The oak-crowned sisters, and their chaste-eyed queen,

Satyrs and sylvan boys were seen
Peeping from forth their alleys green;
Brown Exercise rejoiced to hear,

And Sport leaped up, and seized his beechen spear.

Last came Joy's ecstatic trial:

He, with viny crown advancing,
First to the lively pipe his hand addrest;
But soon he saw the brisk, awakening viol,
Whose sweet entrancing voice he loved the best.
They would have thought, who heard the strain,
They saw, in Tempe's vale, her native maids,
Amidst the festal-sounding shades,

To some unwearied minstrel dancing:
While, as his flying fingers kissed the strings,
Love framed with Mirth a gay fantastic round,
Loose were her tresses seen, her zone unbound:
And he, amidst his frolic play,

As if he would the charming air repay,
Shook thousand odours from his dewy wings.

O Music! sphere-descended maid,
Friend of Pleasure, Wisdom's aid,
Why, Goddess, why, to us denied,
Lay'st thou thy ancient lyre aside?
As in that loved Athenian bower,
You learned an all-commanding power;
Thy mimic soul, O nymph endeared,
Can well recall what then it heard.
Where is thy native simple heart,
Devote to virtue, fancy, art?
Arise, as in that elder time,
Warm, energetic, chaste, sublime!
Thy wonders in that godlike age
Fill thy recording sister's page;
'Tis said, and I believe the tale,
Thy humblest reed could more prevail,
Had more of strength, diviner rage,
Than all which charms this laggard age;
E'en all at once together found,
Cecilia's mingled world of sound.
O bid our vain endeavours cease,
Revive the just designs of Greece;
Return in all thy simple state;
Confirm the tales her sons relate!

Dirge in Cymbeline, sung by Guiderius and Arviragus.

To fair Fidele's grassy tomb

Soft maids and village hinds shall bring
Each opening sweet, of earliest bloom,
And rifle all the breathing spring.

No wailing ghost shall dare appear
To vex with shrieks this quiet grove,
But shepherd lads assemble here,

And melting virgins own their love.
No withered witch shall here be seen,
No goblins lead their nightly crew;
The female fays shall haunt the green,
And dress thy grave with pearly dew;

The red-breast oft, at evening hours,
Shall kindly lend his little aid,
With hoary moss, and gathered flowers,
To deck the ground where thou art hid.

When howling winds, and beating rain,
In tempests shake the sylvan cell,
Or midst the chase, on every plain,
The tender thought on thee shall dwell.

Each lonely scene shall thee restore,
For thee the tear be duly shed;
Beloved till life can charm no more;
And mourned till Pity's self be dead.

Ode on the Death of Mr Thomson. [The scene is on the Thames, near Richmond.]

In yonder grave a Druid lies,

Where slowly winds the stealing wave;
The year's best sweets shall duteous rise
To deck its poet's sylvan grave.

In yon deep bed of whispering reeds
His airy harp shall now be laid,
That he, whose heart in sorrow bleeds,

May love through life the soothing shade.

The maids and youths shall linger here,
And while its sounds at distance swell
Shall sadly seem in Pity's ear

To hear the woodland pilgrim's knell.

Remembrance oft shall haunt the shore, When Thames in summer wreaths is drest; And oft suspend the dashing oar,

To bid his gentle spirit rest.

And oft, as Ease and Health retire
To breezy lawn, or forest deep,

The friend shall view yon whitening spire,

And 'mid the varied landscape weep.

But thou, who own'st that earthy bed,
Ah what will every dirge avail;
Or tears, which love and pity shed,

That mourn beneath the gliding sail?

Yet lives there one whose heedless eye

Shall scorn thy pale shrine glimmering near? With him, sweet bard, may fancy die, And joy desert the blooming year.

But thou, lorn stream, whose sullen tide

No sedge-crowned sisters now attend, Now waft me from the green hill's side,

Whose cold turf hides the buried friend.

And see, the fairy valleys fade,

Dun night has veiled the solemn view. Yet once again, dear parted shade,

Meek nature's child, again adieu !

The genial meads, assigned to bless

Thy life, shall mourn thy early doom;
Their hinds and shepherd-girls shall dress,
With simple hands, thy rural tomb.

Long, long thy stone and pointed clay
Shall melt the musing Briton's eyes :
'O vales, and wild-woods,' shall he say,
'In yonder grave your Druid lies!

