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We enter the dwelling, and identify ourselves with the daily life of the poor. "The toil-worn Cotter" coming home at night "weary, o'er the moor," is met by his children, "Th' expectant wee-things." "His wee bit ingle, blinkin' bonnily," and his wife's smile

"Does a' his weary carking cares beguile."

Like Goldsmith, Burns finds in this simple, wholesome life, with its commonplace duties and its cheerful contentment, his country's greatest pride and strength. In the last two stanzas, which he once repeated kneeling bareheaded on Coldstream Bridge across the Tweed, Burns poured out his passionate love for his country, as he did again in the stirring trumpet notes of Scots Wha Hae Wi' Wallace Bled.

Poet of Democracy. But Burns' ardent soul was not centered merely on his own love or his own country. He was the poet of democracy, extending the hand of brotherhood to the patriots of France. When Burns

wrote that

"Man's inhumanity to man

Makes countless thousands mourn,"

he expressed what thousands were coming to feel; and in his poem For A' That and A' That, he gave to Europe, then nearing a great social change, an immortal declaration of human equality and of the glory of simple manhood:

"A prince can mak a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, and a' that;

But an honest man's aboon his might,
Guid faith he mauna fa' that!
For a' that, and a' that,

Their dignities, and a' that,

The pith o' sense, and pride o' worth,
Are higher rank than a' that.

For a' that, and a' that,

It's coming yet, for a' that,

That man to man, the warld o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that."

But Burns' comprehensive sympathy, like that of Cowper, reaches beyond the circle of human life. He stands in the furrow to look at the tim'rous field

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mouse, whose tiny house his plow has laid in ruins, and his soul is broad enough to think of the trembling creature gently and humbly as his

"Poor earth-born companion

An' fellow-mortal."

In fact, though Burns' life was for the most part passed in remote provincial places out of the sweeping current of political and social change, which was producing a new England and a new Europe, he was one of the great poets of revolution. He represented the humanizing tendency of the revolutionary spirit, and its healthy contempt of hypocrisy.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Toward the close of the eighteenth century, we reach the most stormy and critical period in the history of modern Europe. The growing spirit of humanity, which we have traced in poetry, had done much for the betterment of man, working quietly in men's hearts; but it was to do still more in a way less pacific. Poet and philosopher, in France and England, were pleading the cause of the poor, and the rights of man. Made more sensitive to pain and suffering, they had come to examine the theories of government, the duties of sovereigns, and the rights of subjects. Convinced of the dignity and worth of manhood, they denounced oppres

sion, tyranny, and cruelty. Rousseau called upon men to live in accord with nature; Voltaire scoffed at the shams of mock nobility, and exalted reason in matters of government; Burns had written

"The rank is but the guinea stamp;
The man's the gowd for a' that".

Cowper, in The Task, had cried out against the Bastile (the great prison in Paris) as a shameful "house of bondage;" finally, in France, the toiling masses, starved, overtaxed, oppressed, arose in the might of their longsuffering wrath, and overthrew the Bastile (July 14, 1789). Then

"France her giant limbs upreared,

And with that oath which smote earth, air, and sea,
Stamped her strong foot and said she would be free."

Europe looked on breathless, as the whole glittering fabric of French feudalism, rotten at the base, suddenly crashed into ruin. The ancient barriers of custom and authority were swept away as in a night; the floods were out; the French Revolution had begun.

During the early acts of that terrible drama, it seemed to many that the dreams of poets and philosophers of a Golden Age of peace and brotherhood were about to be realized. Enthusiasm was at the highest. The English poet Blake walked the streets of London wearing the red cockade of the Revolutionists. Even the great statesman Pitt sympathized with them, while Fox, a leader of Parliament, is said to have exclaimed, on hearing of the destruction of the Bastile, "How much is this the greatest event that ever happened in the world, and how much the best!" Edmund

Burke, indeed, stood aloof from the rest, a solitary and impregnable tower of conservatism; and in Edinburgh the young Walter Scott, with his intense love of the chivalric past, looked on at the fury of demolition with disapproval. But, for the most part, the hopes of youth, and of all the ardent and enthusiastic spirits of the time, went out toward the Revolutionists in a great torrent of exultation. The imagination of the youthful poets, WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, and ROBERT SOUTHEY, all in the impressionable years of opening manhood when the Revolution began, was fired by the idea that the world was being made anew. They trod the earth in rapture, their eyes fixed upon a vision of the dawn. Looking back upon this time, Wordsworth wrote:

"Bliss was it in that Dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven."

The effect of these changes upon literature was threefold. They introduced a higher sincerity and truth in art, an ever widening spirit of brotherhood, and a sense of the worth and dignity of the individual soul which led men to write in a more personal and subjective way than they had done before. The master passion of the new leaders of thought was the longing for something natural and genuine. Wordsworth and Coleridge aimed to write poems that should be true poetically and imaginatively, and be free from the artificialities of the school of Pope. Wordsworth sought to reform "poetic diction," and to set up a simpler and truer manner in its stead. A little later, Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) railed against the "shams" of life, and preached that men "should come back to reality, that they should stand upon things and not upon the shows of things."

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

(1770-1850)

William Wordsworth, one of the great leaders in this era of change, was born in 1770 at Cockermouth, a

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little village on the river Derwent in the English Lake country. On both his father's and mother's side the poet came of a family stock deeply rooted in the country soil, and he may well have inherited from his long line of provincial ancestors that sympathy with the country, and with the simple incidents of country life, which is a principal element in his verse. Born in a singularly lovely region of lake and mountain, remote from the

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