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 _comédie 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