Hark! how the sacred calm that breathes around, | destined to perish at sea, published The
Bids every fierce tumultuous passion cease;
In still small accents whisp'ring from the ground,
A grateful earnest of eternal peace.

a

Shipwreck, and Grainger The Sugar-Cane, and Armstrong, according to Churchill's verdict, "taking leave of sense," read in

verse

Musty lectures on Benevolence,

In Gray's Odes, by the way, noble though they be, there is not a little of what may fairly be called the jargon of poetry, jargon that was not only admissible but and Kit Smart the mad poet, whose diseven appreciated when Gray wrote. In like of clean linen was shared by Dr. these Odes, for instance, a cat is called a Johnson, and who, before his confinement "hapless nymph," and a boy trundling a in a mad-house used to walk for exercise hoop is said to chase the rolling circle's to the ale-house, but was carried back speed;" and these are but ordinary exam- again, published very indifferent odes, ples of the artificial style of composition which his biographer mistook for fine poin which Gray sometimes indulged. There ems. Smart also produced a Georgic is, perhaps, less of it in Collins, who, in called The Hop Garden, composed in an two of the loveliest of his lyrics, the artificial pretentious style, which may, Ode to the Brave, and the Ode to Evening however, have done some service as showis wholly free from this vice. Poor Collins ing how rural poetry ought not to be writdied in a madhouse in 1756, just a year ten. Imagine a man deliberately writing before his contemporary, John Dyer, pub- a long poem in blank verse, the average lished The Fleece, a poem which, as the ti- quality of which may be judged from the tle implies, is specifically rural in charac- following passage: ter. It is a queer medley, for the writer not only aims at poetical description, but endeavours also in heavy blank verse to give a minute account of agricultural and manufacturing operations, which no man, however highly endowed, could treat poetically. The poem exhibits more of knowledge than of fancy, more of invention than imagination, but Dyer's Grongar Hill and his Country Walk are marked by an airiness of versification and a vividness of description which remind us of Thomas Warton. Both Warton and Dyer caught their best notes from L'Allegro and Il Penseroso; and Dyer, although he cannot flood his landscape with poetic light, has at least the power of bringing its separate features clearly before the eye.

With two signal exceptions, the poetry of the latter half of the last century bears few marks of high inspiration or of any special intercourse with nature. Then Dr. Johnson produced his London, and Vanity of Human Wishes, weighty poems, both of them, but more remarkable for manly thought than for poetical imagination. Then Hayley sung his platitudes, and Darwin his Botanic Garden, and Bloomfield, a small rural poet, chirped feebly of the country, and Churchill ("the great Churchill," Cowper called him) wrote his scurrilons satires, and Goldsmith (of whom we shall have a word or two to say presently), whose exquisite felicity of style has secured to him a permanent place in literature, produced two beautiful poems, one of which deserves notice for its sweet pastoral passages. Then Falconer, who was

Select the choicest hop t' insert
Fresh in the opening glebe. Say, then, my Muse,
Its various kinds; and from the effete and vile
The eligible separate with care.
The noblest species is by Kentish wights
The Master-hop yclep'd. Nature to him
Has given a stouter stalk, patient of cold,
Or Phoebus; ev'n in youth his verdant blood
In brisk saltation circulates and flows
Indefinitely vigorous. The next
Is arid, fetid, infecund and gross,
Significantly styled the Friar. The last
Is called the Savage, who in every wood
And every hedge unintroduc'd intrudes.
When such the merit of the candidates,
Easy is the election.

No one who has not made it his painful
task to turn over such lumber can imagine
what a mass of similar rubbish is to be
found in the closely-printed volumes which
are said upon their title-pages to contain
the works of the British poets. Of rural
poetry, which, if the bull may be ex-
cused, is not poetry-the last century
produced a load large enough, if a man
were doomed to read it all, to make him
loathe the very thought of verse. Pasto-
rals, Bucolics, Georgics, follow one another
in dreary succession and in the futile effort
of bad rhymesters to imitate good poets.
Nature, which is supposed to form the sub-
ject of the verse, is left out of it altogether.
The latter half of the century displayed
on a wider scale than the preceding half
the vices of these arid versifiers, but it
produced, also, a Cowper and a Burns, two
poets who, in conjunction with, but in a

larger degree than Thomson, may be said to have commenced a new era in English poetry.

