Since the time when Wordsworth launched his manifestoes on the language fit and proper for poetry, it may almost be said that whenever the term “poetic diction” is found used as a more or less generic term of critical disparagement, it has been with reference, implied or explicit, to the so-called classical poetry of the Augustan ages. But the condemnation has perhaps been given too wide an application, and hence there has arisen a tendency to place in this category all the language of all the poets who were supposed to have taken Pope as their model, so that “the Pope style” and “eighteenth century diction” have almost become synonymous terms, as labels for a lifeless, imitative language in which poets felt themselves constrained to express all their thoughts and feelings. This criticism is both unjust and misleading. For when this “false and gaudy splendour” is unsparingly condemned, it is not always recognized or remembered that it is mainly to be found in the descriptive poetry of the period.

It is sufficient to glance at the descriptive verse of practically all the typical “classical” poets to discover how generally true this statement is. We cannot say, of course, that the varied sights and sounds of outdoor life made no appeal at all to them; but what we do feel is that whenever they were constrained to indulge in descriptive verse they either could not, or would not, try to convey their impressions in language of their very own, but were content in large measure to draw upon a common stock of dead and colourless epithets. Local colour, in the sense of accurate and particular observation of natural facts, is almost entirely lacking; there is no writing with the eye on the object, and it has been well remarked that their highly generalized descriptions could be transferred from poet to poet or from scene to scene, without any injustice. Thus Shenstone[58] describes his birthplace:

a quatrain which, with little or no change of epithet, was the common property of the versifiers, and may be met with almost everywhere in early eighteenth century poetry. Every type of English scenery and every phase of outdoor life finds its description in lines of this sort, where the reader instinctively feels that the poet has not been careful to record his individual impressions or emotions, but has contented himself with accepting epithets and phrases consecrated to the use of natural description. A similar inability or indifference is seen even in the attempts to re-fashion Chaucer, or the Bible, or other old material, where the vigour and freshness and colour of the originals might have been expected to exercise a salutary influence. But to no purpose: all must be cast in the one mould, and clothed in the elegant diction of the time. Thus in Dryden’s modernization of the “Canterbury Tales” the beautiful simplicity of Chaucer’s descriptions of the sights and sounds of nature vanishes when garbed in the rapid and conventional phrases and locutions of the classicists. Chaucer’s “briddes” becomes “the painted birds,” a “goldfinch” is amplified into a “goldfinch with gaudy pride of painted plumes,” whilst a plain and simple mention of sunrise, “at the sun upriste,” has to be paraphrased into

The old ballads and the Psalms suffered severely in the same way.[59]

The fact that the words most frequently used in this stock poetic diction have usually some sort of connexion with dress or ornament has not escaped notice, and it has its own significance. It is, as it were, a reflex of the fact that the nature poetry of the period is in large measure the work of writers to whom social life is the central fact of existence, for whom meadow, and woodland, and running water, mountain and sea, the silent hills, and the starry sky brought no inspiration, or at least no inspiration powerful enough to lead them to break through the shackles of conventionality imposed upon them by the taste of their age. Words like “paint” and “painted,” “gaudy,” “adorn,” “deck,” “gilds” and “gilded,” “damasked,” “enamelled,” “embroidered,” and dozens similar form the stock vocabulary of natural description; apart from the best of Akenside, and the works of one or two writers such as John Cunningham, it can safely be said that but few new descriptive terms were added to the “nature vocabulary” of English poetry during this period. How far English poetry is yet distant from a recognition of the sea as a source of poetic inspiration may be perhaps seen from the fact that its most frequent epithet is the feeble term “watery,” whilst the magic of the sky by night or day evokes no image other than one that can be expressed by changes rung on such words as “azure,” “concave,” “serene,” “ætherial.” Even in “Night Thoughts,” where the subject might have led to something new and fresh in the way of a “star-vocabulary,” the best that Young can do is to take refuge in such periphrases as “tuneful spheres,” “nocturnal sparks,” “lucid orbs,” “ethereal armies,” “mathematic glories,” “radiant choirs,” “midnight counsellors,” etc.

