,
Sees Daisies open, Rivers run,
And seeks (as I have vainly done)
Amusing Thought; but learns to know
That Solitude's the Nurse of Woe.
No real Happiness is found
In trailing Purple O'er the Ground:
Or in a Soul exalted high,
To range the Circuit of the Sky,
Converse with Stars above, and know
All Nature in its Forms below;
The Rest it seeks, in seeking dies,
And Doubts at last for knowledge rise.

Presently Contentment speaks:

“Know God—and bring thy Heart to know.
The Joys which from Religion flow.”

The poet accepts her admonition:

Oh! by yonder Mossy Seat
In my Hours of sweet Retreat;
Might I thus my Soul employ,
With sense of gratitude and Joy.

Presently his thought takes a turn like that of Addison's Hymn, published a few months before Parnell's.

I'll lift my Voice and tune my String,
And thee, great Source of Nature, sing.

He then enumerates a long list of “natural objects,” and concludes:

All of these, and all I see
Shou'd be sung and sung by me:
They speak their Maker as they can,
But want and ask the Tongue of Man.(64)

The other exception, A Night-Piece on Death, which it became the habit of the later eighteenth century to compare favorably with Gray's Elegy⁶⁵ was not published until 1721, when Pope, some three years after Parnell's death, made a selection of his friend's poetry.⁶⁶ I think it highly probable, however, that it was written about 1712 or early in 1713, that is to say about the same time as the Hymn to Contentment, which it resembles in metre. In thought it is loosely related to Addison's prose Westminster Abbey, for the poet visits “a place of graves” in order to learn wisdom, and makes somewhat the same general reflections when confronted by

The marble tombs that rise on high,
Whose dead in vaulted arches lie,
Whose pillars swell with sculptur'd stones,
Arms, angels, epitaphs and bones.

In mood and in vocabulary it recalls Parnell's own prose Vision, in the Spectator no. 501 (1712), sometimes called A Vision of Grief.

In this Vision, the author embarks on the River of Tears in a boat steered by Misfortune.

When we landed, we perceived the Island to be strangely overcast with Fogs, which no Brightness could pierce, so that a kind of gloomy Horror sat always brooding over it. … We marched solemnly as at a Funeral, thro' bordering Hedges of Rose-Mary, and thro' a grove of Yew-Trees, which love to over-shadow Tombs and flourish in Church-Yards. [We approached] the most dusky silent Part of the Island … the grotto of Grief. It was a wide, hollow, and melancholy Cave, sunk deep in a Dale, and watered by Rivulets that had a Colour between Red and Black. These crept slow, and half congealed amongst its windings, and mixed their heavy Murmur with the Echo of Groans that rolled thro' all the Passages. In the most retired part sat [Grief] … in eternal Pensiveness, and the profoundest Silence. On one side of her stood Dejection just dropping into a Swoon, and Paleness wasting to a Skeleton. … The whole Vault had a genuine Dismalness in it, which a few scattered Lamps, whose blueish Flames arose and sunk in their Urns, discovered to our Eyes with Encrease. …

[We emerged and began to compare experiences with others, which gave us some comfort. The darkness lessened.] We could now and then discern Tracts in it of a lighter Greyness, like the Breakings of Day, short in Duration, much enlivening, and called in that Country Gleams of Amusement. … Here the waters, that rolled on the other side so deep and silent, were much dried up. … [Patience handed me over to Comfort] and double Day at once broke in upon me.

The experience under the allegorical language we know⁶⁷ to have been this. Parnell's wife died in 1711, and for a year he suffered from melancholia so intense that his friends were alarmed for his sanity. By their efforts he was restored to a normal frame of mind, and began to take renewed interest in life. After 1712 he was writing steadily, submitting what he wrote to Steele, Addison, or Pope, while for his professional advancement he was depending on Swift.

The Night Piece on Death is free from any reference to personal grief, which would have offended the taste of Swift or Pope, and its orthodox Christian ending is such as would have been approved by Addison. It survives for us today by a certain actuality conveyed with very few touches. Parnell had to spend much of his time in retirement at Clogher in Ireland, where he was archdeacon. There, as the Hymn to Contentment hints, he took solitary walks, and such a walk, whether in England, or in Ireland, is sure to lead sometimes to a churchyard. Once, walking at night, Parnell was struck by the beauty of the dark sky with its stars reflected in the silent water below the churchyard hill, and by the pathos of the human effort to perpetuate distinctions of person or of fortune through differences in the manner of marking graves. This impression he successfully transferred to paper. Once having embarked on meditations concerning death, he continues in quite the seventeenth century manner. Ghosts rise “wrapp'd in shrouds” and urge him to

Think, mortal, what it is to die.

The voice of King Death is heard in a “peal of hollow groans,” but begins to speak against the fear of death, and against the external “forms of woe” in which grief expresses itself. The true view is

Death's but a path that must be trod,
If man would ever pass to God.

If my dating of this poem is right, there is no further pensive strain in Parnell after 1712 or 1713. His didactic tale, The Hermit, reflects the doctrine, “Whatever is, is right.” The rest of the volume of 1721 is non-melancholy.

John Gay, another member of the same circle, had more originality in expression than Parnell, but was equally dependent for his themes on suggestions from the stronger members of the group.

In the same collection with Parnell's Hymn to Contentment are two poems written by Gay, although printed anonymously. A Contemplation on Night⁶⁸ takes the same vaguely deistic or vaguely Christian position as Parnell's Hymn and Addison's “The spacious firmament on high.”

Whether amid the gloom of night I stray,
Or my glad eyes enjoy revolving day,
Still Nature's various face informs my sense,
Of an all-wise, all-powerful Providence.

There is some description of night in a passage which Young may have had in mind in the Night Thoughts.