"What true and pretty pastoral images has Goldsmith in his Deserted Village! said Burke. "They beat all; Pope, and Philips, and Spenser too, in my opinion." Goldsmith's pastoral images are pretty, and they are true, indeed, fitter epithets could not have been applied to them. We may also readily admit that they beat Pope, who was the poet of society, and knew little of nature. Neither is it much to say that they beat Philips, too, "namby-pamby" Philips, whose pastorals were ridiculed so cleverly by Pope in the Guardian; but to compare Goldsmith's rural pictures with the broad and splendid landscape of Spenser is to confound things that essentially differ, unless, indeed, Burke had the Shepherd's Calendar in mind, and not the Faerie Queene.

greatest satirist in verse; but on the other hand, he had rare gifts scarcely known to his predecessor, a pathos surpassingly tender, a humour of which Pope had no trace, and, above all, the poet's gift, yet a gift denied to Pope, of describing and interpreting nature.

Of Crabbe, who followed Cowper, and who holds a distinct position among our descriptive poets, it has been well said that he handles life so as to take the bloom off it. His descriptions of scenery, like his descriptions of character, are wonderfully truthful, but, having no sense of beauty, he sees little that is not repulsive in either. Like Cowper, he is a matter-offact poet, but Cowper's humour saved him from the pitfalls into which Crabbe sometimes stumbled. Moreover, Cowper loved the scenery he described so accurately; Crabbe, with equal accuracy is wanting in the love and enthusiasm which warmed the poet of The Task. Crabbe did not die until 1832, but he must be numbered with Cowper among the poets of the last century; for, although his, Borough appeared in 1810, twenty-seven years after the publication of The Village, he had no share in the great poetical revolution which distinguished the earlier years of this century.

It was a wonderful period in our literature, and if it lacked some qualities of sterling value, it gave us much of which the eighteenth century was comparatively barren - splendour of imagination, a passionate force which imparted new life to language, an ardent love of nature that produced as profound an influence in poetry as Turner exercised in plastic art, a width and freedom of range that would have dismayed the correct poetasters who followed in the wake of Pope.

Goldsmith's Deserted Village was published in 1770, the year in which Wordsworth was born; Cowper's Task appeared in 1785, and the influence of that poem on our poetical literature can scarcely be over-estimated. Mr. Lowell, whose critical judgment is almost always sound, has said that, in his opinion, " Cowper is still the best of our descriptive poets for everyday wear," and in these words he does justice to his homely and sterling qualities. Cowper frequently takes false views of politics and society: he has strong prejudices, great weaknesses, and for some of his mistakes we can only find an excuse in the malady that consumed him; but in his love and knowledge of nature he is always sympathetic, always veracious, and it is not difficult to credit his assertion that he took nothing at second-hand. A critic has said recently: "It is utterly idle to contend that Cowper came within leagues The great poets of the age lived in the of Pope as a poet; "but, in spite of this eye of nature. Wordsworth, the greatest decision, it is a question that from one of them all, studied his art out-of-doors. point of view may be not unreasonably "Nine-tenths of my verses," he said, "have discussed. The influence of poets upon been murmured in the open air." Scott's poets is, perhaps, the most striking proof poetry, like his prose, carries with it the of their genius. Spenser's power over his scent of the heather. No one ever ensuccessors has been well-nigh limitless, joyed scenery more, and few have deand it may be safely said that the poetical scribed it with more accuracy and brightsway of Cowper has not only been more ness of colour. Coleridge, when he wrote beneficial, but also more extended than his loveliest verse, was a country-liver. that of Pope, whose school, as Southey re- Shelley, who caught with unerring premarked, has produced no poet. More- cision every aspect of nature, was a wanover, the genius of these poets lies in such derer through the best portion of his brief different directions that they cannot fairly life, and found his grave at last in be compared. Cowper had not the deli- the ocean that he loved so well. Keats, cate fancy displayed by Pope in the Rape London born and bred, adored nature of the Lock, nor had he the trenchant wit as a lover worships his mistress, and which entitles Pope to be ranked as our sings of her as though he had been cradled

