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consideration which has been had of the widening circle of persons to be instructed: and the spirit which prompts the lessons has, in many instances, been worthily embodied in the enlarged and enlightened temper with which they have been communicated. In the midst of much light-mindedness and error, and in spite of eager discussions, alike on questions religious, ecclesiastical and social, we may persuade ourselves that many features are prominent, presaging the birth of a love of mankind more expansive and generous than any that has ever yet pervaded society.

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We possess no poetry comparable to that of the last tion; and, with a vast quantity of prose-writing that may not unreasonably be called eloquent, we have very few men that remarkably unite eloquence with power of thought. Among our thinkers there is, beyond doubt, a greater activity of speculation, in regard to questions affecting the nature and destiny of man, than that which prevailed in the preceding section of the century: but, with rare exceptions, the service done has been rather that of boldly propounding problems which it is desirable to solve, than that of finding true and available solutions. We are struggling, amidst much of doubt and dimness, towards a new organization of social and intellectual life.

When we view the eager spirit of questioning, the unassuaged thirst for action, by which society is ruled, our contemplation of the scene cannot be put to better profit than in the humble thankfulness with which it prompts us to remember, that, among us, more favoured than many of our brethren, those restless impulses have never yet been permitted to destroy social quiet, or to drown the peaceful voice with which Literature speaks, as the worthiest organ of human thought and desire and will. The novel ideas and aspirations, which resound through Europe, like the blast of a trumpet summoning all men to battle, have in our land been so guided, by higher power than ours, as to seek their development by no force but that of honest conviction, through no agency but that of unfettered writing and speech. We, like our fathers, gazing with deep anxiety, have gazed also with unbroken safety, on that wild conflict of opinions, which elsewhere has overthrown, again and again, thrones, and liberty, and faith. The tempest has, as we may venture to believe, cleared away some dangerous elements from the air we breathe; and the bolt which was charged with its terrors has fallen on other homes than ours.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

SECTION SECOND: THE POETRY OF THE FIRST AGE.

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1. First Group of Leading Poets-Campbell.-2. Southey.-3. Second Group-Scott and Byron.-4. Scott's Characteristics and Works.-5. Byron's Characteristics, Ethical and Poetical.-6. Third Group-Coleridge and Wordsworth-Coleridge's Genius and Works.-7. Wordsworth-Features of his Poetical Character.-8. Wordsworth -His Poetical Theory-Its Effect on his Works.-9. Fourth Group-Wilson-Shelley-Keats.-10. Crabbe and Moore-Dramatic Poems-Miscellaneous Names-Sacred Poetry.

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1. In the illustrious band of poets, who enriched the literature of our language during the first generation of the present century, there are four who have gained greater fame than any others, and exercised greater influence on their contemporaries. are Wordsworth and Coleridge, Scott and Byron; and they, although each is individually unlike all the rest, might yet, in respect of their ruling spirit and tendencies, be classed in pairs as they have now been named. Others, however, are hardly less distinguished and all whose works call for exact scrutiny may conveniently be distributed in Four Groups.

In the first of these stand Thomas Campbell and Robert Southey, writers very dissimilar to each other, but differing as widely from all their contemporaries.

d. 1844.

b. 1777. We should hardly expect that the character of Campbell's works would have been other than it is, though he had begun his career thirty years earlier. His larger poems would have delighted all who loved the few pieces truly poetical which that time produced. But to no one living then, would it have occurred to hail him as the precursor of a new school; and no one living now would have wondered to see such compositions as his, succeeding or accompanying those of Goldsmith and Gray. He employed, as they did, an unusually delicate taste, in elaborating his verses, both in diction and melody, with the minute care of execution which had been an orthodox requirement since the days of Queen Anne; and to the descriptive poems of the former of the two his earliest and best work bore a likeness in tone,

though it was more vigorous in fancy and less so in reflection. In narrative, Campbell is, at the best, slow and unimpressive: quick sympathy with energetic action is scarcely traceable, unless in the flashes of enthusiasm which light up his martial odes; and even of these fine Lyrics there is not one, perhaps, into which there does not intrude some heavy or feeble phrase, a token that the flame is flickering and growing dim.

It is a fact not without a meaning, that, while his "Pleasures of Hope" was written between youth and manhood, the “Gertrude of Wyoming," the latest of his productions that is worthy of him, had appeared before he was much past his thirtieth year. The reason may suggest itself if we remember, on how slender a thread of original or coherent thinking are strung the jewels of fancy and feeling, that make the charm of the earlier, which is also by much the more vigorous, of the two poems. Not only does it fail to redeem the promise of its title; but its beautiful descriptions, and its reflections and sentiments, (often deeply touching, but as often very trite,) are related to each other by no unity of purpose, or by none but such as depends on the most casual and indistinct associations. His mind, deficient in manly vigour of thought, had worked itself out in the first few bursts of youthful emotion. But no one has clothed, with more of romantic sweetness, the feelings and fancies which people the fairy-land of early dreams; and no one has thrown around the enchanted region a purer atmosphere of moral contemplation.

