and reckless life. From such a poet no hand is stretched in the service of an upward toiling humanity.__There is then no positive moral purpose in Byron. But is it therefore to be said that his work is vain, a hindrance rather than a gain to the generations that come after him? Such conclusion would be unwarrantable. There is a negative moral purpose. The prophets of God were not seldom in wrathful mood, filled with holy indignation at the wickedness and the idolatries of the people. The moral purpose to be seen in Byron is moral purpose in a destructive, in a wrathful mood. The endeavour to purify heart and mind must begin with the eradication of the tendencies in human nature to self-deceit, to a blinding self-complaisance. Byron saw clearly enough that the England of his day was in the strong prison of an invincible or almost invincible ignorance; and because he shook the citadel of that ignorance to its foundations, a portion of the prophetic revealing gift, which has belonged to the poets by divine right, is his also.

In speaking of Byron reference should never be omitted to the service he rendered not to his own nation alone but to Europe in drawing all eyes to English literature. Shakespere excepted, there is no other with an equal European reputation. In the eloquent phrase of Mazzini, 'He led the genius of Britain on a pilgrimage throughout all Europe.' His splendid name, coupled with the celebrity that attached to it when he joined the Greek army of independence, an act productive of unbounded enthusiasm, were the sufficient causes of his European renown.

Among the poets of Revolution the name of Ebenezer Elliott, the corn-law rhymer cannot be passed over, and he may be mentioned with Byron for two reasons. Elliott's

poetry deals with large subjects with a like passion, and his imagination never leaves earth, but is always in touch with concrete fact. When his soul is in arms he has something of the same voice, the voice of Tyrtæus.

'Day, like our souls, is fiercely dark,

What then? 'tis day!

We sleep no more; the cock crows-hark!

To arms, away!'

In his shorter poems, when he attempted condensation, Byron was not always successful; rarely happy, indeed, except when free to range over great tracts; but he has left a few masterpieces in a more restrained style. We must always remember that, like his contemporaries, Shelley and Keats, he died a very young man, at the age of thirty-six. Crowded and vigorous as that life was, and crowned with marvellous poetic achievement, we may be sure that had he lived his poetry would have gained, if not in strength, certainly in other and even greater qualities. To anyone who doubts that it would have been so no better answer can be given than the last poem written on the completion of his thirtysixth birthday at Missolonghi, three months before the end came. It marks the dawn of a nobler resolution than ever before beautified his life.

'The sword, the banner, and the field,
Glory and Greece, around me see !
The Spartan borne upon his shield,
Was not more free.

Awake! (not Greece-she is awake!)

Awake, my spirit! Think through whom

Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake,

And then strike home.

Tread those reviving passions down,
Unworthy manhood; unto thee
Indifferent should the smile or frown
Of beauty be.

If thou regrett'st thy youth, why live?
The land of honourable death

Is here:-up to the field, and give
Away thy breath!

Seek out-less often sought than found—
A soldier's grave, for thee the best ;

Then look around, and choose thy ground

And take thy rest.'

In that 'land of honourable death' he died on the 19th

of April 1824.

CHAPTER IV

NATURALISM AND SUPERNATURALISM IN POETRY

Coleridge-Wordsworth-Lamb-Bowles

THE restless passion for a perfection to be consummated here and now, which brought about the political and social changes of the Revolution, brought about also the movement named 'transcendental.' A desire for the absolute in action led in the latter years of the eighteenth century to the materialistic revolution, whose spiritual counterpart, a corresponding desire for the absolute in thought, led to the new and enlarged conceptions which drew Nature and man closer to their infinite source. The eighteenth century, an intellectual but unimaginative period in the history of civilisation, made relative truth its object, and regarded 'probability,' in Bishop Butler's phrase, 'as the very guide of life.' If the materialistic revolution be read aright, it will be read as an effort to translate the newly liberated ideals of the spirit of man into instant practice. This was the outcome of the new spirit in the sphere of political philosophy. Transcendental thought in the sphere of metaphysical philosophy aimed at an overthrow of the mechanical procedure of the empirical thinkers, and the substitution of the science of real knowledge, not derived mediately through the senses but immediately from the

central fountain of being. Relative truth, tolerable, social and political institutions were no longer satisfying, and were henceforth discredited. For the future there was to be no rest for the soul; for it could never again make its home amid relative truths and tolerable social and political institutions. Looking back towards the opening of the century, Wordsworth and Coleridge seem to stand over against each other, the two pillars of Hercules at the entrance to the boundless ocean of the new world, over which the hunger of the heart for a stainless ideal drives the child of our unquiet time on a quest which he cannot relinquish, though he knows it will be vain.

Wordsworth's friendship with Coleridge, the strong bond between them in their early days of work, rendered memorable by the joint authorship of the 'Lyrical Ballads,' has made their name and fame inseparable. And yet the extreme diversity in character and temperament of these two men is at once apparent. They visited Germany together in early life, and the influences of that visit are significant of the type of mind of each. Wordsworth made little way in the acquisition of the language, remained undisturbed by the influx of any fresh stream of ideas, and continued quietly to give himself almost wholly to the composition of his own poems. Not even in later life did he express any reverence for Goethe; and the philosophers failed to attract him. Coleridge plunged immediately into the metaphysical studies with which he occupied so large a portion of his life, and did so much to forward in England. The truth is, Wordsworth's faiths were never arrived at by logical process. They were the result of meditative contemplation which brooded on and on, until thought died away into feeling, and the contemplation ceased to be in