zas from an Elegy he wrote on Mr. Phillips, his teacher
in Bristol free school, whose death he laments, in a measure
like that of Gray's Elegy. He begins by praising Phillips
as a poet (he had written verses while Chatterton was his
pupil,) and then bewails his loss as a friend in these lines:
"Wet with the dew, the yellow hawthorns bow;

The rustic whistles through the echoing cave;
Far o'er the lea the breathing cattle low,
And the full Avon lifts the darkened wave.
"Now as the mantle of the evening swells,

Upon my mind I feel a thickening gloom,
Ah! could I charm, by necromantic spells,
The soul of Phillips from the deathly tomb!
"Then would we wander through this darkened vale
In converse such as heavenly spirits use,
And, borne upon the pinions of the gale,

"Now rest my muse, but only rest to weep
A friend most dear by every sacred tie;
Unknown to me be comfort, peace, or sleep;
Phillip's is dead—'tis pleasure then to die.

"Few are the pleasures Chatterton e'er knew,

Short were the moments of his transient peace,
But melancholy robbed him of those few;

And this hath bid all future comfort cease."

These verses are crude and boyish, but it is the crudity of genius, not the sort of precocity that exhausts itself in one or two efforts. We must believe that if Chatterton had only been strong and patient enough to have waited a little longer, or if he had found one helping hand stretched out to hold him up in time of sorest need, he might have stood in the front rank of poets.

These works of Percy, Macpherson and Chatterton, were all published within a period of less than ten years. These re-prints of old English songs, these fragments restored from old Keltic bards, even the ballads in which poor Chatterton imitated the lays of an elder age, all indicated a return to

a fresher and more natural school of poetry. For almost a century, popular taste had been held in a sort of bondage by Dryden, Pope, and the poets who followed them. Even the untaught lay of the earliest minstrel was a refreshment to ears which were tired of the see-saw verses, rhymed in pairs, which had so long been heard. Thus we see it is quite natural that this should lead finally to a reaction towards something new and fresh in poetic treatment, and to a change in popular taste.

TALK L.

ON WILLIAM COWPER AND ROBERT BURNS.

WILLIAM COWPER stands midway between two events in the history of poetry-the going out of Pope and Born 1731. the coming in of Wordsworth. He was a boy of Died 1800. thirteen when Pope died, with the reputation of being the greatest of English poets, and in 1800, the year of Cowper's death, a few people were beginning to suspect that Wordsworth was the foremost poet of a new order. If we look closely into Cowper's poetry, I think we shall find in it a remembrance of Pope, and a prophecy of Wordsworth.

His life was early clouded with a great sorrow. At six years, he lost his mother. One of his most feeling poems, Lines on Receipt of my Mother's Picture, speaks of this grief:

"Oh! mother! when I learned that thou wast dead,
Say, wast thou conscious of the tears I shed?

Hovered thy spirit o'er thy sorrowing son,
Wretch even then, life's journey just begun?
Perhaps thou gav'st me, though unfelt, a kiss;
Perhaps a tear, if souls can weep, in bliss.
I heard the bell tolled on thy burial day;
I saw the hearse that bore thee slow away;
And turning from my nursery window, drew
A long, long sigh, and wept a last adieu."

The sadness which began so young, was made deeper by his fear of being insane, a disease which threatened him early in life; and also by his morbid religious fears. Although a pious, pure-souled man, the gloomy doctrines of his belief took such hold on his mind, that he was made miserable by them through life, and they hung like a black pall over the future.

Yet his poetry is by no means all sadness, and is sometimes bright and gay. He began to write later than most poets, and writing became his chief pleasure, and helped to avert that insanity which had twice attacked him. He published first a volume of short poems. Later appeared The Task, the longest and most famous of all his works. This begins with the praise of the sofa; traces its growth from a three-legged stool to a luxurious couch; and then leading away from the fireside, by which the sofa is placed the poem falls into rural wanderings, in which the poet talks of nature and her lessons. This measure is blank verse, and although in subject it is not unlike some of those long didactic poems written earlier than Cowper, it is in a natural and hearty tone that makes it far superior to most poetry of that style.

Perhaps Cowper's most widely-read poem is the ballad of John Gilpin. This story was told him one evening by a lady who had encouraged him to write, and who suggested the subject of The Task to him. The picture of Gilpin, galloping off a horse that would not be stopped, so touched Cowper's sense of humor, that he could hardly sleep for laughter the night after hearing it, and could not rest till he had put it in a ballad.

The last poem he wrote was The Castaway, one of the dreariest and saddest of poems. This seems like a picture of Cowper's own mind, and he himself traces the likeness in the first and last stanzas:

"Obscurest night involved the sky,

Atlantic billows roared,

When such a destined wretch as I,

Washed headlong from on board.
Of friends, of hope, of all bereft,
His floating home forever left.

"Not long beneath the 'whelming brine, Expert to swim, he lay;

Nor soon he felt his strength decline,
Or courage die away:

But waged with death a lasting strife-
Supported by despair of life.

"He shouted; nor his friends had failed
To check the vessel's course;
But so the furious blast prevailed
That pitiless, perforce,

They left their outcast mate behind,
And scudded still before the wind.

"Some succor, still, they could afford,
And such as storms allow-

The cask, the coop, the floated cordDelayed not to bestow;

But he, they knew, not ship, nor shore,
Whate'er they gave, should visit more.

"Nor cruel as it seemed, could he
Their haste himself condemn,
Aware that flight, in such a sea
Alone could rescue them,

Yet bitter felt it still to die
Deserted, and his friends so nigh.

"He long survives, who lives an hour

In ocean self-upheld;

And so long he, with unspent power
His destiny repelled,

And ever, as the minutes flew,
Entreated help, or cried 'Adieu!'

"At length his transient respite past,
His comrades, who before
Had heard his voice in every blast,

Could catch the sound no more;
For by the toil subdued he drank
The stifling wave, and then he sank.

"I therefore purpose not, or dream
Descanting on his fate,
To give the melancholy theme
A more enduring date;

But misery still delights to trace
Its semblance in another's case.
"No voice divine the storm allayed
No light propitious shone,

When snatched from all effectual aid

We perished, each alone,—

But I, beneath a rougher sea,

And whelmed in deeper gulf than he.”

One noticeable thing in Cowper's verses, is his sympathy with the humanity of which he was part, a feeling for the suffering and oppressed everywhere. poem of his which does not speak this. such lines

"My soul is sick with every day's report

There is hardly a
The Task is full of

Of wrong and outrage, with which earth is filled.”

And again

"I would not have a slave to till my ground,

To carry me, to fan me when I sleep,

And tremble when I wake, for all the wealth

That sinews bought and sold have ever earned."

This tenderness in Cowper breaks out even for the most helpless animal

"I would not enter on my list of friends,

(Though graced with polished manners and fine sense,

Yet wanting sensibility), the man who needlessly sets foot upon a worm."

This spirit of humanity, of sympathy for the sorrows, and ardor for the rights of man, had long needed a voice among the poets, and it was only a year later than Cowper's Task, when a little volume of poems appeared, in which this voice spoke with a power it had never before possessed.

Born 1759.

This volume was published in Scotland, and Died 1796. written by Robert Burns, a poet of the people. He was the son of a farmer and was himself a farm laborer till manhood. Without training, or the