rather the "mild Miltonic maid," Pensive Meditation.

There were various shades of somberness, from the delicate gray of the
Wartons to the funereal sable to Young's "Night Thoughts" (1742-44) and
Blair's "Grave" (1743). Goss speaks of Young as a "connecting link
between this group of poets and their predecessors of the Augustan age."
His poem does, indeed, exhibit much of the wit, rhetorical glitter, and
straining after point familiar in Queen Anne verse, in strange
combination with a "rich note of romantic despair."[17] Mr. Perry, too,
describes Young's language as "adorned with much of the crude ore of
romanticism. . . At this period the properties of the poet were but few:
the tomb, an occasional raven or screech-owl, and the pale moon, with
skeletons and grinning ghosts. . . One thing that the poets were never
tired of, was the tomb. . . It was the dramatic--can one say the
melodramatic?--view of the grave, as an inspirer of pleasing gloom, that
was preparing readers for the romantic outbreak."[18]

It was, of course, in Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"
(1751), that this elegiac feeling found its most perfect expression.
Collins, too has "more hearse-like airs than carols," and two of his most
heartfelt lyrics are the "Dirge in Cymbeline" and the "Ode on the Death
of Mr. Thomson." And the Wartons were perpetually recommending such
themes, both by precept and example.[19] Blair and Young, however, are
scarcely to be reckoned among the romanticists. They were heavy
didactic-moral poets, for the most part, though they touched the string
which, in the Gothic imagination, vibrates with a musical shiver to the
thought of death. There is something that accords with the spirit of
Gothic ecclesiastical architecture, with Gray's "ivy-mantled tower"--his
"long-drawn aisle and fretted vault"--in the paraphernalia of the tomb
which they accumulate so laboriously; the cypress and the yew, the owl
and the midnight bell, the dust of the charnel-house, the nettles that
fringe the grave-stones, the dim sepulchral lamp and gliding specters.

"The wind is up. Hark! how it howls! Methinks
Till now I never heard a sound so dreary,
Doors creak and windows clap, and night's foul bird,
Rocked in the spire, screams loud: the gloomy aisles,
Black-plastered and hung 'round with shreds of scutcheons
And tattered coats-of-arms, send back the sound,
Laden with heavier airs, from the low va