contentment together in their country home until 1720", the year in which the Countess died. With regard to her position as a pioneer in the description of Nature, Wordsworth has written: "It is remarkable that, excepting the "Nocturnal Reverie" of Lady Winchelsea, and a passage or two in the "Windsor Forest" of Pope, the poetry intervening between the publication of the "Paradise Lost" and "The Seasons" does not contain a single new image of external nature". This passage needs correction and modification. Pomfret's "Choice" faintly announced the movement in Naturalism, but "Windsor Forest" is a poem very disappointing to the student of early English Romanticism: obviously modelled on Denham's "Cooper's Hill", it is wholly "classical" in tone, and, though it has variety and charm, it does not offer such distinctive and vivid lines on Nature as we find in several passages of the "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard". Moreover for a gloomy scene, Parnell shows originality, and though not a landscape poet, he must, on account of one or two passages in the "Night-Piece on Death", be considered as bringing something new into the descriptions of Nature written between "Paradise Lost" and the "Seasons". Besides, Ramsay's "Gentle Shepherd” (1725) has slipped Wordsworth's memory; thal delightful pastoral presents new images of external nature. Lady Winchelsea's main contribution to Romanticism undoubtedly consists in "A Nocturnal Reverie"-the "pièce de résistance", the poem "To the Nightingale", and the "Petition for an Absolute Retreat". In the "Nocturnal Reverie", which runs to some fifty lines, the poetess describes a tranquil, fine, half-moonlit night and her feelings thereby excited. She combines general and particular thoughts, wide aspects and picturesque details of Nature. True and artistic description of scene, and profound sympathy with landscape, these form the Romantic elements of the poem. The descriptive manner appears "to advantage dressed" in the following verses: In such a Night, when every louder Wind Is to its distant cavern safe confin'd; In such a Night, when passing Clouds give place, When in some River, overhung with Green, When Odours, which declin'd repelling Day, Thro' temp'rate Air uninterrupted stray; When darken'd Groves their softest Shadows wear, And she describes her emotions thus : ...Silent Musings urge the Mind to seek Joys in th'inferior World, and thinks it like her own. Then she cries : In such a Night let me abroad remain Till Morning breaks,and All's confus'd again. We do not find a similary exact, detailed, and keen observation of Nature, nor so charming, bright and artistic expression thereof, until we come to Ramsay, whose first notable original poems appeared in 1719. Her sympathy with, and the profound and delicate emotions she enjoys in the presence of Nature, are, though less often mentioned, fully as Romantic as those of Ramsay, Thomson, and Dyer, the trio that published such noteworthy verse in the Seventeen-twenties. "To the Nightingale" presents what is for a poet the exquisite union of rapturous thought and verbal music : Sweet, oh! sweet, still sweeter yet Can thy Words such accents fit, Melt a Sense that shall retain Still some Spirit of the Brain, Still with sounds like these (1) it join. (1) A nightingale's notes. The "Petition for a Absolute Retreat" Leigh Hunt has described as "a charming aspiration after one of those sequestered states of felicity which poets love to paint. It is equally beautiful for its thoughts, its pictures, and the music of the burden which it repeats at the close of each paragraph”. The poem, which, composed in rimed couplets of seven or eight-syllabled lines, has a free and easy versification, opens : Give me, O indulgent Fate, Give me yet, before I die, A Sweet, but absolute Retreat, 'Mongst Paths so lost, and Trees so high, Through such Windings and such Shade, Certain aspects of Lady Winchelsea's poetry have been very ably noted by Wordsworth, who, in a letter to Dyce in 1830, wrote of her "I have often applied two lines of her drama ["Aristomenes", Act II, sc. 1] to her affections : Love's soft bands, His gentle cords of hyacinths and roses, Wave in the dewy Spring when storms are silent. ...Her style in rhyme is often admirable, chaste, tender, and vigorous, and entirely free from sparkle, antithesis, and... overculture". And in a sonnet to Lady Lowther, he described the poetess's work as "a Grotto bright and clear From stain or taint", where one comes on "Thoughts though pensive not austere". An examination of her poetry shows that through much of her work there runs a slight thread of Romanticism, but only in the "Nocturnal Reverie" do we discover a wholly Romantic poem; "To