In the Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands, according to Mr Lowell, 'the whole Romantic School is foreshadowed;' while Mr

Gosse has said that it contains passages which are 'unrivalled for rich melancholy fullness' between Milton and Keats. But it deals only very lightly, and in about half of its thirteen stanzas, with specific superstitions; about half are compliment to Home and praise of Scotland generally. One stanza puts the will-o'-the-wisp at the service of the kelpie; two stanzas are devoted to the melancholy fate of the swain who becomes the victim, and the distress of his bereaved widow and children. Then follow these

stanzas:

Unbounded is thy range; with varied skill

Thy muse may, like those feathery tribes which spring From their rude rocks, extend her skirting wing Round the moist marge of each cold Hebrid isle, To that hoar pile, which still its ruin shows:

In whose small vaults a pigmy-folk is found,

Whose bones the delver with his spade upthrows, And culls them, wondering, from the hallowed ground! Or thither, where, beneath the showery west,

The mighty kings of three fair realms are laid;
Once foes, perhaps, together now they rest,
No slaves revere them, and no wars invade :
Yet frequent now, at midnight solemn hour,

The rifted mounds their yawning cells unfold,
And forth the monarchs stalk with sovereign power,
In pageant robes, and wreathed with sheeny gold,
And on their twilight tombs aërial council hold.

But, oh, o'er all, forget not Kilda's race,

On whose bleak rocks, which brave the wasting tides, Fair nature's daughter, virtue, yet abides. Go! just, as they, their blameless manners trace! Then to my ear transmit some gentle song, Of those whose lives are yet sincere and plain, Their bounded walks the rugged cliffs along, And all their prospect but the wintry main. With sparing temperance, at the needful time, They drain the scented spring; or, hunger-prest, Along the Atlantic rock, undreading climb, And of its eggs despoil the solan's nest.

Thus, blest in primal innocence, they live Sufficed, and happy with that frugal fare

Which tasteful toil and hourly danger give. Hard is their shallow soil, and bleak and bare;

Nor ever vernal bee was heard to murmur there! See the memoir of Collins by Dyce in his edition of the Works (1827); and that prefixed by W. Moy Thomas to the Aldine edition (1858; new ed. 1892).

Mark Akenside (1721-70), author of The Pleasures of Imagination, was the son of a respectable butcher at Newcastle-upon-Tyne; and in boyhood the fall of one of his father's cleavers on his foot rendered him lame for life. At the Newcastle schools he showed precocity and promise, and was already writing verse. The Society of Dissenters advanced a sum to educate him for the ministry, but after a session of theology at Edinburgh he changed his views, and, returning the money, entered himself as a student of medicine. His (far from brilliant) Hymn to Science was apparently written about this time. He took his degree of M.D. at Leyden in 1744, and in the same year he had

issued anonymously his Pleasures of Imagination. The price demanded for the copyright was £120; and Pope advised Dodsley not to make a niggardly offer,' for this is no every day writer.' The success of the work justified poet, critic, and publisherthough Gray dissented and Warburton condemned. The same year, after having in a poetical epistle attacked Pulteney under the name of Curio, Akenside commenced physician at Northampton, but did not succeed. He then (1746) engaged to contribute to Dodsley's Museum, began to practise in London as a physician, and published several medical treatises. At Edinburgh and at Leyden he had formed an intimacy with a young Englishman of fortune, Jeremiah Dyson, which ripened into an enthusiastic friendship; and Mr Dyson-afterwards Clerk of the House of Commons and a Lord of the Treasury--was free-handed enough to allow his poet-friend £300 a year. After writing a few Odes and attempting a reconstruction of his great poem, Akenside made no further efforts in literature, save a few occasional poems and some medical works. In 1757 appeared the expanded and altered form of the First Book of what was now called, by way of distinction, The Pleasures of the Imagination; of the Second Book in 1765; and a fragment of an intended Fourth Book was published after his death. He became distinguished as a physician; his society was courted for his taste, knowledge, and eloquence; but his solemn sententiousness of manner, his romantic ideas of liberty, and his unbounded admiration of the ancients exposed him occasionally to ridicule. The physician in Peregrine Pickle, who gives a feast in the manner of the ancients, was universally understood to be a caricature of Akenside. He irritated the Whigs by becoming a Tory after he was appointed queen's physician; and as doctor to one of the London hospitals obtained an unpleasant repute for carelessness towards poor patients. In his later days Akenside reverted with delight to his native landscape on the banks of the Tyne. In his fragment of a Fourth Book of his Imagination, written in the last year of his life, there is one striking passage:

