Do you suppose there is any country where they do not scald milk-pans and swaddle the infants and burn the brushwood and broil the fish? What is true anywhere is true everywhere. And let him go where he will, he can only find so much beauty or worth as he carries.

Cities give us collision. "Tis said London and New York take the nonsense out of a man. A great part of our education is sympathetic and social. Boys and girls who have been brought up with well-informed and superior people show in their manners an inestimable grace. Fuller says, William, Earl of Nassau, won a subject from the King of Spain every time he put off his hat." You cannot have one wellbred man without a whole society of such. They keep each other up to any high point. Especially women; it requires a good many cultivated women,-saloons of bright, elegant, reading women, accustomed to ease and refinement, to spectacles, pictures, sculpture, poetry, and to elegant society, in order that you should have one Madame de Staël. The head of a commercial house, or a leading lawyer or politician, is brought into daily contact with troops of men from all parts of the country, and those too the driving-wheels, the business men of each section; and one can hardly suggest for an apprehensive man a more searching culture. Besides, we must remember the high social possibilities of a million of men. The best bribe which London offers today to the imagination is, that, in such a vast variety of people and conditions, one can believe there is room for persons of romantic character to exist, and that the poet, the mystic, and the hero may hope to confront their counterparts.

The fossil strata show us that Nature began with rudimental forms, and rose to the more complex as fast as the earth was fit for their dwelling-place; and that the lower perish as the higher appear. Very few of our race can be said to be yet finished men. We still carry, sticking to us, some remains of the preceding inferior quadruped organization. We call these millions men; but they are not yet men. Half-engaged in the soil, pawing to get free, man needs all the music that can be brought to disengage him. If Love, red Love, with tears and joy, if Want with his scourge, if War with his cannonade, if Christianity with its charity, if Trade with its money, if Art with its portfolios, if Science with her telegraphs through the deeps of space and time, can set his dull nerves throbbing, and, by loud taps on the tough chrysalis, can break its walls and let the new creature emerge erect and free-make way, and sing pæan! The age of the quadruped is to go out, the age of the brain and of the heart is to come in. The time will come when the evil forms we have known can no more be organized.

LESSON 58.

POETRY. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE POETS."Certain ideas relating to Mankind, considered as a whole, had been growing up in Europe for more than a century, and we have seen their influence on the work of Cowper and Burns. These ideas spoke of natural rights that belonged to every man and which united all men to one another. All men were by right equal and free and brothers. There was, therefore, only one class, the class of Man; only one nation, the nation of Man, of which all were equal citizens. All the old divisions therefore which wealth and rank and class and caste and national boundaries had made were put aside as wrong and useless.

Such ideas had been for a long time expressed by France in her literature. They were now waiting to be expressed in action, and, in the overthrow of the Bastille in 1789, and in the proclamation of the new Constitution in the following year, France threw them abruptly into popular and political form.

Immediately they became living powers in the world, and it is round the excitement they kindled in England that the work of the poets from 1790 to 1830 can best be grouped. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey accepted them with joy, but receded from them when they ended in the violence of the Reign of Terror and in the imperialism of Napoleon. Scott hated them, and, in disgust at the present, turned to write of the romantic past. Byron did not express them themselves, but he expressed the whole of the revolutionary spirit in its action against old social opinions. Shelley took them up after the reaction against them had begun to die away, and re-expressed them. Two men, Rogers and Keats, were wholly untouched by them. One special thing they did for poetry. By the powerful feelings they kindled in men, they brought back passion into its style, into all its work about Man, and through that, into its work about nature.

George Crabbe took up the side of the poetry of Man which had to do with the lives of the poor, in the Village, 1783, and in the Parish Register, 1807. In the short tales related in these books we are brought face to face with the sternest pictures of humble life, its sacrifices, temptations, righteousness, love, and crimes. The prison, the workhouse, the hospital, and the miserable cottage are all sketched with a truthfulness perhaps too unrelenting, and the effect of this poetry in widening human sympathies was very great. The Borough and Tales in Verse followed, and finally the Tales of the Hall in 1819. His work wanted the humor of Cowper, and, though often pathetic and always forcible, was too forcible for pure pathos. His work on Nature is as minute and accurate, but as limited in range of excellence, as his work on Man.

I may mention here in connection with the poetry of the poor, the work of ROBERT BLOOMFIELD, himself a poor shoemaker. The Farmer's Boy, 1798, and the Rural Tales are poems as cheerful as Crabbe's were stern, and his descriptions of rural life are brighter and not less faithful. The kind of poetry thus started long continued in our verse. Wordsworth took it up and added to it new features, and THOMAS HOOD in short pieces, like the Song of the Shirt, gave it a direct bearing on social evils.

