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sheaves, set up in the field.

Night, 72.

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piercing; cognate with the German schnell = quick.

without (the original meaning).

25-48.

But

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snell

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hald = hoar-frost.

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TO A MOUNTAIN DAISY.

This is another poem written in those depressing days at Mossgiel and coming straight from Burns' heart.

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histie dry, barren.

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In shoals and bands, a morrice train,
Thou greet'st the traveller in the lane;
Pleased at his greeting thee again;
Yet nothing daunted

Nor grieved if thou be set at naught:
And oft alone in nooks remote
We meet thee, like a pleasant thought,

When such are wanted.

Wordsworth; To the Daisy, 17-24.

37-54. card; a synecdoche for 'compass.' Pope has the same figure with nearly the same application :

On life's vast ocean diversely we sail,
Reason the card, but Passion is the gale.

Essay on Man, ii. 107-108.

'This passage,' Warton tells us, 'is exactly copied from Fontenelle.' Thus do the poets live off each other! Or shall we rather say, with more conventional dignity: Thus do the poets hand down from age to age the intellectual treasures of their stock in trade?

When Burns was living, he asked of the world bread and they gave him a stone. When he was dead and wanted nothing, they builded him a tawdry monument; nay, worse, two tawdry monuments, one on the banks of Doon, near Alloway Kirk, the other at Dumfries. To injury they added insult by inscribing on the latter a long eulogium in doubtful Latin. Better had they have cut thereon

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Burns' expressed sympathy with the French Revolution came near costing him his place in the Excise; he was instructed by his superior officer (one

Corbet) that his 'business was to act, not to think. This would have been an exceedingly easy instruction for Corbet himself to follow, but Burns was not a Corbet. The poet's pent-up feeling found relief in Bannockburn, of which he writes that the 'recollection of that glorious struggle for freedom, associated with the glowing ideas of some struggles of the same nature, not quite so ancient, roused my rhyming mania.'1 In the same letter he writes of the air Hey tutti tatie: ' . . well I know that . . . it has often filled my eyes with tears. There is a tradition, which I have met with in many places of Scotland, that it was Robert Bruce's march at the battle of Bannockburn. This thought, in my solitary wanderings, warmed me to a pitch of enthusiasm on the theme of liberty and independence which I threw into a kind of Scottish ode, fitted the air, that one might suppose to be the gallant Royal Scot's address to his heroic followers on that eventful morning. So may God ever defend the cause of truth and liberty as he did that day! Amen.'

The battle of Bannockburn was fought on the 24th of June, 1314, and resulted in the total defeat of the English under Edward II.

FOR A' THAT AND A' THAT.

This triumphant lyric of Democracy was written on New Year's Day, 1795. Some two years earlier the Marseillaise had spread like wild-fire through France; but the Marseillaise is a local song:

Français, pour nous, ah! quel outrage!

For A' That is a song for all men of all nations; it breathes 'the prophetic soul of the wide world, dreaming on things to come.'

1-8. gowd gold. Compare:

9-40.

Worth makes the man and want of it the fellow,
The rest is all but leather or prunella.

Pope, Essay on Man, iv. 203-204.

birkie = con

hodden-grey = coarse woollen cloth.

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A prince can make a belted

knight. Compare The Deserted Village, 53-54, and The Cotter's Saturday Night, 165.

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fa' pretend to.

gree

1 Letter to G. Thomson, Sept., 1793.

prize, honor.

THE REVIVAL OF ROMANTICISM.

THE great writers of the eighteenth century, with Pope at their head, had a deep distrust for all forms of politics and literature characterized by Visionariness, Enthusiasm, Mysticism, and Fantasticism. With a shudder at the remembrance of a Rump Parliament and a Cowley, they turned to Reality and moralized their song. Who shall blame them?- But given the human mind, constituted as it is, the reaction against their habit of thought was sure to come. However excellent the quality of the bread, men will not live on bread alone. The craving after the Supernatural, the longing to escape from the bonds of Sense, the desire to identify the life of Man with the life of Nature, the fond looking-back to the mythical ideals of the Past, — all this is in the heart of man and must, from time to time, find expression. From such subjects the classical poets of the eighteenth century resolutely averted their faces; hence, in due time, there arose to treat these subjects, a new school of poets: their morningstar glimmered in Collins, and their sun rose in full splendor in Coleridge. Byron, Keats, Shelley, Scott, and Wordsworth, dissimilar as they appear at first sight, will all be found, on closer study, to belong to this, the Romantic School.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

