As regards his own practice, Coleridge goes on to say[192] that he “pruned the double epithets with no sparing hand”; but the pruning was not very severe, judging from a comparison of the two volumes. Yet these early poems are not without examples of good compound epithets: “_zephyr-haunted_ brink,” (“Lines to a Beautiful Spring”), “_distant-tinkling_ stream” (“Song of the Pixies,” 16), “_sunny-tinctured_ hue” (_ibid._, 43), “_passion-warbled_ strain,” (“To the Rev. W. J. H.”), etc. When we review the use of compound epithets in the poetry of the eighteenth century we are bound to admit that in this, as in other aspects of the “purely poetical,” the eighteenth century stands apart from other periods in our literary history. Most readers could probably at will call to their mind half a dozen compound epithets of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan period, of Milton, or of more modern writers, such as Keats, that are, as it were, little poems in themselves, Shakespeare’s “_young-eyed cherubim_,” or Milton’s “_grey-hooded even_,” or Keats’s “_soft-conched shell_.” It is safe to say that few eighteenth century words or phrases of this nature have captured the imagination to a similar degree; Collins’s “_dim-discovered spires_” is perhaps the only instance that comes readily to the mind. There are, of course, as our study has shown, plenty of instances of good compound epithets, but in the typical eighteenth century poetry these are rarely the product of a genuine creative force that endows the phrase with imaginative life. Even the great forerunners of the Romantic revolt are not especially remarkable in this respect; one of the greatest of them, William Blake, gave scarcely a single new compound epithet to the language, and whilst this fact, of course, cannot be brought as a reproach against him, yet it is, in some respects at least, significant of the poetical atmosphere into which he was born. It has often been remarked that when Latin influence was in the ascendant the formation of new and striking compound epithets has been very rare in English poetry, whilst it has been always stimulated, as we know from the concrete examples of Chapman and Keats, by the influence of a revived Hellenism.