pth of winter, while without
The ceaseless winds blow ice, be my retreat
Between the groaning forest and the shore,
Beat by the boundless multitude of waves,
A rural, sheltered, solitary scene;
Where ruddy fire and beaming tapers join
To cheer the gloom. There studious let me sit
And hold high converse with the mighty dead."[24]

The revival again, of the preternatural and of popular superstitions as
literary material, after a rationalizing and skeptical age, is signalized
by such a passage as this:

"Onward they pass, o'er many a panting height,
And valley sunk and unfrequented, where
At fall of eve the fairy people throng,
In various game and revelry to pass
The summer night, as village stories tell.
But far around they wander from the grave
Of him whom his ungentle fortune urged
Against his own sad breast to life the hand
Of impious violence. The lonely tower
Is also shunned, whose mournful chambers hold,
So night-struck fancy dreams, the yelling ghost."

It may not be uninstructive to note the occurrence of the word _romantic_
at several points in the poem:

"glimmering shades and sympathetic glooms,
Where the dim umbrage o'er the falling stream
Romantic hangs."[25]

This is from a passage in which romantic love once more comes back into
poetry, after its long eclipse; and in which the lover is depicted as
wandering abroad at "pensive dusk," or by moonlight, through groves and
along brooksides.[26] The word is applied likewise to clouds, "rolled
into romantic shapes, the dream of waking fancy"; and to the scenery of
Scotland--"Caledonia in romantic view." In a subtler way, the feeling of
such lines as these is romantic:

"Breathe your still song into the reaper's heart,
As home he goes beneath the joyous moon;"

or these, of the comparative lightness of the summer night:

"A faint, erroneous ray,
Glanced from the imperfect surfaces of things,
Flings half an image on the straining eye."

In a letter to Stonehewer (June 29, 1760), Gray comments thus upon a
passage from Ossian:

"'Ghosts ride on the tempest to-night:
Sweet is their voice between the gusts of wind:
_Their songs are of other worlds._'

"Did you never observe (_while rocking winds are piping loud_) that pause,
as the gust is re-collecting itself, and rising upon the ear in a shrill
and plaintive note,