 Part 1 Chapter 6 of A Brief History of English and American Literature. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Kalinda. A Brief History of English and American Literature by Henry A. Beers. Part 1 Chapter 6. From the Death of Pope to the French Revolution. 1744 to 1789. Pope's example continued potent for fifty years after his death. Especially was this so in satiric and didactic poetry. Not only Dr. Johnson's adaptations from Juvenile, London, 1738, and The Vanity of Human Wishes, 1749, but Giffords, Bavillade, 1791, and Mavillade, 1795, and Byron's English Bards and Scotch reviewers, 1809, were in the verse and manner of Pope. In Johnson's Lives of the Poets, 1781, Dryden and Pope are treated as the two greatest English poets. But long before this, a revolution in literary taste had begun, a movement which is variously described as the return to nature, or the rise of the new romantic school. For nearly a hundred years, poetry had dealt with manners and the life of towns, the gay prosaic life of congrief or of Pope. The sole concession to the life of nature was the old pastoral, which in the hands of cockneys like Pope and Ambrose Phillips, who merely repeated stock descriptions at second or third hand, became even more artificial than a beggar's opera or a rape of the lock. These, at least, were true to their environment and were natural just because they were artificial. But the seasons of James Thompson, published in installments from 1726 to 30, had opened a new field. Their theme was the English landscape, as varied by the changes of the year, and they were written by a true lover and observer of nature. Mark Akinside's Pleasures of Imagination, 1744, published the Year of Pope's Death, was written like the seasons in blank verse, and although its language had much of the formal didactic cast of the Queen Anne poets, it pointed unmistakably in the new direction. Thompson had painted the soft beauties of a highly cultivated land, lawns, gardens, forest preserves, orchards and sheep walks. But now a fresh note was struck in the literature, not of England alone, but of Germany and France. Romanticism, the chief element in which was a love of the wild. Poets turned from the lameness of modern existence to savage nature and the heroic simplicity of life among primitive tribes. In France, Brousseau introduced the idea of the natural man, following his instincts in disregard of social conventions. In Germany, Bodmer published, in 1753, the first edition of the Old German Epic, the Nibelungen Lied. Works of a similar tendency in England were the odes of William Collins and Thomas Gray, published between 1747 and 57, especially Collins's Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands, and Gray's Bard, a penderic, in which the last survivor of the Welsh Bards invokes vengeance on Edward I, the destroyer of his guild. Gray and Mason, his friend and editor, made translations from the ancient Welsh and Norse poetry. Thomas Percy's Relics of Ancient English Poetry, 1765, aroused a taste for old ballads. Richard Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance, Thomas Wharton's History of English Poetry, 1774-78, Tyrwitt's Critical Edition of Chaucer, and Horace Walpole's Gothic Romance, the Castle of Otranto, 1765, stimulated this awakened interest in the picturesque aspects of feudal life, and contributed to the fondness for supernatural and medieval subjects. James Beatty's Minstrel, 1771, described the educating influence of Scottish mountain scenery upon the genius of a young poet, but the most remarkable instances of this passion for wild nature and the romantic past were the poems of Ashen and Thomas Chatterson's literary forgeries. In 1762, James McPherson published the first installment of what professed to be a translation of the poems of Ashen, a Gaelic Bard, whom tradition placed in the third century. McPherson said that he had made his version, including two complete epics, Fingal and Timora, from Gaelic manuscripts, which he had collected in the Scottish Highlands. A fierce controversy had once sprang up over the genuineness of these remains. McPherson was challenged to produce his originals, and when, many years after, he published the Gaelic text, it was asserted that this was nothing but a translation of his own English into modern Gaelic. Of the manuscripts which he have professed to have found, not a scrap remained, the Gaelic text was printed from transcriptions in McPherson's handwriting or in that of his secretaries. But whether these poems were the work of Ashen or of McPherson, they made a deep impression upon the time. Napoleon admired them greatly, and Goethe inserted passages from the songs of Selma in his sorrows of Goethe. McPherson composed or translated them in an abrupt, rhapsodical prose resembling the English version of Job or of the prophecies of Isaiah. They filled the minds of their readers with images of vague sublimity and desolation, the mountain torrent, the mist on the hills, the ghosts of heroes half seen by the setting moon, the thistle in the ruined courts of chieftains, the grass whistling on the windy heath, the grey rock by the blue stream of Lutha, and the cliffs of sea-surrounded Gormel. A tale of the times of old. Why thou wanderer unseen, thou bender of the thistle of Laura, why thou breeze of the valley hast thou left mine ear? I hear no distant roar of streams, no sound of the harp from the rock. Come, thou huntress of Lutha, Malvina, call back his soul to the bard. I look forward to Lachlan of Lakes, to the dark billowy bay of Uthornow, where Fingal descends from ocean from the roar of winds. Few are the heroes of Morvan in a land unknown. Thomas Chatterton, who died by his own hand in 1770 at the age of 17, is one of the most wonderful examples of precocity in the history of literature. His father had been sextant of the ancient church of St. Mary Redcliffe in Bristol, and the boy's sensitive imagination took the stamp of its surroundings. He taught himself to read from a black-letter Bible. He drew charcoal sketches of churches, castles, nightly tombs, and heraldic blazonry. When only eleven years old, he began the fabrication of documents in prose and verse, which he ascribed to a fictitious Thomas Rowley, a secular priest at Bristol in the 15th century. Chatterton pretended to have found these among the contents of an old chest in the mutimate room of St. Mary Redcliffe's. The Rowley poems included two tragedies, Ayela and Godwin, two cantos of a long poem on the Battle of Hastings, and a number of ballads and minor pieces. Chatterton had no precise knowledge of early English or even of Chaucer. His method of working was as follows. He made himself a manuscript glossary of the words marked as archaic in Bailey's and Cursey's English dictionaries, composed his poems first in modern language, and then turned them into ancient spelling, and substituted here and there the old words in his glossary for their modern equivalents. Naturally he made many mistakes, and the Horace Walpole to whom he sent some of his pieces was an unable to detect the forgery, his friends Gray and Mason to whom he submitted them and once pronounced them spurious. Nevertheless there was a controversy over Rowley, hardly less obstinate than that over Ocean. A controversy made possible only by the then almost universal ignorance of the forms, scansion, and vocabulary of early English poetry. Chatterton's poems are of little value in themselves, but they are the record of an industry and imitative quickness, marvelous in a mere child, and they show how with the instinct of genius he threw himself into the main literary current of his time. Discarding the couplet of Pope, the poets now went back for models to the Elizabethan writers. Thomas Wharton published in 1753 his observations on the fairy queen. Beatty's minstrel, Thompson's castle of indolence, William Shenstone's schoolmistress, and John Dyer's fleece were all written in the Spensarian stanza. Shenstone gave a partly humorous effect to his poem by imitating Spencer's archasisms, and Thompson reproduced in many passages the copious harmony and luxuriant imagery of the fairy queen. The fleece was a poem on English wool growing after the fashion of Virgil's Georgics. The subject was unfortunate for, as Dr. Johnson said, it is impossible to make poetry out of surges and druggits. Dyer's Gronger Hill, which mingles reflection with natural description in the manner of Gray's elegy written in a country churchyard, was composed in the octosyllabic verse of Milton's La Legro and Il Pensaroso. Milton's minor poems, which had hitherto been neglected, exercised a great influence on Collins and Gray. Collins's Ode to Simplicity was written in the stanza of Milton's Nativity, and his exquisite unrhymed Ode to Evening was a study in versification after Milton's translation of Horace's Ode to Pyrrha in the original Meters. Shakespeare began to be studied more reverently. Numerous critical editions of his plays were issued, and Garrick restored his pure texts to the stage. Collins was an enthusiastic student of Shakespeare and one of his sweetest poems, The Durage in Symboline, was inspired by the tragedy of Symboline. The verse of Gray, Collins and the Wharton Brothers abounds in verbal reminiscences of Shakespeare, but their genius was not allied to his, being exclusively lyrical and not at all dramatic. The muse of this romantic school was fancy rather than passion. A thoughtful melancholy, a gentle scholarly pensiveness, the spirit of Milton's Il Penseroso, pervades their poetry. Gray was a fastidious scholar who produced very little, but that little of the finest quality. His famous elegy, expressing a meditative mood in language of the choicest perfection, is the representative poem of the second half of the 18th century, as the rape of the lock is of the first. The Romanticists were quietists and their scenery is characteristic. They loved solitude and evening, the twilight veil, the mossy hermitage, ruins, glens and caves. Their style was elegant and academic, retaining a little of the still-did poetic diction of their classical forerunners. Personification and paraphrases were their favorite mannerisms. Collins's odes were largely addressed to abstractions, such as fear, pity, liberty, mercy and simplicity. A poet in their dialect was always a bard, a countryman was the untutored swain, and a woman was a nymph or the fair, just as in Dryden and Pope. Thompson is perpetually mindful of Virgil and afraid to speak simply. He uses too many Latin epithets, like amusive and precipitant, and calls a fish-line. The floating lines snatched from the hoary steed. They left much for Calper and Wardsworth to do in the way of infusing the new blood of a strong, racy English into our exhausted poetic diction. Their poetry is impersonal, bookish, literary. It lacks emotional force, except now and then in Grey's immortal elegy, in his ode on distant prospect of Eaton College, in Collins's lines on the death of Thompson, and his little ode beginning, How Sleep the Brave. The new school did not lack critical expounders of its principles and practice. Joseph Wharton published in 1756 the first volume of his essay on the genius and writings of Pope, an elaborate review of Pope's writings, Seriatim, doing him certainly full justice, but ranking him below Shakespeare, Spencer and Milton. Witt and Satire, wrote Wharton, are transitory and perishable, but nature and passion are eternal. He's stuck to describing modern manners, but those manners, because they are familiar, artificial and polished, and their very nature unfit for any lofty effort of the muse. Whatever poetical enthusiasm he actually possessed, he withheld and stifled. Surely it is no narrow and niggardly encomium to say, he is the great poet of Reason, the first of ethical authors in verse. Wharton illustrated his critical positions by quoting freely not only from Spencer and Milton, but from recent poets like Thompson, Gray, Collins and Dyer. He testified that the seasons have been very instrumental in defusing a general taste for the beauties of nature and landscape. It was symptomatic of the change in literary taste that the natural or English school of landscape gardening now began to displace the French and Dutch fashion of clipped hedges, regular parterres, etc., and that Gothic architecture came into repute. Horace Walpole was a virtuoso in Gothic art, and in his castle at Strawberry Hill, he made a collection of