no one had done before, and with the freshness and frankness of an evident delight. To poets who never ventured beyond a park or garden, and thought that Fleet Street provided every interest that human imagination could desire, the wild work of Macpherson was a revelation. He had managed to utter a need which had long been silenced in the hearts of men, the need of communion with nature. Not the distorted nature of trim gardens and well-ordered parks, but nature in her solitude, her sternness, her terror; the majesty of her scarred and tempest-riven rocks, the pomp and splendour of her skies and seas, the "mountain glory" and the "mountain gloom," the nature that Turner was to paint, the skies that Shelley was to picture, the sea whose boundless and eternal freedom Byron was to sing, the mountains whose ever-shifting pageant, ranging from the vision of magic colouring and airy distance to the sublimity of tempest and trailing storm-cloud, Ruskin was to describe with unapproachable fidelity and eloquence. Strange as it may seem to those who disinter from their obscure grave the tiresome tirades of James Macpherson to-day, and read them with impatience and disdain, yet the first note of all the wealth of work represented in such names as Turner, Shelley, Byron, and Ruskin is struck in his forgotten "Ossian." There was yet another writer in whom the new spirit was to find a still higher expression; that writer was William Cowper. The pathetic story of Cowper's life is well known. What a strange contradiction the man seems! The writer of " John Gilpin" and the "Olney Hymns," the despairing suicide and the brilliant humorist; can the force of contrast go farther? How incomprehensible it seems that the man who wrote "God moves in a mysterious way" should also write about himself thus : Hatred and vengeance-my eternal portion, Man disavows and Deity disowns me; How tragic is the reflection that the sweet singer who has done so much to inspire cheerfulness and trust in others should write of himself, "I feel a wish that I had never been, a wonder that I am, and an ardent but hopeless desire not to be!" The secret of this immense despair was in the fact that Cowper's delicate spirit was crushed beneath the weight of intolerable theological problems-the riddle of "this unintelligible world." It was Cowper who introduced the theological element into English poetry, and it has worked ill both for poetry and theology. But Cowper also introduced another element-the utmost simplicity and unaffected naturalness of style, and a true and beautiful love of nature. Far away from the vexed and crowded life of cities he lived in the heart of nature, and his own heart was ever open to her inspiration. When he described the flowers, the clouds, the weather, he did so with an inimitable fidelity. He put down just what he saw with the utmost simplicity, one might say almost with a scientific simplicity. In this Cowper was intensely modern. Nothing is better worth study, or would prove more interesting, than to trace how the scientific spirit of description has grown in English poetry. The earlier eighteenthcentury poets describe what they never saw, and what they had never taken the trouble to identify. Hence, because they have never really studied nature for themselves, they perforce fall back upon the stock phrases of artificial description. In this they stand aloof both from the earliest English poets and the latest. Chaucer tells us just what he sees-he makes us feel that he has seen it, and we see it too. Tennyson, in like manner, has brought the most vigilant observation to bear on all natural phenomena which he has described. The botanist cannot improve on his description of a flower, or the naturalist on his picture of the way in which a bird flies or a wave breaks. We have now become used to this species of scientific accuracy in poetic description, and we resent the loose. and inaccurate generalities of which many poets are still guilty. But the true author of this change was Cowper. He was the forerunner of Wordsworth. He wrote of nature, not because it was part of the stock business of a poet to do so, but because he loved her. He, too, had felt the "impulse of a vernal wood," and knew that nature, when reverently studied, has secrets to teach which neither sage nor scholar can unfold. Few read Cowper to-day. His "Task" has verified its title, and men weary of it midway. Cowper is known rather by his hymns and a few brief lyrics than by his more serious and ambitious poems. But it was nevertheless William Cowper who was the herald of the modern school of poets, and who sang the glories of the day when the dawn had scarcely broken. Not less marked was the change effected in poetry. in relation to its human interests. Cowper loved man as well as nature. In this he was the precursor of a great line of great poets. In place of violent satire on the follies of the great, Cowper gave us sympathetic descriptions of the labour and sorrows of the poor. In this he was followed by George Crabbe, whose descriptions are equally sympathetic, but more realistic. Crabbe has even fewer readers than Cowper to-day, and is only known to many readers as the "John Richard William Alexander Dyer" of Horace Smith's "Rejected Addresses;" yet he was a true poet, and deserves a better fate. John Murray said truly that Crabbe said uncommon things in a common way, and perhaps it is the homeliness of his verse which has done much to obscure its great qualities. Byron called him "Nature's sternest painter and the best;" Wordsworth predicted for him immortality; Scott read him. with renewed and fresh delight in old age; Tennyson says, "Crabbe has a world of his own; " while Newman, in one of his "Addresses to the Catholics of Dublin," tells us that he had read one of his poems " on its first publication with extreme delight," and again, twenty years after, with even more emotion, and yet again, twenty years after that, with undiminished interest, and adds that "whether for conception or execution" it is one of the most touching poems in the language.* It seems strange that a poet whose claims are so unanimously endorsed by the most competent judges should have fallen into such complete oblivion, and perhaps the real reason lies in the deficiencies of metrical art which appear in Crabbe's poetry, and the carelessness of his diction as compared with the metrical refinement of later verse. Crabbe is a poet who wears worsted; but, homely as he is, his writings have some *Vide Literary Remains of Edward Fitzgerald, vol. iii., P. 490. of the qualities of the greatest poetry. It is in realism. that his force lies. He has little humour; he is in deadly earnest. He goes to the gaol, the workhouse, the hospital, the half-ruined cottage, for his themes. He pictures the shameful squalor, the hard life, the unpitied ignorance, and the humble heroisms of the poor. He tells his tale of shame and ruin with a grave simplicity and directness of statement which is wholly tragic. He is the spokesman of the ignorant and neglected He utters their appeal against the social system of their time, and in this Crabbe was the avant-coureur of the great Revolution. With the French Revolution an entirely new spirit was breathed into European literature. The social problems of the times were forced upon the minds of all men of letters, and especially of the poets. This is again one of the most distinctive features of modern English literature. The social problem is to-day the great problem of Europe. It engages the perpetual thought of statesmen, and it presses heavily upon the hearts of all imaginative writers. A large section of the poetry of our day is full of bitter invective on the tragedies endured by the poor, and an increasing section of our fiction is animated by the same spirit. The beginning of this movement is in Crabbe and Cowper. With the dawn of the Revolution, there rose up poets who uttered the same cry with infinitely greater bitterness, and expressed the same spirit with an agonised intensity, a passionate daring and poignancy, wholly transcending the works of Crabbe and Cowper. But, as we have seen, these poets lived in the interval Between two worlds-one dead, |