And the same lack of direct observation and individual expression is obvious whenever the classicists have to mention birds or animals. Wild life had to wait for White of Selborne, and for Blake and Burns and Cowper and Wordsworth, to be observed with accuracy and treated with sympathy; and it has been well remarked that if we are to judge from their verse, most of the poets of the first quarter of the eighteenth century knew no bird except the goldfinch or nightingale, and even these probably only by hearsay. For the same generalized diction is usually called upon, and birds are merely a “feathered,” “tuneful,” “plumy” or “warbling” choir, whilst a periphrasis, allowing of numerous and varied labels for the same animal, is felt to be the correct thing. In Dryden sheep are “the woolly breed” or “the woolly race”; bees are the “industrious kind” or “the frugal kind”; pigs are “the bristly care” or “the tusky kind”; frogs are “the loquacious race”; crows, “the craven kind,” and so on: “the guiding principle seems to be that nothing must be mentioned by its own name.”[60]

Many of these stock epithets owed their appearance of course to the requirements imposed upon poets by their adherence to the heroic couplet. Pope himself calls attention to the fact that the necessities of rhyme led to the unceasing repetition of stereotyped phrases and locutions:

adducing, with unconscious irony, the very rhymes prevalent in much of his own practice.[61]

It was also recognized by the versifiers that the indispensable polish and “correctness” of the decasyllabic line could only be secured by a mechanical use of epithets in certain positions. “There is a vast beauty [to me],” wrote Shenstone, “in using a word of a particular nature in the 8th and 9th syllable of an English verse. I mean what is virtually a dactyl. For instance,

Let any person of any ear substitute liquid for wat’ry and he will find the disadvantage.”[62] Saintsbury has pointed out[63] that the “drastic but dangerous device of securing the undulating penetration of the line by the use of the gradus epithet was one of the chief causes of the intensely artificial character of the versification and its attendant diction.... There are passages in the ‘Dispensary’ and ‘The Rape of the Lock,’ where you can convert the decasyllable into the octosyllable for several lines together without detriment to sense or poetry by simply taking out these specious superfluities.”

In the year of Dryden’s death (or perhaps in the following year) there had appeared the “Art of Poetry” by Edward Bysshe, whose metrical laws were generally accepted, as authoritative, during the eighteenth century. During the forty years of Dryden’s literary career the supremacy of the stopped regular decasyllabic couplet had gradually established itself as the perfect form of verse. But Bysshe was the first prosodist to formulate the “rules” of the couplet, and in doing so he succeeded, probably because his views reflected the general prosodic tendencies of the time, in “codifying and mummifying” a system which soon became erected into a creed. “The foregoing rules (of accent on the even places and pause mainly at the 4th, 5th, or 6th syllable) ought indispensably to be followed in all our verses of 10 syllables: and the observation of them will produce Harmony, the neglect of them harshness and discord.”[64] Into this rigid mechanical mould contemporary and succeeding versifiers felt themselves constrained to place their couplets. But to pad out their lines they were nearly always beset with a temptation to use the trochaic epithets, of which numerous examples have been given above. As a natural result such epithets soon became part and parcel of the poetic stock of language, and hence most of them were freely used by poets, not because of any intrinsic poetic value, but because they were necessary to comply with the absurd mechanics of their vehicle of expression.

Since the “Lives of the Poets” it has been customary to regard this “poetic diction” as the peculiar invention of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, and especially of Dryden and Pope, a belief largely due to Johnson’s eulogies of these poets. As an ardent admirer of the school of Dryden and Pope, it was only natural that Johnson should express an exalted opinion of their influence on the poetic practice of his contemporaries. But others—Gray amongst them—did not view their innovations with much complacency, and towards the end of the century Cowper was already foreshadowing the attack to be made by Wordsworth and Coleridge in the next generation. To Pope’s influence, he says in effect, after paying his predecessor a more or less formal compliment, was due the stereotyped form both of the couplet and of much of the language in which it was clothed. Pope had made

and in one of his letters he stigmatizes and pillories the inflated and stilted phraseology of Pope, and especially his translation of Homer.[65] Finally, Wordsworth and Coleridge agreed in ascribing the “poetical diction,” against which their manifestoes were directed, to that source.