ancient armor, made in manuscripts, and brick-a-brack of all kinds. Gray had been Walpole's travelling companion in France and Italy, and the two had quarreled and separated, but were afterward reconciled. From Walpole's private printing press at Strawberry Hill, Gray's two sister-oads, the Bard, and the Progress of Posey were first printed in 1757. Both Gray and Walpole were good correspondents, and their printed letters are among the most delightful literature of the kind. The central figure among the English men of letters of that generation was Samuel Johnson, 1709 to 84, whose memory has been preserved less by his own writings than by James Boswell's famous Life of Johnson, published in 1791. Boswell was a Scotch-layered and advocate who first met Johnson in London when the latter was 54 years old. Boswell was not a very wise or witty person, but he reverenced the worth and intellect that shone through his subjects uncouth exterior. He followed him about notebook in hand, bore all his snubbings patiently, and made the best biography ever written. It is related that the doctor once said that if he thought Boswell meant to write his life, he should prevent it by taking Boswell's. And yet Johnson's own writings and this biography of him have changed places in relative importance so completely that Carlile predicted that the former would soon be reduced to notes on the latter, and Macaulay said that the man who was known to his contemporaries as a great writer was known to posterity as an agreeable companion. Johnson was one of those rugged, eccentric, self-developed characters so common among the English. He was the son of a lich-filled bookseller, and after a course at Oxford which was cut short by poverty and an unsuccessful career as a schoolmaster, he had come up to London in 1737, where he supported himself for many years as a bookseller's hack. Gradually, his great learning and abilities, his ready social wit and powers as a talker, caused his company to be sought at the tables of those whom he called the great. He was a club-able man, and he drew about him at the tavern, a group of the most distinguished intellects of the time. Edmund Burke, the orator and statesman, Oliver Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds, the portrait painter, and David Gerrick, the great actor, who had been a pupil in Johnson's school near Lich-filled. Johnson was the typical John Bull of the last century. His oddities, virtues, and prejudices were thoroughly English. He hated Frenchmen, Scotchmen, and Americans, and had a cocknish attachment to London. He was a high Tory and an orthodox churchman. He loved a lord in the abstract, and yet he asserted sturdy independence against any lord in particular. He was deeply religious but had an abiding fear of death. He was burly in person and slovenly in dress. His shirt-frill was always covered with snuff. He was a great diner-out and inordinate tea-drinker and a voracious and untidy feeder. An inherited scrawfula, which often took the form of hypochondria and threatened to affect his brain, deprived him of control over the muscles of his face. Boswell describes how his features worked, how he snorted, grunted, whistled, and rolled about in his chair when getting ready to speak. He records his minutest trait, such as his habit of pocketing the orange peels of the club and his superstitious way of touching all the posts between his house and the miter tavern, going back to do it if he skipped one by chance. Though bearish in his manners and arrogant in dispute, especially when talking for victory, Johnson had a large and tender heart. He loved his ugly old wife, twenty-one years his senior, and he had his house full of unfortunates. A blind woman, an invalid surgeon, a destitute widow, a negro servant, whom he supported for many years and bore with all their ill-humors patiently. Among Johnson's numerous writings, the ones best entitled to remembrance are, perhaps, his Dictionary of the English Language, 1755, his Moral Tale, Rasselas, 1759, the introduction to his edition of Shakespeare, 1765, and his Lives of the Poets, 1781. Johnson wrote a sonorous cadence prose full of big Latin words and balanced clauses. Here is a sentence, for example, from his visit to the Hebrides. We were now treading that illustrious island which was once the luminary of the Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived the benefits of knowledge and the blessings of religion. To abstract the mind from all local emotion would be impossible if it were endeavored and would be foolish if it were possible. The difference between his colloquial style and his book style is well illustrated in the instance cited by Macaulay. Speaking of Villiers rehearsal, Johnson said, it has not wit enough to keep it sweet, then paused and added, translating English into Johnsonese. It has not fatality sufficient to preserve it from putrefaction. There is more of this in Johnson's rambler and idler papers than in his latest work, The Lives of the Poets. In this he showed himself a sound and judicious critic, though with decided limitations. His understanding was solid, but he was a thorough classicist and his taste in poetry was formed on pope. He was unjust to Milton and to his own contemporaries, Gray, Collins, Shenston and Dyer. He had no sense of the higher and subtler graces of romantic poetry and he had a comical indifference to the beauties of nature. When Boswell once ventured to remark that poor Scotland had at least some noble, wild prospects, the doctor replied that the noblest prospect Scotchman ever saw was the road that led to London. The English novel of real life had its origin at this time. Books like Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Captain Singleton, Journal of the Plague, etc. were tales of incident and adventure rather than novels. The novel deals primarily with character and with the interaction of characters upon one another as developed by a regular plot. The first English novelist in the modern sense of the word was Samuel Richardson, a printer, who began authorship in his fiftieth year with his Pamela, the story of a young servant girl who resisted the seductions of her master and finally, as the reward of her virtue, became his wife. Clarissa Harlow, 1748, was the tragical history of a high-spirited young lady who being driven from home by her family because she refused to marry the suitor selected for her, fell into the toils of lovelace and accomplished rake. After struggling heroically against every form of artifice and violence, she was at last drugged and ruined. She died of a broken heart and loveless, born down by remorse, was killed in a duel by a cousin of Clarissa. Sir Charles Grandison, 1753, was Richardson's portrait of an ideal, fine gentleman whose stately doings fill eight volumes, but who seems to the modern reader a bore and a prig. All of these novels were written in the form of letters passing between the characters, a method which fitted Richardson's subjective cast of mind. He knew little of life, but he identified himself intensely with his principal character and produced a strong effect by minute accumulated touches. Clarissa Harlow is his masterpiece, though even in that the situation is painfully prolonged. The heroine's virtue is self-conscious and rhetorical, and there is something almost ludicrously unnatural in the copiousness with which she pours herself out in gushing epistles to her female correspondent at the very moment when she is beset with dangers, persecuted, agonized and driven nearly mad. In Richardson's novels appears for the first time that sentimentalism which now began to infect European literature. Pamela was translated into French and German and fell in with that current of popular feeling which found fullest expression in Rousseau's Nouvelle Louise, 1759, and Goethe's Leiden des Jungen Werther, which set all the world a weeping in 1774. Coleridge said that to pass from Richardson's books to those of Henry Fielding was like going into the fresh air from a close room heated by stoves. Richardson, it has been affirmed, knew man, but Fielding knew men. The latter's first novel, Joseph Andrews, 1742, was begun as a travesty of Pamela. The hero, a brother of Pamela, was a young footman in the employ of Lady Booby, from whom his virtue suffered a like assault to that made upon Pamela's by her master. This reversal of the natural situation was in itself full of laughable possibilities, had the book gone on simply as a burlesque. But the exuberance of Fielding's genius led him beyond his original design. This hero, leaving Lady Booby's service, goes traveling with good parson-adams and is soon engaged in a series of comical and rather boisterous adventures. Fielding had seen life, and his characters were painted from the life with a bold free hand. He was a gentleman by birth and had made acquaintance with society in the town in 1727, when he was a handsome, stalwart young fellow, with high animal spirits and a great appetite for pleasure. He soon ran himself into debt and began writing for the stage, married and spent his wife's fortune, living for a while in much splendor as a country gentleman, and afterward in a reduced condition as a rural justice with a salary of 500 pounds of the dirtiest money on earth. Fielding's masterpiece was Tom Jones, 1749, and it remains one of the best of English novels. Its hero was very much after Fielding's own heart, wild, spend-thrift, warm-hearted, forgiving, and greatly in need of forgiveness. The same type of character with the lines deepened reappears in Captain Booth in Amelia, 1751, the heroine of which is a portrait of Fielding's wife. With Tom Jones as contrasted bliffle, the embodiment of meanness, hypocrisy, and cowardice, Sophia Western, the heroine, is one of Fielding's most admirable creations. For the regulated morality of Richardson with its somewhat old, granified air, Fielding substituted instinct. His virtuous characters are virtuous by impulse only, and his ideal of character is manliness. In Jonathan Wilde, the hero is a highwayman. This novel is ironical, a sort of prose mock heroic, and is one of the strongest, though certainly the least pleasing, of Fielding's writings. Tobias Smollett was an inferior Fielding with a difference. He was a Scotch ship surgeon and had spent some time in the West Indies. He introduced into fiction the now familiar figure of the British Tar in the persons of Tom Bowling and Commodore Trunnion. As Fielding had introduced in Squire Western the equally national type of hard swearing, deep drinking, fox hunting, Tory Squire. Both Fielding and Smollett were of the hearty British beef and beer school. Their novels are downright, energetic, coarse, and high-blooded. Low life, physical life, runs riot through their pages, tavern brawls, the breaking of pates, and the offhand courtship of country wenches. Smollett's books, such as Roderick Random, 1748, Peregrine Pickle, 1751, and Ferdinand Count Fathom, 1752, were more purely stories of broadly comic adventure than Fielding's. The latter's view of life was by no means idyllic, but with Smollett, this English realism ran into vulgarity and a hard Scotch literalness, and character was pushed to caricature. The generous whine of Fielding, says Tane, in Smollett's hands becomes brandy of the dram shop. A partial exception to this is to be found in his last and best novel, Humphrey Clinker, 1770. The influence of Cervantes, and of the French novelist Lesage, who finished his Adventures of Gilles Blas in 1735, are very perceptible in Smollett. A genius of much finer mold was Lawrence Stern, the author of Tristram Shandy, 1759-67, and The Sentimental Journey, 1768. Tristram Shandy is hardly a novel. The story merely serves to hold together a number of characters, such as Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim, conceived with rare subtlety and originality. Stern's chosen province was the whimsical, and his great model was rabble. His books are full of digressions, breaks, surprises, innuendos, double meanings, mystifications, and all manner of odd turns. Coleridge and Carlisle unite in pronouncing him a great humorist. Thackeray says that he was only a great jester. Humor is the laughter of the heart, and Stern's pathos is closely interwoven with his humor. He was the foremost of English sentimentalists, and he had that taint of insincerity which distinguishes sentimentalism from genuine sentiment, like goldsmiths, for example. Stern, in