A Thought on Eternity draws from Horatian premises orthodox Christian conclusions.

Ah! what is life? with ills encompassed round,
Amidst our hopes, Fate strikes the sudden wound …
Who then would wish to stretch this narrow span,
To suffer life beyond the date of man?
The virtuous soul pursues a nobler aim,
And life regards but as a fleeting dream:
She longs to wake and wishes to get free;
To launch from earth into eternity.
For while to Thee she lifts her soaring thought,
Ten thousand thousand rolling years are naught.

In this same year, 1713, Gay, then secretary to the Duchess of Monmouth, published Rural Sports: a Georgic, inscribed to Mr. Pope. His first lines are a sort of Retirement poem contrasting his own situation, confined to the city, with Pope's country retreat at Twickenham. He describes what would be his own chosen occupation on a pleasant summer day—watching the happy peasants rake hay. When the sun was hot, he would retire to the shade and read the Georgics, which are then very skilfully summarized. He describes the coming of evening and of night. Lines 91-94 have a reality which causes them to fore-shadow the beginning of Gray's Elegy where the scene is similar.

Or when the ploughman leaves the task of day,
And trudging homeward whistles on the way;
When the big-udder'd cows with patience stand,
Waiting the stroakings of the damsel's hand. …

Lines 95-106 are unfortunately so generalized as to make no distinct picture. Lines 107-120 repeat in different language the idea of his Contemplation on Night.

But after 1713, Gay's contemplative mood is over. He is absorbed in burlesquing pastorals, in occasional verse, in plays, operas, and mock heroics, sometimes collaborating with others, sometimes merely under orders from Swift and Pope. His vein of pathos found expression in ballads of love—the dramatic monologues of the day—and was much appreciated. But there is no more pensiveness in the first person.

We find, then, that in the Age of Anne and throughout the first quarter of the century, the melancholy of the preceding age persists and the old subjects are treated with even more diffuseness. There is the same fascination with the thought of death, suicide, physical decay, and the Great Assize, the same complaint of the vanity of life, the same professed admiration for solitary retirement. Point of view and phrasing are still largely subject to the same literary influences, Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, Seneca, Martial, Ecclesiastes, Job, the Psalms, reinforced by the influence of Milton.

In the poems on Retirement, or Contemplation, there is an increasing tendency to expand into descriptions copied from Virgil's Georgics or from Milton, but up to 1725 almost no English poet had followed Lady Winchilsea's lead and sought inspiration from the direct and loving observation of nature at first hand. All the nature descriptions are bookish, and they therefore fail either to evoke a picture, or to give pleasure by sharpness or freshness of detail, except where they successfully imitate a fine original. Both Philips and Gay occasionally caught the true Miltonic or classic effect, but for the most part the descriptions are mere maps or lists.

There are, however, some differences in manner between this poetry and that of the last century, differences slight but important as hints of coming change.

First, in the Judgment Day poems particularly, and also in the poems on Contemplation, there is a tendency to dwell on the beauty of the universe as a whole. Poets frequently mount in imagination to some point in stellar space, and there hymn the wonders of planetary motion, passing, by a natural transition, from description to lyric praise of the Creator of such a world. These passages doubtless reflect the growing popularity of Milton's epic and the recognition of the analogy between “the sublime” in certain of his descriptions and in the poetry of the nature Psalms. But they are also symptomatic of the spread of the understanding of the Copernican system and the popular enthusiasm over Newton's discoveries.⁶⁹ We find, in fact, that while an ardently religious mind like Watts accepts without question the necessity of the final cataclysm, secular poets tend to mourn the destruction of so beautiful a world, and to hint at the unreasonableness of condemning to eternal torment beings who are not responsible for their own existence in this world. In Hill's Judgment Day we notice, even, that a sort of scientific pleasure in the exact delineation of the final fate of the cosmos has almost superseded fear of the divine retribution for sin.

Secondly, we observe that the prevailing mood of the poems of Retirement is the Miltonic one. Melancholy is no longer an unmixed evil, but has both its uses and its mild joys, if indulged in moderation and properly dissociated from religious depression. The pleasures of melancholy are described with no feeling that they are abnormal, or dangerous, or that they will inevitably be followed by pain.

In the third place, while all the principal Queen Anne writers, except Swift, recognized possibilities in the old melancholy themes, and tried their hands at either the prose or the poetic expression of them, it is evident that for the most vigorous minds in the group, these subjects did not furnish real inspiration. Swift suppressed his melancholy, or hid it under satiric form. Steele and Addison advised it in small doses only, as moral antidote or tonic. Pope tried the existing fashion, achieving a certain distinction in parts of the Elegy and of Eloisa, but dropped it completely at the age of twenty-nine (1717) having found other moods vastly more fruitful. Gay and Parnell, under the influence of the stronger men, also abandoned contemplation, pensiveness, or gloom. Poets were plainly in need of new and larger experience, if poetry was ever again to rise to lyric heights and resume its place as a formative influence in the spiritual life of Englishmen.⁷⁰

It remains to explain the loss of interest by Pope and his group in melancholy themes when these had been tried with some success and had proved congenial for a time at least. While the influence of Swift was, as we have said, anti-melancholy, and a good deal of poetic energy was absorbed in the writing of political satire, it is evident that these two facts do not, of themselves, sufficiently account for the abandonment of a vein of poetry which was to prove a veritable gold-mine to other poets some thirty years later. A more fundamental explanation is furnished by recognizing the changed and still rapidly changing world of readers for whom the Queen Anne poets wrote.