The steer forgot to graze,

And where the hedge-row cuts the path-way,
stood,

Leaning his horns into the neighbour field,
And lowing to his fellows. From the woods
Came voices of the well-contented doves,
The lark could scarce get out his notes for joy,
His happy home, the ground. To left and right
But shook his song together as he neared
The cuckoo told his name to all the hills;
The mellow ouzel fluted in the elm;
The redcap whistled, and the nightingale
Sang loud, as though he were the bird of day.

on her bosom; and Byron found his chief is, as a simple description, its beauty is enjoy and his noblest inspiration from inter- hanced a thousandfold when we rememcourse with the mighty mother. The ber how this outward joy and serenity is spirit awakened by these illustrious men in harmony with the exultant bliss of the has been at work ever since, and the poets lover on that bright May morning:of our own day are remarkable beyond all save the greatest poets that have preceded them for a profound study of nature. It is not to men who are essentially rural poets that we must look for the best rural poetry, not to a Clare, truthful as his descriptions are, so much as to a Wordsworth; not to a Barnes though his Poems of Rural Life display a freshness of thought and a fidelity of description worthy of high praise, so much as to a Mrs. Browning or a Mr. Tennyson. A great master of the greatest of all arts deals in the first place with human emotion, and to this his affection for nature must ever be subordi- Both Wordsworth and Tennyson are able nate. The beauty he sees around him by a line, almost by a word, to transport suggests thoughts and gives a rich colour- the city-dweller into the open country, so ing to language, but to describe it can that he hears the lowing of cattle, the munever be his highest object any more than sic of birds and streams, scents the frait is the single aim of the artist to be a superb colourist. Wordsworth never for-grance of flowers, and sees with the "ingets man in his intercourse with nature. and, indeed, the exquisite charm of his most exquisite descriptions consists in the way in which he blends the deepest feelings of the heart with the sights and sounds and hues of nature. Always with him there is, to use his own words

Some happy tone

Of meditation, slipping in between
The beauty coming and the beauty gone.

ward eye" the forest glade and mountain valley. Indeed, so thoroughly have these poets, if the phrase may be allowed, taken possession of nature, that a lover of her and of them finds himself continually haunted by their music, or using their words, as he loiters leisurely through the

country.

If he sees a row of pigeons deep in contemplation upon a cottage roof, he remembers how these birds have been described as "sunning their milky bosoms on the And even when in the ardour of his love thatch;" in the solitude of forests he recalls Wordsworth's injunction to touch he prefers the knowledge to be gained with gentle hand, "for there is a spirit from natural objects to that derived from in the woods;" the shrill crowing of books, it is because it will best teach him the cock, returned as it so often is about man, the highest study of the poet: from adjoining farmsteads, suggests the couplet:

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil, and of good,
Than all the sages can.

It is scarcely needful to point out how the
same feeling pervades the idyllic poetry
of Mr. Tennyson. In some of those almost
faultless poems, which, like Wordsworth's
Brothers, may, in the best sense of the
word, be called pastorals - The Gardiner's
Daughter, The Miller's Daughter, and The
Brook, for example it is interesting to
note how closely-linked is the human sym-
pathy and the sympathy with nature, how
the one love blends with and purifies the
other. Can there be a more perfeet rural
picture than the following? Yet lovely as it

On tiptoe rear'd he strains his clarion throat,
Threaten'd by faintly answering farms remote.

A stream that moves quietly along, "glideth at his own sweet will;" wayside flowers, the daisy, the celandine, or the primrose, have each an appropriate line of commemoration which the sight of them brings back to the memory; and who is there that, while listening to the sounds heard upon a warm day of summer in a lovely English park, has not echoed Mr. Tennyson's most musical couplet ? —

The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees.