life, was selfish, heartless, and untrue. A clergyman, his worldliness and vanity and the indecency of his writings were a scandal to the church, though his sermons were both witty and affecting. He enjoyed the titillation of his own emotions, and he had practiced so long at detecting the latent pathos that lies in the expression of dumb things and of poor patient animals, that he could summon the tear of sensibility at the thought of a discarded post-chez, a dead donkey, a starling in a cage, or of Uncle Toby putting a housefly out of the window and saying, there is room enough in the world for thee and me. It is a high proof of his cleverness that he generally succeeds in raising the desired feelings in his reader even from such trivial occasions. He was a minute philosopher, his philosophy was kindly, and he taught the delicate art of making much out of little. Less coarse than fielding, he is far more corrupt. Fielding goes bluntly to the point. Stern lingers among the temptations and suspends the expectation to tease and excite it. Forbidden fruit had a relish for him, and his pages seduce. He is full of good sayings, both tender and witty. It was Stern, for example, who wrote, God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb. A very different writer was Oliver Goldsmith, whose vicar of Wakefield, 1766, was the earliest and is still one of the best novels of domestic and rural life. The book, like its author, was thoroughly Irish, full of bulls and inconsistencies. Very improbable things happened in it with a cheerful defiance of logic, but its characters are true to nature, drawn with an idyllic sweetness and purity, and with touches of a most loving humor. Its hero, Dr. Primrose, was painted after Goldsmith's father, a poor clergyman of the English church in Ireland, and the original, likewise, of the country parson in Goldsmith's deserted village, 1770, who was passing rich on forty pounds a year. This poem, though written in the fashionable couplet of Pope, and even containing a few verses contributed by Dr. Johnson, so that it was not at all in line with the work of the romanticists, did perhaps as much as anything of Grey or of Collins to recall English poetry to the simplicity and freshness of country life. Except for the comedies of Sheridan and Goldsmith, and perhaps a few other plays, the stage had now utterly declined. The novel, which is dramatic in essence, though not in form, began to take its place, and to represent life, though less intensely, yet more minutely than the theatre could do. In the novelists of the 18th century, the life of the people, as distinguished from society or the upper classes, began to invade literature. Richardson was distinctly a bourgeois writer, and his contemporaries, Fielding, Smollett, Stern and Goldsmith, ranged over a wide variety of ranks and conditions. This is one thing which distinguishes the literature of the second half of the 18th century from that of the first, as well as in some degree from that of all previous centuries. Among the authors of this generation, whose writings belong to other departments of thought than pure literature may be mentioned in passing, the great historian Edward Gibbon, whose decline in fall of the Roman Empire was published from 1776 to 1888, and Edmund Burke, whose political speeches and pamphlets possess a true literary quality. The Romantic poets had addressed the imagination rather than the heart. It was reserved for two men, a contrast to one another in almost every respect, to bring once more into British song a strong, individual feeling, and with it a new warmth and directness of speech. These were William Cowper, 1731 to 1800, and Robert Burns, 1759 to 96. Cowper spoke out of his own life experience, his agony, his love, his worship and despair, and straight away the varnish that had glittered all over our poetry since the time of Dryden melted away. Cowper had scribbled verses when he was a young law student at the Middle Temple in London, and he had contributed to the only hymns published in 1779 by his friend and pastor, the Reverend John Newton, but he only began to write poetry in earnest when he was nearly 50 years old. In 1782, the date of his first volume, he said in a letter to a friend that he had read but one English poet during the past 20 years. Perhaps therefore, of all English poets of equal culture, Cowper owed the least impulse to books and the most to need of uttering his inmost thoughts and feelings. Cowper had a most unhappy life. As a child, he was shy, sensitive and sickly, and suffered much from bullying and fagging at a school whether he was sent after his mother's death. This happened when he was six years old, and in his affecting lines written on receipt of my mother's picture, he speaks of himself as a wretch even then life's journey just begun. In 1763 he became insane and was sent to an asylum where he spent a year. Judicious treatment restored him to sanity, but he came out a broken man and remained for the rest of his life in invalid, unfitted for any active occupation. His disease took the form of religious melancholy. He had two recurrences of madness and both times made attempts on his life. At Huntington, and afterward at Olney in Buckinghamshire, he found a home with the Unwin family whose kind misted all which the most soothing and delicate care could do to heal his wounded spirit. His two poems, to Mary Unwin, together with the lines on his mother's picture, were almost the first examples of deep and tender sentiment in the lyrical poetry of the last century. Calper found relief from the black thoughts that beset him only in an ordered round of quiet household occupations. He corresponded indefatigably, took long walks through the neighborhood, read, sang, and conversed with Mrs. Unwin and his friend Lady Austin, and amused himself with carpentry, gardening, and raising pets, especially hares, of which gentle animals he grew very fond. All these simple tastes in which he found for a time a refuge and a sheltered happiness are reflected in his best poem, The Task, 1785. Calper is the poet of the family affections of domestic life and rural retirement. The laureate of the fireside, the tea table, the evening lamp, the garden, the greenhouse, and the rabbit coop. He draws with elegance and precision a chair, a clock, a harpsichord, a barometer, a piece of needlework. But Calper was an outdoor as well as an indoor man. The only landscape was Tame, a fat agricultural region where the sluggish owls wound between plowed fields and the horizon was bounded by low hills. Nevertheless, Calper's natural descriptions are at once more distinct and more imaginative than Thompson's. The task reflects also the new philanthropic spirit, the enthusiasm of humanity, the feeling of the brotherhood of men to which Rousseau had given expression in France, and which issued in the French Revolution. In England this was the time of Wilberforce, the anti-slavery agitator, of Whitefield, the eloquent revival preacher, of John and Charles Wesley, and of the evangelical and Methodist movements which gave life to the English church. John Newton, the Curit of Olney, and the Keeper of Calper's Conscience was one of the leaders of the evangelicals. And Calper's first volume of table-talk and other poems, 1782, written under Newton's inspiration was a series of sermons in verse, somewhat intolerant of all worldly enjoyment such as hunting, dancing, and theaters. God made the country and man made the town, he wrote. He was a moralizing poet, and his morality was sometimes that of the invalid and the recluse. Byron called him a coddled poet, and indeed there is a suspicion of gruel and dressing gowns about him. He lived much among women, and his sufferings had refined him to a feminine delicacy. But there is no sickliness in his poetry, and he retained a charming playful humor displayed in his excellent comic ballad, John Gilpin. And Mrs. Browning has sung of him, how when one by one sweet sounds and wandering lights departed he bore no less a loving face because so broken-hearted. At the close of the year 1786 a young Scotchman named Samuel Rose called upon Calper at Olney and left with him a small volume which had appeared at Edinburgh during the past summer, entitled Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect by Robert Burns. Calper read the book through twice, and though somewhat bothered by the dialect, pronounced it a very extraordinary production. This momentary flash, as of an electric spark, marks the contact not only of the two chief British poets of their generation, but of two literatures. Scotch poets like Thompson and Beatty had written in southern English, and as Carlisle said in Vacuo, that is with nothing special national in their work, Burns' sweet though rugged Doric first secured the vernacular poetry of his country a hearing beyond the border. He had to be sure a whole literature of popular songs and ballads behind him and his immediate models were Alan Ramsey and Robert Ferguson, but these remained provincial, while Burns became universal. He was born in Ayrshire, on the banks of Bonny Dune, in a clay biggin not far from Allway's old haunted Kirk, the scene of the witch dance in Tamishander. His father was a hard-headed, god-fearing tenant farmer, whose life and that of his sons was a harsh struggle with poverty. The crops failed, the landlord pressed for his rent, for weeks at a time the family tasted no meat. Yet this life of toil was lightened by love and homely pleasures. In the codder Saturday night, Burns has drawn a beautiful picture of his parents' household, the rest that came at the week's end, and the family worship about the wee-bit ingle Blinken Bonny. Robert was handsome, wild, and witty. He was universally susceptible, and his first songs, like his last, were of the Lasses. His head had been stuffed in boyhood with tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf candles, deadlights, etc. Told him by one Jenny Wilson, an old woman who lived in the family. His ear was full of ancient Scottish tunes, and as soon as he fell in love, he began to make poetry as naturally as a bird sings. He composed his verses while following the plow, or working in the stackyard, or at evening, balancing on two legs of his chair and watching the light of a peep-fire play over the reeky walls of the cottage. Burns' love songs are in many keys, ranging from strains of the most pure and exalted passions, like a fond kiss and to merry in heaven, to such loose ditties as when January winds and green grow the rushazo. Burns liked a glass almost as well as a lass, and at Machlein, buried on a farm with his brother Gilbert after their father's death, he began to seek a questionable relief from the pressure of daily toil and unkind fates in the convivialities of the tavern. There, among the wits of the Machlein club, farmers' sons, shepherds from the uplands, and the smugglers who swarmed over the west coast, he would discuss politics and farming, recite his verses, and join in the singing and ranting, while booze in northern Nappy and get in fowl and unco-happy. Experiences we owe not only those excellent drinking songs, John Barley Corn and Willie Brutipeck'em out, but the headlong fun of Tamashanter and the visions, grotesquely terrible of Death and Dr. Hornbrook, and the dramatic humor of the jelly beggars. Cowper had celebrated the cup which cheers but not inebriates. Burns sang the praises of the scotch drink. Cowper was a stranger to Burns' high animal spirits and his robust enjoyment of life. He had affections but no passions. At Machlein, Burns, whose irregularities did not escape the censure of the Kirk, became involved through his friendship with Gavin Hamilton in the controversy between the old light and new light clergy. His Holy Fair, Holy Tulsi, Two Herds, Holy Willie's Prayer, and Addressed to the Unco Goode are satires against bigotry and hypocrisy. But in spite of the rollicking profanity of his language and the violence of his rebound against the austere religion of Scotland, Burns was at bottom deeply impressable by religious ideas, as may be seen from his prayer under the pressure of violent anguish and prayer in prospect of death. His farm turned out a failure and he was on the eve of sailing for Jamaica when the favour with which his volume of poems was received stayed his departure and turned his steps to Edinburgh. He was recognized for a winter season by the learned and polite society of the Scotch