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... all three is at an elevated style of language, a diction more or less Miltonic. Here again none of them are successful. Akenside's elevation is mainly rhetorical, rarely, at his best, as in the Hymn to the Naiads, it is poetical; there he almost catches something of the true Miltonic tone; Gray's is marked by nobleness, strength, much real sublimity, but he is often betrayed into rhetoric tho' even then... partly done by carrying the eighteenth-century habit of personification to an almost ridiculous extreme, but more successfully by dwelling like Milton on the images of Greek mythology, as in the Hymn to the Naiads, or Gray's earlier poems, especially the Progress of Poesy; also by dwelling on the ideas of the Celtic romantic fancy, such as ghosts, fairies, spirits as in Gray's Bard & Collins' Ode or of ...