Page:Poetry's plea for animals; an anthology (IA poetryspleaforan00clar).pdf/16

viii In gentler strain Burns quickens sympathy for helpless creatures with here a line and there a line, and now and then an entire poem; while Cowper consecrates much of his verse to a cause that received no legal recognition in his country till twenty-five years after his death.

The poetry of the gentle William Blake is suffused with loving pity for the little inhabitants of earth and air. Byron in casual flashes, but especially in his vituperative fling at mankind in the epitaph to his dog Boatswain, testifies to his affectionate sympathy for animals. Coleridge's masterpiece has for its theme: "He prayeth well who loveth well Both man and bird and beast." But the humane trend in the poetry of the first half of the nineteenth century finds fullest expression in Wordsworth's nature poems. The Brownings, Tennyson, Swinburne, Christina Rossetti, William Morris, and Leigh Hunt, and lesser Victorian poets, have occasional verse pointedly humane. In America, Longfellow, Holmes, Emerson, and several humbler poets were awakening sentiment chiefly through legend. The Birds of Killingworth, The Emperor's Bird's Nest, The Bell of Atri, Walter von der Vogelweid are a few of Longfellow's tales of justice. He states with characteristic sincerity: "Among the noblest of the land,
 * Though he may count himself the least,

That man I honor and revere,
 * Who, without favor, without fear,

In the great city dares to stand Holmes pitied the caged lion. Emerson found a lesson in the brave gymnastics of the cheery little chickadee,
 * The Friend of every friendless Beast."