ally ; often for an illustration or a metaphor, but simply and vividly, as if, like Shelley, he had that day seen the sight that evoked the image. Compare :
As wild geese, that the creeping fowler eye
Or russet-pated choughs, many in sort,
Rising and cawing at the gun's report,
Sever themselves and madly sweep the sky,
So at his sight away his fellows fly :
or the sun,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy,
with Donne's description of a storm :
From out her (England's) pregnant entrails sighed a wind,
Which at th' air's middle marble room did find
Such strong resistance, that itself it threw
Downward again
.
Or with Crashaw's :
Hath aged winter, fledged with feathered raine,
To frozen Caucasus his flight now tane ?
Or his :
Bid thy golden God, the sun
Burnisht in his best beames rise,
Put all his red-eyed Rubies on ;
These Rubies shall put out their eyes.
And the insincerity of the conceits will strike us freshly. The same in the eighteenth century may be said of a few choice spirits, in spite of misleading conventions : of Gray, with his classic austerity ; of Collins (at his best) and Thomson, with their real love of Nature ; and, later, of Cowper and of Crabbe. In the midst of the ridiculous world of nymphs and river-gods, and the pompous world of Night- thoughts and rhymed homilies in which mountains and chasms and oceans were constantly preaching gloomy moral lessons, there arose the simplicity of Cowper and the intense bareness of Crabbe. Space fails here for adequate