ROBERT SOUTHEY, 1774-1843, began his poetical life with the revolutionary poem of Wat Tyler, 1794; and between 1802 and 1814 wrote Thalaba, Madoc, The Curse of Kehama, and Roderick the Last of the Goths. His Vision of Judgment, written on the death of George III., and ridiculed by Byron in another Vision, proves him to have become a Tory of Tories.

SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE, 1752-1834, could not turn round. so completely, but the wild enthusiasm of his early poems was lessened when in 1796 he wrote the Ode to the Departing Year and the Ode to France, poems which nearly reach sublimity. When France, however, ceasing to be the champion of freedom,

attacked Switzerland, Coleridge as well as Wordsworth ceased to believe in her, and fell back on the old English ideas of patriotism and of tranquil freedom. Still the disappointment was bitter, and the Ode to Dejection is instinct not only with his own wasted life but with the sorrow of one who has had golden ideals, and has found them turn in his hands to clay. His best work is but little, but of its kind it is perfect and unique. For exquisite music of metrical movement and for an imaginative phantasy, such as might belong to a world where men always dreamt, there is nothing in our language to be compared with Christabel and Kubla Khan and to the Ancient Mariner, published as one of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798. The little poem called Love is not so good, but it touches with great grace that with which all sympathize. All that he did excellently might be bound up in twenty pages, but it should be bound in pure gold."

“The main phenomenon of Coleridge's poetic life is not, as with most poets, the gradual development of a poetic gift, determined, enriched, retarded by the circumstances of the poet's life, but the sudden blossoming, through one short season, of such a gift already perfect in its kind, which thereafter deteriorates as suddenly, with something like premature old age. Christabel and the Ancient Mariner belong to the great year of Coleridge's poetic production, his twenty-fifth year, 1797-8. In poetic quality, above all in that most poetic of all qualities, a keen sense of and delight in beauty, the infection of which lays hold upon the reader, they are quite out of proportion to all his other composition.

It is in a highly sensitive apprehension of the aspects of external nature that Coleridge identifies himself most closely with one of the main tendencies of the Lake School;' a tendency instinctive, and no mere matter of theory, in him as in Wordsworth. There is yet one other sort of sentiment, connected with the love of outward nature, in which he is at. one with that school, yet all himself-his sympathy with the animal world.

Coleridge's verse, with the exception of his avowedly political poems, is singularly unaffected by any moral or professional or personal effort and ambition, written, as he says, after the more violent emotions of sorrow, to give him pleasure when perhaps nothing else could, but coming thus, indeed, very close to his own most intimately personal character

istics, and having a certain languidly soothing grace or cadence for its most fixed quality from first to last.' - Walter H. Pater.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. SOUTHEY.-Southey's Life and Corresp. of; De Quincey's Essays; Howitt's Homes of Brit. Poets; W. S. and R. J. Austin's Poets-Laureate; Ward's Anthology; Quar. Rev. v. 98, 1856; Ecl. Mag., May and July, 1850, and Dec., 1873. COLERIDGE.-P. Bayne's Essays; De Quincey's Essays; Hazlitt's Lit. Remains; J. S. Mill's Dissertations and Discussions; J. C. Shairp's Studies in Poetry and Philos.; J. A. Hart's Camb. Essays; Ward's Anthology; Black. Mag., v. 110, 1871; Harper's Mo., vs. 14 and 39; N. Br. Rev., v. 43, 1865; Quar. Rev., July, 1868; West, Rev., vs. 85, 93, and 94.

READING.-The Village and The Ancient Mariner, in pamphlet, by Clarke and Maynard.

LESSON 59.

WORDSWORTH.-"Of all the poets, misnamed Lake Poets, WILLIAM WORDSWORTH was the greatest. Born in 1770, educated on the banks of Esthwaite, he loved the scenery of the Lakes as a boy, lived among it in his manhood, and died in 1850 at Rydal Mount, close to Rydal lake. He took his degree in 1791 at Cambridge. The year before, he had made a short tour on the Continent, and stepped on the French shore at the very time when the whole land was mad with joy.' The end of 1791 saw him again in France and living at Orleans. He threw himself eagerly into the Revolution, joined the 'patriot side,' and came to Paris just after the September massacre of 1792. Narrowly escaping the fate of his friends, the Brissotins, he got home to England before the execution of Louis XVI. in 1793, and published his Descriptive Sketches. His sympathy with the French continued, and he took their side against his own country, hating the war that England now set on foot against France.

He was poor, but his friend Raisley Calvert left him £900, and enabled him to live the simple life he had now chosen, the life of a retired poet. At first we find him at Racedown, where in 1797 he made friendship with Coleridge, and then at Alfoxden, in Somerset, where he and Coleridge planned and published in 1798 the Lyrical Ballads. After a winter in