Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume VI.djvu/655

 ENGLAND (LANGUAGE AND LITEKATURE) 643 his being, the object of all his thought, obser- vation, reading, and experience. His aim was to renovate and refresh literature by bringing back poetry to truth and nature ; and he be- gan by composing lyrical ballads on the hum- blest subjects in language such as was "really used by men." Readers, long familiar with poems on learned themes or marked by polished sentimentalities, marvelled at his bald topics and colloquial platitudes. Yet his simplicity of feeling, truthfulness of delineation, compre- hensive spirit of humanity, and union of deep and subtle thought with sensibility, attracted by degrees a circle of enthusiastic admirers. The works of no other poet have been so ex- clusively the product of personal experience and retrospection. In striking contrast with Wordsworth was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose finest pieces, as " Christabel " and " The Ancient Mariner," were produced early in life, and are unsurpassed as strong, wild, and musi- cal sallies of pure imagination. The faultless rhythm of " Christabel," accentual instead of syllabic, was the acknowledged model of Scott's " Lay of the Last Minstrel." As a philosopher and critic he has inspired many followers to rise to higher standpoints than those of Locke, Paley, and Lord Kames. Kobert Southey when a schoolboy conceived the design of exhibiting in narrative poems the grandest forms of my- thology that ever obtained among men, and his "Thalaba" and "Curse of Kehama," founded on Arab and Hindoo legends, were the partial fulfilments of his plan, and display through a charming diction extensive learning and bril- liant imagination. The irregular, unrhyming verse of " Thalaba " he described as the " Ara- besque ornament of an Arabian tale." Southey was the most diligent of literary men, and in almost every department of prose and poetry has left monuments of his talent and erudition. A new tendency appeared in the poems of Sir Walter Scott, who combined the refinements of modern poetry with the spirit and materials of border minstrelsy and of the early metrical romances. He adopted in his principal po- ems the octosyllabic measure, which had been generally used by the old romancers. From 1805 to 1812, when the first cantos of " Childe Harold " appeared, Scott was the most popular British poet ; but he retreated to prose fiction as the genius of Byron began to display its strength. John Wilson, after producing a few poems marked especially by delicacy of senti- ment and vigor of description, applied himself chiefly to prose literature, criticism, and phi- losophy. The celebrity of Lord Byron was un- rivalled during his brief and impetuous career ; and perhaps no other man, dying at 37, ever wrote so much that was remarkable for intel- lectual power and intensity of passion. A new phase of the poetic mind appeared in John Keats, who gave great promise before his early death not only by his profusion of beautiful and grand conceptions, but also by the progress which he rapidly made in bringing his genius under the control of judgment. He had an in- stinct for choice words, which were in them- selves pictures or ideas, and he gave an exam- ple of refined sensuousness which has affected especially the forms of poetical expression. He was an early admirer of the poetry of Leigli Hunt, whose manner was derived from Italian models, and his influence appears strongly in the productions of Percy Bysshe Shelley, often most ethereal in imagery and language. Though the conceptions of Shelley were derived from imaginative philosophy and from speculations on elemental nature, rather than from human nature and real life, yet he was instinct with a love and intellectual sense of ideal beauty, which appear in single thoughts and images in his larger productions, and especially in some of his lesser poems, as " The Sensitive Plant," " The Skylark," "The Cloud," and the " Hymn to Intellectual Beauty." His "Prometheus Unbound " is worthy of JEschylus. Thomas Moore, a writer of beautiful songs and of light and elegant satires, displayed his highest pow- ers in the ^four oriental tales of which " Lalla Rookh " is composed, remarkable for their splendor of diction and copiousness of imagery. George Crabbe produced strong impressions by elaborately chronicling a series of minute cir- cumstances, and in brief passages, as in " Sir Eustace Grey," rises to a fine imaginative en- ergy. Samuel Eogers (1V63-1855), the con- temporary of a long series of poets, followed no one of the new tendencies, but attained high artistic excellence in the heroic couplet, with a nicety of taste and grace of sentiment worthy of Pope and Goldsmith. Thomas Campbell had a higher genius with an equal culture ; and in his lyrical pieces he gave to romantic conceptions a classical elaboration and finish which was hardly attempted by his contemporaries. His "Pleasures of Hope " will always rank as an English classic. Charles Lamb, a peculiar and happily wayward genius, wrote almost nothing that is not exquisite, and his few poems, like his essays, reveal an original wit and genial character, moulded by sympathetic study of the old French writers. His reputation rests chief- ly on his "Essays of Elia," the finest of their kind in literature. The poems of Thomas Hood, whether serious or comic, are pregnant with matter for thought. Though a singularly clever rhyming punster and jester, his main strength appears in simple pathetic lyrics like "The Song of the Shirt" and "The Bridge of Sighs;" and even through many of his comic pieces, as " The Last Man," "Miss Kilmansegg with her Golden Leg," and others, runs a deep vein of earnest pathos and tragic power. The Scotch poet James Hogg (the Ettrick Shep-- herd), with a rare imagination, sometimes ex^ celled marvellously in describing things that transcend nature's laws ; and his story of " Kil- meny," a child stolen by the fairies and con- veyed to fairy land, is a most charming ex- ample of pure poetry. The best compositions of Allan Cunningham are ballads and songs of