But the eighteenth century had little of this magic power of evocation; the secret had departed with the blind Milton, and it was not till the Romantic ascendancy had firmly established itself, not until Keats and Shelley and their great successors, that English poetry was once more able so to handle and fashion and rearrange words as to win from them their total and most intense associations. Yet contemporary criticism, especially in France, had not failed altogether to appreciate this potential magic of words. Diderot, for instance, speaks of the magic power that Homer and other great poets have given to many of their words; such words are, in his phrase, “hieroglyphic paintings,” that is, paintings not to the eye, but to the imagination.[267] What we feel about all the so-called classical verse of the eighteenth century, as well as of a good deal of the earlier Romantic poetry, is that writers have not been able to devise these subtle hieroglyphics; lack of real poetical inspiration, or the pressure of the prosaic and unimaginative atmosphere of their times, has led to a general poverty in the words or phrases that evoke some object before the inner eye, or charm the ear by an unheard melody, terms that, like the magic words of Keats, or the evanescent imagery of Shelley, stir us both emotionally and æsthetically. The verse of Pope and his followers is not without something of this power, but here the effect is achieved by the skill and polish with which the words are selected and grouped within the limits of the heroic couplet. Crabbe had marked down, accurately enough, this lack of word-power in his description of Dryden’s verse as “poetry in which the force of expression and accuracy of description have neither needed nor obtained assistance from the fancy of the writer,” and again, more briefly, as “poetry without an atmosphere.”[268] One negative indication of this “nudity” is the comparative poverty of eighteenth century poetry in new compound epithets, those felicitous terms which have added to the language some of its most poetical and pictorial phrases.