It was vulgar to say that the moon was rising; the gentlemanly expression
was, 'Cynthia is lifting her silver horn!' Women became nymphs in this
new phraseology, fruits became 'the treasures of Pomona,' a horse became
'the impatient courser.' The result of coining these conventional
counters for groups of ideas was that the personal, the exact, was lost
in literature. Apples were the treasures of Pomona, but so were
cherries, too, and if one wished to allude to peaches, they also were the
treasures of Pomona. This decline from particular to general language
was regarded as a great gain in elegance. It was supposed that to use
one of these genteel counters, which passed for coin of poetic language,
brought the speaker closer to the grace of Latinity. It was thought that
the old direct manner of speaking was crude and futile; that a romantic
poet who wished to allude to caterpillars could do so without any
exercise of his ingenuity by simply introducing the word 'caterpillars,'
whereas the classical poet had to prove that he was a scholar and a
gentleman by inventing some circumlocution, such as 'the crawling scourge
that smites the leafy plain.'. . . In the generation that succeeded Pope
really clever writers spoke of a 'gelid cistern,' when they meant a cold
bath, and 'the loud hunter-crew' when they meant a pack of foxhounds."

It would be a mistake to suppose that the men of Pope's generation,
including Pope himself, were altogether wanting in romantic feeling.
There is a marked romantic accent in the Countess of Winchelsea's ode "To
the Nightingale"; in her "Nocturnal Reverie"; in Parnell's "Night Piece
on Death," and in the work of several Scotch poets, like Allan Ramsay and
Hamilton of Bangour, whose ballad, "The Braces of Yarrow," is certainly a
strange poem to come out of the heart of the eighteenth century. But
these are eddies and back currents in the stream of literary tendency.
We are always in danger of forgetting that the literature of an age does
not express its entire, but only its prevailing, spirit. There is