ilded[32] scenes and shining prospects rise; while
everywhere are balmy zephyrs, sylvan shades, winding vales, vocal shores,
silver floods, crystal springs, feathered quires, and Phoebus and
Philomel and Ceres' gifts assist the purple year. It was after this
fashion that Pope rendered the famous moonlight passage in his
translation of the Iliad:

"Then shine the vales, the rocks in prospect rise,
A flood of glory bursts from all the skies," etc.

"Strange to think of an enthusiast," says Wordsworth, "reciting these
verses under the cope of a moonlight sky, without having his raptures in
the least disturbed by a suspicion of their absurdity." The poetic
diction against which Wordsworth protested was an outward sign of the
classical preference for the general over the concrete. The vocabulary
was Latinized because, in English, the _mot propre_ is commonly a Saxon
word, while its Latin synonym has a convenient indefiniteness that keeps
the subject at arm's length. Of a similar tendency was the favorite
rhetorical figure of personification, which gave a false air of life to
abstractions by the easy process of spelling them with a capital letter.
Thus:

"From bard to bard the frigid caution crept,
Till Declamation roared whilst Passion slept;
Yet still did Virtue deign the stage to tread,
Philosophy remained though Nature fled,. . .
Exulting Folly hailed the joyful day,
And Pantomime and Song confirmed her sway."[33]

Everything was personified; Britannia, Justice, Liberty, Science,
Melancholy, Night. Even vaccination for the smallpox was invoked as a
goddess,

"Inoculation, heavenly maid, descend!"[34]

But circumstances or periphrasis was the capital means by which the
Augustan poet avoided precision and attained nobility of style. It
enabled him to speak of a woman as a "nymph," or a "fair"; of sheep as
"the fleecy care"; of fishes as "the scaly tribe"; and of a picket fence
as a "spiculated paling." Lowell says of Pope's followers: "As the
master had made it an axiom to avoid what was mean or low, so the
disciples endeavored to escape from what was common. This they contrived
by the ready expedient of the periphrasis. They called everything
something else. A boot with them was

"'The shining leather that encased the limb.'

"Coffee became

"'The fragrant juice of Mocha's berry brown.'"[35]

"For the direct appeal to Nature, and the naming of specific obj