[1] The tradition of this concreteness was not lost even in the
eighteenth century. Poets, living in a time of abstract thought, and
feeling under the necessity of handling abstractions, hit upon the
device of personifying them, with the result that from the pages of
Dodsley’s _Miscellany_ every faculty of the mind and every operation of
every science looks out at one with a capital letter, a fashion happily
parodied in the famous line:
“Inoculation, heavenly maid, descend.”
Gray is not untouched with the malady, though, on the whole, he
represents a reaction back to the richness of the concrete, the “pomp
and prodigality” of Shakespeare and Milton.
[2] Characteristically Wordsworth, in his celebrated preface,
illustrated what he meant by Imagination, not from his friend’s poetry,
but his own. Upon the line “Over his own sweet voice the stock-dove
broods,” he thus comments: “The stock-dove is said to _coo_, a sound
well imitating the note of the bird; but by the intervention of the
metaphor _broods_, the affections are called in by the imagination
to assist in marking the manner in which the bird reiterates and
prolongs her soft note, as if herself delighting to listen to it, and
participatory of a still and quiet satisfaction, like that which may be
supposed inseparable from the continuous process of incubation.”