It is to be admitted that Pope’s translation is to some extent open to the charge brought against it of corrupting the language with a meretricious standard of poetic diction. In his Preface he expresses his misgivings as to the language fit and proper for an English rendering of Homer, and indeed it is usually recognized that his diction was, to a certain extent, imposed upon him both by the nature of his original, as well as by the lack of elasticity in his closed couplet. To the latter cause was doubtless due, not only the use of stock epithets to fill out the line, but also the inevitable repetition of certain words, due to the requirements of rhyme, even at the expense of straining or distorting their ordinary meaning. Thus train, for instance, on account of its convenience as a rhyming word, is often used to signify “a host,” or “body,” and similarly plain, main, for the ocean. In this connexion it has also been aptly pointed out that some of the defects resulted from the fact that Pope had founded his own epic style on that of the Latin poets, whose manner is most opposed to Homer’s. Thus he often sought to deck out or expand simple thoughts or commonplace situations by using what he no doubt considered really “poetical language,” and thus, for instance, where Homer simply says, “And the people perished,” Pope has to say, “And heaped the camp with mountains of the dead.” The repeated use of periphrases: feathered fates, for “arrows”; fleecy breed for “sheep”; the wandering nation of a summer’s day for “insects”; the beauteous kind for “women”; the shining mischief for “a fascinating woman”; rural care for “the occupations of the shepherd”; the social shades for “the ghosts of two brothers,” may be traced to the same influence.[66]

But apart from these defects the criticisms of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and their ascribing of the “poetical diction,” which they wished to abolish, to the influence of Pope’s “Homer,” are to a large extent unjust. Many of the characteristics of this “spurious poetic language” were well established long before Pope produced his translation. It is probable that they are present to a much larger extent, for instance, in Dryden; painted, rural, finny, briny, shady, vocal, mossy, fleecy, come everywhere in his translations, and not only there. Some of his adjectives in y are more audacious than those of Pope: spongy clouds, chinky hives, snary webs, roomy sea, etc. Most of the periphrases used by Pope and many more are already to be found in Dryden: “summer” is the sylvan reign; “bees,” the frugal or industrious kind; “arrows,” the feathered wood or feathered fates; “sheep,” the woolly breed; “frogs,” the loquacious race! From all Pope’s immediate predecessors and contemporaries similar examples may be quoted, like Gay’s

or Ambrose Philips:

and that “Epistle to a Friend,” in which he ridicules the very jargon so much used in his own Pastorals.[67]

Pope then may justly be judged “not guilty,” at least “in the first degree,” of having originated the poetic diction which Johnson praised and Wordsworth condemned; in using it, he was simply using the stock language for descriptive poetry, whether original or in translations, which had slowly come into being during the last decade of the seventeenth century. If it be traced to its origins, it will be found that most of it originated with that poet who may fairly be called the founder of the English “classical” school of poetry—to Milton, to whom in large measure is due, not merely the invention, but also, by the very potency of the influence exercised by his great works, its vogue in the eighteenth century.

Before the time of Milton, it is not too much to say, even when we remember the practice of Spenser and Donne and their followers, that there was no special language for poetry, little or nothing of the diction consecrated solely to the purposes of poets. The poets of the Elizabethan age and their immediate successors had access to all diction, upon which they freely drew. But it seems natural, indeed inevitable, that for Milton, resolved to sing of things “unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,” the ordinary language of contemporary prose or poetry should be found lacking. He was thus impelled, we may say, consciously and deliberately to form for himself a special poetical vocabulary, which, in his case, was abundantly justified, because it was so essentially fitted to his purpose, and bore the stamp of his lofty poetic genius.

This poetical vocabulary was made up of diverse elements. Besides the numerous “classical” words, which brought with them all the added charm of literary reminiscence, there were archaisms, and words of Latin origin, as well as words deliberately coined on Latin and Greek roots. But it included also most of the epithets of which the eighteenth century versifiers were so fond. Examples may be taken from any of the descriptive portions of the “Paradise Lost”:

or

Other phrases, like “vernal bloom,” “lucid stream,” “starry sphere,” “flowery vale,” “umbrageous grots,” were to become the worn-out penny-pieces of the eighteenth century poetical mint. Milton indeed seems to have been one of the great inventors of adjectives ending in y, though in this respect he had been anticipated by Browne and others, and especially by Chapman, who has large numbers of them, and whose predilection for this method of making adjectives out of nouns amounts almost to an obsession.[68]

