[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.