ults,
The mansions of the dead."[20]

Blair's mortuary verse has a certain impressiveness, in its gloomy
monotony, not unlike that of Quarles' "Divine Emblems." Like the
"Emblems," too, "The Grave," has been kept from oblivion by the art of
the illustrator, the well-known series of engravings by Schiavonetti from
designs by Wm. Blake.

But the thoughtful scholarly fancy of the more purely romantic poets
haunted the dusk rather than the ebon blackness of midnight, and listened
more to the nightingale than to the screech-owl. They were quietists,
and their imagery was crepuscular. They loved the twilight, with its
beetle and bat, solitude, shade, the "darkening vale," the mossy
hermitage, the ruined abbey moldering in its moonlit glade, grots,
caverns, brooksides, ivied nooks, firelight rooms, the curfew bell and
the sigh of the Aeolian harp.[21] All this is exquisitely put in
Collins' "Ode to Evening." Joseph Warton also wrote an "Ode to Evening,"
as well as one "To the Nightingale." Both Wartons wrote odes "To
Solitude." Dodsley's "Miscellanies" are full of odes to Evening,
Solitude, Silence, Retirement, Contentment, Fancy, Melancholy, Innocence,
Simplicity, Sleep; of Pleasures of Contemplation (Miss Whately, Vol. IX.
p. 120) Triumphs of Melancholy (James Beattie, Vol. X. p. 77), and
similar matter. Collins introduced a personified figure of Melancholy in
his ode, "The Passions."

"With eyes upraised, as one inspired,
Pale Melancholy sat retired;
And from her wild, sequestered seat,
In notes by distance made more sweet,
Poured through the mellow horn her pensive soul;
And dashing soft from rocks around,
Bubbling runnels joined the sound;
Through glades and glooms the mingled measure stole,
Or o'er some haunted stream, with fond delay,
Round a holy calm diffusing
Love of peace and lonely musing,
In hollow murmurs died away."

Collins was himself afflicted with a melancholia which finally developed
into madness. Gray, a shy, fastidious scholar, suffered from inherited
gout and a lasting depression of spirits. He passed his life as a
college recluse in the cloistered retirement of Cambridge, residing at
one time in Pembroke, and at another in Peterhouse College. He held the
chair of modern history in the university, but never gave a lecture. He
declined the laureateship after Cibber's death. He had great learning,
and a taste most del