Milton was also perhaps the great innovator with another kind of epithet, which called forth the censure of Johnson, who described it as “the practice of giving to adjectives derived from substantives the terminations of participles,” though the great dictator is here attacking a perfectly legitimate device freely used by the Jacobeans and by most of the poets since their time.[69] Nor are there wanting in Milton’s epic instances of the idle periphrases banned by Wordsworth: straw-built citadel for “bee-hive,” vernal bloom for “spring flowers,” smutty grain for “gunpowder,” humid train for the flowery waters of a river, etc.[70]

With Milton, then, may be said to have originated the “poetic diction,” which drew forth Wordsworth’s strictures, and which in the sequel proved a dangerous model for the swarm of versifiers who essayed to borrow or imitate it for the purpose of their dull and commonplace themes. How much the Miltonic language, as aped and imitated by the “landscape gardeners and travelling pedlars” of the eighteenth century, lost in originality and freshness, may be felt, rather than described, if we compare so well-known a passage as the following with any of the quotations given earlier:

But the minor poets of the eighteenth century, who, by their mechanical imitations, succeeded in reducing Milton’s diction to the level of an almost meaningless jargon, had had every encouragement from their greater predecessors and contemporaries. The process of depreciation may be seen already in Dryden, and it is probably by way of Pope that much of the Miltonic language became part of the eighteenth century poetic stock-in-trade. Pope was a frequent borrower from Milton, and, in his “Homer” especially, very many reminiscences are to be found, often used in an artificial, and sometimes in an absurd, manner.[71] Moreover, Pope’s free and cheapened use of many of Milton’s descriptive epithets did much to reduce them to the rank of merely conventional terms, and in this respect the attack of Wordsworth and Coleridge was not without justice. But on the whole the proper conclusion would seem to be that what is usually labelled as “the Pope style” could with more justice and aptness be described as “the pseudo-Miltonic style.” It is true that the versifiers freely pilfered the “Homer,” and the vogue of much of the stock diction is thus due to that source, but so far as Pope himself is concerned there is justice in his plea that he left this style behind him when he emerged from “Fancy’s maze” and “moralized his song.”

To what extent this catalogue of lifeless words and phrases had established itself as the poetical thesaurus is to be seen in the persistency with which it maintained its position until the very end of the century, when Erasmus Darwin with a fatal certainty evolved from it all its worst features, and thus did much unconsciously to crush it out of existence. James Thomson is rightly regarded as one of the most important figures in the early history of the Romantic Revolt, and he has had merited praise for his attempts to provide himself with a new language of his own. In this respect, however, he had been anticipated by John Philips, whose “Splendid Shilling” appeared in 1705, followed by “Cyder” a year later. Philips, though not the first Miltonic imitator, was practically the first to introduce the Miltonic diction and phrases, whilst at the same time he acquired the knack of adding phrases of his own to the common stock. He was thus an innovator from whom Thomson himself learned not a little.

But though the “Seasons” is ample testimony to a new and growing alertness to natural scenery, Thomson found it hard to escape from the fetters of the current poetic language. We feel that he is at least trying to write with his eye steadily fixed upon the object, but he could perhaps hardly be expected to get things right from the very beginning. Thus a stanza from his “Pastoral Entertainment” is purely conventional:

while he paraphrases a portion of the sixth chapter of St. Matthew into:

where the stock terms scarcely harmonize with the simple Biblical diction. He was well aware of the attendant dangers and difficulties, and in the first book of “The Seasons” he gives expression to the need he feels of a language fit to render adequately all that he sees in Nature.[72] But though there is much that is fresh and vivid in his descriptive diction, and much that reveals him as a bold pioneer in poetic outlook and treatment, the tastes and tendencies of his age were too strong entirely to be escaped. Birds are the plumy, or feathered people, or the glossy kind,[73] and a flight of swallows is a feathered eddy; sheep are the bleating kind, etc. In one passage (“Spring,” ll. 114-135) he deals at length with the insects that attack the crops without once mentioning them by name: they are the feeble race, the frosty tribe, the latent foe, and even the sacred sons of vengeance. He has in general the traditional phraseology for the mountains and the sea, though a few of his epithets for the mountains, as keen-air’d and forest-rustling, are new. He speaks of the Alps as dreadful, horrid, vast, sublime. Shaggy and nodding are also applied to mountains as well as to rocks and forests; winter is usually described in the usual classical manner as deformed and inverted. Leaves are the honours of trees, paths are erroneous, caverns sweat, etc., and he also makes large use of Latinisms.[74]

John Dyer (1700-1758), though now and then conventional in his diction, has a good deal to his credit, and is a worthy contemporary of the author of “The Seasons.” Thus in the “Country Walk” it is the old stock diction he gives us:

and much the same thing is to be found in “The Fleece,” published in 1757:

whilst he has almost as many adjectives in y as Ambrose Philips. But these are more than redeemed by the new descriptive touches which appear, sometimes curiously combined with the stereotyped phrases, as in “The Fleece” (Bk. III):

Nor must we forget “Grongar Hill,” which has justly received high praise for its beauties and felicities of description.

