Before attempting to sum up the use of compound epithets in eighteenth century poetry, brief reference may be made to their use in the early work of the two poets who announced the definite advent of the new age. Wordsworth in his early poems has many instance of compound words, most of which are either his own formations, or are rare before his time. The original and final drafts both of the “Evening Walk” and the “Descriptive Sketches” show some divergence in this respect, compounds found in the 1793 version being omitted later, whilst on the other new formations appear in the revised poems. Besides imitative instances such as “_cloud-piercing_ pine trees” (D.S., 63), there are more original and beautiful compounds, such as the “_Lip-dewing_ song and the _ringlet-tossing_ dance” (_ibid._, 132), which does not appear until the final draft. Examples of Type IV are “_holly-sprinkled_ steeps” (E.W., 10), “The sylvan cabin’s _lute-enlivened_ gloom” (D.S., 134, final); and of Types V and VI, “_green-tinged_ margin” (D.S., 122), “_clear-blue_ sky” (D.S., 113), “_dim-lit_ Alps” (D.S., 1793 only, 217), and “the _low-warbled_ breath of twilight lute” (D.S., 1793, 749). Wordsworth’s early poems, it has been noted, are almost an epitome of the various eighteenth century devices for producing what was thought to be a distinctively poetical style,[189] but he soon shakes off this bondage, and “Guilt and Sorrow,” perhaps the first poem in which his simplicity and directness of expression are fully revealed, is practically without instances of compound epithets. The critics, it would appear, had already marked down as a fault a “profusion of new coined double epithets”[190] in a “small volume of juvenile poems” published by Coleridge in 1794. In replying to, or rather commenting on, the charge, Coleridge makes an interesting digression on the use of such formations, defending them on “the authority of Milton and Shakespeare,” and suggesting that compound epithets should only be admitted if they are already “denizens” of the language, or if the new formation is a genuine compound, and not merely two words made one by virtue of the hyphen. “A Language,” he adds, “which like the English is almost without cases, is indeed in its very genius unfitted for compounds. If a writer, every time a compounded word suggests itself to him, would seek for some other mode of expressing the same sense, the chances are always greatly in favour of his finding a better word.” Though there is a good deal of sound sense in these remarks, we have only to recall the wealth of beautiful compound epithets with which Keats, to take only one example, was soon to enrich the language, to realize that English poetry would be very much the poorer if the rule Coleridge lays down had been strictly observed. It would perhaps be truer to say that the imaginative quality of the compound epithets coined by a poet is a good test of his advance in power of expression.[191]