Note 1 — PASSION AND IMAGINATION IN POETRY.

The tradition of this concreteness was not lost even in the eighteenth century. Poets, living in a time of abstract thought, and feeling under the necessity of handling abstractions, hit upon the device of personifying them, with the result that from the pages of Dodsley’s Miscellany every faculty of the mind and every operation of every science looks out at one with a capital letter, a fashion happily parodied in the famous line:

Gray is not untouched with the malady, though, on the whole, he represents a reaction back to the richness of the concrete, the “pomp and prodigality” of Shakespeare and Milton.