SCOTTISH POETRY illustrates and anticipates the poetry of the poor and the ballad. We have not mentioned it since Sir David Lyndsay, for, with the exception of stray songs, its voice was silent for a century and a half. It revived in ALLAN RAMSAY, a friend of Pope and Gay. His light pieces of rustic humor were followed by the Tea Table Miscellany and the Ever-Green, collections of existing Scottish songs mixed up with some of his own. They carried on the song of rural life and love and humor which Burns perfected. Ramsey's pastoral drama of the Gentle Shepherd, 1725, is a pure, tender, and genuine picture of Scottish life and love among the poor and in the country.

ROBERT FERGUSON deserves to be named, because he kindled the muse of Burns, and his occasional pieces, 1773, are chiefly concerned with the rude and humorous life of Edinburgh. The Ballad, always continuous in Scotland, took a more modern but very pathetic form in such productions as Auld Robin Gray and the Flowers of the Forest, a mourning for those who fell at Flodden Field. The peculiarities I have dwelt on already continue in this revival. There is the same nationality, the same rough wit, the same love of nature, but the love of color has lessened.

The new elements and the changes on which I have dwelt are expressed by three poets-Cowper, Crabbe, and Burns. But before these we must mention the poems of WILLIAM BLAKE, the artist, and for three reasons.

1. They represent the new elements. The Poetical Sketches, written in 1777, illustrate the new study of the Elizabethan poets. Blake imitated Spenser, and, in his short fragment of Edward III., we hear again and again the note of Marlowe's violent imagination. A short poem To the Muses is a cry for the restoration to English poetry of the old poetic passion it had lost. In some ballad poems we trace the influence represented by Ossian and given by the publication of Percy's Reliques.

2. We find also in his work certain elements which belonged to the second period of which I shall now speak. The love of animals is one. A great love of children and the poetry of home is another. He also anticipated, in 1789 and 1794, when his Songs of Innocence and Experience were written, the simple natural poetry of ordinary life which Wordsworth perfected in the Lyrical Ballads, 1798. Further still, we find in these poems traces of the democratic element, of the hatred. of priestcraft, and of the war with social wrongs which came much later into English poetry. We even find traces of the mysticism and the search after the problem of life that fill so much of our poetry after 1832.

3. But that which is most special in Blake is his extraordinary reproduction of the spirit, tone, and ring of the Elizabethan songs, of the inimitable innocence and fearlessness which belong to the childhood of a new literature. The little poems too in the Songs of Innocence, on infancy and first motherhood, and on subjects like the Lamb, are without rival in our language for ideal simplicity and a perfection of singing joy. The Songs of Experience give the reverse side of the Songs of Innocence, and they see the evil of the world as a child with a man's heart would see it-with exaggerated and ghastly horBlake stands alone in our poetry, and his work coming where it did, between 1777 and 1794, makes it the more remarkable. We turn now to William Cowper, who represents fully and more widely than either Crabbe or Burns the new elements on which I have dwelt.

ror.

WILLIAM COWPER.-The first poems of WILLIAM COWPER, 1731-1800, were the Olney Hymns, 1779, written along with John Newton, and in these the religious poetry of Charles Wesley was continued. The profound personal religion, gloomy even to insanity as it often became, which fills the whole of Cowper's poetry, introduced a theological element into English poetry which continually increased till within the last ten years, when it has gradually ceased.

His didactic and satirical poems, 1782, link him backwards to the last age. His translation of Homer, 1791, and of shorter pieces from the Latin and Greek, connects him with the classical influence, his interest in Milton with the revived study of the English Poets. The playful and gentle vein of humor which he showed in John Gilpin and other poems reminds us of Addison, and opened a new kind of verse to poets. With this kind of humor is connected a simple pathos of which Cowper is our greatest master. The Lines to Mary Unwin and to his Mother's Picture prove, with the work of Blake, that pure natural feeling, wholly free from artifice, had returned to English song. A wholly new element was also introduced by him and Blake-the love of animals and the poetry of their relation to man, a vein plentifully worked by after poets.

His greatest work was the Task, 1785. It is mainly a description of himself and his life in the country, his home, his friends, his thoughts as he walked, the quiet landscape of Olney, the life of the poor people about him, mixed up with disquisitions on political and social subjects, and, at the end, a prophecy of the victory of the Kingdom of God. The change in it in relation to the subject of Nature is very great. Cowper is the first poet who loves Nature entirely for her own sake. He paints only what he sees, but he paints it with the affection of a child for a flower and with the minute observation of a man.