It is scarcely necessary to illustrate further the vogue of this sort of diction in the first half of the eighteenth century; it is to be found everywhere in the poetry of the period, and the conventional epithets and phrases quoted from Dyer and Thomson may be taken as typical of the majority of their contemporaries. But this lifeless, stereotyped language has also invaded the work of some of the best poets of the century, including not only the later classicists, but also those who have been “born free,” and are foremost among the Romantic rebels. The poetic language of William Collins shows a strange mixture of the old style and the new. That it was new and individual is well seen from Johnson’s condemnation, for Johnson recognized very clearly that the language of the “Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands” did not conform to what was probably his own view that the only language fit and proper for poetry was such as might bear comparison with the polish and elegance of Pope’s “Homer.” It is not difficult to make due allowance for Johnson when he speaks of Collins’s diction as “harsh, unskilfully laboured, and injudicially selected”; we deplore the classical bias, and are content enough to recognize and enjoy for ourselves the matchless beauty and charm of Collins’s diction at its best. Yet much of the language of his earlier work betrays him as more or less a poetaster of the eighteenth century. The early “Oriental Eclogues” abound in the usual descriptive details, just as if the poet had picked out his words and phrases from the approved lists. Thus,

and even in the “Ode on the Popular Superstitions” there were expressions like watery surge, sheeny gold, though now and then the “new” diction is strikingly exemplified in a magnificent phrase such as gleamy pageant.

When Collins has nothing new to say his poetic language is that of his time, but when his inspiration is at its loftiest his diction is always equal to the task, and it is then that he gives us the unrivalled felicities of “The Ode to Evening.”

Amongst all the English poets there has probably never been one, even when we think of Tennyson, more careful and meticulous (or “curiously elaborate,” as Wordsworth styled it) about the diction of his verses, the very words themselves, than Gray. This fact, and not Matthew Arnold’s opinion that it was because Gray had fallen on an “age of prose,” may perhaps be regarded as sufficient to explain the comparative scantiness of his literary production. He himself, in a famous letter, has clearly stated his ideal of literary expression: “Extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical, is one of the grand beauties of lyrical poetry.”[75] Hence all his verses bear evidence of the most painstaking labour and rigorous self-criticism, almost as if every word had been weighed and assessed before being allowed to appear. His correspondence with Mason and Beattie, referred to in the previous chapter, shows the same fastidiousness with regard to the work of others. Gray indeed, drawing freely upon Milton and Dryden, created for himself a special poetic language which in its way can become almost as much an abuse as the otiosities of many of his predecessors and contemporaries—the “cumbrous splendour” of which Johnson complained. Yet he is never entirely free from the influence of the “classical” diction which, for Johnson, represented the ideal. His earliest work is almost entirely conventional in its descriptions, the prevailing tone being exemplified in such phrases as the purple year, the Attic Warbler pours her throat (Ode on “The Spring”), whilst in the “Progress of Poesy,” lines like

are not uncommon, though of course the possibility of the direct influence of the classics, bringing with it the added flavour of reminiscence, is not to be ignored in this sort of diction. Moreover, a couplet from the fragmentary “Alliance of Education and Government”:

is almost typical, apart from the freshness of the epithet breathing, of what Wordsworth wished to abolish. Even the “Elegy” has not escaped the contagion: storied urn or animated bust is perilously akin to the pedantic periphrases of the Augustans.

