Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/150

120 He was the true creator of modern French literature, for which he furnished a new vocabulary, and he brought France out of her frigid classicism into line with the Northern world. Then came Lamartine Other French romanticists. with his sentiment, and Musset and Gautier, children of Paris and Helen, consecrate from birth to the abandon of emotion and beauty, and equally with Lamartine to the poetry of self-expression.

Long before, in Scotland, a more spontaneous minstrel Burns. also had sung out of the fulness of the music born within him, but with a tone that separated him from the choir of purely subjective poets. Burns was altruistic, because his songs were those of his people. In his notes amid the heather, Scotia's lowly, independent children found a voice. It was his own, and it was theirs; he looked out and not in, or, if in, upon himself as the symbol of his kind. Of all our poets, lyric and idyllic, he is most truly nature's darling; his pictures were life, his voice was freedom, his heart was strength and tenderness. Yet Burns,

is not a child of the introspective Muse. Relatively late as was his song, he stands glad and brave among the simple, primitive, and therefore universal minstrels.

No; it is in Byron, with his loftier genius and more self-centred emotions, that we find our main