well in reproducing the wild air of his originals.  His biographer, Mr. Gosse, promises that “the student will not fail . . . in the Gothic picturesqueness of ‘The Descent of Odin,’ to detect notes and phrases of a more delicate originality than are to be found even in his more famous writings; and will dwell with peculiar pleasure on those passages in which Gray freed himself of the trammels of an artificial and conventional taste, and prophesied of the new romantic age that was coming.”

Celtic antiquity shared with Gothic in this newly around interest.  Here too, as in the phrase about “the stormy Hebrides,” “Lycidas” seems to have furnished the spark that kindled the imaginations of the poets.

    “Where were ye, nymphs, when the remorseless deep
    Closed o’er the head of your loved Lycidas? 
    For neither were ye playing on the steep
    Where your old bards, the famous Druids lie,
    Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high,
    Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream.”

Joseph Warton quotes this passage twice in his “Essay on Pope” (Vol I., pp. 7 and 356, 5th ed.), once to assert its superiority to a passage in Pope’s “Pastorals”:  “The mention of places remarkably romantic, the supposed habitation of Druids, bards and wizards, is far more pleasing to the imagination, than the obvious introduction of Cam and Isis.”  Another time, to illustrate the following suggestion:  “I have frequently wondered that our modern writers have made so little use of the druidical times and the traditions of the old bards. . .  Milton, we see, was sensible of the force of such imagery, as we may gather from this short but exquisite passage.”  As further illustrations of the poetic capabilities of similar themes, Warton gives a stanza from Gray’s “Bard” and some lines from Gilbert West’s “Institution of the Order of the Garter” which describe the ghosts of the Druids hovering about their ruined altars at Stonehenge: 

                “—­Mysterious rows
    Of rude enormous obelisks, that rise
    Orb within orb, stupendous monuments
    Of artless architecture, such as now
    Oft-times amaze the wandering traveler,
    By the pale moon discerned on Sarum’s plain.”

He then inserts two stanzas, in the Latin of Hickes’ “Thesaurus,” of an old Runic ode preserved by Olaus Wormius (Ole Worm) and adds an observation upon the Scandinavian heroes and their contempt of death.  Druids and bards now begin to abound.  Collins’ “Ode on the Death of Mr. Thomson,” e.g., commences with the line

    “In yonder grave a Druid lies.”

In his “Ode to Liberty,” he alludes to the tradition that Mona, the druidic stronghold, was long covered with an enchantment of mist—­work of an angry mermaid: 

    “Mona, once hid from those who search the main,
    Where thousand elfin shapes abide.”

In Thomas Warton’s “Pleasures of Melancholy,” Contemplation is fabled to have been discovered, when a babe, by a Druid