capital, with results in the end not altogether favourable to Burns' best interests. For when society finally turned the cold shoulder on him, he had to go back to farming again, carrying with him a bitter sense of injustice and neglect. He leased a farm in Ellisland in 1788, and some friends procured his appointment as excisement for the district. His regular habits and broken health clouded his last years and brought him an untimely death at the age of 37. He continued, however, to pour forth songs of unequaled sweetness and force. The man sank, said Coleridge, but the poet was bright to the last. Burns is the best of British songwriters. His songs are singable, they are not merely lyrical poems. They were meant to be sung, and they are sung. They were mostly set to old Scottish heirs, and sometimes they were built up from ancient fragments of anonymous popular poetry, a chorus or stanza, or even a single line. Such are, for example, Old Langzine, My Hearts in the Highlands, and Land Lady Count the Lawn. Burns had a great warm heart, his sins were sins of passion, and sprang from the same generous soil that nourished his impulsive virtues. His elementary qualities as a poet were sincerity, a healthy openness to all impressions of the beautiful, and a sympathy which embraced men, animals, and the dumb objects of nature. His tenderness toward flowers and the brute creation may be read in his lines to a mountain daisy, to a mouse, and the old farmer's New Year's morning salutation to his old mayor Maggie. Next after love and good fellowship, patriotism is the most frequent motive of his song. Of his national anthem, Scott's What How You Wallace Bled, Carlisle said, So long as there is warm blood in the heart of a Scotchman, or man, it will move in fierce thrills under this war-oad. Burns's politics were a singular mixture of sentimental tourism with practical democracy. A romantic glamour was thrown over the fortunes of the exiled stewards, and to have been out in 45 with the young pretender was a popular thing in parts of Scotland. To this purely poetic logic loyalty may be attributed such Jacobite ballads of Burns as Over the Water to Charlie. But his sober convictions were on the side of liberty and human brotherhood, and are expressed in the twa dogs, the first epistle to Davy, and a man's a man for a that. His sympathy with the Revolution led him to send four pieces of ordnance taken from a captured smuggler as a present to the French Convention, a piece of bravado which got him into difficulties with his superiors in the excise. The poetry which Burns wrote, not in dialect but in the classical English, is in the stilted manner of his century, and his prose correspondence betrays his lack of culture by his constant lapse into rhetorical affectation and fine writing. End of Part 1, Chapter 6. Part 1, Chapter 7 of a brief history of English and American literature. This LibriVox recording Recording by Colinda. A brief history of English and American literature by Henry A. Beers. Part 1, Chapter 7 from the French Revolution to the death of Scott, 1789 to 1832. The burst of creative activity at the opening of the 19th century has but one parallel in English literary history. Namely, the somewhat similar flowering out of the national genius of the time of Elizabeth and the first two Stuart Kings. The later age gave birth to no supreme poets like Shakespeare and Milton. It produced no Hamlet and no Paradise Lost, but it offers a greater number of important writers, a higher average of excellence and a wider range and variety of literary work than any preceding era. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelly and Keats are all great names, while Suthie, Landor, Moore, Liam and DeQuincy would be noteworthy figures at any period and deserve a fuller mention than can be here recorded them. But in so crowded a generation, selection becomes increasingly needful and in the present chapter accordingly the emphasis will be laid upon the first named group as not only the most important but the most representative of the various tendencies of their time. The conditions of literary work in this century have been almost unduly stimulating. The rapid advance in population, wealth, education and the means of communication has vastly increased the number of readers. Everyone who has anything to say can say it in print and is sure of some sort of a hearing. A special feature of the time is the multiplication of periodicals. The great London dailies like The Times and The Morning Post which were started during the last quarter of the 18th century were something quite new in journalism. The first of the modern reviews, the Edinburgh, was established in 1802 as the organ of the Whig Party in Scotland. This was followed by the London Quarterly in 1808 and by Blackwood's magazine in 1817 both in the Tory interest. The first editor of the Edinburgh was Francis Geoffrey who assembled about him a distinguished core of contributors including the versatile Henry Broham afterward a great parliamentary orator and Lord Chancellor of England and the Reverend Sidney Smith whose witty sayings are still current. The first editor of the Quarterly was William Gifford, a satirist who wrote the Baviad and the Maviad in ridicule of literary affectations. He was succeeded in 1824 by James Gibson Lockhart the son-in-law of Walter Scott and the author of An Excellent Life of Scott. Blackwood's was edited by John Wilson Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh who under the pen name of Christopher North contributed to his magazine a series of brilliant imaginary dialogues characters of the day entitled Noctis Ambrosiane because they were supposed to take place at Ambros' Tavern in Edinburgh. These papers were full of a profuse headlong eloquence of humor, literary criticism and personalities interspersed with songs expressive of a roistering and convivial tourism and an uproarious contempt for wigs and cockneys. These reviews and magazines and others which sprang up beside them became the nuclei about which the wit of both parties gathered. Political controversy under the regency and the reign of George IV was thus carried on more regularly by permanent organs and no longer so largely by privateering in the shape of pamphlets like Swift's Public Spirit of the Wigs Johnson's Taxation Not tyranny and Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. Nor did politics by any means usurp the columns of the review literature, art, science the whole circle of human effort and achievement passed under review. Blackwood's Phrasers and Other Monthly's published stories, poetry, criticism and correspondence everything in short which enters into the makeup of our magazines today except illustrations. Two main influences of foreign origin have left their trace in the English writers of the first 30 years of the 19th century the one communicated by contact with the new German literature of the latter half of the 18th century and in particular with the writings Schiller and Kant the other springing from the events of the French Revolution. The influence of German upon English literature in the 19th century was more intellectual and less formal than that of the Italian in the 16th and of the French in the 18th. In other words the German writers furnished the English with ideas and ways of feeling rather than with models of style. Goethe and Schiller did not become subjects for literary imitation as Molière, Racine and Boileau had become in Pope's time. It was reserved for a later generation and for Thomas Carlisle to domesticate the diction of German prose but the nature and extent of this influence can perhaps best be noted when we come to take up the authors of the time one by one. The excitement caused by the French Revolution was something more obvious and immediate. When the Bastille fell in 1789 the enthusiasm among the friends of liberty and human progress in England was hardly less intense than in France. It was the dawn of a new day the shackles were stricken from the slave all men were free and all men were brothers and radical young England sent up a shout that echoed the roar of the Paris mob. Wordsworth's lines on the fall of the Bastille Coleridge's fall of Robespierre and Ode to France and Sadi's revolutionary drama Wat Tyler gave expression to the hopes and aspirations of the English democracy. In afterlife Wordsworth's looking back regretfully to those years of promise wrote his poem on the French Revolution as it appeared to enthusiasts at its commencement. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive but to be young was very heaven. O times in which the meagre stale forbidding ways of custom law and statute took at once the attraction of a country in romance. Those were the days in which Wordsworth then an undergraduate at Cambridge spent a college vacation in Tramping through France landing at Calais on the eve of the very day July 14th 1790 on which Louis the 16th signalized the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille by taking the oath of fidelity to the new constitution. In the following year Wordsworth re-visited France where he spent 13 months forming an intimacy with the republican general Beau Puy at Orléans and reaching Paris not long after the September massacres of 1792. Those were the days too in which young and young Coleridge having married sisters at Bristol were planning a Pantosocracy or ideal community on the banks of the Susquehanna and denouncing the British government for going to war with the French Republic. This group of poets who had met one another first in the south of England came afterward to be called the lake poets from their residence in the mountainous lake country of Westmoreland and Cumberland with which their names and that of Wordsworth especially are forever associated. The so called Lakers did not properly speaking constitute a school of poetry. They differed greatly from one another in mind and art, but they were connected by social ties and by religious and political sympathies. The excesses of the French Revolution and the usurpation of Napoleon disappointed them as it did many other English Liberals and drove them into the ranks of the reactionaries. Advancing years brought conservatism and they became in time loyal Tories and Orthodox Churchmen. William Wordsworth 1770 to 1850 the chief of the three and perhaps on the whole the greatest English poet since Milton published his Lyrical Ballads in 1798. The volume contained a few pieces by his friend Coleridge among them the ancient Mariner and its appearance may fairly be said to mark an epic in the history of English poetry. Wordsworth regarded himself as a reformer of poetry and in the preface to the second volume of Lyrical Ballads he defended the theory on which they were composed. His innovations were twofold in subject matter and addiction. The principal object which I proposed to myself in these poems he said was to choose incidents and situations from common life. Low and rustic life was generally chosen because in that condition the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity and are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature. Wordsworth discarded in theory the poetic diction of his predecessors and professed to use a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation. He adopted he said the language of men in rustic life because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived. In the matter of poetic diction Wordsworth did not in his practice adhere to the doctrine of this preface. Many of his most admired poems such as the lines written near Tinter and Abbey the great ode on the intimations of immortality, the sonnets and many parts of his longest poems the excursion and the prelude deal with philosophic thought and highly intellectualized emotions. In all of these and in many others the language is rich, stately, involved and as remote from the real language of Westmoreland Shepherds as is the epic blank verse of Milton. On the other hand in those of his poems which were consciously written in illustration of his theory the affectation of simplicity coupled with the defective sense of humor sometimes led him to the selection of vulgar and trivial themes and the use of language which is bald, childish or even ludicrous. His simplicity is too often the simplicity of mother goose rather than of Chaucer. Instances of this occur in such poems as Peter Bell, the idiot boy Goody Blake and Harry Gill Simon Lee and