The twelve years of Anne's reign had seen a revolution in popular literary taste. Greater political stability in church and state following the Act of Settlement (1701), the Union with Scotland (1707), and the Peace of Utrecht (1713), relieved the tension under which Englishmen had been living for a century. Rapid commercial expansion and prosperity, an abundance of material things, was adding to the leisured, reading class more and more of the comfortable, city-bred, middle-class element. For these, the spread of journalism and the free use of the cheap pamphlet form of publication were providing a new literature, chiefly in prose, written by paid writers under orders from politicians, editors, and booksellers, and deliberately aimed to please the general reader, please him easily and at once. The Daily Courant, founded 1702, and Defoe's Review, 1704-13, accustomed readers to demand novelty. The Tatler, 1709-11, and the Spectator, 1711-12, did much to open their minds and awaken their taste for belles-lettres, music, and drama, and to popularize a knowledge of the classics, at least in translation, but the average reader was probably far less intellectually keen than in the days of Charles I, for this new public, though it had real common sense, was somewhat heavy-witted, fond of the clear and the obvious, the sensational, and the sentimental.⁷¹

In religion, the popular attitude was changing from intolerance to indifferentism, skepticism, or cynicism. The re-examination of theology by the light of reason in the early work of Toland, Tindal, and Collins, the anti-sectarianism of such books as Swift's Tale of a Tub (1704) and Hoadly's Preservative against the Principles and Practices of the Non-jurors (1717), the multiplication of dissenting sects, the fierceness of controversy within the church itself, had undermined the influence of religion, and made for worldliness and free-thinking.⁷² The average reader asked for secular reading matter, and his habitual frame of mind, in contrast with that of the late seventeenth century, was optimistic, objective, and not over-anxious about the state—or the fate—of his own soul.

These changes, already well under way by the end of Anne's reign, became more evident under the worldly-wise, prosperous administration of the Whigs, especially during the ministry of Walpole,⁷³ and were at their most influential moment about 1740. Optimism had many exponents, but one of the most important for literature, because of his eloquent and persuasive style, was Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Early of Shaftesbury, who died in 1713.⁷⁴

The nature of Shaftesbury's revolt against seventeenth century pessimism is very fully expressed in his Letter to a Friend, dated Dec. 2, 1704.⁷⁵ He first quotes the letter of his old master, John Locke (cited at the end of chapter II), ending “this life is a scene of vanity, that soon passes away, and affords no solid satisfaction but in the consciousness of doing well, and in hopes of another life. This is what I can say upon experience.” From this breakdown of Locke's philosophical position, and from his apparent sanction of the conventional church doctrine which placed the reward of virtue in a future life, Shaftesbury strongly dissents. His own experience leads him to a different conclusion.

[O]ur life, thank heaven, has been a scene of friendship of long duration, with much and solid satisfaction, founded on the consciousness of doing good for good's sake, without any farther regards, nothing being truly pleasing or satisfactory but what is thus acted disinterestedly, generously, and freely. This is what I can say upon experience, and this you will find sufficient at the last to make all reckonings clear, leaving no terrible account to be made up, nor terrible idea of those who are to account with.

The whole matter, he thinks, is a question of attitude, of will, of moral philosophy.

Life is vain ('t is true) to those that make it so. … For my own part … I have … no falling out with it … No harm in it at all that I know; no vanity. But (if one wills oneself) a fair, honest, sensible thing it is, and not so uncomfortable as it is made.

He then inveighs against the materialistic view that mere living on the animal plane is any satisfaction, and that human and rational pleasures, such as “friendship, justice, generosity, acts of love, and such like, the exposing of life, health, or fortune, spending it, throwing it away, laying it readily down for others—for friends, country, fellow-creatures,—are no happiness or satisfaction without a reward” in this life or another. He accuses the philosophers of his own day of being “hugely given to wealth and bugbears,” i.e., to insisting on a system of visible or invisible rewards and punishments, and upbraids them with “making virtue burdensome and death uneasy.” His own system is a better one.

For our part, let us, on the contrary, make the most of life and least of death. … Thank heaven, I can do good and find heaven in it. I know nothing else that is heavenly. And if this disposition fits me not for heaven, I desire never to be fitted for it, nor come into the place. I ask no reward from heaven for that which is reward itself. Let my being be continued or discontinued, as in the main is best. The author of it best knows, and I trust Him with it. To me it is indifferent, and always shall be so. I have never yet served God or man, but as I loved and liked.

Shaftesbury's Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit had already been published by Toland in 1699, though without the author's knowledge. The rest of his works came out in rapid succession between 1708 and 1710, and were collected in 1711 under the title of Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, of which a new edition, revised and enlarged, was published in 1713 immediately after his death. Other posthumous works continued to appear up to 1721. Signs of his influence are observable in Thomson's Winter (1726), and his ideas and emotions are continually repeated in the poetry of the second quarter of the century by Pope, Akenside, and a host of minor writers.⁷⁶ His books offered the public two novel attractions; the first, that his style was rapturous, the second that his system of ethics was based not on the revelations of religion or on the authority of the Church, but on a tolerant, hopeful view of ordinary human nature. As for the effect on poetry, it is obvious that Shaftesbury's confidence in the reliability of human, average reason, his conception of man as naturally virtuous, of the exercise of virtue as an end in itself and as constituting happiness, his identification of the good and the beautiful, and his indulgence of the “benevolent” sentiments which he found instinctive in all men, would all, if accepted, tend to diminish the attractiveness of the usual melancholy themes.

