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Although not poshis verse is lit up His prose writings

poetry is graceful, sprightly, and full of fancy. sessing much soul and emotion, here and there with wit, or glows with tenderness and grace. consist of essays, collected under the titles of The Indicator and The Companion; Sir Ralph Esther, a novel; The Old Court Suburb ; his lives of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, prefixed to his edition of their dramatic writings, and many others.

The father of Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864) was a gentleman of wealth, residing in Warwickshire. The son entered Rugby at an early age, and thence proceeded to Trinity College, Oxford; but he left the University without a degree. As a poet he stands with Leigh Hunt between the age of Scott and Byron and the age of Tennyson and Browning. In 1795 his first work-a volume of poems-appeared, followed early in the present century by a translation into Latin of Gebir, one of his own English poems. Landor had facility in classical composition, and he appeared to have the power of transporting himself into the times and sentiments of Greece and Rome. This is still more clearly seen in the Heroic Idyls in Latin verse; and the reproduction of Greek thought in The Hellenics is one of the most successful attempts of its kind. Shortly after the death of his father, the poet took up his abode on the Continent, where he resided during the rest of his life, making occasional visits to his native country. The republican spirit which led him to take part as a volunteer in the Spanish rising of 1808 continued to burn fiercely to the last. He even went so far as to defend tyrannicide, and boldly offered a pension to the widow of any one who would murder a despot. Between 1820 and 1830 he was engaged upon his greatest work, Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen. This was followed in 1831 by Poems, Letters by a Conservative, Satire on Satirists (1836), Pentameron and Pentalogue (1837), and a long series in prose and poetry, of which the chief are The Hellenics Enlarged and Completed, Dry Sticks Fagoted, and The Last Fruit off an Old Tree. He died at Florence, an exile from his country, misunderstood by the majority of his countrymen, but highly appreciated by those who could rightly estimate the works he has left.

Thomas Hood (1799-1845) has unfortunately been regarded only as a humorist; but "pathos, sensibility, indignation against wrong, enthusiasm for human improvement—all these were his.”

"His pen touched alike the springs of laughter and the sources of tears." He was associated with the brilliant circle who then contributed to The London Magazine; among whom were Lamb, Hazlitt, the Smiths, and De Quincey. His magazine articles were followed by Whims and Oddities. Hood became at once a popular writer; but in the midst of his success a business house failed, involving him in its losses. The poet, disdaining to seek the aid of bankruptcy, emulated the example of Scott, and determined by the economy of a life in Germany to pay off the debt thus involuntarily contracted. In 1835 the family took up their residence in Coblenz; from thence removed to Ostend (1837); and returned to London in 1840. He was editor of the New Monthly from 1841 until 1843, when the first number of his own Magazine was issued. A pension was obtained for him in 1844; and he died in the following year.

Hood was not a creative genius. He has given little indication of the highest imaginative faculty; but his fancy was delicate, and full of graceful play. He possessed in a remarkable degree the power of perceiving the ridiculous and the odd. His words seemed to break up into the queerest syllables. His wit was caustic, and yet it bore with itself its remedy. It was never coarse. An impurity even in suggestion cannot be found in Hood's pages. With the humor was associated a tender pathos. The Death-bed (323) is one of the most affecting little poems in our language, and is equalled only by another of his ballads entitled Love's Eclipse. Amongst his larger works, the Plea of the Midsummer Fairies and Hero and Leander, are the most elaborate. The descriptive parts in both are full of careful observation of nature, and most musical expression of her beauties. The best known of his poems are The Bridge of Sighs (322), Eugene Aram, and the Song of the Shirt. In them the comic element is entirely wanting. His poems usually have a blending of humor and of pathos; and in their humor there is an earnest purpose. "He tempts men to laugh, and then leads them to pity and relieve."

