Keats's poetry combines the purest sensuous pleasures with the intellectual.

His chief poem, Endymion, was severely criticised by the Quarterly Review.

Some of his other works are Hyperion, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes.

Keats died at Rome, in his 24th year.

Thomas Moore is best known by his Irish Melodies.

Lalla Rookh is his principal poem.

George Crabbe was the poet of the poor.

Other poets of this time were Robert Bloomfield, Reginald Heber, Mary Tighe, Robert Pollok, Henry Kirke White.

The Scotch poets were Robert Tannahill, James Hogg (the "Ettrick Shepherd"), Allan Cunningham, and William Motherwell.

The principal dramatists of the time were George Colman "the younger," Mrs. Inchbald, Joanna Baillie.

The novelists of the age were Sir Walter Scott, Miss Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Jane Porter, Anne Radcliffe, Henry Mackenzie, William Beckford, William Godwin.

Scotch novelists, besides Sir Walter Scott, were Lockhart, Prof. John Wilson ("Christopher North "), John Galt, Miss Ferrier, etc.

Philosophical writers were Dugald Stewart, James Mackintosh, Thomas

Brown.

Writers on political economy were Bentham, Malthus, Ricardo, and James Mill.

Writers on physical science were Sir Humphrey Davy and Sir William Herschel.

Theology was represented by Robert Hall, Thomas Chalmers, Edward Irving, Adam Clarke.

History by Wm. Mitford, Lingard, Sharon Turner, Tytler, Napier, etc. The Edinburgh Review was started in 1802 by Sydney Smith, Francis Jeffrey, and others. It was a Whig organ.

The London Quarterly Review was started in the interest of the Tory party, 1809. It was edited by William Gifford.

The Westminster Review was started by the Radical party in 1824. Jeremy Bentham was chief editor.

The monthly magazines began to spring into existence in the early part of the nineteenth century.

Blackwood's Magazine was started in 1817 by William Blackwood. Weekly magazines were started in 1832. Of these Dickens's Household Words and All the Year Round have been most popular.

The literary world owes a debt of gratitude to the brothers William and Robert Chambers for their indefatigable labors in procuring and furnish ing popular information.

WORDSWORTH.

CHAPTER XII.

THE LAKE POETS.

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WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE, AND

SOUTHEY.

1832-1850.

EORGE IV. died in 1830, and was succeeded by his brother, William IV. During his short reign of seven years, important measures of government were begun. In 1832 the great Reform in Parliament was carried by King and Commons against the Lords. The next year slavery was abolished throughout the British Colonies, and in the same year the first public grant was made in behalf of public schools. In England, America, and France, the spirit of universal freedom was awakened.

Among the most ardent upholders of the French Revolution in its earlier stages were the three young poets WordsWORTH, COLERIDGE, and SOUTHEY. Without tracing the devious path which led to the final overthrow of all their political and religious convictions, it may be briefly stated that the three, starting in life as the most ultra radicals in politics and religion, ended their lives as the upholders of kings and supporters of the Church of England. They were the poets of humanity, and, following Burns, Cowper, and Crabbe in the natural school of poetic art, insisted on a still wider deviation from the artificial school.

Attracted by the beautiful scenery of Westmoreland and Cumberland, one after the other of these poets took up his

residence among the lakes of north-western England, and from this fact they have always been known as the "Lake Poets."

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850), the chief of this school of poets, was born in Cumberland. He received his education at Cambridge, travelled on the Continent, and was in France at the beginning of the Revolution of 1791. Returning to England, he devoted his time to literary pursuits, and appeared as a poet in 1793. Soon after he met Coleridge, and the two became life-long friends. In 1797 their joint production of Lyrical Ballads was published.*

To bring the art of poetry back to nature, Wordsworth contended that the ordinary topics of daily life were fit subjects for poetry, and that the language should be that "really used by men." For this deviation from all preconceived ideas of propriety in poetic diction, he received showers of ridicule and censure; yet, undismayed, he held on his course, and, after fifty years of patient waiting, was recognized as the first poet. of his age.