He held a brief for cheerfulness in religion:⁷⁷

The melancholy way in which we have been taught Religion, makes us unapt to think of it in good Humour. 'Tis in Adversity chiefly, or in ill Health, under Affliction, or Disturbance of Mind, or Discomposure of Temper, that we have recourse to it. Tho in reality we are never so unfit to think of it as at such a heavy and dark Hour. … For then it is we see Wrath, and Fury, and Revenge, and Terrors in the Deity; when we are full of Disturbance and Fears within. …

If we would but contemplate the nature of the deity at a time when we ourselves were “in the best of Humours, and in the sweetest, kindest Disposition of our Lives,” we should perceive that either there is no God, or else that “he is truly and perfectly Good,” and hence incapable of sending evil upon men, even by way of punishment.

In a passage in which he discriminates between the harmless and the harmful indulgence of fancy⁷⁸ he charges melancholy poetry (whether religious or Epicurean) with conducing to sensuality.

One of the latter [i.e., of the harmful fancies] is an Enchantress who appears in a sort of dismal Weed and with a most mournful Countenance, often casting up her Eyes, and wringing her Hands. … The Airs she borrows, are from the tragick Muse Melpomene … and if by her tragick Aspect, and melancholy Looks, she can persuade us that Death (whom she represents) is such a hideous Form; she conquers in behalf of the whole fantastick Tribe of wanton, gay, and fond Desires. Effeminacy and Cowardice instantly prevail. … The more eagerly we grasp at Life, the more impotent we are in the enjoyment of it. By this avidity its very Lees and Dregs are swallow'd. … Worth, Manhood, Generosity, and all the nobler Opinions and Sentiments of honest Good, and virtuous Pleasure, disappear, and fly before this Queen of Terrors. … The vicious Poets employ this Specter too on their side. … The gloomy Prospect of Death becomes the Incentive to Pleasure of the lowest Order. Ashes and Shade, the Tomb and Cypress, are made to serve as Foils to Luxury. The Abhorrence of an insensible State, makes mere Vitality and Animal-sensation highly Cherish'd.

Indulge Genio: carpamus dulcia, nostrum est
Quod vivis: Cinis, et Manes, et Fabula fies.

In characteristic accord with this point of view he elsewhere proves that Horace's final philosophy is Stoic, “or Socratic, civil, or social,”⁷⁹ that Shakespeare's Hamlet is “one continue'd Moral,”⁸⁰ and that Milton's Paradise Lost has met with popular favor because of its “solid Thought, strong Reasoning, noble Passion, and a continu'd Thred of moral Doctrine, Pity, and Virtue.”⁸¹ From the public taste for such noble pieces, he concludes that it is not so much the public ear as the ill hand and vicious manner of our poets, which need reform.

In contrast to Swift, he approves the indulgence and the free expression of rapturous emotion, even of that fanatic passion called Enthusiasm, provided such enthusiasm is directed towards unselfish and exalted objects:

The Transports of Poets, the Sublime of Orators, the Rapture of Musicians, the high Strains of the Virtuosi; all mere Enthusiasm! Even Learning it-self, the Love of Arts and Curiositys, the Spirit of Travellers and Adventurers, Gallantry, War, Heroism; All, all Enthusiasm!—'T is enough: I an content to be this new Enthusiast, in a way unknown to me before.⁸¹

And again:

So far is he [i.e., the author, Shaftesbury himself] from degrading Enthusiasm, or disclaiming it in himself; that he looks on this Passion, simply consider'd, as the most natural, and its Object as the justest in the World. Even Virtue it-self he takes to be no other than a noble Enthusiasm justly directed, and regulated by that high Standard which he supposes in the Nature of Things.⁸²

But he is careful to say that when the natural reaction from such states of exaltation comes in the shape of melancholy, reason must correct the distorted view of things thereby induced, and the best weapon to employ against it is ridicule.⁸³

Shaftesbury's philosophy, then, permitted enthusiastic outpouring so long as the emotion expressed was felt in connection with ideas of virtue or benevolence and was optimistic in character. In The Moralists, the first title of which was The Sociable Enthusiast,⁸⁴ he composed a sort of prose poem in praise of retirement, or the contemplative life, amid beautiful natural surroundings, as leading directly to ecstatic joy in nature, God, and man. These lyric outbursts, occurring chiefly in parts two and three, become the source, direct or indirect, of so many rhapsodic passages of natural description in the poetry of Thomson and his school that a summary of the contents of some of them may be useful here for future reference.

At the beginning of part two, Philocles recalls a long conversation which he has had with his friend, Theocles. He finds his friend roving in the field with a book, and rallies him on seeking retirement in order to read Virgil or Horace. But Theocles affirms that he is only putting himself in the mood in which these authors wrote, since “for the sake of such a life and habit, as you call contemplative, they were willing to sacrifice the highest advantages, pleasures and favours of a court,” and launches into the praise of occasional solitude as a necessary relish to life. The two friends then discuss the nature of the highest good, which they conclude to be not a series of deeds, but a sentiment, benevolence, or love of mankind. Later they discuss the idea that virtue in itself is happiness, without any notion of rewards or punishments in the future state. Theocles, in a famous passage, asserts the order and harmony of the universe.

Later in the evening the two friends, accompanied by two guests, take a walk in the fields. “We fell naturally into the praise of a country life, and discoursed awhile of husbandry and the nature of the soil.” Theocles argues from the order within a single plant to the necessity of believing in the order of the whole universe, though the finite mind cannot really grasp the idea of infinite harmony. Hence he proceeds to the notion of a Universal Mind, and thence to the idea of man's place in the universe, the union of all things, and the subordination of one order of beings to another. He concludes that the State of Nature is necessarily a social state.

At the beginning of part three, Theocles begins thus a prose poem in praise of country retirement:

Ye fields and woods, my refuge from the toilsome world of business, receive me in your quiet sanctuaries, and favour my retreat and thoughtful solitude. Ye verdant plains, how gladly I salute ye. Hail, O, ye blissful mansions, known seats! delightful prospects! majestic beauties of this earth, and all ye rural powers and graces!

