Another fact is worthy of attention. Many of the most beautiful compound epithets in the English language are nature phrases descriptive of outdoor sights and sounds. The arrested development, or the atrophy of the sense of the beauty of the external world, which is a characteristic of the neo-classical school, was an unconscious but effective bar to the formation of new words and phrases descriptive of outdoor life. The neo-classical poet, with his eye fixed on the town and on life as lived there, felt no necessity for adding to the descriptive resources of his vocabulary, especially when there was to his hand a whole _gradus_ of accepted and consecrated words and phrases. It is in the apostles of “the return to Nature” that we find, however inadequately, to begin with, a new diction that came into being because these poets had recovered the use of their eyes and could sense the beauty of the world around them. And this fact leads to a further consideration of the use of compound epithets from the formal viewpoint of their technical value. It has already been suggested that their use may not be unconnected with the mechanism of verse, and the æsthetic poverty of eighteenth century poetry in this respect may therefore be not unjustly regarded as an outcome of the two great prevailing vehicles of expression. In the first place, there was the heroic couplet as brought to perfection by Pope. “The uniformity and maximum swiftness that marked his manipulation of the stopped couplet was achieved,” says Saintsbury, “not only by means of a large proportion of monosyllabic final words, but also by an evident avoidance of long and heavy vocables in the interior of the lines themselves.”[193] Moreover, perhaps the commonest device to secure the uniform smoothness of the line was that use of the “_gradus_ epithet” which has earlier been treated; these epithets were for the most part stock descriptive adjectives—_verdant_, _purling_, _fleecy_, _painted_, and the like—which were generally regarded by the versifiers as the only attendant diction of the couplet. If we compare a typical Pope verse such as Let _vernal_ airs through trembling osiers play with the line already quoted, Love-whisp’ring woods and lute-resounding waves we may perhaps see that the free use of compound epithets was not compatible with the mechanism of the couplet as illustrated in the greater part of Pope’s practice; they would tend to weaken the balanced antithesis, and thus spoil the swing of the line.