the Wagoner. But there are multitudes of words worth ballads and lyrics which are simple without being silly and which in their homeliness and clear profundity in their production of the strongest effects by the fewest strokes are among the choicest modern examples of pure as distinguished from decorated art. Such are out of many Ruth, Lucy, a portrait to a Highland girl the reverie of poor Susan to the cuckoo the reaper we are seven the pet lamb the fountain the two April mornings the leech gatherer, the thorn and yarrow revisited. Words worth with something of a Quaker in poetry and loved the sober drabs and grays of life. Quietism was his literary religion and the sensational was to him not merely vulgar but almost wicked. The human mind, he wrote is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants. He disliked the far-fetched themes and high-colored style of Scott and Byron. He once told Landor that all of Scott's poetry together was not worth sixpence. From action and passion he turned away to sing the inward life of the soul and the outward life of nature. He said, to me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. Long have I loved, would I behold the night that calms the day that cheers the common growth of mother earth suffices me her tears, her mirth her humblest mirth and tears. Words worth life was outwardly uneventful the companionship of the mountains and of his own thoughts the sympathy of his household the lives of the dalesmen and cottagers about him furnished him with all the stimulus that he required. Love had he found in huts where poor men lie his only teachers had been woods and rills the silence that is in the starry sky the sleep that is among the lonely hills. He read little but reflected much and made poetry daily composing by preference out of doors and dictating his verses to some member of his family. His favorite Emanuensis was his sister Dorothy a woman of fine gifts to whom Wordsworth was indebted for some of his happiest inspirations. She was the subject of the poem beginning as a child and her charming memorials of a tour in the Scottish Highlands records the origin of many of her brother's best poems. Throughout life Wordsworth was remarkably self-centered the ridicule of the reviewers against which he gradually made his way to public recognition never disturbed his serene belief in himself or in the divine message which he felt himself commissioned to deliver he was a slow and serious person a preacher as well as a poet not to say narrowness of character. That plastic temperament which we associate with poetic genius Wordsworth either did not possess or it hardened early whole sides of life were beyond the range of his sympathies he touched life at fewer points than Byron and Scott but touched it more profoundly it is to him that we owe the phrase plain living and high thinking as also a most noble illustration of it in his own practice his was the wisest and deepest spirit among the English poets of his generation though hardly the most poetic he wrote too much and attempting to make every petty incident or reflection the occasion of a poem he finally reached the point of composing verses on seeing a harp in the shape of a needle case and on other themes more worthy of Mrs. Sigourney in parts of his long blank verse poems the excursion 1814 and the prelude which was printed after his death in 1850 though finished as early as 1806 the poetry wears very thin and its place is taken by prosaic tedious didacticism these two poems were designed as portions of a still more extended work the recluse which was never completed the excursion consists mainly of philosophical discussions on nature and human life between a school master a solitary and an itinerant peddler the prelude describes the development of Wordsworth's own genius in parts of the excursion the diction is fairly Shakespearean the good die first and they whose hearts are dry as summer dust burn to the socket a passage not only beautiful in itself but dramatically true in the mouth of the bereaved mother who utters it to that human instinct which generalizes a private sorrow into a universal law much of the prelude can hardly be called poetry at all yet some of Wordsworth's loftiest poetry is buried among its dreary wastes and now and then in the midst of common places comes a flash of miltonic splendor like golden city's ten months journey deep among Tartarian wiles Wordsworth is above all things the poet of nature in this province he was not without forerunners to say nothing of burns and cowper there was George Crabb who had published his village in 1783 fifteen years before the lyrical ballads and whose last poem, Tales of the Hall came out in 1819 years after the excursion Byron called Crabb nature's sternest painter and her best he was a minutely accurate delineator of the harsher aspects of rural life he photographs a gypsy camp a common with its geese and donkey a salt marsh, a shabby village street or tumbledown mats but neither Crabb nor cowper has the imaginative lift of Wordsworth the light that never was on sea or land the consecration and the poet's dream in a note on a couplet in one of his earliest poems descriptive of an oak tree standing dark against the sunset Wordsworth says I recollect distinctly the very spot where this struck me the moment was important in my poetical history for I dated from my consciousness of the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by poets of any age or country and I made a resolution to supply in some degree the deficiency in later life he has said to have been impatient of anything spoken or written by another about mountains conceiving himself to have a monopoly of the power of hills but Wordsworth did not stop with natural description Matthew Arnold has said that the office of modern poetry is the moral interpretation of nature such at any rate was Wordsworth's office to him nature was alive and divine he felt under the veil of phenomena a presence that disturbs me with joy of elevated thought and sublime of something far more deeply interfused he approached if he did not actually reach the view of pantheism which identifies God with nature and the mysticism of the idealists who identify nature with the soul of man this tendency was not inspired in Wordsworth by German philosophy he was no metaphysician in his rambles with coloreg about nether stoe and al-Foxden when both were young they had indeed discussed Spinoza and in the autumn of 1798 after the publication of the lyrical ballads the two friends went together to Germany where Wordsworth spent half a year but the literature and philosophy of Germany made little direct impression upon Wordsworth he disliked Goethe and he quoted with approval the saying of the poet Klopstock whom he met at Hamburg that he placed the romanticist burger above both Goethe and Schiller it was through Samuel Taylor Colleridge 1772 to 1834 who was preeminently the thinker among the literary men of his generation that the new German thought found its way into England during the 14 months which he spent in Germany chiefly at Radsburg and Goetingen he had familiarized himself with the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant and of his continuators Fichte and Schelling as well as with the general literature of Germany on his return to England he published in 1800 the publication of Schiller's Wallenstein and through his writings and more especially through his conversations he became the conductor by which German philosophic ideas reached the English literary class Colleridge described himself as being from boyhood, a bookworm and a daydreamer he remained through life and omnivorous though unsystematic reader he was helpless in practical affairs and his native indolence and procrastination were increased by his indulgence in the opium habit on his return to England in 1800 he went to reside at Kesswick in the Lake Country with his brother-in-law Sadi whose industry supported both families during his last 19 years Colleridge found an asylum under the roof of Mr. James Gilman of Highgate near London wither many of the best young men in England were accustomed to resort to listen to Colleridge's wonderful talk talk indeed was the medium through which he mainly influenced his generation it cost him an effort to put his thoughts on paper his table-talk crowded with pregnant paragraphs was taken down from his lips by his nephew Henry Colleridge his criticisms of Shakespeare are nothing but notes made here and there from a course of lectures delivered before the Royal Institute and never fully written out though only hints and suggestions they are perhaps the most penetrative and helpful Shakespearean criticism in English he was always forming projects and abandoning them he projected a great work on Christian philosophy which was to have been his magnum opus but he never wrote it he projected an epic poem on the fall of Jerusalem I schemed it at 25 he said but alas Venturum expectat what bad fare to be his best poem Christabel is a fragment another strangely beautiful poem Kubla Khan which came to him he said in sleep is even more fragmentary and the most important of his prose remains theographia literaria 1817 a history of his own opinions breaks off abruptly it was in his suggestiveness that Colleridge's great service to posterity resided he was what J.S. Mill called a seminal mind and his thought had that power of stimulating thought in others which is the mark and the privilege of original genius many a man has owed to some sentence of Colleridge's if not the awakening in himself of a new intellectual life at least the starting of fruitful trains of reflection which have modified his whole view of certain great subjects on everything that he left is set the stamp of high mental authority he was not perhaps primarily he certainly was not exclusively a poet in theology in philosophy in political thought and literary criticism he set currents flowing which are flowing yet the terminology of criticism for example is in his debt for many of those convenient distinctions such as that between genius and talent between wit and humor between fancy and imagination which are familiar enough now but which he first introduced or enforced his definitions and apathems we meet everywhere such are for example the sayings every man is born an aristotelian or a Platonist prose is words in their best order poetry the best words in the best order and among the bits of subtle interpretation that abound in his writings may be mentioned his estimate of Wordsworth in the biographia literary and his sketch of Hamlet's character one with which he was personally in strong sympathy in the lectures on Shakespeare the broad church party in the English church among whose most eminent exponents have been Frederick Robertson Arnold of Rugby F. D. Maurice Charles Kingsley and the late Dean Stanley traces its intellectual origins to Coleridge's aids to reflection to his writings and conversations in general and particularly to his ideal of a national clarity as set forth in his essay on church and state in politics as in religion Coleridge's conservatism represents the reaction against the destructive spirit of the 18th century and the French Revolution to this root and branch democracy he opposed the view that every old belief or institution such as the throne or the church had served some need of a national idea at the bottom of it to which it might be again recalled and made once more a benefit to society instead of a curse and an anachronism as a poet Coleridge has a sure though slender hold upon immortal fame no English poet has sung so wildly well as the singer of Christabel and the ancient Mariner the former of these inform a romance in a variety of meters and in substance a tale of supernatural possession by which a lovely and innocent maiden is brought under the control of a witch though unfinished and obscure in intention it haunts the imagination with a mystic power Byron had seen Christabel in manuscript and urged Coleridge to publish it he hated all the Lakers but when on parting from Lady Byron he wrote his song Fair thee well and if forever still forever fair thee well he prefixed it to the noble lines from Coleridge's poem beginning alas they had been friends in youth in that weird ballad the ancient Mariner the supernatural is handled with even greater subtlety than in Christabel the reader has led to feel that amid the loneliness of the tropic sea the line between the