O ye dales

Of Tyne, and ye most ancient woodlands; where
Oft, as the giant flood obliquely strides,
And his banks open and his lawns extend,
Stops short the pleased traveller to view,
Presiding o'er the scene, some rustic tower
Founded by Norman or by Saxon hands:
O ye Northumbrian shades, which overlook
The rocky pavement and the mossy falls
Of solitary Wensbeck's limpid stream;
How gladly I recall your well-known seats
Beloved of old, and that delightful time
When all alone, for many a summer's day,
I wandered through your calm recesses, led
In silence by some powerful hand unseen.
Nor will I e'er forget you; nor shall e'er
The graver tasks of manhood, or the advice
Of vulgar wisdom, move me to disclaim

Those studies which possessed me in the dawn
Of life, and fixed the colour of my mind
For every future year: whence even now
From sleep I rescue the clear hours of morn,
And, while the world around lies overwhelmed
In idle darkness, am alive to thoughts

Of honourable fame, of truth divine
Or moral, and of minds to virtue won

By the sweet magic of harmonious verse.

The Pleasures of Imagination is a didactic poem in three books of blank verse. Gray censured the mixture in it of philosophy-from Hutcheson and Shaftesbury; Plato, Lucretius, and even the papers by Addison in the Spectator were also laid under contribution by the imaginer. The pleasures his poem professes to treat 'proceed,' he says, 'either from natural objects, as from a flourishing grove, a clear and murmuring fountain, a calm sea by moonlight, or from works of art, such as a noble edifice, a musical tune, a statue, a picture, a poem.' But in reality Akenside dealt chiefly with abstract subjects, and rarely succeeded in grafting upon them human or poetic interest. The work is an uninspired but dignified and graceful melange of reflection and illustration, reason and imagination, deism, optimism, and commonplace eighteenth-century philosophising. There is too much exposition, too much rhetoric, and, on the other hand, sometimes too much ornament. The constant admiration of virtue and lofty ideals, though probably sincere, is not stimulating. And many long passages are less alluring than sections of an abridged handbook of psychology and æsthetics:

Suffice it to have said

Where'er the power of ridicule displays
Her quaint-eyed visage, some incongruous form,
Some stubborn dissonance of things combined,
Strikes on the quick observer : whether Pomp
Or Praise or Beauty mix their partial claim
Where sordid fashions, where ignoble deeds,
Where foul Deformity are wont to dwell.

But his highest flights have variety and energy. For him, familiarity with physical science enhanced the charms of nature. Unlike Campbell, who repudiated these 'cold material laws,' he viewed the rainbow with new pleasure after he had studied the Newtonian theory of light and colours :

Nor ever yet

The melting rainbow's vernal tinctured hues
To me have shown so pleasing, as when first
The hand of Science pointed out the path

In which the sunbeams gleaming from the west
Fall on the watery cloud, whose darksome veil
Involves the orient.

The diffuse and florid descriptions of the Imagination are the natural outcome of Akenside's youthful exuberance. He was afterwards conscious of the defects of his poem, and saw that there was too much leaf for the fruit; but in cutting off these luxuriances he sacrificed some of the finest

And through the mists of passion and of sense,
And through the tossing tide of chance and pain,
To hold his course unfaltering, while the voice
Of Truth and Virtue, up the steep ascent
Of Nature, calls him to his high reward,
The applauding smile of Heaven? Else wherefore burns
In mortal bosoms this unquenched hope,
That breathes from day to day sublimer things,
And mocks possession? wherefore darts the mind
With such resistless ardour to embrace
Majestic forms; impatient to be free,
Spurning the gross control of wilful might;
Proud of the strong contention of her toils;
Proud to be daring? who but rather turns

To Heaven's broad fire his unconstrained view,
Than to the glimmering of a waxen flame?
Who that, from Alpine heights, his labouring eye
Shoots round the wide horizon, to survey
Nilus or Ganges rolling his bright wave
Through mountains, plains, through empires black with
And continents of sand, will turn his gaze
To mark the windings of a scanty rill

That murmurs at his feet? The high-born soul

[shade,

Disdains to rest her heaven-aspiring wing
Beneath its native quarry. Tired of earth
And this diurnal scene, she springs aloft
Through fields of air; pursues the flying storm;
Rides on the vollied lightning through the heavens ;
Or, yoked with whirlwinds and the northern blast,
Sweeps the long tract of day. Then high she soars
The blue profound, and, hovering round the sun,
Beholds him pouring the redundant stream
Of light; beholds his unrelenting sway
Bend the reluctant planets to absolve

The fated rounds of Time. Thence far effused,
She darts her swiftness up the long career
Of devious comets; through its burning signs
Exulting measures the perennial wheel

Of Nature, and looks back on all the stars,
Whose blended light, as with a milky zone,
Invests the orient. Now, amazed she views
The empyreal waste, where happy spirits hold,
Beyond this concave heaven, their calm abode;
And fields of radiance, whose unfading light
Has travelled the profound six thousand years,
Nor yet arrived in sight of mortal things.
Even on the barriers of the world, untired
She meditates the eternal depth below;
Till half-recoiling, down the headlong steep
She plunges ; soon o'erwhelmed and swallowed up
In that immense of being. There her hopes
Rest at the fated goal. For from the birth
Of mortal man, the sovereign Maker said,
That not in humble nor in brief delight,
Not in the fading echoes of Renown,
Power's purple robes, nor Pleasure's flowery lap,
The soul should find enjoyment: but from these
Turning disdainful to an equal good,

Through all the ascent of things enlarge her view,
Till every bound at length should disappear,
And infinite perfection close the scene.

