but in Mrs. Radcliffe the romantic gloom
is profound and all-pervading. In what pastures she had fed is manifest
from the verse captions that head her chapters, taken mainly from Blair,
Thomson, Warton, Gray, Collins, Beattie, Mason, and Walpole's "Mysterious
Mother." Here are a few stanzas from her ode "To Melancholy":

"Spirit of love and sorrow, hail!
Thy solemn voice from far I hear,
Mingling with evening's dying gale:
Hail, with thy sadly pleasing tear!

"O at this still, this lonely hour--
Thine own sweet hour of closing day--
Awake thy lute, whose charmful power
Shall call up fancy to obey:

"To paint the wild, romantic dream
That meets the poet's closing eye,
As on the bank of shadowy stream
He breathes to her the fervid sigh.

"O lonely spirit, let thy song
Lead me through all thy sacred haunt,
The minster's moonlight aisles along
Where specters raise the midnight chant."

In Mrs. Radcliffe's romances we find a tone that is absent from
Walpole's: romanticism plus sentimentalism. This last element had begun
to infuse itself into general literature about the middle of the century,
as a protest and reaction against the emotional coldness of the classical
age. It announced itself in Richardson, Rousseau, and the youthful
Goethe; in the _comedie larmoyante_, both French and English; found its
cleverest expression in Sterne, and then, becoming a universal vogue,
deluged fiction with productions like Mackenzie's "Man of Feeling," Miss
Burney's "Evelina," and the novels of Jane Porter and Mrs. Opie.
Thackeray said that there was more crying in "Thaddeus of Warsaw" than in
any novel he ever remembered to have read.[21] Emily, in the "Mysteries
of Udolpho" cannot see the moon, or hear a guitar or an organ or the
murmur of the pines, without weeping. Every page is bedewed with the
tear of sensibility; the whole volume is damp with it, and ever and anon
a chorus of sobs goes up from the entire company. Mrs. Radcliffe's
heroines are all descendents of Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe, but under
more romantic circumstances. They are beset with a thousand
difficulties; carried off by masked ruffians, immured in convents, held
captive in robber castles, encompassed with horrors natural and
supernatural, persecuted, threatened with murder and with rape. But
though perpetually sighing, blushing, trembling, weeping, fainting, they
have a