Cowper leads on to the later day in his perfect love for truth and simplicity. He speaks with stern indignation against all the falseness and affectation of the artificial life of the time, which, whether in Society, in the State, or in the Church, had set up the tyranny of the world—

"Advancing fashion to the post of truth,

And centring all authority in modes

And customs of her own."

And he delights in the pure pleasures of country life, and finds true poetry in the common daily walks and homely scenes around Olney.

The natural gloom of his mind led him often to write of the evils of the time with a certain hopelessness; yet in heart he was inspired by the sincere conviction that light was rising over the world, and that for the coming generations there were better days in store

"Thus Heavenward all things tend. For all were once

Perfect, and all must be at length restored.

So God has greatly purposed; who would else
In His dishonoured works Himself endure
Dishonour, and be wronged without redress.
Haste then and wheel away a shattered world,
Ye slow revolving seasons! We would see
A world that does not dread and hate His laws,
And suffer for its crime; would learn how fair
The creature is that God pronounces good,
How pleasant in itself what pleases Him.
He is the happy man whose life, e'en now,

Shows something of that happier life to come."

The thoughts in these lines link together the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the beginning of the French Revolution hope was strong in what could be done for the world by political changes; the nineteenth century begins, as we shall see, with the lesson taught by that experience: that it is only as each individual man fulfils the true ideal,

and orders his life aright, that society can be made happier and better.

In the last year of the eighteenth century, Thomas Campbell, a young poet, closed the era with another bright outlook into the coming time in his poem, "The Pleasures of Hope."

"Hope! when I mourn with sympathizing mind

The wrongs of fate, the woes of human kind,

Thy blissful omens bid my spirit see

The boundless fields of rapture yet to be;
I watch the wheels of Nature's mazy plan,
And learn the future by the past of man.
Come, bright Improvement on the car of Time,
And rule the spacious world from clime to clime.
Thy handmaid Arts shall every wild explore,
Trace every wave and culture every shore.

*

Ye that the rising morn invidious mark

And hate the light, because your deeds are dark,
Ye that expanding Truth invidious view,
And think, or wish, the Song of Hope untrue,
Perhaps your little hands presume to span
The march of genius and the powers of man;
Perhaps ye watch at Pride's unhallowed shrine,
Her victims newly slain, and thus divine-
'Here shall thy triumphs, genius, cease, and here
Truth, Science, Virtue close your short career;'
Tyrants, in vain ye trace the wizard ring,

In vain ye limit Minds unwearied spring!"

And thus the history of our English Literature passes into our present century, not to tell of traces of decay, but of the renewal of freshness and vigour in the very springs of its life-truthfulness, sympathy, and simplicity; and with the greater force of freer growth to gain wider victories over darkness and wrong.

CHAPTER XXII.

POETS OF THE FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

(1800-1850).

As we begin the nineteenth century, we find that the strong force which was leading men to question and cast off authority had not lost its energy. It was the springing up of new life, and it could not be stifled or crushed. The wild, destroying power could only be controlled, as men found out that above themselves and above their fellow-men there was a rule to which it was no slavery to submit, but the noblest, freest life—the rule of reason and conscience, the self-controlled obedience of each individual to law and to God. It was the noblest and most enlightened minds which saw this first, the "Happy Warriors," who gained the victory for themselves, and then helped others to conquer too; and of these Wordsworth stands as the leader in this, the great battle of the nineteenth century. There were other poets, his contemporaries, who did not see so far; they felt the crushing weight of artificial forms and needless tyrannies; they looked only at man's representation of God, and they rose in fierce revolt against God and man, and threw off individual allegiance to duty and law.

Byron represents in this way the strong energy of revolt and the bare assertion of self-will as the principle of life. He belonged to a family in which unsoundness of mind seems to have been hereditary, and he was brought up by his mother, who was a capricious and violent woman There

was nothing in his training to teach him self-control or self-renunciation for the good of others; and, drifting on the current of the time, he rose against the restraints of society and law which in any way interfered with his own individual action. He was born in 1788, and in 1807 published his first collection of short poems, "Hours of Idleness." In the years from 1807 to 1823 he wrote "Childe Harold," "The Giaour," "The Bride of Abydos," "The Corsair," "Lara,” “The Prisoner of Chillon,” “Manfred," and "Don Juan." Most of these poems are narratives, of which he is himself the hero; and the concentration of thought and feeling around himself caused that natural weariness of the subject which made him look on the world and life with bitterness and disgust.

The power and eloquence with which he appealed to the world for sympathy with himself, and the energy with which he expressed the free spirit of that time, gave his poetry a strong hold over the readers of his own day. It must not be forgotten that, while he asserted for himself and others the unrestrained action of individual selfishness as the principle of life, he had sympathy with the wider aspirations of patriotism. It was with the desire to help others to freedom that, in 1823, he threw himself into the cause of the Greeks, who were then asserting their independence of the Turks, by whom they had been greatly oppressed. Lord Byron went to Greece, and helped to rouse the national feeling of the people, and to unite them as one man in the struggle for liberty. At Missolonghi he was seized with fever, and his constitution being already worn out by his lawless life, he sank under it. There is something sad in his death in a strange land, and without a friend near him; yet compared with his life, it is like the thin gleam of golden sunlight cast across the world at the sunset of a dark, stormy day.

Another poet who in his own way expressed the spirit

of revolt against tyranny, was Percy Bysshe Shelley; but in him it was not so much the desire for individual freedom of action which gave energy to his poetry, as the grand conception he had formed of the "future of the world that was to be." He was of all poets the most ideal; he could imagine a perfection of human character and life far beyond all that had yet been attained; and, like Cowper, he believed in the new hope of a more glorious day. Meantime his spirit rose against all that held men down and thwarted their higher development, with a force equal to his love for man, his faith in the possibilities of a better time, and his earnest longings for its coming. Shelley's power of conceiving the purest ideal led him to see how much there was which had, at different times, entered into man's conception of God that was inconsistent with the perfection of love, justice, and truth; so that the human colouring tinged and distorted the Divine image, like an object seen through a painted window, or as he himself expresses it :—

"Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity,

Until Death tramples it to fragments. Die,

If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek."

Shelley desired the immediate realisation of the ideal. Like all the nobler minds of the time, he hoped much from the French Revolution, and when he saw the failure of political theories to regenerate a world not ripe for them, he felt the bitter chill of disappointment; had he lived longer he might have passed onward to the deeper lessons Wordsworth taught that it is only by individual regeneration and development that the human race advances-and have learnt in faith to work and wait. His intense sympathy with humanity, and the very strength of his love, made him rise against the fires of suffering which are a part of the process of purification and spiritual refinement; he pas