daisy, brooded over the pathos of the one and the beauty of the other, and then sang of them in his poems. He was much influenced by the contemporary wave of democracy then sweeping over the political and social world. Perhaps no man has ever desired more strongly the realization of many a poet's dream of the identification of the democracy and the aristocracy, the coming of all people upon one level, and that level the highest. Neither leisure, nor dress, nor authority, nor title, nor wealth makes a man, in Burns's opinion, but good sense and native worth. A man's a man if endowed with sense and character, and to Burns the time is coming when

man to man, the warld o'er,

Shall brothers be for a' that.

Burns was born in 1759 and died in 1796; but into those few years were crowded many hard and sad experiences, and, at times, many pleasing ones both among the socially great and the lowly, for he was welcomed in cultured Edinburgh as well as in the plowman's cottage.

Few can read his passionately earnest songs against oppression and in praise of loyalty and humanity without being moved to recognition of the greatness of Burns. Passionate treatment of love is the chief interest of Burns, however, and to him an easy task, for his singing robes were ever on; and perhaps fullness of blood rather than of brain accounts for the buoyant force and spontaneity of nearly all that he penned. The Jolly Beggars, The Cotter's Saturday Night, Tam o' Shanter, The Banks o' Doon, Afton Water, Highland Mary, To Mary in Heaven, Bannockburn, Comin' through the Rye, My Heart's in the Highlands, and For A' That and A' That, and numbers of other poems by him are known wherever English-speaking people read. William Blake. The Songs of Innocence and Songs of Ex

perience, written by William Blake, were Elizabethan in their music, but in subject matter they were very like that of the nineteenth-century writers who were interested in the animal world and in the cry of the children. Charles Lamb, a "belated Elizabethan," wrote of Blake, "His pictures, one in particular, The Canterbury Pilgrims (far above Stothard's), have great merit, but are hard, dry, and yet with grace. He has written a catalogue of them, with a most spirited criticism on Chaucer, but mystical and full of vision. His poems have sold hitherto only in manuscript. I have never read them, but a friend at my desire procured the Sweep Song. There is one to a Tiger, which I heard recited, beginning,

which is glorious.

Tiger, Tiger, burning bright,

Thro' the deserts of the night,

But alas! I have not the book, for the man is flown, whither I know not, to Hades, or a Mad House. But I must look on him as one of the most extraordinary persons of the age." Blake's Songs of Innocence were published in 1789, and the Songs of Experience in 1794.

Lyrical ballads. The work of the Lake Poets, as Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth are often called, began during the seventeen-nineties. Their writings will be dealt with more fully in the chapter on the Early Nineteenth Century. But they were well under way in their labors before 1799. The incidents of the French Revolution affected them greatly. Southey, sick at heart at what "every day's report" brought of human wrong and human misery, and wild with resentment at "what man has made of man," published in 1794 his revolutionary poem entitled Wat Tyler.

The most noteworthy thing done by Coleridge and Wordsworth during this decade was the joint publication of a volume

under the title of Lyrical Ballads. This little book, in the first edition, contained Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, and Wordsworth's We are Seven and Tintern Abbey. In these poems, and others included in the same volume, four in all by Coleridge and nineteen in all by Wordsworth, are found the chief elements of romanticism; namely, love of man, love of animals, love of nature generally, interest in the supernatural, interest in the grotesque, intense curiosity about the beautiful and about the insoluble mystery and strangeness that colors not only those things farthest from ordinary experience, but also those met with in the most common situations of everyday life. "The imagination," Wordsworth said, " may be called forth as imperiously by incidents in the humblest departments of life," as those in the seas "out of place, out of time," of Coleridge's fancy. Wordsworth's theory of writing was that things taken from humble and rustic life were the best of all things to write of, and that they should be clothed "in a selection of language really used by men" at the same time that they should be so tinted by the imagination that "ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect."

Thomas Campbell. A curious illustration of how hard the eighteenth-century methods and ideals died in literature is in the work of Thomas Campbell, a Scotchman, who hoped to be called "the Pope of Glasgow.' In 1799 he published what amounted to an essay in verse, after the manner of Thomson and Gray and Pope, correct in its formal rhythm, but artificial in its feeling for nature, and showing his great annoyance at the revolutionary requirements for poetic language which Wordsworth was setting up. This poem was called Pleasures of Hope. We shall see later that, after a visit to Germany, Campbell returned and out-Wordsworthed Wordsworth in the highspiritedness of his romantic ballads.