There are golden veins of poetry running throughout everything he has written, gleaming here and there in genuine col⚫ors, then again obscured, as he meant they should be, in the russet of common, every-day expression. In his Ode to Immortality there is the grand Æolian melody, the perfection of human utterance.†

In the poet's mind there was a natural order and sequence in the arrangement of his poems, typical of the development of his spiritual powers. The Excursion, his principal poem, was intended as a second part to a longer poem to be entitled The Recluse. The first part-The Prelude-records "the origin and progress of his own powers." The second part-The Excursion-deals with passing events and existing circumstances, and, being completed first, was published as an independent poem. In the language of Wordsworth, the two hold the relationship to each other of "the ante-chapel to the body of a Gothic church." The smaller poems, as he says, are to be

*To this Coleridge contributed his Ancient Mariner.

This poem Emerson designates as the "high-water mark of English thought of the nineteenth century."

regarded as "little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses. The third part- The Recluse-which was never finished, was to consist of meditations "On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life."

The love of nature was with him a passion, and the influence of nature on man was a favorite subject. He says:

"One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,

Than all the sages can."

None but a poet inspired by the utmost confidence in himself would have risked such subjects as Wordsworth chose. Yet the sad music of humanity rings in minor tones through such poems as The Idiot Boy, notwithstanding the most prosaic and inharmonious lines. The poet is triumphant in producing a vivid picture, and in calling out the truest, kindliest sympathy.

Wordsworth brought back the Sonnet, which, since Milton's day, had fallen out of English poetry.

The domestic life of the poet was unclouded and happy.* In 1802 he had married Mary Hutchinson, and till his death,· in 1850, they lived in the quiet seclusion of Grasmere and Rydal Mount. All the lakes and mountains of that district seemed a portion of the great poet's existence.

Wordsworth's principal poems are, The Excursion, Hart-Leap Well, Yarrow Unvisited, Visited, and Revisited, and Laodamia. The poems most read are, Ode on Immortality, She was a Phantom of Delight, We are Seren, Ruth, Lucy, etc. Those most ridiculed were, Peter Bell, The Idiot Boy, Alice Fell, The Blind Highland Boy, etc.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834) was two years younger than Wordsworth. With kindred sympathies in literary tastes, they were wholly different types of men. Coleridge possessed a rare genius, but lacked "the reason firm, the temperate will." Incompleteness marked all his works, and his works were typical of his life. We probably obtain the truest

*To his sister Dora, his constant companion, Wordsworth attributes some of the best influences of his life.

estimate of his life and genius from his contemporaries rather than from later critics, who see only the fragmentary works of a great genius, and deplore the overthrow of a noble mind.*

Like Dr. Johnson, Coleridge was great in his own day; because, like Dr. Johnson, the charm of his conversation won all who heard him. With Coleridge there was the added attraction of melodious utterance, genial temper, and the mingling of poetic and philosophical argument. To hear him talk was in itself an education. It has often been regretted that Coleridge did not reserve his best thoughts for posterity, instead of lavishing them in the evanescent breath of conversation. But so long as he has given to us the perfected poems of The Ancient Mariner, Genevieve, The Hymn to Mont Blanc, the translation of Schiller's Wallenstein, and the unfinished poem of Christabel, we will not covet the unrecorded eloquence which charmed his contemporaries.

Although the two poets harmonized in their general views of poetry, Coleridge saw the fallacy of Wordsworth's theory concerning the use of ordinary diction in poetry, and argued "that philosophers, not clowns, are the authors of the best parts of language." The Lyrical Ballads, to which allusion has been made,† were partly composed by Coleridge, and it should also be remembered that Wordsworth suggested and wrote some few portions of The Ancient Mariner.‡

In company with Wordsworth, Coleridge went to Germany. / The spirit of philosophic inquiry which he found here interested Coleridge quite as much as the poetry, and these, interfused with his poetic imaginings, produced those glowing conversations for which he was famed. Returning from Germany, Coleridge went to reside at Keswick, in Cumberland, near the home of Wordsworth.

Among the visionary schemes of Coleridge was that of the Pantisocracy, which he, with his friends SOUTHEY and Lov

He had become addicted to opium eating, which caused his ruin.

† See page 311.

Singularly enough, although in their literary partnership Coleridge was to furnish the supernatural and highly imaginative, and Wordsworth was to give poetic significance to the common things of life, it was Wordsworth who suggested the killing of the Albatross and the steering of the ship by the ghastly crew.