He passes to the adoration of nature-creatrix, as the source of beauty and perfection, and presently we find him speaking of nature and the Universal Mind, as though they were one and the same. This identity is presently explained by his exclamation, “Oh glorious nature! … Wise substitute of Providence! Empowered creatress.” In a famous passage beginning, “Oh mighty genius! sole animating and inspiring Power!” he argues, but still rhapsodically, that the assurance of God's existence is wholly reasonable. All nature's wonders serve to excite and perfect this idea of their Author. Then follow paragraphs which are like little poems in themselves, expressing adoration for the stars, the sun, the planets, and for God, the Author and Controller of planetary motion. Theocles, in fact, speaks of his own rhapsody as “this vein of enthusiasm.” Descending from heaven to earth, he praises the tilling of the soil in words recalling the Georgics; then the minerals in the mines, the movements of air and mists, the beauty of water and light, the awful sublimity of winter in the extreme Northern climes, the teeming fertility of the tropics. At this point we have apostrophes to the crocodile, the desert, Mount Atlas, the thick shade of the African jungle, and other “natural objects” and scenes not usually considered delightful by his contemporaries.

Here (section 2) Theocles interrupts himself with a sort of apology for having wandered so far from the present scene, but Philocles asserts that he likes the rhapsody and begs him to go on with a description of America. He claims that under his friend's influence he is beginning to have a growing passion for nature, even for “the rude rocks, the mossy caverns, the irregular unwrought grottos and broken falls of waters, with all the horrid graces of the wilderness itself.” He reminds Theocles, however, that “all those who are deep in this romantic way, are looked upon, you know, as a people either plainly out of their wits, or over-run with melancholy and enthusiasm. We always endeavor to recall them from these solitary places. And I must own, that often when I have found my fancy run this way, I have checked myself, not knowing what it was possessed me, when I was passionately struck with objects of this kind.” Theocles assures him that the passion for nature may be safely indulged, if he will always remember that the beauty of nature is a representative beauty only, designed to lead to the adoration of the Universal Mind. In fact, such rapturous admiration of beauty is conducive to philosophizing, which is the highest activity of the highest created beings in the universe—mankind.⁸⁵

These are, in summary, the new ideas which Pope and his friends found more inspiring than the outworn melancholy of their predecessors, whether Epicurean, Stoic or Christian, and more suited to the tranquil prosperity of the reigns of the first and second Georges.⁸⁶ They are repeatedly recognizable in poetry up to 1750 or 1760. Often, however, we must suppose that the poet has been reading not Shaftesbury, but Thomson, who probably is echoing Pope, who, in his turn, is transmitting ideas received sometimes directly from Shaftesbury, sometimes at second hand through Bolingbroke.⁸⁷ Even more often we find it wholly impossible to trace the optimism of a particular poet with certainty to any of these sources.

For Shaftesbury's immediate appeal was not to the untrained mind, but to the aristocrat in literature. His philosophy did not become truly popular until it had been simplified and, as it were, translated into the language of the bourgeois reader.

I have been reading my Lord Shaftesbury's Moralist [writes Mrs. Rowe⁸⁸ to the Countess of Hertford] which has fill'd my head with beauties, and love, and harmony, but all of a divine and mysterious nature. However superior his notions may be to my capacity, I have been agreeably led on thro' I know not what enchanting scenes of happiness. I wish you would read it, for it would make you the most charming and agreeable enthusiast in the world. Whether I am in my right senses at present I cannot tell. …

In the fields of philosophy and religion, his interpreter was Francis Hutcheson;⁸⁹ in poetry, his chief exponents were Thomson and Pope. His social ethics are to be found in popular form in Pope's Essay on Man, although Pope probably had received them already clarified by Bolingbroke. His personal ethics, based on the idea of self-development through submission to the influence of the world of physical nature, formed a large, though subsidiary, part of Thomson's Seasons, 1726-30. When thus separately developed, these two leading ideas were later perceived to be ethically opposed, for the eighteenth century continued to regard the contemplative attitude towards man and nature as “melancholy,” and therefore anti-social. On the other hand, Pope's conception of man as a purely social being, without individual rights or importance, was regarded by the eighteenth century as a cure for melancholy.

The first effect on melancholy poetry of the acceptance of a more optimistic philosophy was, however, a new emphasis on the pleasures of melancholy, a new enthusiasm for the life of retirement, and a renewed assertion of its moral defensibility. These effects are most clearly seen in the descriptive poetry of James Thomson and his followers.

Notes

1. Chalmers, English Poets, vol. X.

2. Ibid.

3. Written in 1608 during Donne's almost impossible struggle with illness and poverty, but not printed in his lifetime. First ed. 1644, 2d ed. 1700.

4. Realistically and prosaically described by Defoe in his book, The Storm, 1704.

5. Winchilsea, op. cit., p. CXXIV.

6. Ibid. p. CXXXIV.

7. 2d ed. 1713. 3rd ed. 1722. (British Museum Catalogue.) My quotations are from the third edition.

8. The Learned Lady in England, 1650-1760, p. 147. Dr. Reynolds emphasizes other aspects of Lady Chudleigh's life and work not pertinent here.

9. Unauthorized edition 1707. Authorized edition 1709.

10. In Dryden's Miscellany Poems, 1704, vol. V, p. 210.

11. L. G. Wickham Legg emphasizes his repeated illnesses and recurrent fits of melancholy. Matthew Prior, pp. 67, 119, 128, 169, 190, 230, 273.

12. In its pirated form, this appeared in A Collection of Poems issued by Browne and Tooke in 1701. The author printed a correct folio edition in 1705. (Dict. Nat. Biog.)