True Beauty.

Thus doth beauty dwell

There most conspicuous, even in outward shape
Where dawns the high expression of a mind
By steps conducting our enraptured search
To that eternal origin, whose power,

Through all the unbounded symmetry of things,
Like rays effulging from the parent sun,
This endless mixture of her charms diffused.
Mind, mind alone-bear witness, earth and heaven!-
The living fountains in itself contains

Of beauteous and sublime: here hand in hand
Sit paramount the Graces; here enthroned,
Celestial Venus, with divinest airs,
Invites the soul to never fading joy.
Look, then, abroad through nature, to the range
Of planets, suns, and adamantine spheres,
Wheeling unshaken through the void immense;
And speak, O man! does this capacious scene
With half that kindling majesty dilate
Thy strong conception, as when Brutus rose
Refulgent from the stroke of Cæsar's fate,
Amid the crowd of patriots; and his arm
Aloft extending, like eternal Jove,

When guilt brings down the thunder, called aloud
On Tully's name, and shook his crimson steel,
And bade the father of his country, hail!

For lo! the tyrant prostrate on the dust,
And Rome again is free! Is aught so fair
In all the dewy landscapes of the spring,
In the bright eye of Hesper, or the morn,
In Nature's fairest forms, is aught so fair
As virtuous friendship? as the candid blush
Of him who strives with fortune to be just?
The graceful tear that streams from others' woes,
Or the mild majesty of private life,
Where Peace, with ever-blooming olive, crowns
The gate; where Honour's liberal hands effuse
Unenvied treasures, and the snowy wings
Of Innocence and Love protect the scene?
(Book i. ll. 473-511.)

The Sense for Beauty.

This, nor gems nor stores of gold,
Nor purple state, nor culture can bestow;
But God alone, when first his active hand
Imprints the secret bias of the soul.
He, mighty Parent! wise and just in all,
Free as the vital breeze or light of heaven,
Reveals the charms of nature. Ask the swain
Who journeys homeward from a summer day's
Long labour, why, forgetful of his toils
And due repose, he loiters to behold

The sunshine gleaming, as through amber clouds,
O'er all the western sky; full soon, I ween,
His rude expression and untutored airs,
Beyond the power of language, will unfold
The form of beauty smiling at his heart. . . .
O blest of heaven! whom not the languid songs

Of luxury, the siren ! not the bribes

Of sordid wealth, nor all the gaudy spoils

Of pageant honour, can seduce to leave

Those ever-blooming sweets, which from the store
Of nature fair Imagination culls
To charm the enlivened soul. What though not all
Of mortal offspring can attain the heights
Of envied life; though only few possess
Patrician treasures or imperial state;
Yet Nature's care, to all her children just,
With richer treasures and an ampler state,
Endows at large whatever happy man
Will deign to use them.
His the city's pomp,

The rural honours his. Whate'er adorns
The princely dome, the column and the arch,
The breathing marble and the sculptured gold,
Beyond the proud possessor's narrow claim,
His tuneful breast enjoys. From him the spring
Distils her dews, and from the silken gem
Its lucid leaves unfolds: for him the hand
Of autumn tinges every fertile branch
With blooming gold and blushes like the morn.
Each passing hour sheds tribute from her wings;
And still new beauties meet his lonely walk,
And loves unfelt attract him. Not a breeze
Flies o'er the meadow, not a cloud imbibes
The setting sun's effulgence, not a strain
From all the tenants of the warbling shade
Ascends, but whence his bosom can partake
Fresh pleasure, unreproved. Nor thence partakes
Fresh pleasure only for the attentive mind,
By this harmonious action on her powers,
Becomes herself harmonious: wont so oft
In outward things to meditate the charm

:

Of sacred order, soon she seeks at home
To find a kindred order, to exert
Within herself this elegance of love,

