usage, and a mastery over verse and stanza that constantly wrought new wonders out of material trite and old. Burns reached a clarity and simplicity of diction in the lyric unmatched by any one before his time save Shakespeare; and he also attained to that choicest gift of the greatest poets, the power to give to elemental and universal ideas a form of crystalline and lasting beauty.

From our point of view of the lyric, none of the lesser poets of the last of the century need hold us, whatever his individual claim on the high seas of general poetry. The inspiration of Burns begot a lesser inspiration in several lesser poets: Joanna Baillie, with her Fugitive Verses, 1790, more memorable for her few songs than for her portentous Plays of the Passions; and Lady Nairne, although her poetry, with that of Hogg and Tannahill, comes rather later, with the influences of the romantic outburst likewise upon them. Erasmus Darwin, with his Botanic Garden, last and most preposterously logical of the followers of Pope; William Hayley, puzzled friend and benefactor of Blake, as wretched a poet as he appears to have been an estimable man; Samuel Rogers, who aimed in his Pleasures of Memory, as in his later pleasing versified guide book, Italy, no higher than prose and reached no higher: in none of these is there the slightest suspicion of the lyric. And still less could we expect to find song in the Rolliads, the Baviads, and Mæviads, in which, as in the earlier Diaboliads, contemporary small satirists in forgotten diatribes chid lesser men than themselves. Hannah More, "the most powerful versificatrix in the

language" as Dr. Johnson called her, yields little that is lyrical; and the verses of Mrs. Mary Robinson, the Prince of Wales's "Perdita," who styled herself "the English Sappho," yield, of their kind, too much. Another poetess, Anna Lætitia Barbauld, in a long life of literary diligence, reached deserved repute for a single beautiful poem, beginning, "Life! we've been long together"; though that, too, came later. With Blake, Chatterton, and Burns in mind, and likewise with the respectable unlyrical people noticed above, it might almost be said that the lyric by 1795 had fallen into the hands of women and children, ploughmen and mad folk. But the day was at hand, and the lyric was shortly to come to its own. In this very year, 1795, Walter Savage Landor issued the first of his volumes of poetry; in the next, Coleridge appeared for the first time as an author in company with Charles Lamb; while 1798 is the ever memorable year of the publication by Wordsworth and Coleridge of Lyrical Ballads. But all of this belongs to the next chapter.

CHAPTER VI

THE LYRIC AND THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL

HERE are words that are like palm-worn coins; we believe them to be precious metal, but we know neither their sometime weight nor to what sovereigns they once owed allegiance: they have become mere counters. Such a word is "romanticism," with some half dozen like, — classical, psychological, renaissance movement, and they deserve no less than banishment from our lips and from our books, could we know how to get on without them. As to romanticism, which is our concern, to attempt a new definition here would be mere pedantry; to assume that the term is likely to mean sufficiently nearly the same thing to any two minds to make exact a joint conclusion, would be an assumption hazardous at the least. And yet obviously there is a difference between the trim and definite urban world of Pope, between nature as excellently described by Thomson, or man set nakedly forth by Crabbe and the transfigured world of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley; and somewhere within the broad and undefined superficies that marks the difference, the element in literature, as in art, called romanticism, finds its place. A well-known critic has called this change "the renaissance of wonder," and indubitably wonder at

the strange, the inexplicable, a sense of the unattainable beyond our philosophical, as beyond our artistic reach, is a striking component in the make-up of our early nineteenth-century romantic poetry. But this is not all; the greatest poets do not leave us in puzzled and dissatisfied perplexity, nor can the art that aims at it knows not what, reached it knows not how, charm much beyond the period of its novelty. Dubiety, approximation, and incompleteness are no more qualities to be sought in art than in science; the suggestiveness, the sense of something seen from a new angle, the depth, beyond, so to speak, which is of the very essence of romantic art, may be compassed in many other ways than by stirring the sense of the marvellous. When all has been said, perhaps the artists' word "atmosphere," long ago used by Coleridge, most nearly expresses this quality of depth, the real criterion of romantic art; certainly no poem, piece of fiction, or picture that is without the something that we designate "atmosphere," can be considered romantic. And we have come to set such store on this matter of shadow and light that we are wont, some of us hastily, to deny poetry, art, grace, existence, to anything else.

The influences that make for a change in taste seldom come singly or as the result of some one revolutionary figure. If the nineties of the eighteenth century marked

1 Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Of course, this allusion by no means disposes of this admirable phrase or calls into any question the fine critical discernment discoverable in this justly famous essay.

the culmination of Pope in Erasmus Darwin, the popularity of Cowper continued in Rogers's pedestrian Pleasures of Memory, with the Sonnets of Bowles "written amidst various interesting scenes, during a tour under youthful dejection," as one of their accepted novelties. They saw, too, not only much of the poetry of Blake and Burns, but three little volumes in which Wordsworth figured,-Lyrical Ballads among them,- Coleridge's Poems on Various Subjects, and first volumes of Southey, Lamb, Landor, and Ebenezer Eliot. In almost all there is departure from the things poetical that had been, and much of their newness is of a nature lyrical. In that famous walk of Coleridge and the Wordsworths in the Quantocks, the summer of 1796, when Lyrical Ballads was discussed and with it the principles of the new poetry, Coleridge reported his agreement with his friend on "the two cardinal points of poetry- the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of gaining the interest of novelty by the modifying colors of the imagination." It was these two "powers" that the two authors exercised, each in his contribution to their joint early effort for to Lyrical Ballads, "We are Seven" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" both were contributed. It will be recalled by all readers of poetry how Wordsworth, after a brief experience with the world in London and in momentary touch with the French Revolution, retired to his native Lake Country to cultivate poetry with a devotion and a constancy absolutely unparalleled; and how in contrast,