"Through the dim veil of evening's dusky shade Near some lone fane or yew's funereal green," etc. --_Elegy IV_. "The glimmering twilight and the doubtful dawn Shall see your step to these sad scenes return, Constant as crystal dews impearl the lawn," etc. --_Ibid_. [47] "Life of Akenside." [48] "Pleasures of Hope." [49] _cf._ Wordsworth's "Some casual shout that broke the silent air, Or the unimaginable touch of time." --_Mutability: Ecclesiastical Sonnets_, XXXIV. CHAPTER V. The Miltonic Group That the influence of Milton, in the romantic revival of the eighteenth century, should have been hardly second in importance to Spenser's is a confirmation of our remark that Augustan literature was "classical" in a way of its own. It is another example of that curiously topsy-turvy condition of things in which rhyme was a mark of the classic, and blank verse of the romantic. For Milton is the most truly classical of English poets; and yet, from the angle of observation at which the eighteenth century viewed him, he appeared a romantic. It was upon his romantic side, at all events, that the new school of poets apprehended and appropriated him. This side was present in Milton in a fuller measure than his completed works would show. It is well known that he, at one time, had projected an Arthuriad, a design which, if carried out, might have anticipated Tennyson and so deprived us of "The Idyls of the King." "I betook me," he writes, "among those lofty fables and romances which recount in solemn cantos the deeds of knighthood."[1] And in the "Epitaphium Damonis" he thus apprised the reader of his purpose: "Ipse ego Dardanais Rutupina per aequora puppes, Dicam, et Pandrasidos regnum vetus Inogeniae, Brennumque Arviragunque duces, priscumque Belinum, Et tandem Armoricos Britonum sub lege colonos; Tum gravidam Arturo fatali fraude Ioergernen; Mendaces vultus, assumptaque Gorloeis arma, Merlini dolus."[2]