This fair inspired delight: her tempered powers
Refine at length, and every passion wears
A chaster, milder, more attractive mien.
But if to ampler prospects, if to gaze
On nature's form, where, negligent of all
These lesser graces, she assumes the port
Of that eternal majesty that weighed
The world's foundations: if to these the mind
Exalts her daring eye; then mightier far

Will be the change, and nobler. Would the forms
Of servile custom cramp her generous power;
Would sordid policies, the barbarous growth
Of ignorance and rapine, bow her down
To tame pursuits, to indolence and fear?
Lo! she appeals to nature, to the winds

And rolling waves, the sun's unwearied course,
The elements and seasons: all declare
For what the eternal Maker has ordained
The powers of man: we feel within ourselves
His energy divine: he tells the heart,
He meant, he made us to behold and love
What he beholds and loves, the general orb
Of life and being; to be great like him,
Beneficent and active. Thus the men

Whom nature's works can charm, with God himself

Hold converse; grow familiar, day by day,
With his conceptions, act upon his plan,
And form to his, the relish of their souls.

(From the close of Book iii.)

Inscription for a Statue of Chaucer at
Woodstock.

Such was old Chaucer: such the placid mien
Of him who first with harmony informed
The language of our fathers. Here he dwelt
For many a cheerful day. These ancient walls
Have often heard him, while his legends blithe
He sang; of love, or knighthood, or the wiles
Of homely life; through each estate and age,
The fashions and the follies of the world
With cunning hand portraying. Though perchance
From Blenheim's towers, O stranger, thou art come
Glowing with Churchill's trophies; yet in vain
Dost thou applaud them, if thy breast be cold
To him, this other hero; who in times
Dark and untaught, began with charming verse
To tame the rudeness of his native land.

In the ode On leaving Holland, after a farewell to the 'sober seat' of the Muse at Leyden, to the fogs and grave pacific air' of Holland, where never mountain zephyr blew,' are these blither verses on England-a veritable return to nature in the concrete :

O my loved England, when with thee
Shall I sit down, to part no more?
Far from this pale, discolour'd sea,
That sleeps upon the reedy shore :
When shall I plough thy azure tide?
When on thy hills the flocks admire,

Like mountain snows; till down their side

I trace the village and the sacred spire,

While bowers and copses green the golden slope divide?

Ye nymphs who guard the pathless grove,
Ye blue-eyed sisters of the streams,
With whom I wont at morn to rove,
With whom at noon I talk'd in dreams;
Oh! take me to your haunts again,
The rocky spring, the greenwood glade ;
To guide my lonely footsteps deign,
To prompt my slumbers in the murmuring shade,
And soothe my vacant ear with many an airy strain.
And thou, my faithful harp, no longer mourn
Thy drooping master's inauspicious hand :
Now brighter skies and fresher gales return,
Now fairer maids thy melody demand.
Daughters of Albion, listen to my lyre!
O Phoebus, guardian of the Aonian choir,
Why sounds not mine harmonious as thy own,
When all the virgin deities above

With Venus and with Juno move

In concert round the Olympian father's throne?

The last verse unfortunately ends in bathos, and the answer of Phœbus is not even suggested. In another ode of a grateful convalescent this strikes a sympathetic chord :

How gladly, 'mid the dews of dawn, My weary lungs thy healing gale, The balmy west or the fresh north, inhale! How gladly, while my musing footsteps rove Round the cool orchard or the sunny lawn, Awaked I stop, and look to find What shrub perfumes the pleasant wind, Or what wild songster charms the Dryads of the grove!

The standard edition of Akenside's poetical works is that of Dyce (1834), with a Life prefixed; and there is another by Gilfillan (1857).

James Grainger (c. 1721–66) was probably born at Duns in Berwickshire, the son of a ruined Jacobite gentleman of Cumberland, who had had to take a berth in the excise. He studied medicine in Edinburgh, was an army surgeon (1745-48), made the tour of Europe, and after 1753 established himself in practice in London, but had to support himself largely by his pen. His poem of Solitude appeared in 1755, and was praised by Johnson, who considered the opening 'very noble.' Grainger wrote several other pieces, translated Tibullus, and was a critic in the Monthly Review. In 1759 he went to St Christopher in the West Indies, married a lady of fortune, and commenced practising as a physician. During his residence there he wrote his poem of the Sugar-cane (1764), which Shenstone thought capable of being rendered a good poem; and the arguments in which Southey said were 'ludicrously flat and formal.' Some passages are certainly ridiculous enough: 'he very poetically,' says Campbell, 'dignifies the poor negroes with the name of "swains ;"' while the line 'Now Muse, let's sing of rats' is a stock example of bathos. The mongoose had not yet been introduced into the West Indies, and so escaped the attentions of the Muse. Grainger died in St Christopher.