13. The Miscellanies of the period, besides those already mentioned, contain a good deal of melancholy material but no single piece of importance. We have, for instance:

    1712. Miscellaneous Poems and Translations, by Several Hands. (Lintot's Miscellany.) Containing An Epistle, by Mr. Bate; Broome's paraphrase of Habbakuk III and parts of Job XXXVIII, XXXIX; Southcott's Jeremiah's Prayer.

    1713. Sacred Miscellanies: Or, Divine Poems Upon Several Subjects. Viz: I An Ode on Divine Vengeance, inscribed to Mr. Steele. II On the Last Judgment, and Happiness of the Saints in Heaven, by N. Rowe, Esq. etc. (Curll's Miscellany).

    1716. The edition in six volumes of Dryden's Miscellany Poems. Containing an anonymous On Solitude; Against The Fear of Death by Sir Robert Howard; A Hymn to Darkness, Humane Life, and The Curse of Babylon, by Yalden; Considerations on the Eighty-eighth Psalm, by Prior; a translation of Tibullus I, 1, by Charles Hopkins; The Passing Bell (anonymous); The Plague of Athens, by Sprat.

    1717. A Collection of the Best English Poetry, by Several Hands, 3 vols. Containing Rochester's A Satyr against Mankind; An Ode upon Solitude, by Roscommon (separately paged and dated 1710, indicating that the volumes were made up by binding together numerous piratical issues of some years before).

14. My quotations are from the 3d ed., 1715. Beneath Watts's portrait which forms the frontispiece to this edition is the motto, Musas colimus severiores.

15. Watts admires Milton, but with some reservations.

16. Cf. Virgil's description of the miseries of the Scythians, Georgics III, 349-383, Ovid's account of his sufferings in his northern exile at Tomi (near the mouth of the Danube), in Tristia, especially III, 10, and Shaftesbury, The Moralists, in Characteristics, ed. Robertson, vol. II, p. 119.

17. This is doubtless again the great storm of 1703, ante p. 82 and note 4.

18. Matthew Casimir Sarbiewski, 1595-1640, usually known as Casimir, and called “the Christian Horace,” was a Polish Jesuit who wrote exclusively in Latin. He became famous outside of his own country more rapidly than at home. Dr. Watts translated many of his lyrics. For other English translations see Bowring, Sir John, Specimens of the Polish Poets, London, printed for the author, 1827. The (Cambridge) Classical Journal, vol. XXV, pp. 103-110 (1822) has an article On the Life and Writings of Casimir, signed Caecilius Metellus, who is, Bowring says, “Mr. Walker of Cambridge.” This writer admires Casimir's skill in Latin verse, but finds the poetry uninteresting except in “the enunciation of moral truth.” He notes parallels to Casimir's thoughts in Sir Thomas Browne and Bishop Jeremy Taylor. Mrs. Elizabeth Carter also translated portions of Casimir. I note that he loved solitude and sometimes described the natural scenery of his native Lithuania. See Brückner, A., Geschichte der polnischen Literatur, Leipzig, 1901, pp. 176-177.

19. This seems like a combination of the familiar “All the world's a stage” and Drummond's “This World a hunting is.” Only, instead of Death as the Nimrod, Watts conceives a “flight of demons,” who shoot from the clouds. The next important variation in the metaphor is made by Edgar Allan Poe in The Conqueror Worm, where angel spectators are added, who, at the end of the piece,

              “Uprising, unveiling, affirm
    That the play is the tragedy Man,
                        And the hero, the Conqueror Worm.”

    I have often wondered whether some of Poe's melancholy effects could not be accounted for by supposing him to have read at an impressionable age, Dr. Watts, Johnson's Rasselas, and the Bible.

20. Here the influence of Paradise Lost, IV, 411ff. is obvious for several lines.

21. The British Museum Catalogue gives up the attempt to distinguish editions numerically after 12th ed. corr. of Horae Lyricae, London, 1770, and 28th ed. of Hymns and Spiritual Songs, London, 1767.

22. First edition, 1662.

23. Quotations from Chalmers, English Poets, vol. XIII.

24. W. Thomas, in his Le poète Edward Young, p. 310, is at great pains to suppose that the subject may have been proposed to him by John Philips or John Hughes. Whether or not this is true, the subject was simply “in the air.”

25. This idea derives from Milton and aligns Young with Dennis, Blackmore, Watts, and other reformers who believed that the most sublime religious ideas were the best subjects for poetry.

26. Job, XVII, 14.

27. Dies Irae.

28. Cf. Flatman, A Doomsday Thought, ante, p. 62.

29. I suspect Young of trying here to repeat the success of Samuel Wesley, the elder, whose epic version of the Bible story had now reached gigantic proportions in The History of the Old and New Testament in Verse, London, 1703, 3 vols.

30. Even this gruesome conception is capable of really poetical treatment. Cf. Dryden, Ode to the Pious Memory of … Mrs. Anne Killigrew.

    “When in mid-air the golden trump shall sound,
              To raise the nations under ground;
    When, in the Valley of Jehoshaphat,
    The judging God shall close the book of Fate;
              And there the last assizes keep
              For those who wake and those who sleep;
              When rattling bones together fly
              From the four corners of the sky;
    When sinews o'er the skeletons are spread,
    Those clothed with flesh, and life inspires the dead;
    The sacred poets first shall hear the sound,
              And foremost from the tomb shall bound,
    For they are cover'd with the lightest ground;
    And straight, with in-born vigour, on the wing,
    Like mounting larks, to the new morning sing.”

    This resemblance is noted by Dr. Johnson and by W. Thomas, op. cit., p. 315.