764

If Keats had lived out a full life, instead, have been observed by Mr. Matthew Arof gaining in early manhood "a grave nold (note particularly his Scholar Gipsy, among the eternal," it is probable that so with its lovely glimpses of Oxford dear a lover of nature would have enriched scenery); by Mr. Buchanan, whose special our poetical literature with rural imagery gift it is to depict, as in Willie Baird and to as large an extent as Wordsworth or Poet Andrew, the scenes and passions of Tennyson. As it is, the small volume he rural life; by Miss Jean Ingelow, whose has left behind him is brimful to overflow-charm as a versifier lies wholly, as it seems ing of glorious poetry, and the fidelity of to us, in her idyllic pieces; and by other his descriptions is as remarkable as the poets, who maintain more or less worthily richness of his imagination. Mrs. Brown- the honour of English poetry. ing had more leisure to complete her life's glish Muse," work, and in some respects the result is "The Engmore satisfactory. She, like Keats, was a poet to the heart's core, and read love and politics and all great social questions in the light of a noble imagination. Like Keats, too, she knew much of Nature, and her rural pictures are as faithful and accu- ser, Milton, Shelley, and Wordsworth witness Shakspeare, Spenrate as if, like poor Clare, it had formed are distinguished beyond all others of the the one aim of her genius to "babble of modern world for splendour of imaginagreen fields." It is impossible, in treating, tion; but it may be said of them with of necessity very briefly, and imperfectly, truth that, while exercising the poet's a large topic like English Rural Poetry, highest faculty, they do not lose sight of to do more than hint at subjects which the common ways of men and of what might fairly demand a volume for their we in our ignorance are accustomed to call consideration. This much, perhaps, we the common objects of nature. They have made clear, that the love of rural beauty and the knowledge of rural life

the farm-yard, the lane, and market. She says Mr. Emerson, "loves says with De Stäel, "I tramp in the mire with wooden shoes whenever they would force me into the clouds." The assertion is curiously one-sided: for the poets of this country.

From Fraser's Magazine.

THE KRIEGSSPIEL.

have been most largely displayed by our True to the kindred points of heaven and home. Soar, but never roam, poets within the present century, that it is not to the poets who have confined their attention to rural objects we must necessarily look for the finest examples of rural poetry, and that the artificial verse known under the name of pastoral was the result of a false conception, which the poets of this century have replaced by a true one. called inspiration in war, is nothing but WE have long been told that "what is Goethe in his Hermann and Dorothea had the result of calculation quickly made,' shown how possible it was for a great poet and this "the result of cabinet study or to write a great pastoral poem. worth, in The Brothers, already mentioned, guessed to what an extent cabinet study Words- experience; but probably few of us in Michael, in the Waggoner, in the Old might be made to imitate real experience, Cumberland Beggar, and other poems of until we became acquainted with the_now similar character, has shown also that pas- celebrated Kriegsspiel, on which the Prustorals may be written which shall be sian military attaché, Major Roerdansz, wholly free from "the childish prattle- has recently lectured at our military instiment," as Cowper termed it, of these com- tutions. We have sometimes solaced ourpositions, as produced by Shenstone, Cun- selves with the thought, that we had freningham, and other rhymesters. Mr. quent opportunities of testing officers' Tennyson, while maintaining an entirely ability in some colonial war, insignificant original treatment, has followed in the perhaps in extent, but valuable in the same track, and so successfully, that it is lessons it taught and the experience it beprobable he is better known to some read- queathed. But what shall we say of a naers as the author of the poems we have tion who, during a long period of profound already mentioned than as the poet of peace, learn to play the terrible game of In Memoriam, of Morte d'Arthur and of war so excellently that the results of three Enone. We refrain from dwelling upon campaigns hardly display a false move or the rural poetry of other living poets; an but did space permit, it would be interest- sounds, the study doors of the military eserroneous calculation? The trumpet ing to point out how accurately and affec-tablishments open, and there come forth, tionately the simpler aspects of nature' not book worms or theoretical soldiers,