BORN in Devonshire in 1772. He speaks of himself as an imagina child who, at the age of six, had read Belisarius, Robinson Crusoe and Philip Quarll. At nine he entered Christ's Hospital School,1 where Charles Lamb was already a pupil. Debts, disappointed love and Pantisocratic dreams interfered sadly with his studies at Cambridge (1791-94), which he left without taking his degree. One Cottle, a publisher, having offered to buy at a guinea and a half a hundred (eight cents a line) all the verses Coleridge could write, the young bard married on this brilliant prospect. The dreary struggle for bread and butter that followed brought on nervous prostration, and this that opium habit which DeQuincey says killed Coleridge as a poet. Kubla Khan and Christabel: Part the First, were written in 1797. His growing intimacy with the Wordsworths led him to publish The Ancient Mariner in Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads (1798). The same year a small annuity bestowed by some generous friends enabled him to visit Germany. From Göttingen he writes: 'I shall have bought thirty pounds' worth of books, chiefly metaphysics, and with a view to the one work to which I hope to dedicate in silence the prime of my life.'

With Coleridge the metaphysician and the theologian we are not greatly concerned here. The thirty-six years of life that remained to him after 1798 were devoted chiefly to those subjects — with what success we may be content to let the metaphysicians decide. Occasionally Coleridge would make an excursion into the fields of Belles-Lettres and sow there such precious seeds as are to be found scattered through the Biographia Literaria and the Lectures on Shakespeare. At rarer intervals he would rouse his dormant poetic faculty, as when he wrote Christabel: Part the Second, The Ballad of the Dark Ladié (both of these unfinished and unfinishable), and the magnificent Hymn Before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni. These fragments, thrown off during nearly four decades of inglorious dependence upon rich men's bounties; innumerable projects for a magnum opus that never came to anything; the worship of a little philosophical coterie whose feeble influence is rapidly waning; - such are the literary results of the manhood and old age of one whose youthful performance declares him to have been one of the most splendidly endowed of English poets.

LIFE AND TIMES.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Prefixed to the latest and best edition of Coleridge's Poems is a careful and elaborate biography by J. Dykes Campbell. (Macmillan.)

1 See Thackeray's Newcomes, Cap. LXXV.

This does not attempt any literary estimate in connection with the life; such a treatment will be found in Traill's Coleridge (E. M. L.). Hall Caine's Life of Coleridge (Gt. Wr.) contains a good Bibliography. The poet's grandson, E. H. Coleridge, has in preparation another and more elaborate biography: it is difficult to imagine what useful or pleasant result will be attained by exhibiting to the world in more detail the characteristics of the poetical Skimpole who dwelt at Highgate. Contemporary portraits will be found in Lamb's (fanciful) Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago; in DeQuincey's Literary and Lake Reminiscences and in his Coleridge and Opium Eating; in Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Poets and in his Literary Remains (Essay XIX.); in Carlyle's Sterling, Part p. viii.

TICISM.- James Wilson (Christopher North): Essay on Coleridge's Poetical Works. If any one lack enthusiastic admiration for Coleridge, he should read this Essay, which places the Hymn before Sunrise ahead of any strain in Milton or Wordsworth!

Whipple: Essays and Reviews; English Poets of the Nineteenth Century; also, Coleridge as a Philosophical Critic. Two little studies as admirable for their sanity as for their brevity.

Swinburne: Essays and Studies; Coleridge. The most poetically-appreciative estimate we have; ranks Coleridge as the greatest of lyric poets 'for height and perfection of imaginative quality.'

Courthope: The Liberal Movement in English Literature; (Poetry, Painting and Music): Coleridge and Keats. Contends that whatever unity there may be in Coleridge's poems is not logical unity, but musical unity.

Lowell: Address on Unveiling the Bust of Coleridge at Westminster Abbey. A charming little speech that judiciously avoided taxing the thinking-power of the audience.

(Those who are courageous enough to follow Coleridge into what he himself called the 'holy jungle of transcendental metaphysics' will find an exposition and critique (1) of his social and political philosophy in 7. S. Mill's Dissertations and Discussions, Vol. ii.; (2) of his moral, religious and metaphysical systems in Shairp's Studies in Poetry and Philosophy. The latter is the Fine Old Tory view, and declares Coleridge to have been 'the greatest thinker whom Britain has during the century produced.' (!) Mr. G. E. Woodberry hardly shares this conviction, for he asserts (N. Y. Nation, 39, 549) that it is plain not only that Coleridge's 'mind ranged through a vast circuit of knowledge habitually, but also that it touched the facts only at single points and superficially.' Most of us, I think, will also agree with Mr. Woodberry when he adds: [Coleridge's] 'theology and metaphysics, in pursuit of which he wasted his powers, are already seen to be transient.' An artistic description of Coleridge as a critic is given by Professor H. A. Beers in the Introduction to his Prose Extracts from Coleridge.)

THE ANCIENT MARINER.

The origin of this poem is thus related in Wordsworth's Memoirs: In the autumn of 1797, he [Coleridge], my sister and myself started from Alfoxden pretty late in the afternoon, with a view to visit Linton and the Valley of Stones

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