While Chatterton did not leave enough verse of surpassing merit to rank him as a great poet, his work nevertheless entitles him to be chosen from among all his boyish peers to receive the laurel wreath for song.
The Literature of Melancholy.--The choice of subjects in which the emotion of melancholy was given full sway shows one direction taken by the romantic movement. Here, the influence of Milton's _Il Penseroso_ can often be traced. The exquisite _Ode to Evening_, by William Collins (1721-1759), shows the love for nature's solitudes where this emotion may be nursed. Lines like these:--
"...be mine the hut, That, from the mountain's side, Views wilds and swelling floods, And hamlets brown, and dim-discovered spires; And hears their simple bell; and marks o'er all Thy dewy fingers draw The gradual dusky veil,"
caused Swinburne to say: "Corot on canvas might have signed his _Ode to Evening_."
The high-water mark of the poetry of melancholy of this period was reached in Thomas Gray's (1716-1771) _Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard_ (1751). The poet with great art selected those natural phenomena which cast additional gloom upon the scene. We may notice in the very first stanza that the images were chosen with this end in view:--
"The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea, The plowman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me"
Then we listen to the droning flight of the beetle, to the drowsy tinklings from a distant fold, to the moping owl in an ivy-mantled tower. Each natural object, either directly or by contrast, reflects the mind of man. Nature serves as a background for the display of emotion.
Gosse says in his _Life of Gray_: "The _Elegy_ has exercised an influence on all the poetry of Europe, from Denmark to Italy, from France to Russia. With the exception of certain works of Byron and Shakespeare, no English poem has been so widely admired and imitated abroad."
[Illustration: STOKE POGES CHURCHYARD (SCENE OF GRAY'S ELEGY).]
The Conflict between Romanticism and Classicism.--The influences of this period were not entirely in the direction of romanticism. Samuel Johnson, the literary dictator of the age, was unsparing in his condemnation of the movement. The weight of his opinion kept many romantic tendencies in check. Even authors like Gray were afraid to adopt the new creed in its entirety. In one stanza of his _Hymn to Adversity_ we find four capitalized abstractions, after the manner of the classical school: Folly, Noise, Laughter, Prosperity; and the following two lay figures, little better than abstractions:--