The change in relation to the subject of Man is equally great. The idea of Mankind as a whole, which we have seen growing up, is fully formed in Cowper's mind. The range of his interests is as wide as the world, and all men form one brotherhood. All the social questions of Education, Prisons, Hospitals, city and country life, the state of the poor and their sorrows, the question of universal freedom and of slavery, of human wrong and oppression, of just and free government, of international intercourse and union, and, above all, the entirely

new question of the future destiny of the race, as a whole, are introduced by Cowper into English poetry. And though splendor and passion were added, by the poets who succeeded him, to the new poetry, yet they worked on the thoughts he had laid down, and he is their leader."

Cowper is one of the first symptoms, if not the originator, of a revolution in style which is soon to become a revolution in ideas. The

clear, crisp English' of his verse is not the work of a man who belongs to a school, or follows some conventional pattern. It is for his amusement, he repeats again and again in his letters, that he is a poet; just as it has been for his amusement that he has worked in the garden and made rabbit-hutches. He writes because it pleases him, without a thought of his fame or of contriving what the world will admire.

The Task, his most characteristic poem, is indeed a work of great labor; but the labor is not directed, as Pope's labor was directed, towards methodizing or arranging the material, towards working up the argument, towards forcing the ideas into the most striking situations. The labor is in the cadences and the language; as for the thoughts, they are allowed to show themselves just as they come, in their natural order, so that the poem reads like the speech of a man talking to himself. To turn from a poem of Cowper's to a poem of Pope's, or even of Goldsmith's, is to turn from one sphere of art to quite another, from unconscious to conscious art. 'Formal gardens in comparison with woodland scenery,' as Southey said. And how much that means! It means that the day of critical, and so-called classical, poetry is over; that the day of spontaneous, natural, romantic poetry has begun. Burns and Wordsworth are not yet, but they are close at hand. We read Cowper not for his passion or for his ideas, but for his love of nature and his faithful rendering of her beauty, for his truth of portraiture, for his humor, for his pathos; for the refined honesty of his style, for the melancholy interest of his life, and for the simplicity and the loveliness of his character."-Thomas H. Ward.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. COWPER.-Cowper's Letters; Southey's Life of; Bagehot's Estimates of some Eng. and Scotchmen; F. Jeffrey's Essays; Thomson's Celebrated Friendships; Eng. Men of Let. Series; Ward's Anthology; Black. Mag., v. 109, 1871; Fort. Rev., v. 3, 1865; Fraser's Mag., v. 64, 1861; Nat. Quar. Rev., v. 7, 1863; N. Br. Rev., v. 22, 1854; Quar. Rev., v. 107, 1860.

LESSON 47.

Cowper's On the Receipt of my Mother's Picture.
Oh that those lips had language! Life has passed
With me but roughly since I heard thee last.
Those lips are thine-thy own sweet smiles I see,
The same that oft in childhood solaced me;
Voice only fails, else how distinct they say,
"Grieve not, my child, chase all thy fears away!"
The meek intelligence of those dear eyes-
Blest be the art that can immortalize,
The art that baffles time's tyrannic claim
To quench it-here shines on me still the same.
Faithful remembrancer of one so dear,

O welcome guest, though unexpected here,
Who bidst me honor with an artless song,
Affectionate, a mother lost so long,

I will obey, not willingly alone

But gladly, as the precept were her own.
And, while that face renews my filial grief,
Fancy shall weave a charm for my relief,
Shall steep me in Elysian reverie,

A momentary dream that thou art she.

My mother! when I learned that thou wast dead, Say, wast thou conscious of the tears I shed? Hovered thy spirit o'er thy sorrowing son, Wretch even then life's journey just begun? Perhaps thou gavest me, though unfelt, a kiss; Perhaps a tear, if souls can weep in blissAh, that maternal smile! it answers-Yes. I heard the bell tolled on thy burial-day, I saw the hearse that bore thee slow away, And, turning from my nursery window, drew A long, long sigh, and wept a last adieu. But was it such? It was. Where thou art gone, Adieus and farewells are a sound unknown. May I but meet thee on that peaceful shore, The parting sound shall pass my lips no more. Thy maidens, grieved themselves at my concern, Oft gave me promise of thy quick return.