senting a class of society at a given period, do not appeal to any other class; and, second, that, arising out of the mind when unimpassioned, unwarmed by emotion, they appeal only to the mind when unimpassioned, unwarmed by emotion. They have their birth in the intellect, and do not touch the heart. Pope's wit and flexibility of intelligence keep his poetry alive; but when persons who did not possess these qualities came to write in his style, although they had acquired his trick of versification, they were unable to do anything more than echo what he had already done. Pope's poetry written by inferior hands failed to afford a new kind of pleasure; and every poet who aspires to be read must impart to his verse the power of giving a new kind of pleasure. The name of every poet who retains his place in the temple of fame suggests distinctive attributes; it cannot be included among those of the select company whose names are already there, unless he have added something all his own, different from the addition made by any other, to the common treasury of song.

The poetry of the early part of the eighteenth century failed to stimulate the generation that came after Pope; the imaginative minds of the later half of the century found no nourishment in it, and gradually they began to fall back on earlier poets for the necessary stimulus-on Chaucer and Shakespere and Spenser. Long before any new poetic impulse arose powerful enough to support the poet at a high level, a kind of borrowed or reflected light from the early naturalism of Chaucer and his successors gave some help to those who looked for stronger guidance than that of Pope and Dryden. The return of poetry to the natural emotions, to universal feelings, to the permanent elements of human nature as opposed to transient fashions and manners, was

gradual. Before the morning star of a new day of song appeared in the person of Robert Burns, a kind of poetry of the gradually brightening twilight, whose light of inspiration was, in part, at least, borrowed, and which yet possesses a beauty and a softness of colour which are its own, this poetry of the twilight fills the space between day and day. A revolution of some kind, new lights upon life, some exciting cause, fresh and originating and powerful ideas were needed to infuse the vital spirit into the dead frigid artificiality in which the classic tendency had become exhausted. Writing about thirty-five years after the death of Pope, William Blake, the artist-poet, laments in a poem to the Muses that they had forsaken poetry.

'Whether on Ida's shady brow,

Or in the chambers of the east,
The chambers of the sun that now
From ancient melody have ceased;

Whether in heaven ye wander fair,
Or the green corners of the earth,
Or the blue region of the air,

Where the melodious winds have birth;

Whether on crystal rocks ye rove,
Beneath the bosom of the sea,
Wandering in many a coral grove,
Fair Nine, forsaking poetry !

How have you left the ancient love

That bards of old enjoyed in you!

The languid strings do scarcely move,

The sound is forced, the notes are few!'

This was written in the lifetime of Dr Johnson, about the time that Cowper was publishing his poem of the 'Task,

and long after the deaths of Thomson and Gray. Blake's position is that of a herald of the poetic glories of the dawn of the present century. He was, though born many years before them, a kinsman of Wordsworth and of Coleridge; and his aloofness from his own age, his intellectual independence mark him out as a conspicuous figure. But, although poetry had languished, the decay was due to the absence of arousing and stimulating impulses rather than to the dearth of poetic minds.

Gray and Thomson, Collins and Goldsmith, were all poets born, endowed in a very special sense with the true poetic nature, responsive to the subtle influences upon which it is nourished. The want of spiritual intensity in the times was blighting to poetry. Take up Thomson, the earliest of this group of poets. He felt keenly the disease, and ascribed it to the artificial life of cities with their crowded salons, their fashionable inanities, and their ignoble ambitions. For him the only remedy seemed to be in retirement to a country life amid country sights and sounds. So he turned for health of mind to the green fields and the long brown furrows of the tilled glebe, to the interchange of sunshine and shower, of Spring and Summer, and Autumn and Winter, to the wide open spaces that are untroubled by bustle and invaded by no foolish crowds. Though a love of Nature had from the first been present in Scotch poetry, due to a Celtic element, Thomson was the first writer to celebrate Nature for her own sake, to dwell lovingly upon her changing moods in their unchanging loveliness, and for this he must keep his place among English poets. Unfortunate in the time of his birth, his poetic instinct and power were sufficient to overcome, partially at least, the paralysing influences around him; and a passage such as this, descriptive

of the vast multitudes of sea birds on the western coast of Scotland, is proof that he had indeed freed himself from the bondage of the school of Pope

'Where the northern ocean in vast whirls
Boils round the naked melancholy isles
Of farthest Thule, and the Atlantic surge
Pours in among the stormy Hebrides;
Who can recount what transmigrations there
Are annual made? What nations come and go?
And how the living clouds on clouds arise?
Infinite wings! till all the plume-dark air
And rude resounding shore are one wild cry.'

The Elizabethan poets had almost exclusively treated of man, his actions, passions and thoughts; and, indeed, the thoughts, passions and actions of men must for ever remain as the supreme subject for poetry. But none the less in the beauties and teachings of Nature may the poets be versed, for man is the child of Nature, cradled in her embrace, fed by her bounty, covered by her kindly dust in the grave. This is a true view of Nature, but there is a view of higher truth. As the scene of the great passion-play of human life, Nature draws to herself a meaning and a mystery not altogether her own, but borrowed from a sojourn of the deathless spirit of man in her realm. And this is the view

of the greatest poets.

Besides Thomson, before Blake and Cowper, two men lived and wrote who carried the art of versification, the pure form of poetry to a highly-wrought perfection in a new direction. Collins and Gray, born within a year or two of each other, though poets of a different order from each other, were scholars who introduced into their own language, as far as was possible, the classical metres and methods.

Neither of them wrote much. A very tiny volume would contain their collected works, but every line is chiselled to a degree of perfection never before seen in English poetry. It cannot be denied that the poems of Collins and of Gray are artifical, artificiality of style was inevitable; but they are in that highest style of the artificial where the art is so cunning that it conceals the art. They cultivated a very narrow strip of ground, but they made it a garden in which the flowers, if few, are of rare growth and delicate colouring.

Blake, as we have seen, longed for a return of the simplicity and passion of the Elizabethan time, and he stands a lonely precursor of the poetry that was to revive these qualities. He was not a child of his own age, but of that which followed his own, and which he lived to see. The 'Songs of Innocence and Experience' are full of the same sympathies that give the distinctive tone to the poetry of Wordsworth and of Coleridge-unalloyed delight in the simplest sights and sounds of Nature, a tender vein of feeling for childhood, and a passionate, disinterested fervour in the cause of the human race. Blake's poems, indeed, combine in a wonderful degree the most characteristic features of both the later poets. From his simplicity there breathes a like spiritual power; there is present in his poems the mystic vision of Coleridge, with the gentle innocence of Wordsworth. His was not a balanced mind, but it was visited by rare gleams of a pure and intense light, and his devotion to the ideal forms of goodness, truth and beauty, was that of a child. His recognition of them was no less intuitive and childlike. No strain of philosophic reflection is to be heard in his best poetry; it has the careless charm of a bird's note, the spontaneous, unpremeditated flow of one of Jonson's or