31. This idea is like Flatman's in A Doomsday Thought, ante, p. 62, and also like a passage in Donne's Sermons, p. 239.

32. Cf. Job III, 20. “Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul?” Also the plea of the “reprobate infants” in Wigglesworth's Day of Doom.

    “O great Creator, why was our Nature
                        depraved and forlorn?
    Why so defil'd, and made so vil'd
                        whilst we were yet unborn?”

33. Cf. Dryden's Palamon and Arcite, I, 484-491.

    “Nay, worse than other beasts is our estate;
    Them to pursue their pleasures you create;
    We, bound by harder laws must curb our will,
    And your commands, not our desires, fulfill:
    Then, when the creature is unjustly slain,
    Yet, after death at least, he feels no pain;
    But man in life surcharged with woe before,
    Not freed when dead, is doomed to suffer more.”
    Poetical Works of John Dryden, ed.

    Christie, p. 522.

34. Cf. Flatman, A Doomsday Thought, ante, p. 62.

35. Cf. ante, ch. II, note 37.

36. Young's Ocean: an Ode, 1725, should be mentioned as contributing to the melancholy tradition because of the slightly morbid tone of the concluding Wish for a humble and retired life, a tone for which we are unprepared by the raptures of the preceding descriptions of ocean. So placed, The Wish has almost the effect of an epitaph.

                                            “The Wish
    O may I steal along the vale
    Of humble life, secure from foes!
    My friend sincere, My judgment clear,
    And gentle business my repose!”

    We must remember also that Young's plays, Busiris (1719) and The Revenge (1721), contained complaints of life and other melancholy passages, which are quoted by W. Thomas in his Le Poète, Edward Young, pp. 308-309.

37. Hill's character is drawn in a life-like manner in Dorothy Brewster's Aaron Hill: Poet, Dramatist, Projector. He edited the Plain Dealer from March 23, 1724, to May 7, 1725. No. 42 is a Reverie in Westminster Abbey. No. 32 is a Meditation on Death.

38. A similar thought is in Young's The Last Day, II, 113-116.

39. Quotations from Works of the Late Aaron Hill, 2nd ed. London, 1754.

40. First published 1659, and frequently reprinted thereafter. Included in Dryden, Miscellany Poems, 1716. Dr. Watson Nicholson's Historical Sources of Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year includes the passage from Thucydides on which both Lucretius and Sprat are founded.

41. Broome, a clergyman who held small livings, is known today only as having assisted Pope in his translation of the Odyssey. His poems are in Chalmers, English Poets, vol. XII.

42. In Ralph's Miscellaneous Poems by Several Hands.

43. The Miscellaneous Works in Prose and Verse, edited by her brother-in-law, Theophilus Rowe, in 1739, had a 5th ed. in 1772. Devout Exercises of the Heart had at least twelve editions before 1789, and Friendship in Death, twelve by 1786. She was popular in France and in America, and influenced the German romantic movement. See Wolf, Elisabeth Rowe in Deutschland.

44. There is little difference between Philomela's expressions of love for her husband and devotion to her God. Yet she suited the taste of her time. Pope admired her elegy on the death of her husband sufficiently to include it in the same volume with his Eloisa to Abelard, 2d ed. London, 1720, containing also his Verses to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady and some other elegiac verse by Gay, Allan Ramsay, and Burchet. (British Museum Catalogue.)

45. Miscellaneous Works, vol. II, pp. 68, 100.

46. Who was also a friend of that quite different melancholy poet, Shenstone.

47. Mrs. Rowe's letters were printed almost without dates by Theophilus Rowe, but seem to be in approximately chronological order so far as dates are given or can be inferred. The letter mentioning the Moralists precedes one dated 1719.

48. For Mrs. Rowe's standing as a woman of learning, see Reynolds, The Learned Lady.

49. While this poem is quite orthodox, founded on the first three verses of the nineteenth Psalm, it was likely to please the deists and free-thinkers also, who reasoned in similar fashion from Nature to God. For instance:

    “All Nature's wonders serve to excite and perfect this idea of their author. 'Tis here he suffers us to see, and even converse with him in a manner suitable to our frailty. How glorious is it to contemplate him in this noblest of his works apparent to us, the system of the bigger World.” Shaftesbury, The Moralists, in Characteristics, 5th ed. vol. II, p. 112.

50. As in Odes IV, 7 and 12.

51. As in Odes II, 14 and 18; III, 24.

52. Cf. Epictetus, bk. II, ch. I, and Samuel Johnson, Rombler 2, March 24, 1749-50:

    “It is the sage advice of Epictetus, that a man should accustom himself often to think of what is most shocking and terrible, that by such reflections he may be preserved from too ardent wishes for seeming good, and from too much dejection in real evil.”

53. Alluded to in a letter to Cromwell, July 17, 1709.

54. Quoted by Steele in Spectator no. 532 (1712).

55. For an account of the relations between Pope's version and Prior's earlier one, see Pope's Works, ed. Elwin and Courthope, vol. IV, pp. 408-410.

56. One line is borrowed whole from Flatman.

57. All this is in Latin epic style, though not of the best period. Pope's maturer taste rejected this sort of thing, and he never again tried the “dreadful” manner. Warton classes Statius with Lucan, Claudian, and Seneca as likely to mislead young authors, because “his images are gigantic and outrageous, and his sentiments, tortured and hyperbolical.” Quoted in Pope's Works, ed. Elwin and Courthope, vol. I, p. 43.

58. The lines so much admired by Warton have a cadence similar to that of some lines in Collins's How Sleep the Brave (1746).

    By foreign hands thy dying eyes were closed,
    By foreign hands thy decent limbs composed,
    By foreign hands thy humble grave adorned,
    By strangers honoured, and by strangers mourned.