Before passing to a consideration of the work of Johnson and Goldsmith, who best represent the later eighteenth century development of the “classical” school of Pope, reference may be made to two other writers. The first of these is Thomas Chatterton. In that phase of the early Romantic Movement which took the form of attempts to revive the past, Chatterton of course played an important part, and the pseudo-archaic language which he fabricated for the purpose of his “Rowley” poems is interesting, not only as an indication of the trend of the times towards the poetic use of old and obsolete words, but also as reflecting, it would seem, a genuine endeavour to escape from the fetters of the conventional and stereotyped diction of his day. On the other hand, in his avowedly original work, Chatterton’s diction is almost entirely imitative. He has scarcely a single fresh image or description; his series of “Elegies” and “Epistles” are clothed in the current poetic language. He uses the stock expressions, purling streams, watery bed, verdant vesture of the smiling fields, along with the usual periphrases, such as the muddy nation or the speckled folk for “frogs.” One verse of an “Elegy” written in 1768 contains in itself nearly all the conventional images:

It can be judged from these examples how a stereotyped mode of expression may depreciate to a large extent the value of much of the work of a poet of real genius. Chatterton is content in most of his avowedly “original” work to turn his poetic thoughts into the accepted moulds, which is all the more surprising when we remember his laborious methods of manufacturing an archaic diction for his mediaeval “discoveries,”[76] even if we may assume that it reflected a strong desire for something fresh and new.

A poet of much less genius, but one who enjoyed great contemporary fame, was William Falconer, whose “Shipwreck,” published in 1762, was the most popular sea-poem of the eighteenth century. The most striking characteristic of the descriptive parts of the poem is the daring and novel use of technical sea-terms, but apart from this the language is purely conventional. The sea is still the same desert-waste, faithless deep, watery way, world, plain, path, or the fluid plain, the glassy plain, whilst the landscape catalogue is as lifeless as any of the descriptive passages of the early eighteenth century:

When he leaves this second-hand description, and describes scenes actually experienced and strongly felt, Falconer’s language is correspondingly fresh and vivid, the catastrophe of the shipwreck itself, for example, being painted with extraordinary power.[77]

When we come to Johnson and Goldsmith, here again a distinction must be made between the didactic or satiric portion of their work and that which is descriptive. Johnson’s didactic verse, marked as it is by a free use of inversion and ellipsis, rarely attains the clearness and simplicity of Goldsmith’s, whilst he has also much more of the stock descriptive terms and phrases. His “Odes” are almost entirely cast in this style. Thus in “Spring”:

whilst exactly the same stuff is turned out for a love poem, “To Stella”:

Though there is not so much of this kind of otiose description in the poems of Goldsmith, yet Mr. Dobson’s estimate of his language may be accepted as a just one: “In spite of their beauty and humanity,” he says, “the lasting quality of ‘The Traveller’ and ‘The Deserted Village’ is seriously prejudiced by his half-way attitude between the poetry of convention and the poetry of nature—between the gradus epithet of Pope and the direct vocabulary of Wordsworth.”[78] Thus when we read such lines as

we feel that Goldsmith too has been writing with his eye on the object, and even in such a line as

there is a freshness of description that compensates for the use of the hackneyed warbling grove. On the other hand, there are in both pieces passages which it is difficult not to regard as purely conventional in their language. Thus in “The Traveller,” the diction, if not entirely of the stock type, is not far from it:

and so on for another dozen lines.[79]

Only the slightest traces, however, of this mechanical word-painting appear in “The Deserted Village,” almost the only example of the stereotyped phrase being in the line

Thus whilst Goldsmith in much of his work continues the classical school of Pope, alike in his predilection for didactic verse and his practice of the heroic couplet, in his poetic language he is essentially individual. In his descriptive passages he rarely uses the conventional jargon, and the greater part of the didactic and moral observations of his two most famous poems is written in simple and unadorned language that would satisfy the requirements of the Wordsworthian canon.

That pure and unaffected diction could be employed with supreme effect in other than moral and didactic verse was soon to be shown in the lyric poetry of William Blake, who, about thirty years before Wordsworth launched his manifestoes, evolved for himself a poetic language, wonderful alike in its beauty and simplicity. In those of the “Songs of Innocence” and “The Songs of Experience,” which are concerned with natural description, the epithets and expressions that had long been consecrated to this purpose find little or no place. Here and there we seem to catch echoes of the stock diction, as in the lines,

of the Introduction to the “Songs of Experience,” or the

of “The Cradle Song”; but in each case the expressions are redeemed and revitalized by the pure and joyous singing note of the lyrics of which they form part. Only once is Blake to be found using the conventional epithet, when in his “Laughing Song” he writes