"Spirit of love and sorrow, hail! Thy solemn voice from far I hear, Mingling with evening's dying gale: Hail, with thy sadly pleasing tear!
"O at this still, this lonely hour-- Thine own sweet hour of closing day-- Awake thy lute, whose charmful power Shall call up fancy to obey:
"To paint the wild, romantic dream That meets the poet's closing eye, As on the bank of shadowy stream He breathes to her the fervid sigh.
"O lonely spirit, let thy song Lead me through all thy sacred haunt, The minster's moonlight aisles along Where specters raise the midnight chant."
In Mrs. Radcliffe's romances we find a tone that is absent from Walpole's: romanticism plus sentimentalism. This last element had begun to infuse itself into general literature about the middle of the century, as a protest and reaction against the emotional coldness of the classical age. It announced itself in Richardson, Rousseau, and the youthful Goethe; in the _comédie larmoyante_, both French and English; found its cleverest expression in Sterne, and then, becoming a universal vogue, deluged fiction with productions like Mackenzie's "Man of Feeling," Miss Burney's "Evelina," and the novels of Jane Porter and Mrs. Opie. Thackeray said that there was more crying in "Thaddeus of Warsaw" than in any novel he ever remembered to have read.[21] Emily, in the "Mysteries of Udolpho" cannot see the moon, or hear a guitar or an organ or the murmur of the pines, without weeping. Every page is bedewed with the tear of sensibility; the whole volume is damp with it, and ever and anon a chorus of sobs goes up from the entire company. Mrs. Radcliffe's heroines are all descendents of Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe, but under more romantic circumstances. They are beset with a thousand difficulties; carried off by masked ruffians, immured in convents, held captive in robber castles, encompassed with horrors natural and supernatural, persecuted, threatened with murder and with rape. But though perpetually sighing, blushing, trembling, weeping, fainting, they have at bottom a kind of toughness that endures through all. They rebuke the wicked in stately language, full of noble sentiments and moral truths. They preserve the most delicate feelings of propriety in situations the most discouraging. Emily, imprisoned in the gloomy castle of Udolpho, in the power of ruffians whose brawls and orgies fill night and day with horror, in hourly fear for her virtue and her life, sends for the lord of the castle,--whom she believes to have murdered her aunt,--and reminds him that, as her protectress is now dead, it would not be proper for her to stay any longer under his roof thus unchaperoned, and will he please, therefore, send her home?