The worthiest poet among women is Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1809-1861). She was the daughter of a wealthy merchant of London, and by good fortune received what has been allowed to comparatively few of her sex, a good education. In the Latin and Greek literature she was well versed. The delicacy of her health prevented her from doing the toilsome work of the most laborious

students; yet her acquisitions were so great that in her youth she was as famous for her learning as for her genius. Illness did not keep her from books. By a varied and extensive course of reading, and by her meditation, she prepared herself for her place among the poets. Her first acknowledged work was a translation of the Prometheus Bound, published in 1833. Next appeared a collection of poems in 1844, establishing her reputation as the strongest, most high-toned and most melodious of female poets. In 1846 she was married to Robert Browning, and went with him to Italy for the improvement of her health. From that time her sympathies with Italian aspirations were so intense that they color nearly all of her writings. Her Casa Guidi Windows gives her impressions of what she saw of Italian life from her home, the Casa Guido, in Florence. Her greatest work, and in the estimation of some critics the noblest poem of the present century, is Aurora Leigh. This she herself pronounces "the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered." In 1856 she left England for the last time, dying at Florence in 1861.

This woman of deep emotion, of high-toned thought, of devout spirit, with soul strong enough to have filled the body of a Joan of Arc, shut in her darkened chamber, reading "almost every book worth reading in almost every language," mingling with a few friends, her heart going forth in sympathy with the wretched and down-trodden, gathered up her strength, and put her soul into her verse, now with all the passion of Aurora Leigh, and now in the tenderer sonnets full of pathos and love. It is not to be wondered at, that some of her writing has been called spasmodic. Mrs. Browning has not the calm, unfailing flow of thought and feeling found in her only modern superior in England, the Laureate. But the woman rises to heights on which the man has never stood, and finds deeps which he has never fathomed. Her style is therefore often rugged, unfinished, and at times utterly without rhythm.

The sadness pervading all the writings of Mrs. Browning is what might be expected from such a life as hers. Her ill health, the sudden loss of her younger brother, the long-continued confinement in that chamber where no sunbeam ever cheered, must all have deepened the sorrow in which she ever dwelt. Her verse is therefore but rarely sportive. She deals sometimes in satire, but satire is always sad. Her own idea of the poet's work seems to bear this

view: "Poetry has been as serious a thing to me as life itself; and life has been a very serious thing. I never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for the hour of the poet." From such a view of poetry and life, we cannot wonder at the moral purpose found in all her writing.

Mrs. Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793-1835), whose maiden name was Browne, has written poems that are extensively read. Her subjects find a ready admission to the hearts of all classes. The style is graceful, but presenting, as Scott said, "too many flowers for the fruit." There is little intellectual or emotional force about her poetry, and the greater part of it will soon be forgotten. A few of the smaller pieces will perhaps remain as English gems, such as The Graves of a Household, and the Homes of England.

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE LAKE SCHOOL-WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE AND SOUTHEY

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

"Him who uttered nothing base."-Alfred Tennyson.

"I do not know a man more to be venerated for uprightness of heart and lofti ness of genius."-Walter Scott.

"To feel for the first time a communion with his mind, is to discover loftier faculties in our own."--Thomas N. Talfourd.

"Whatever the world may think of me or of my poetry is now of little consequence; but one thing is a comfort of my old age, that none of my works written since the days of my early youth, contains a line which I should wish to blot out because it panders to the baser passions of our nature. This is a comfort to me; 1 can do no mischief by my works when I am gone."- William Wordsworth.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), the founder of the so-called Lake School of poetry, was born at Cockermouth, in the north of England (294-300). He was left an orphan very early in life. In his ninth year he was sent to a school at Hawkshead, in the most picturesque district of Lancashire, where his love for the beauties of creation was rapidly developed. After taking his degree at Cambridge in 1791, he went to France, and eagerly embraced the ideas of the wildest champions of liberty in that country. His political sentiments, however, became gradually modified, till in later life they settled down into steady conservatism in all questions of church and state. In 1793 he published two little poems, An Evening Walk, and Descriptive Sketches. Their metre and language are of the school of Pope; but they are the work of a promising pupil, and not of a master. In the following year he completed the story of Salisbury Plain, or, Guilt and Sorrow. In regard to time it is separated from the Descriptive Sketches by a span, but ir merit they are parted by a gulf. He had ceased to write in the

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