Task of Cowper or the Excursion of Wordsworth. Byron pronounced it "one of the most beautiful didactic poems in our language." It is a series of pure and elevated pictures of nature and domestic life, mingled with descriptive episodes, one of which contains these stirring lines on the II.-Downfall of Poland. 1. O sacred Truth! thy triumph ceased awhile, Presaging wrath to Poland-and to man! 2. Warsaw's last champion from her height surveyed "O Heaven!" he cried, "my bleeding country save! 4. In vain, alas! in vain, ye gallant few, From rank to rank your volleyed thunder flew! Found not a generous friend, a pitying foe, Strength in her arms, nor mercy in her woe! And Freedom shrieked as Kosciusko fell! 1. The year following the publication of the Pleasures of Hope, Campbell visited the Continent, and from a neighboring monastery he witnessed the battle that gave Ratisbon to the French. "It has been very generally supposed," says a recent edition of Chambers's Encyclopædia, "that he was present at the battle of Hohenlinden; but that battle was not fought until some weeks after Campbell had left Bavaria." Still, he made this conflict the subject of his Hohenlinden, "one of the grandest battle-pieces in miniature that was ever drawn. In a few verses, flowing like a choral melody, the poet brings before us the silent midnight scene of engagement wrapt in the snows of winter, the sudden arming for the battle, the press and shout of charging squadrons, the flashing of artillery, and the scene of death." 2. In 1809 Campbell published his second great poem, Gertrude of Wyoming, a love-romance, the scene of which is laid on the banks of the Susquehanna in Pennsylvania, at the time of the memorable massacre by the Indians at Kingston, near Wilkesbarre. Prior and subsequent to this effort he wrote a number of minor poems, such as Lochiel's Warning, The Exile of Erin, Ye Mariners of England, and others. He also contributed extensively to periodicals, and was a writer of travels and a compiler of annals. 3. Campbell's style is polished and elaborate. He lacks the simplicity of living poets, but unites the concentration of meaning found in Pope with the discursiveness found in Cowper, and he weaves the favorite alliteration of Saxon poetry with metres of classical correctness. CHAPTER LXIV.-MISCELLANEOUS. The Significance of Work. 1. It has been written, "an endless significance lies in work." A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair sced-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and, withal, the man himself first ceases to be a jungle and foul unwholesome desert thereby. Consider how, even in the meanest sorts of labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony, the instant he sets himself to work! Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself, all these lie beleaguering the soul of the poor day-worker, as of every man; but he bends himself with free valor against his task, and all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far off into their caves. The man is now a man. The blessed glow of labor,-is it not as purifying fire, wherein all poison is burnt up, and of sour smoke itself there is made bright, blessed flame? 2. Destiny, on the whole, has no other way of cultivating us. A formless chaos, once set it revolving, grows round and ever rounder; ranges itself, by mere force of gravity, into strata, spherical courses; is no longer a chaos, but a round compacted world. What would become of the earth, did she cease to revolve? In the poor old carth, so long as she revolves, all inequalities, irregularities, disperse themselves; all irregularities are incessantly becoming regular. Hast thou looked on the potter's wheel-one of the venerablest objects; old as the prophet Ezekiel, and far older? Rude lumps of clay, how they spin themselves up, by mere quick whirling, into beautiful circular dishes. 3. And fancy the most assiduous potter, but without his wheel; reduced to make dishes, or rather amorphous botches, by mere kneading and baking! Of an idle unrevolving man, the kindest destiny, like the most assiduous potter without wheel, can bake and knead nothing other than a botch; let her spend on him what expensive coloring, what gilding and enamelling she will, he is but a botch. Not a dish; no, a bulging, kneaded, crooked, shambling, squint-cornered, amorphous botch, -a mere enamelled vessel of dishonor! Let the idle think of this. 4. Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose; he has found it, and will follow it! How, as a free-flowing channel, dug and torn by noble force through the sour mud swamp of one's existence, like an ever-deepening river there, it runs and flows!-draining off the sour festering water gradually from the root of the remotest grass-blade; making, instead of pestilential swamp, a green fruitful meadow, with its clear-flowing stream. How blessed for the meadow itself, let the stream and its value be great or small! 5. Labor is life: from the inmost heart of the worker rises his God-given force, the sacred celestial life-essence breathed into him by Almighty God; from his inmost heart it awakens him to all nobleness-to all knowledge, “selfknowledge" and much else, so soon as work fitly begins. Knowledge? The knowledge that will hold good in working, cleave thou to that; for nature herself accredits that, says Yea to that. Properly, thou hast no other knowledge but what thou hast got by working: the rest is yet all a hypothesis of knowledge; a thing to be argued of in schools, a thing floating in the clouds, in endless logicvortices, till we try it and fix it. Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.-Thomas Carlyle. CHAPTER LXV.-THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY.— 1800-1859. I.-Biographical. 1. Whatever Macaulay did was done with brilliancy and energy. He excelled as poet, essayist, orator, and historian. Throughout his life he was distinguished for the ease with which he gained knowledge, and for his unfailing command of what he knew. His memory was wonderfully retentive, and his industry incessant. At Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1822, he won two prize medals by his poems, and a classical scholarship by his attainments. He studied law, was admitted to the bar, entered the civil service at twenty-eight, was four times elected to Parliament,-twice by the voters of Edinburgh,-and at thirtyfour was sent to India as a member of the Supreme Council, where he made a complete code of penal laws for that Empire. He entered Lord John Russell's Cabinet in 1846, but retired from political life in 1856; and in 1857 he was made a peer, with the title of Baron Macaulay of Rotheby. 2. The early home of the Macaulays was in Lewis, one of the Hebrides Islands, off the west coast of Scotland. The Baron's grandfather was a Presbyterian minister in the Highlands, and his father was a merchant and a philanthropist. These antecedents appear in the sympathies which the son expressed in the House of Commons, and in his essays and English History. He began his literary career as a poet, publishing some French and English ballads, among which was the well-known Battle of Ivry, that celebrated the victory of Henry of Navarre over the Catholic party of France, a victory by which Henry obtained the crown. 3. As a poet, Macaulay won some renown by The Lays of Ancient Rome. The theory on which these poems are constructed is, that the early history of nations usually exists in metrical legends as its first form. To reproduce the incidents of ancient Roman history in the shape in which they existed before Livy wrote, Macaulay chose the old ballad measure as most likely to produce the same effects on modern ears as the conjectured popular verse did upon the old Romans. A critic, speaking of these Lays, says of their author, "He is entirely of the Homer, the Chaucer, and the Scott school, his poetry being thoroughly |