to his own condition, he wrote The Castaway, drawing the melancholy analogy :

No voice divine the storm allayed,
No light propitious shone,

When, snatched from all effectual aid,

We perished, each alone:

But I, beneath a rougher sea,

And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.

Cowper died in 1800, uncheered by any gleam of hope.

His greatest work was The Task. This broke the spell of classicism and opened up vistas of the era that was to follow. The Task was utterly dissimilar to the poems which had preceded it. It had been the fashion to write poems on abstract subjects-Truth, The Progress of Error, Retirement, and the like. The subject must be regularly and logically developed, and above all the poem must be composed in rhyming couplets of a certain type. Cowper threw these restrictions to the winds. His Task is lawless, irregular; it is "entirely independent of natural transition "-and is written in blank verse. He begins with some lines that "sing the Sofa," because his lady had laid this task upon him, but almost immediately he steps out of doors and into the full beauty of the poem.

At once we see

the difference between this manner and the stilted

fashion then in vogue.

The scenery is real; a ruffling wind" blows in our faces, and all the gracious open-air noises come to our ears.

Mighty winds

That sweep the skirt of some far spreading wood
Of ancient growth, make music not unlike
The dash of ocean on his winding shore,
Unnumbered branches waving in the blast,
And all their leaves fast fluttering all at once.

For over a century there had been nothing of the kind in English literature. It is like passing out of a trim garden, full of exotic plants and surrounded by clipped hedges, into the windy range of a farreaching landscape. All his pictures are drawn with the clearest touch. A familiar passage will serve as an example:

Forth goes the woodman, leaving unconcerned
The cheerful haunts of man, to wield the axe
And drive the wedge, in yonder forest drear,
From morn to eve his solitary task.
Shaggy and lean and shrewd, with pointed ears,
With tail cropped short, half lurcher and half cur,
His dog attends him. Close behind his heel
Now creeps he slow, and now with many a frisk,
Wide scamp'ring, snatches up the drifted snow
With iv'ry teeth, or ploughs it with his snout;
Then shakes his powdered coat, and barks for joy.
Heedless of all his pranks, the sturdy churl
Moves right towards the mark; nor stops for aught,
But now and then, with pressure of his thumb,
To adjust the fragrant charge of a short tube,
That fumes beneath his nose; the trailing cloud
Streams far behind him, scenting all the air.

Nothing could be more of a departure from the conventional methods of the day. Cowper's boldness is amazing. But the innovation was necessary and it became popular. He showed the unconsidered

beauty of common things, so that men gasped as they read and then read again. The naturalness of such passages as the above, their delightful familiarity, their skilful art, made The Task a worthy precursor of the greater works that were to follow.

Crabbe and Blake came next in order of time. George Crabbe (1754–1832) was the son of a "salt master"—a sort of revenue officer-on the Suffolk coast. His youth was not a kindly one in its rough surroundings. He set up as a doctor in his native village at something over twenty and with a plenti ful lack of medical training. But his real tastes were poetic, and he soon made his way to London. There, after various hardships, he was taken up by the mighty Edmund Burke, whose sympathies were wider than political. The great man was justified in his generous aid. In 1783 Crabbe published The Village, a poem describing his native place. It is valuable, because of its severe truth. The author's early years had given him an insight into country life:

By such examples taught I paint the Cot,

As Truth will paint it and as Bards will not,

thus casting a deadly shaft at the absurd Chloes and Corydons who had been in vogue so long. He speaks of things as they are. Ye Poor, he

says,

Can poets soothe you, when you pine for bread,
By winding myrtles round your ruined shed?

Crabbe's next work was issued in 1785. Then he

kept silence for twenty-two years. In 1807 he added to his poetry The Parish Register, and in 1810 The Borough. The Tales of the Hall followed nine years later, being extremely successful. During the period of his seclusion the literary world had suffered revolution. Crabbe belonged more to the past era than did Cowper or Burns or Blake, but his harsh arraignment of the fashionable pastoral poetry and the rugged strength of his verse give him a place among the important writers of the time. Byron characterized him as "Nature's

sternest painter, yet the best."

The poetical career of William Blake (1757-1827) was long, strange, and intermittent. He was a painter of strange pictures as well as a writer of strange poems. During his life he received little enough of honor or wealth; but his unique worth has been recognized since. In Blake's character the practical faculties were under control of the imaginative; in other words, he was a "mystic," and some have even questioned his sanity. He was born in "the desert of London town," and there attempted to realize some impossible ideals. One of these was the making of his own books by a process in which each page was designed-letter-press and border. These little volumes are now of the utmost value to the collector. "Every page was a picture with its rhyme set in the middle." Some friends tried to get him to produce his books in the ordinary manner; but after some months of what

he considered restraint, he yielded to the admonitions of certain "angels" who visited him at night, and "again emerged into the light of day. Nothing can withstand," he continues, "the fury of my course among the stars of God and in the abysses of the accuser." For Blake aimed at being a prophet as well as a poet-in fact, more so. His prophetical inspiration was received in much the same manner as that of the spiritualists at present, and his claims were very similar. He wrote a sublime allegory" called Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion. Of this, he said, he was merely the secretary; "the authors are in eternity. I consider it the grandest poem this world contains." Unfortunately the world's opinion was radically different, and its opinion was entirely correct. The mystic writings which form so large a part of Blake's output were valueless.

But when we regard him as a poet the case is very different. In 1789 and 1794 he published by the process mentioned two volumes called respectively Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. By virtue of these, some estimates place him as "the greatest and most delectable poet of the eighteenth century proper in England," and no possible judgment can refuse him a high position. His songs are singularly beautiful, combining music with simplicity in a degree quite exceptional. Little poems like the famous Tiger will always live. Even better is the Mad Song.