ole's story. See his quatrain "Die Burg von Otranto," first printed
in 1837.

"Sind die Zimmer saemmtlich besetzt der Burg von Otranto:
Kommt, voll innigen Grimmes, der erste Riesenbesitzer
Stuckweis an, and verdraengt die neuen falschen Bewohner.
Wehe! den Fliehenden, weh! den Bleibenden also geschiet es."

[24] Ossian.

[25] See her "Journey through Holland," etc. (1795)

[26] _cf._ Keats, "The Eve of Saint Agnes":

"The arras rich with hunt and horse and hound
Flattered in the besieging wind's uproar,
And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor."

[27] "Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne."

[28] See Julia Kavanagh's "English Women of Letters."

CHAPTER VIII.

Percy and the Ballads.

The regeneration of English poetic style at the close of the last century
came from an unexpected quarter. What scholars and professional men of
letters had sought to do by their imitations of Spenser and Milton, and
their domestication of the Gothic and the Celtic muse, was much more
effectually done by Percy and the ballad collectors. What they had
sought to do was to recall British poetry to the walks of imagination and
to older and better models than Dryden and Pope. But they could not jump
off their own shadows: the eighteenth century was too much for them.
While they anxiously cultivated wildness and simplicity, their diction
remained polished, literary, academic to a degree. It is not, indeed,
until we reach the boundaries of a new century that we encounter a Gulf
Stream of emotional, creative impulse strong enough and hot enough to
thaw the classical icebergs till not a floating spiculum of them is left.

Meanwhile, however, there occurred a revivifying contact with one
department, at least, of early verse literature, which did much to clear
the way for Scott and Coleridge and Keats. The decade from 1760 to 1770
is important in the history of English romanticism, and its most
important title is Thomas Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry:
Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of our Earlier
Poets," published in three volumes in 1765. It made a less immediate and
exciting impression upon contemporary Europe than MacPherson's "Poems of
Ossian," but it was more fruitful in enduring results. The Germans make
a convenient classification of poetry into _Kunstpoesie_ and
_Volkspoesie_, terms which may be imperfectly translated as literary
poetry and popul