b. 1774.) 2. Southey, with an ethical tone higher and sterner d. 1848. than Campbell's, offers in every other feature a marked contrast to him. He is rough and careless in working up details: he indulges in no poetical reveries, and scorns everything approaching to sentimentalism: he throws off rapid sketches of human action, embellished with great pomp of external imagery, interesting through grandeur and seriousness of feeling, and seldom touching the key of the pathetic. In much of this, he is the man of his own age: but he is above his age in one view, in respect of which he has not received justice. Writing narrative poetry before any of his celebrated contemporaries had entered the ground, he stood solitary among them to the last; the only poet of his day who strove to emulate the great masters of epic song; the only one who took pains to give his works external symmetry of plan; the only one who attempted bestowing on a poem an internal unity, by making it the representative of one leading idea. This, it must firmly be maintained, is a loftier and worthier theory of poetic art, than that which ruled the irregular outbursts of Scott and Byron. But it may be that the aspiration was too am

bitious for the time: it was certainly far above the competency of the aspirer. The reflective skill of the artist was insufficiently supported by the native temperament of the poet. Southey wanted spontaneous depth of sympathy: his emotion has the steady and measured flow of the artificial canal, not the leaping gush of the river in its self-worn channel. His imagination, likewise, is full and picturesque, rather than original: he could elaborate fine images out of objects whose poetical relations are obvious; but he was not gifted with the strong and exquisite sense which discerns poetical elements in things seemingly unpoetical.

In two of his three best poems, he has imitated his epic models in a fashion which cools all but highly imaginative readers. He has founded the interest mainly on supernatural agency, and that of a kind which not only is obscure to most of us, but cannot command so much as a momentary belief of reality. The novelty which he desired to gain is purchased at an extravagant price: the splendid panoramas pass away like the figures of a magic lantern. In his Arabian tale, "Thalaba the Destroyer," we are placed amidst the array of striking superstitions which surrounds the Deism of Mahomet: and the scattered rays of truth and goodness, which twinkle through the darkness of the false creed, are concentrated in a series of scenes, whose moral dignity of thought, and solemn portraiture of conscientious self-sacrifice, cannot fail to impress us vividly; if only we are able to make ourselves at home among the witches and talismans, the fallen angels who haunt the ruins of Babylon, and the gigantic brood of sorcerers who fill the lurid caverns stretching under the roots of the ocean. "The Curse of Kehama," relating a story yet more touching, and adorned with passages of great tenderness, tries us still more severely, by seeking to interest us in the monstrous and mischievous fables of the Hindoo mythology. The supernatural machinery, and the bold use of the lyrical metres, are alike abandoned in the blank-verse epic, Roderick, the Last of the Goths." It is much to be regretted that the choice of a story, containing circumstances irremediably revolting, should deform this noble poem, which is otherwise the fairest proof the author has given of the practicability of his enlightened poetic theory.

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3. Our second group of poets will (unless Moore ought to find a place in it) contain only Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, who were in succession the most popular of all, and owed their popularity mainly to characteristics which they had in com

mon.

They are distinctively the poets of active life. They portray, in spirited narrative, idealized resemblances of the scenes of

reality; events which arise out of the universal relations of society, hopes and fears and wishes which are open to the consciousness of all mankind. Were it not for some higher flights which Byron took, inspired from without rather than from within, we might say of them, without exception, what is true of him generally; that they neither aspired to the praise of wedding poetry with abstract thought, nor ascended into those secluded walks of fanciful musing, in which none delight but minds very finely toned.

Both of them have described some of their works as tales; and it has been said of Scott, while it might with not less truth have been said of Byron, that his works are romances in verse. It is unquestionable, that they have neither the elevation nor the regularity belonging to the highest kind of narrative poetry; and, while the poems of the one are in many points strikingly analogous to his own historical novels, those of the other often derive their popular attractiveness from sources of interest nearly akin to that which prevails in less worthy works of fiction.

But the model of both poets was something different from the regular epic; and, if there must be a comparison, the standard is to be sought elsewhere. Scott, fondly attached to the early literature of the land, began his authorship, in "The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," with the republication and imitation of ancient ballads; and he avowedly designed his poems as restorations, with changes suited to modern tastes, of a very interesting class of poems with which he was not less familiar. His originals were the Romances of Chivalry; and, after the extraordinary success of his attempts at embodying the chivalrous and national idea, nothing was more natural than that the example should be applied, by Byron as well as by others, in the construction of narratives founded on a different kind of sentiments. The likeness to the old romances was completed by the adoption of their most usual measure, the couplet of lines in eight syllables or four accents. This metre, although long in use, had recently been held fit only for comic rhyming or lyrics; a poet of Johnson's time would no more have thought of using it for a long and serious narrative, than of choosing the common measure of the Psalms. But it is not to be forgotten that the idea of imitating the romances, as well as the use of their metre and the accentual way of treating it, belongs really to Coleridge, whose "Christabel" was the immediate model of Scott's earliest tale.

It was to be expected, and it was right, that compositions of this sort, executed admirably by both writers, should gain extensive popularity. It may be that the audience was the larger,

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