earthly and unearthly vanishes and the poet leaves him to discover for himself whether the spectral shapes that the Mariner saw were merely the visions of the Calenture or a glimpse of the world of spirits Coleridge is one of our most perfect metrists the poet Swinburne then whom there can be no higher authority on this point though he is rather given to exaggeration pronounces Kubla Khan for absolute melody and splendor the first poem in the language Robert Sadi the third member of this group was a diligent worker and one of the most voluminous of English writers as a poet he was lacking in inspiration and his big oriental epics Thalaba 1801 and the curse of Kahama 1810 are little better than waxwork of his numerous works in prose the life of Nelson is perhaps the best in that biography. Several other authors were more or less closely associated with the Lake poets by residence or social affiliation John Wilson the editor of Blackwoods lived for some time when a young man at Ellaray on the banks of the Windermere he was an athletic man of outdoor habits and enthusiastic sportsmen and a lover of natural scenery his admiration of Wordsworth was thought to have led him to the imitation of the latter in his Isle of Palms 1812 and his other poetry John Wilson's companions in his mountain walks was Thomas DeQuincey who had been led by his reverence for Wordsworth in Coleridge to take up his residence in 1808 at Grassmere where he occupied for many years the cottage from which Wordsworth had removed to Allen Bank DeQuincey was a shy bookish little man of erratic nocturnal habits who impresses one personally as a child of genius with a child's helplessness and a child's sharp observation he was above all things a magazineist all his writings with one exception appeared first in the shape of contributions to periodicals and his essays, literary criticisms and miscellaneous papers are exceedingly rich and varied the most famous of them was his confessions of an English opium eater published as a serial in the London magazine in 1821 he had begun to take opium as a cure for the toothache when a student at Oxford where he resided from 1803 to 1808 by 1816 he had risen to 8,000 drops of Laudanum a day for several years after this he experienced the acutist misery and his will suffered an entire paralysis in 1821 he succeeded in reducing his dose to a comparatively small allowance and in shaking off his torpor so as to become capable of literary work the most impressive effect of the opium habit was seen in his dreams in the unnatural expansion of space and time the repetition of the same objects his sleep was filled with dim vast images measureless cavalcades deploying to the sound of orchestral music an endless succession of vaulted halls with staircases climbing to heaven up which toiled eternally the same solitary figure then came sudden alarms hurrying to and fro trepidations of innumerable fugitives darkness and light tempest and human faces difficult but there is always something baffling in these reminiscences in the interminable wanderings of his pen for which perhaps opium was responsible he appears to lose all trace of facts or of any continuous story every actual experience of his life seems to have been taken up into a realm of dream and they are distorted till the reader sees not the real figures but the enormous grotesque shadows of them executing wild dances on a screen an instance of this process is described by himself in his vision of sudden death but his unworldliness and faculty of vision seeing were not inconsistent with the keenness of judgment and the justness and delicacy of perception displayed in his biographical sketches of Wordsworth, Coleridge and other contemporaries in his critical papers on Pope, Milton, Lessing, Homer and the Homeridae his essay on style and his brief appraisal of the Greek literature his curious scholarship is seen in his articles on the toilet of a Hebrew lady and the casuistry of Roman meals his ironical and somewhat elaborate humor in his essay on murder considered as one of the fine arts of his narrative pieces the most remarkable is his revolt of the Tartars describing the flight of a Kalmok tribe of 600,000 souls from Russia to the Chinese frontier a great Hegira or Anabasis which extended for 4,000 miles over desert steps infested with foes occupied six months time and left nearly half the tribe dead upon the way the subject was suited to De Quincey's imagination it was like one of his own opium visions and he handled it with a dignity and force which makes the history not altogether unworthy of comparison with Thucydides Great Chapter on the Sicilian Expedition an intimate friend of Sothe was Walter Savage Landor a man of kingly nature of a Leonine presence with a most stormy and unreasonable temper and yet with the courtliest graces of manner and with, said Emerson a wonderful brain, despotic, violent and inexhaustible he inherited wealth and lived a great part of his life at Florence where he died in 1864 in his 90th year Dickens who knew him at Bath in the latter part of his life made a kindly caricature of him as Lawrence Boytham in Bleakhouse whose combination of superficial ferocity and inherent tenderness which testifies Henry Crabb Robinson in his diary was true to the life Landor is the most purely classical of English writers not merely his themes but his whole way of thinking was pagan and antique he composed indifferently in English or Latin preferring the latter, if anything in obedience to his instinct for compression and exclusiveness thus, portions of his narrative poem Gebir 1798 were written originally in Latin and added a Latin version, Gebirius to the English edition in like manner, his Hellenics 1847 were mainly translations from his Latin idyllia heroica written years before the Hellenic clearness and repose which were absent from his life Landor sought in his art his poems in their restraint their objectivity, their aloofness from modern feeling have something chill and artificial the verse of poets like Byron and Wordsworth is alive and his blood runs in it but Landor's polished, clean cut intaglios have been well described as written in marble he was a master of fine and solid prose his Pericles and Aspasia consists of a series of letters passing between the great Athenian demagogue the Hetira Aspasia her friend Cleon of Miletus Anaxagoras, the philosopher and Pericles as Nephew Alcibiades in this masterpiece the intellectual life of Athens at its period of highest refinement is brought before the reader with singular vividness and he has made to breathe an atmosphere of high bread, grace, delicate wit and thoughtful sentiment expressed in English of Attic choice the imaginary conversations 1824-1846 were platonic dialogues between a great variety of historical characters between for example Dante and Beatrice Washington and Franklin Elizabeth and Cecil Xenophon and Cyrus the Younger Bonaparte and the President of the Senate Landor's writings have never been popular they address an aristocracy of scholars and Byron whom Landor disliked and considered vulgar sneered at the latter as a writer who cultivated much private renown in the shape of Latin verses he said of himself that he never contended with the contemporary but walked alone on the far eastern uplands meditating and remembering the carriage at Christ's hospital and his friend and correspondent through life was Charles Lamb one of the most charming of English essayists he was an old bachelor who lived alone with his sister Mary a lovable and intellectual woman but subject to recurring attacks of madness Lamb was a notched and cropped scrivener a votary of the desk a clerk that is in the employ of the East India Company he was of antiquarian tastes an ardent play-goer his tastes are reflected in his essays of Elia contributed to the London magazine and reprinted in book form in 1823 from his mousing among the Elizabethan dramatists and such old humorists as Burton and Fuller his own style imbibed peculiar quaintness and pungency his specimens of English dramatic poets 1808 is admirable for its critical insight in 1802 he paid a visit to Coleridge at Kesswick in the Lake Country he felt or affected a whimsical horror of the mountains and said Fleet Street and the Strand are better places to live in among the best of his essays are Dream Children Poor Relations The Artificial Comedy of the Last Century Old China Roast Pig A Defense of Chimney Sweeps A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis and The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple The Romantic movement prelude by Gray, Collins, Chatterton and others culminated in Walter Scott 1771-1832 his passion for the medieval was first excited by reading Percy's Relics when he was a boy and in one of his school themes he maintained that Ariosto was a greater poet than Homer he began early to collect manuscript ballads, suits of armor pieces of old plate, border horns and similar relics he learned Italian in order to read the romancers Ariosto, Tasso Colci and Boyardo preferring them to Dante he studied Gothic architecture, heraldry and the art of fortification and made drawings of famous ruins and battlefields in particular he read eagerly everything that he could lay hands on relating to the history, legends and antiquities of the Scottish border the Vale of Tweed, Teviate Dale Ettrick Forest and the Yarrow of all which land he became the laureate as Burns had been of air share in the west country Scott, like Wordsworth was an outdoor poet he spent much time in the saddle and was fond of horses, dogs, hunting and salmon fishing he had a keen eye for the beauties of natural scenery though more especially he admits when combined with ancient ruins or remains of our forefathers piety or splendor he had the historic imagination and in creating the historical novel he was the first to throw a poetic glamour over European annals in 1803 Wordsworth visited at Lasswade near Edinburgh and Scott afterward returned to visit at Grasmere Wordsworth noted that his guest was full of anecdote and a verse from Disquisition the Englishman was a moralist and much given to Disquisition while the Scotchman was above all things a raconteur and perhaps on the whole the foremost of British storytellers Scott's Toryism too was of a different stripe from Wordsworth's being rather the result of sentiment and imagination than of philosophy and reflection his mind struck deep root in the past his local attachments and family pride were intense Abbotsford was his darling and the expenses of this domain and of the baronial hospitality which he very extended to all comers were among the causes of his bankruptcy the enormous toll which he exacted of himself to pay off the debt of 117,000 pounds contracted by the failure of his publishers cost him his life more gratified when the Prince Regent created him a baronet in 1820 than by all the public recognition that he acquired as the author of the Waverly novels Scott was attracted by the romantic side of German literature his first published poem was a translation made in 1796 from Burger's Wild Ballad Leonora he followed this up with versions of the same poets Wielde Jäger of Goethe's violent drama of feudal life Goethe's fun by Lichenin and with other translations from the German of a similar class on his horseback trips through the border where he studied the primitive manners of the Lidsdale people and took down old ballads from the recitation of ancient dames and cottagers he amassed the materials for his Minstrel Sea of the Scottish Border 1802 but the first of his original poems was The Lay of the Last Minstrel published in 1805 and followed in quick succession by Marmian the Lady of the Lake of the Isles and a volume of ballads and lyrical pieces all issued during the years 1806 to 1814 the popularity won by this series of metrical romances was immediate and widespread nothing so fresh or so brilliant had appeared in English poetry for nearly two centuries the reader was hurried along through scenes of rapid action whose effect was heightened by wild landscapes and picturesque manners the pleasure was a passive one there was no deep thinking to perplex no subtler beauties to pause on the feelings were stirred pleasantly but not deeply the effect was on the surface the spell employed was novelty or at most wonder and the chief emotion aroused was breathless interest in the progress of the story Carlile said that Scott's genius was inextenso