An oak and an elm tree stand beside, A traveller came to the well of St. Keyne, For from cock-crow he had been travelling, He drank of the water so cool and clear, And he sat down upon the bank, There came a man from a house hard by, At the well to fill his pail ; On the well-side he rested it, And he bade the stranger hail. "Now, art thou a bachelor, stranger? " quoth he, "For an if thou hast a wife, The happiest draught thou hast drunk this day "Or has thy good woman, if one thou hast, Ever here in Cornwall been? For an if she have, I'll venture my life, She has drunk of the well of St. Keyne." "I have left a good woman who never was here," The stranger he made reply; "But that my draught should be the better for that, I pray you answer me why." "St. Keyne," quoth the Cornishman, "many a time Drank of this crystal well; And before the angel summoned her, "If the husband, of this gifted well A happy man thenceforth is he, For he shall be master for life. "But if the wife should drink of it first, The stranger stooped to the well of St. Keyne, "You drank of the well, I warrant, betimes," He to the Cornishman said; But the Cornishman smiled as the stranger spake, "I hastened, as soon as the wedding was done, But i' faith she had been wiser than me, For she took a bottle to church." Like Wordsworth, Southey was very industrious; he worked in a great many fields, history, biography, essays, and fiction. At the outset of his literary career he was poor, but by his work accumulated a fair fortune and collected a fine library. He was as much a radical as Coleridge had been in youth, but became more conservative than either of his friends, and bitterly criticised any difference from the opinions he learned to hold. It is to be said of the Lake Poets that they were all men of pure lives; strict adherents to principle, whichever way the vane of opinion was set; good husbands, fathers, and friends. In bringing back some of the virtues of an early age of poetry, they brought back none of the vices of that day, and nothing in their career marks the literary man as a Bohemian or social outlaw. Jus LIII. ON THOMAS CAMPBELL AND TOM MOORE. UST about the time the Lake Poets were making their first stir in the world of books, THOMAS CAMPBELL, who was a countryman of Robert Burns, first ap1777-1844 peared in print. He was a youthful poet, - only twenty-two, and his poem, The Pleasures of Hope, was written in that tiresome old rhyming measure used so continually since Dryden and Pope, which the Lake School did so much towards abolishing. The Pleasures of Hope proved a very popular poem, however, and while Wordsworth's poems fell dead from the press, Campbell's sold four editions in less than a year. There are strong passages in The Pleasures of Hope, although, as a whole, I think it dull reading. The best lines in it are those which burn with generous anger against the wrongs Poland had suffered when divided among her oppressors and crushed out of being as a nation. Campbell's best poems are his shorter ones, The Mariners of England, Battle of the Baltic, Hohenlinden, The Exile of Erin, and the like. Every schoolboy knows these, as well as Lochiel's Warning, O'Connor's Child, and Lord Ullin's Daughter, which are founded on old stories of the Border. In these shorter songs he has escaped from the bonds of that see-saw rhyme, and his songs and ballads are full of spirit, with a ring in the lines which is like a bugle-sound. You can hear this in Ye Mariners of England, which begins, "Ye mariners of England That guard our native seas, Whose flag has braved, a thousand years, The battle and the breeze! Your glorious standard launch again To match another foe, And sweep through the deep While the stormy winds do blow; While the battle rages loud and long, And the stormy winds do blow." Still more like martial music is The Battle of the Baltic: "Of Nelson and the North, Sing the glorious day's renown, When to battle fierce came forth All the might of Denmark's crown, And her arms along the deep proudly shone ; By each gun the lighted brand In a bold, determined hand, And the prince of all the land Led them on. "Like leviathans afloat Lay their bulwarks on the brine, It was ten of April morn by the chime; There was silence deep as death, "But the might of England flushed To anticipate the scene; And her van the fleeter rushed O'er the deadly space between. 'Hearts of oak!' our captains cried, when each gun From its adamantine lips Spread a death-shade round the ships, Like the hurricane eclipse Of the sun. 'Again! again! again! And the havoc did not slack, Till a feeble cheer the Dane To our cheering sent us back; Their shots along the deep slowly boom; Then ceased, and all is wail As they strike the shattered sail; "Out spoke the victor then, As he hailed them o'er the wave: 'Ye are brothers, ye are men! And we conquer but to save! So peace instead of death let us bring; But yield, proud foe, thy fleet, With the crews, at England's feet, To our King.' "Then Denmark blessed our chief That he gave her wounds repose; And the sounds of joy and grief From her people wildly rose As Death withdrew his shades from the day; O'er a wide and woful sight, Where the fires of funeral light Died away. "Now joy, Old England, raise! For the tidings of thy might, By the festal cities' blaze, Whilst the wine-cup shines in light; By thy wild and stormy steep, Such pieces as these, vigorous and dramatic, are admirably adapted for recitation; and hence many of Campbell's minor poems have had wide circulation in reading-books and collections of poetry. After publishing a volume of short poems, Campbell wrote his Gertrude of Wyoming, a Tale of Pennsylvania. It was written on a tragedy of the war of the American Revolution, in which a savage band, more than half of them Indians, swept down on a little settlement in the valley of the Wyoming, and massacred the villagers, men, women, and babes, without mercy. It was a shameful and bloodthirsty murder, and Campbell, whose sympathies were always passionately on the side of humanity, put his heart into the poem. The heroine is Gertrude, who, murdered by the enemy, dies in her husband's arms. see that the poem is in the Spenserian measure : "A scene of death! where fires beneath the sun, The lovely Gertrude, safe from present harm, "But short that contemplation, -sad and short Where friendly swords were drawn and banners flew ; You will |