59. Young in his Night Thoughts III, later uses this same situation as a source of pathetic effect.

60. Joseph Warton observed that Pope had been reading Milton. Essay on … Pope, 5th ed. corr. 1806, vol. I, p. 304, note.

61. They were so bad that, when published in 1758, Gray spoke of them as “the dung-hill of Grub Street” (Letters of Thomas Gray, ed. D. C. Tovey, vol. II, p. 37) and Johnson took them for possible forgeries (Lives of the English Poets, ed. Hill, vol. II, p. 54).

62. By that time, the immense vogue of Young's Night Thoughts and Gray's Elegy would naturally cause a biographer or critic to single out for mention any earlier production of like character.

63. In Steele's Poetical Miscellanies, April, 1713. Quotations from Chalmers' English Poets, vol. IX.

64. Parnell is evidently thinking of Psalms XIX, 3, 4, and of Addison's line,

    “What though no real voice is heard?”

65. Cf. Johnson, Lives of the Poets, ed. Hill, vol. II, p. 55 and note 5.

66. It attracted no special attention at the time. In Jacob's Poetical Register, London, 1723, Parnell is included merely as “an acquaintance of Mr. Pope's,” and only three of his poems, not including the Night Piece, are mentioned.

67. Chiefly from references to Parnell in Swift's Letters.

68. Quotations from Chalmers, English Poets, vol. X.

69. The use of these descriptions was probably a conscious effort after the sublime on the part of poets. John Dennis in The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704) says, “The next Ideas that are most proper to produce Enthusiasm of Admiration, are the great Phaenomena of the Material World; because they too lead the Soul to its Maker, and shew, as the Apostle says, his eternal Power and Godhead.” He quotes in illustration several descriptions of the sun and moon from Paradise Lost, his own paraphrase (1701) of the Te Deum, an apostrophe to the sun in Aeneid IV, 607, Godfrey's vision of the earth seen from heaven in Hierusalemme XIV, st. 9-11, and Milton's Paraphrase of Psalm CXLVIII in Paradise Lost V, 153 ff. Critical Essays of the Eighteenth Century, 1700-1725, ed. Durham, pp. 167-175.

70. Courthope says of the end of the seventeenth century, “It is indeed evident that unless poetry were recruited by new and abundant waters, it was in danger of perishing in a marsh. The eighteenth century brought the much needed supply. … The ancient spring of inspiration derived from national life and manners was renewed, and a long succession of poets … carried on the ethical impulse communicated to poetry by Pope.” The Liberal Movement in English Literature, pp. 59-61.

71. For the increase in the number of readers and the improvement in their taste under Addison's influence, see Beljame, op. cit., pp. 329-338.

72. Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century (N. Y., 1882-90), vol. I, pp. 269-341.

    Toland's Christianity not Mysterious appeared in 1696; Tindal's Rights of the Christian Church in 1706, his more important work, Christianity as Old as the Creation, in 1730. Collins's Discourse of Free-thinking was published in 1713.

73. On the general prosperity during Walpole's administration, see Lecky, op. cit., vol. I, pp. 355-404. Mr. Paul Elmer More, in his essays on Swift and Pope in With the Wits, regards the corresponding intellectual change as wholly disastrous for literature. According to him, “the high zeal of the imagination” was opposed and put to rout by the practical sense of England.

74. On Shaftesbury's debt to Spinoza, and on his popularity and influence, see Robertson, Pioneer Humanists, pp. 181-229.

75. In Shaftesbury's Life, ed. Rand, pp. 344-347.

76. Moore, C. A., Shaftesbury and the Ethical Poets in England, 1700-1760. In Modern Language Association of America, Publications, vol. XXXI (1916), p. 277.

77. Characteristics, 5th ed. vol. I, pp. 32-33.

78. Ibid. p. 315.

79. Letter to Pierre Coste, 1706, in Life, ed. Rand, pp. 355-356.

80. Characteristics, vol. I, p. 276.

81. Ibid. vol. II, p. 400.

82. Ibid. vol. III, p. 33.

83. Ibid. vol. I, p. 13 and elsewhere.

84. Life, ed. Rand, p. 336.

85. Characteristics, 5th ed., vol. II, The Moralists.

86. Cf. Leonard Welsted, Dissertation Concerning the State of Poetry (1724). “May it not, my Lord, be reasonably hop'd, that the Peace, the Happiness, the universal Quiet and Tranquillity, which Great Britain and All Europe enjoys under the Influence of his Majesty's Councils, will have such happy Consequences for all the Studies of Humanity, as may, in Time, and under just Encouragements, bring them to that Standard or Perfection, which denominates a Classical Age?” Critical Essays of the Eighteenth Century, 1700-1725, ed. Durham, p. 358.

87. Collins, J. C., Bolingbroke, pp. 137, 138. Bolingbroke's Minutes of Letters to Mr. Pope, which form the basis of the Essay on Man, were probably written between 1727 and 1733, but not published until 1754, after having been much revised. Sichel, W., Bolingbroke and His Times, vol. II, pp. 326-329, and Collins, op. cit., p. 194.

    “[Bolingbroke's] deism … gave some form and impulse not only to Pope but also to Voltaire, and so to the whole century. … His thought, though not his own, was coined anew by Voltaire and Pope, and ran broadcast among the lands that read the Dictionnaire and the Essay on Man.” Elton, The Augustan Ages, p. 288. Cf. Moore, C. A., op. cit., p. 324.

88. Miscellaneous Works in Prose and Verse, vol. II, p. 44.

89. Shaftesbury was probably more popular after Mandeville's attack on his ideas in the latter's Fable of the Bees, 1723, and Hutcheson's defense called An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 1725. Hutcheson occupied the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow from 1729 until his death in 1746, and continued to spread Shaftesbury's ideas in his lectures.