rather than inintenso and that its great praise was its healthiness this is true of his verse but not altogether so of his prose exhibits deeper qualities some of Scott's most perfect poems too are his shorter ballads like Jock a Hazeldine and Proud Maisie is in the woods which have a greater intensity and compression than his metrical tales from 1814 to 1831 Scott wrote and published the Waverly novels some 30 in number if we consider the amount of work done the speed with which it was done and the general average of excellence maintained perhaps the most marvelous literary feed on record the series was issued anonymously and takes its name from the first number Waverly or Tiz 60 years since this was founded upon the rising of clans in 1745 in support of the young pretender Charles Edward Stewart and it revealed to the English public that almost foreign country which laid just across their threshold the Scottish Highlands the Waverly novels remain as a whole unequaled as historical fiction although here and there a single novel like George Elliot's Ramola or Thackeray's Henry Esmond or Kingsley's Hypatia may have attained a place beside the best of them they were a novelty when they appeared English prose fiction had somewhat declined since the time of fielding in Goldsmith there were truthful though rather tamed delineations of provincial life like Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility 1811 and Pride and Prejudice 1813 or Maria Edgeworth's Popular Tales 1804 on the other hand there were gothic romances like of Matthew Gregory Lewis to whose tales of wonder some of Scott's translations from the German had been contributed or like Anne Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolfo the great original of this school of fiction was Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto 1765 an absurd tale of secret trap doors subterranean vaults apparitions of monstrous mailed figures and colossal helmets pictures that descended from their frames and hollow voices that proclaim the ruin Scott used the machinery of romance but he was not merely a romancer or a historical novelist even and it is not as Carlisle implies the buff belts and jerkins which principally interest us in his heroes Ivanhoe and Kenilworth and the Talisman are indeed romances pure and simple and very good romances at that but in novels such as Rob Roy The Antiquary, The Heart of Midlothian and The Bride of Lammermore Scott drew from contemporary life and from his intimate knowledge of Scott's character the story is there with its entanglement of plot and its exciting adventures but there are also as truly as in Shakespeare though not to the same degree the observation of life, the knowledge of men the power of dramatic creation no writer awakens in his readers a warmer personal affection than Walter Scott the brave, honest, kindly gentleman the noblest figure among the literary men of his generation another scotch poet was Thomas Campbell whose Pleasures of Hope 1799 was written in Pope's couplet and in the stilt addiction of the 18th century Gertrude of Wyoming, 1809 a long narrative poem in Spensarian stanza is untrue to the scenery and life in Pennsylvania where the scene is laid but Campbell turned his rhetorical manner and his clanking martial verse to find advantage in such pieces as Hoennlinden, Yee Mariners of England and The Battle of the Baltic these have the true lyric fire and rank among the best English war songs when Scott was asked why he had left off writing poetry he answered Byron Betme George Gordon Byron, 1788 to 1824 was a young man of 24 when on his return from a two years sauntering through Portugal, Spain, Albania, Greece and the Levant he published in the first two cantos of Child Harold, 1812 a sort of poetic itinerary of his experiences and impressions the poem took rather to its author surprise who said that he woke one morning and found himself famous Child Harold opened a new field to poetry, the romance of travel the picturesque aspects of foreign scenery, manners and costumes it is instructive of the difference between the two ages in poetic sensibility to such things to compare Byron's glowing imagery with Addison's tame letter from Italy written a century before Child Harold was followed by a series of metrical tales the giar the Bride of Abidos, the Corsair Lara, the Siege of Corinth Paracena and Prisoner of Chillon all written in the years 1813 to 1816 these poems at once took the place of Scots in popular interest dazzling a public that had begun to weary of chivalry romances with pictures of eastern life with incidents as exciting as Scots descriptions as highly colored and a much greater intensity of passion so far as they depended for their interest upon the novelty of their accessories the effect was a temporary one suraglios, divans, bull bulls gulestons, zolikas and other oriental properties deluged English poetry for a time and then subsided even as the tide of moss troopers sorcerers, hermits and feudal castles had already had its rise and fall but there was a deeper reason for the impression made by Byron's poetry upon his contemporaries he laid his finger right on the sore spot in modern life he had the disease with which the time was sick, the world weariness the desperation which proceeded from passion incapable of being converted into action we find this tone in much of the literature which followed the failure of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars from the irritations of that period the disappointment of high hopes from the future of the race the growing religious disbelief and the revolt of democracy and free thought against conservative reaction sprang what Sothi called the Titanic School which spoke its loudest word in Byron Titanic is the better word for the rebellion was not against God but Jupiter, that is, against the state church and society of Byron's day against George III the Tory cabinet of Lord Castleray the Duke of Wellington the Bench of Bishops London Gossip the British Constitution and British Cant in these poems of Byron and in his dramatic experiments the figure the figure of Byron under various masks and one pervading mood a restless and sardonic gloom a weariness of life, a love of solitude a melancholy exultation in the presence of the wilderness in the sea Byron's hero is always represented as a man originally noble whom some great wrong by others or some mysterious crime of his own has blasted and embittered and who carries about the world a seared heart and a somber brow who may stand as a type of all his heroes has run through sin's labyrinth and feeling the fullness of satiety is drawn abroad to roam the wandering exile of his own dark mind the loss of a capacity for pure, unjaded emotion is the constant burden of Byron's lament no more, no more oh, nevermore on me the freshness of the heart shall fall like dew and again oh, could I feel as I have felt or be what I have been or weep as I could once have wept or many a vanished scene as springs in deserts found seem sweet all brackish though they be so midst the withered waste of life those tears would flow to me this mood was sincere in Byron but by cultivating it and posing too long in one attitude he became self-conscious and theatrical and much of his serious poetry had a false ring his example infected the minor poetry of the time and it was quite natural that Thackeray, who represented a generation that had a very different ideal of the heroic, should be provoked into describing Byron as a big, sulky dandy Byron was well fitted by birth and temperament to be the spokesman of this fierce discontent he inherited from his mother a haughty and violent temper and profligate tendencies from his father he was, through life, a spoiled child whose main characteristic was willfulness he liked to shock people by exaggerating his wickedness and adversely maintaining the wrong side of a dispute but he had traits of bravery and generosity women loved him and he made strong friends there was a careless charm about him which fascinated natures as unlike each other as Shelly and Scott by the death of the fifth lord Byron without issue Byron came into a title and estates at the age of ten though a liberal in politics he had aristocratic feelings and was vain of his rank as he was of his beauty he was educated at Harrow at Trinity College Cambridge where he was idle and dissipated but did a great deal of miscellaneous reading he took some of his Cambridge set Hobhouse, Matthews and others to Newstead Abbey, his ancestral seat where they filled the ancient cloisters with eccentric orgies Byron was strikingly handsome his face had a spiritual paleness and a classic regularity and his dark hair curled closely to his head a deformity in one of his feet was a mortification to him he would greatly impair his activity and he prided himself on his powers as a swimmer in 1815 when at the height of his literary and social ecla in London he married in February of the following year he was separated from Lady Byron and left England forever pursued by the execrations of outraged respectability in this course of abuse there was mingled a share of cant but Byron got on the whole what he deserved from Switzerland he spent a summer by La Clamme with the Shelleys from Venice, Ravenna, Pisa and Rome scandalous reports of his intrigues and his wild debaucheries were wafted back to England and with these came poem after poem full of burning genius pride, scorn and anguish and all hurling defiance at English public opinion the third and fourth cantos of Child Herald 1816 to 1818 were a great advance upon the first two and contained the best of Byron's serious poetry he has written his name all over the continent of Europe and on a hundred memorable spots has made the scenery his own on the field of Waterloo on the castled crag of drakenfels by the blue rushing of the arrowy roam in Venice on the bridge of Pisa in the Colosseum at Rome and among the Isles of Greece the tourist is compelled to see with Byron's eyes and under the associations of his pilgrimage in his later poems such as Beppo 1818 and Don Juan 1819 to 1823 he passed into his second manner a mocking cynicism gaining ground upon the somewhat stagey gloom of his early poetry Mephistopheles gradually elbowing out Satan Don Juan though morally the worst is intellectually the most vital and representative of Byron's poems it takes up into itself most fully the life of the time with the characteristic alterations of Byron's mood and the prodigal resources of wit, passion and understanding which rather than imagination were his prominent qualities as a poet the hero a graceless, amorous stripling goes wandering from Spain to the Greek islands and Constantinople thence to St. Petersburg and finally to England everywhere his seductions are successful and Byron uses him as a means of exposing the weakness of the human heart of society in all countries in 1823 breaking away from his life of self-indulgence in Italy Byron threw himself into the cause of Grecian liberty which he had sung so gloriously in the Isles of Greece he died at Missalonghi in the following year of a fever contracted by exposure and overwork Byron was a great poet but not a great literary artist he wrote negligently and with the ease of assured strength his mind gathering heat as it moved and pouring itself forth in reckless profusion his work is diffuse and imperfect much of it is melodrama or speech making rather than true poetry but on the other hand much, very much of it is unexcelled as the direct strong sincere utterance of personal feeling such as the quality of his best lyrics like when we two parted the elegy on Therza stanzas to Augusta and of innumerable passages lyrical and descriptive in his longer poems he had not the wisdom of Wordsworth nor the rich and subtle imagination of Coleridge, Shelley and Keats when they were at their best but he had greater body and motive force than any of them he is the strongest personality among English poets since Milton though his strength was wasted by want of restraint and self-culture in Milton the passion was there but it was held in check by the will of his friends made subordinate to good ends ripened by long reflection and finally uttered in forms of perfect and harmonious beauty Byron's love of nature was quite different in kind from Wordsworth's of all English poets he has sung most lyrically of that national theme the sea as witness among many other passages the famous apostrophe