a Nightingale" and the "Petition", however, are Romantic largely in sentiment, moderately in form. These three poems, significant intrinsically, possess a great importance from the historical point of view they constitute the earliest potent and unmistakable manifestation of Romanticism in the English literature of the Eighteenth Century. Four years after Lady Winchelsea had quietly introduced this new element, Pope, the champion of classicism, momenta rily deviated from the paths of the conventional and strayed Pep into almost unknown fields. In 1717 he published the "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady" and the "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard", which form the "documents" for his share in early Romanticism. Any publication that announced a wave of revolt had its importance, but, more often than not, it was, during the earlier half of the century, received with only a moderate welcome. Not much was said, about these two poems, by contemporaries who probably considered them more or less as aberrations. Of the "Elegy", Dr. A. W. Ward has well observed: "In execution this elegy ranks with Pope's most consummate efforts, in pathetic power it stands almost alone amoung his works. More than that. It contains glimmers of Romanticism. Where, indeed, Pope opens out with "Ye Powers ", "thou, false guardian”, "So peaceful rests" and "Poets themselves must fall" (that is, in much the great er part of the poem), he is classical, but where he addresses himself to objective thoughts of the unfortunate woman, he approaches Romanticism. Truth to tell, it would be unwise to affirm the romantic in any other than the following short passages : What beck'ning ghost, along the moonlight shade And : By foreign hands thy dying eyes were closed, By strangers honour'd, and by strangers mourn'd! Much more significant, as an indication of a ferment just beginning to work in English poetry, was the "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard", which merits a close examination, partly because of the nature of the piece and partly because critics have given so little attention to the Romantic aspect of Pope; a few critics have postulated germs of revolt, but they have not defined those. germs. The "Argument" has its importance: "Abelard and Eloisa flourished in the twelfth century; they were two of the most distinguished Persons of their age... After a long course of calamities, they retired each to a several Convent, and consecrated the remainder of their days to religion. It was many years after this separation, that a letter of Abelard's to a Friend, which contained the history of his misfortune, fell into the hands of Eloisa. This awakening all her tenderness, occasioned those celebrated letters..." Eloisa, deciding to write to him, pours forth to Abelard her love in lines of genuine passion, and closes her letter with a plea that he attend her burial as a priest over a penitent sinner. Between three and four hundred lines long, this poem contains much that announces the coming Romanticism: to the passionate theme, Pope does justice, and he shows that had he given himself to Romantic subjects, had he lived rather later, and had he not felt constrained to keep up his position as the head of Eighteenth-century Classicism, he might have been as significant a figure in the history of early English Romanticism as were Ramsay and Thomson. As it is, a mere quantitative test, -useful for theme, sentiment, and phrasing, though of course not pretending to cope with the general tone or atmosphere of a poem,shows that nearly one-fifth of the total number of lines are indisputably either markedly Romantic in themselves or clearly Romantic in tendency. And the general effect, that intangible atmosphere which really determines the nature of any literary work, its contemporary significance, and its future influence, is Romantic. Despite the heroic couplets; despite a few personifications ("Love", "Friendship", "Melancholy", "Hope", etc.); despite several frigidly rhetorical flights (happily they are brief) as e. g. "waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole" and "Rise Alps between us and whole oceans roll!" ; despite such references to a now obsolete philosophy as "his loved Idea" and "each bright Idea of the skies"; despite such a recondite turn of phrase of the kind dear to the Metaphysical School and to overrefined "classical" writers-as the second line in the statement, You raised these hallow'd walls; the desert smiled, And Paradise was open'd in the Wild; and despite the influence of early Eighteenth-century English morals on the manner in which Pope handles Eloisa's preference of the position of mistress to the status of wife despite |