and "On the Approach of Summer," are in the
familiar octosyllabics.

"Haste thee, Nymph! and hand in hand,
With thee lead a buxom band;
Bring fantastic-footed joy,
With Sport, that yellow-tressed boy," etc.[13]

In Gray and Collins, though one can hardly read a page without being
reminded of Milton, it is commonly in subtler ways than this. Gray, for
example, has been careful to point out in his notes his verbal
obligations to Milton, as well as to Shakspere, Cowley, Dryden, Pindar,
Vergil, Dante, and others; but what he could not well point out, because
it was probably unconscious, was the impulse which Milton frequently gave
to the whole exercise of his imagination. It is not often that Gray
treads so closely in Milton's footsteps as he does in the latest of his
poems, the ode written for music, and performed at Cambridge in 1769 on
the installation of the Duke of Grafton as Chancellor; in which Milton is
made to sing a stanza in the meter of the "Nativity Ode";

"Ye brown o'er-arching groves
That Contemplation loves,
Where willowy Camus lingers with delight;
Oft at the blush of dawn
I trod your level lawn,
Oft wooed the gleam of Cynthia, silver bright,
In cloisters dim, far from the haunts of Folly,
With Freedom by my side, and soft-eyed Melancholy."

Not only the poets who have been named, but many obscure versifiers are
witnesses to this Miltonic revival. It is usually, indeed, the minor
poetry of an age which keeps most distinctly the "cicatrice and capable
impressure" of a passing literary fashion. If we look through Dodsley's
collection,[14] we find a _melange_ of satires in the manner of Pope,
humorous fables in the manner of Prior, didactic blank-verse pieces after
the fashion of Thomson and Akenside, elegiac quatrains on the model of
Shenstone and Gray, Pindaric odes _ad nauseam_, with imitations of
Spenser and Milton.[15]

To the increasing popularity of Milton's minor poetry is due the revival
of the sonnet. Gray's solitary sonnet, on the death of his friend
Richard West, was composed in 1742 but not printed till 1775, after the
author's death. This was the sonnet selected by Wordsworth, to
illustrate his strictures on the spurious poetic diction of the
eighteenth century, in the appendix to the preface to the second edition
of "Lyrical Ballads." The style is noble, though somewhat artificial:
the order of the rhymes conforms neither to