to the ocean which closes child herald and the opening of the third canto in the same poem once more upon the waters etc but a passion for night and storm because they made him forget himself most glorious night that word not sent for somber that may be a sharer in thy fierce and far delight a portion of the tempest and of thee Byron's literary executor and biographer was the Irish poet Thomas Moore a born songwriter whose Irish melodies set to old native airs are like Burns's genuine spontaneous singing and run naturally to music songs such as The Meeting of the Waters The Harp of Tara Those Evening Bells, The Light of Other Days Araby's Daughters and The Last Rose of Summer were and still are popular favorites Moore's oriental romance La La Rue 1817 is overlaid with ornament and with a sugary sentiment that clogs the palette he had the quick Irish wit sensibility rather than passion and fancy rather than imagination Byron's friend Percy Bish Shelley 1792-1822 was also in fiery revolt against all conventions and institutions though his revolt proceeded not as in Byron's case from the turbulence of passions which brooked no restraint but rather from an intellectual impatience of any kind of control he was not like Byron a sensual man but temperate and chaste he was indeed in his life and in his poetry as nearly a disembodied spirit as a human creature can be The German poet Heine said that liberty was the religion of this century and of this religion Shelley was a worshipper his rebellion against authority began early he refused to fag at Eaton and was expelled from Oxford for publishing a tract on the necessity of atheism at nineteen he ran away with Harriet Westbrook and was married to her in Scotland three years later he deserted her for Mary Godwin with whom he eloped to Switzerland two years after this his first wife drowned herself in the serpentine and was then formally wedded to Mary Godwin all this is rather startling in the bare statement of it yet it is not inconsistent with the many testimonies that exist to Shelley's singular purity and beauty of character testimonies borne out by the evidence of his own writings impulse with him took the place of conscience moral law accompanied by the sanction of power and imposed by outside authority he rejected as a form of tyranny his nature lacked robustness and ballast Byron, who was at bottom intensely practical said that Shelley's philosophy was too spiritual and romantic Haslett, himself a radical, wrote of Shelley he has a fire in his eye a fever in his blood a maggot in his brain a hectic flutter in his speech which mark out the philosophic fanatic he is sanguine complexioned and shrill voiced it was perhaps with some recollection of this last mentioned trait of Shelley the man that Carlisle wrote of Shelley the poet that the sound of him was shrieky and that he had filled the earth with an inarticulate wailing his career as a poet began characteristically enough with the publication while at Oxford of a volume of political rhymes entitled Margaret Nicholson's Remains Margaret Nicholson being the crazy woman who tried to stab George III his boyish poem Queen Mahab was published in 1813 a laster in 1816 and the revolt of Islam his longest in 1818 all before he was 21 these were filled with splendid though unsubstantial imagery but they were abstract and subject and had the faults of incoherence and formlessness which makes Shelley's longer poems wearysome and confusing they sought to embody his social creed of perfectionism as well as a certain vague pantheistic system of belief in a spirit of love in nature and man whose presence is a constant source of obscurity in Shelley's verse in 1818 he went to Italy where the last four years of his life were passed and where under the influences of Italian art and poetry his writing became deeper and stronger he was fond of yachting and spent much of his time upon the Mediterranean in the summer of 1822 his boat was swamped in a squall off the gulf of Spezia and Shelley's drowned body was washed ashore and burned in the presence of Byron and Lee Hunt the ashes were entombed in the Protestant cemetery at Rome with the epitaph of Emperor Cordium Shelley's best and maturist work nearly all of which was done in Italy includes his tragedy The Sensi 1819 and his lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound 1821 the first of these has a unity and a definiteness of contour unusual with Shelley and is with the exception of some of Robert Browning's the best English tragedy since Otway Prometheus represented to Shelley's mind the human spirit fighting against divine oppression in his portrayal of this figure he kept in mind not only the Prometheus of Excalice but the Satan of Paradise Lost indeed in this poem Shelley came nearer to the sublime than any English poet since Milton yet it is in lyrical rather than in dramatic quality that Prometheus Unbound is great if Shelley be not as his latest editor Mr. Foreman claims him to be the foremost of English lyrical poets he is at least the most lyrical of them he had in a supreme degree the lyric cry his vibrant nature trembled to every breath of emotion and his nerves craved ever newer shocks to pant to quiver to thrill to grow faint in the spasm of intense sensation the feminine cast observable in Shelley's portrait is borne out by this tremulous sensibility in his verse it is curious how often he uses the metaphor of wings of the winged spirit soaring like his skylark till lost in music, rapture, light and then falling back to earth three successive moods longing, ecstasy and the revulsion of despair are expressed in many of his lyrics as in the hymn to the spirit of nature in Prometheus in the ode to a skylark and in the lines to an Indian air Edgar Poe's favorite his passionate desire to lose himself in nature to become one with that spirit of love and beauty in the universe which was to him in place of God into the west wind his most perfect poem make me thy lyre even as the forest is what if my leaves are falling like its own the tumult of thy mighty harmonies will take from both a deep autumnal tone sweet though in sadness be thou spirit fierce my spirit be thou me impetuous one in the lyrical pieces already mentioned together with Adonias the lines written in the Eugenian Hills Epicychidion stands as written in dejection near Naples a dream of the unknown and many others Shelley's lyrical genius reaches a rarer loveliness and more faultless art than Byron's ever attained though it lacks the directness and momentum of Byron In Shelley's longer poems intoxicated with the music of his own singing he abandons himself wholly to the guidance of his imagination and the verse seems to go on of itself like the enchanted boat in Elastor with no one at the helm vision succeeds vision in glorious but bewildering profusion ideal landscapes and cities of cloud pinnacle dim in the intense inane these poems are like the waterfalls in the Yosemite which tumbling from a height of several thousand feet are shattered into foam by the air and waved about over the valley very beautiful is this descending spray and the rainbow dwells in its bosom but there is no longer any stream nothing but an iridescent mist the word ethereal best expresses the quality of Shelley's genius his poetry is full of atmospheric effects of the tricks which light plays with the fluid elements of water and air of stars clouds rain dew mist frost wind the foams of the sea the phases of the moon the green shadows of waves the shapes of flames the golden lightning of the setting sun nature in Shelley wants homeliness and relief while poets like Wordsworth and Burns let in an ideal light upon the rough fields of earth Shelley escapes into a moonlight colored realm of shadows and dreams among whose abstractions the heart turns cold one bit of Wordsworth mountain turf is worth them all by the death of John Keats 1796 to 1821 whose elegy Shelley sang in Adonais English poetry suffered an irreparable loss his endymion 1818 though disfigured by mockishness and by some affectations of manner was rich in promise its fault were those of youth the faults of exuberance and of a tremulous sensibility which time corrects Hyperion 1820 promised to be his masterpiece but he left it unfinished a titanic torso because as he said there were too many miltonic inversions in it the subject was the displacement by Phoebus Apollo of the ancient sun god Hyperion the last of the titans who retained his dominion it was a theme of great capabilities and the poem was begun by Keats with a strength of conception which leads to the belief that here was once more a really epic genius had fate suffered it to mature the fragment as it stands that inlet to severe magnificence proves how rapidly Keats diction was clarifying he had learned to string up his looser chords there is nothing modlin in Hyperion all there is in whole tones and in the grand manner as sublime as Escalus said Byron with the grave antique simplicity and something of modern sweetness interfused Keats father was a groom in a London livery stable the poet was apprenticed at 15 to a surgeon at school he had studied Latin but not Greek he who of all English poets had the most purely Hellenic spirit made acquaintance with Greek literature and art only through the medium of classical dictionaries translations and popular mythologies and later through the marbles and castes in the British Museum his friend the artist Hayden lent him a copy of Chapman's Homer and the impression that it made upon him he recorded in his sonnet on first looking into Chapman's Homer other poems of the same inspiration are his three sonnets to Homer on seeing the Elgin marbles on a picture of Leander Lamia and the beautiful Ode on a Grecian urn but Keats' art was retrospective and eclectic the blossom of a double root and golden-tongued romance with serene loot had her part in him as well as the classics in his 17th year he had read the fairy queen and from Spencer he went on to a study of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton then he took up Italian and read Ariosto the influence of these studies is seen in his poem Isabella or the Pot of Basil taken from a story of Boccaccio in his wild ballad La Beldame San Merci and in his love tale the eve of Saint Agnes with its wealth of medieval adornment in the ode to autumn and ode to a nightingale the Hellenic choiceless is found touched with the warmer hues of romance there is something deeply tragic in the short story of Keats' life the seeds of consumption were in him he felt the stirrings of a potent genius but knew that he could not wait for it to unfold but must die before high-piled books in character hold like rich garners the full ripened grain his disease was aggravated possibly by the stupid brutality with which the reviewers had treated endymion and certainly by the hopeless love which devoured him the very thing which I want to live most for he wrote will be a great occasion of my death if I had any chance of recovery this passion would kill me in the autumn of 1820 his disease gaining a pace he went on a sailing vessel to Italy accompanied by a single friend a young artist named Severn the change was of no avail and he died at Rome a few weeks after in his 26th year Keats was above all things the artist with that love of the beautiful and that instinct for his reproduction which are the artist's divine gifts he cared little about the politics of his day and he did not make his poetry the vehicle of ideas it was sensuous poetry the poetry of youth and gladness but if he had lived and if with wider knowledge of men and deeper experience of life he had attained to words worth spiritual insight and to Byron's power of passion and understanding he would have become a greater poet than either for he had a style a natural magic which only needed the chastening touch of a finer culture anything in modern English poetry and to force us back to Milton or Shakespeare for a comparison his tombstone not far from Shelly's bears the inscription of his own choosing here lies one whose name was writ in water but it would be within the limits of truth to say that it is written in large characters on most of our contemporary poetry Wordsworth says Lowell has influenced most the ideas of succeeding poets Keats and he has influenced these out of all proportion to the amount which he left or to his intellectual range by virtue of the exquisite quality of his technique End of Part 1 Chapter 7