For then, by toil subdued, he drank
The stifling wave, and then he sank.

"No poet wept him; but the page
Of narrative sincere,

That tells his name, his worth, his age,
Is wet with Anson's tear :

And tears by bards or heroes shed
Alike immortalise the dead.

"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 gulphs than he."

This is the last sound that comes to us out of the darkness in which Cowper was fast disappearing. Never had a harmless life so miserable an ending. He went down in those deep waters without even that gleam of light at the last, which so often gives pathetic gladness to an ending life. Unconsoled, he was swallowed up by those billows. The last words he said were, when he was offered a cordial, "What can it signify?" What, indeed, did it matter, an hour of weakness, more or less, a pain the greater? By that time the gloom had reached its blackest, the light was near. What did it signify? Who can doubt that all the ceaseless sufferings of his life, all his miseries, some hours thereafter, had become as dreams to him in the great and new revelation that awaited him at the gates of heaven?

His life had been a harmless life; but yet it had

been full of trouble to himself, and all who were concerned in it, as unsatisfactory a human existence as ever was. But what he failed altogether to accomplish for himself he did for literature. He had not force enough to break any bonds of his own; on the contrary, his hapless feet were always getting entangled in new ones, and at the very last, after his partial escape from the potent sway of such a man as Newton, he made a poor little dictator for himself out of a pompous village pedagogue, to whom he laid bare all the tortures of his heart. But while he was bound in spirit he was free in his genius, as no man else in his generation was free. Academical rule and precedent had no sway over him; he went out of the schools of the poets a gentle rebel, casting all their leading strings to the winds, not saying a word of revolt, but with a quiet obstinacy taking his own way. He would not be bound even to logic or sequence, but waved all those limitations lightly from him, and did as Fancy bade, with no defiance, but only a gentle natural waywardness. He saw, with eyes as clear as truth itself, what was before him in the soft fresh outside world, in which there was no intoxicating loveliness but only a modest English landscape; and taste and inclination at once refused to bring in any foreign images, finding that enough, and the genuine humanity that peopled it. He was bold to say what was in him, and to say it his own way; he had the courage to step back in the course of time, and bring his model from higher sources than those of the Augustan age. He broke the spell of Pope, and opened the way to Wordsworth and all the singers that were being born, while he languished and agonised. The world would have been a different world for them if Cowper had not been.

CHAPTER II.

ROBERT BURNS.

WHILE Cowper was wasting his early manhood in London doing nothing, and knowing nothing either of the misery or the importance of his future life, a child was born in a clay hut among the Ayrshire wilds, in that far-distant and unknown realm of Scotland, which, though united to England by the closest bonds, was yet almost as little known to Englishmen as any foreign country. It is very difficult to realise to ourselves, indeed, what that country was before Burns and before Scott. No country in the world has owed so much to literature; and we doubt if all the enterprise and spirit of the race could ever have produced the prosperity and wealth which is now its portion, without the stimulating touch of that revelation which made Scotland enchanted ground to all Europe, and has made her sons proud, wherever they have gone, to claim her name. No two men in the world were ever more unlike than the English gentleman, gently bred and well connected, but indolent, timid, and helpless, and the impassioned peasant, full of strong desires and impulses, rash, headstrong, and daring, whose lamp of genius was infinitely more vivid, and his place in poetry greater, but whose warm flesh and blood encumbered his way even more than madness and misery did that of his contemporary. They never met, and knew

little of each other; nevertheless, their work had a similar influence. The one in his blue bonnet, the other in his invalid night-cap, they stand at the great gates which had been neatly barred and bolted by the last generation, and, pushing them abroad upon their unwilling hinges, made English poetry free as she had been before.

The mind of Burns and his career launches us into an entirely changed atmosphere and new scene. He was a son of the soil, without education, without culture, without friends; all he had in the world, save a well-knit frame and arms strong to work, was genius, against which there was every possible obstacle placed, that it should. not be able to do itself justice. Cowper did not begin to write till he was over fifty; Burns was done with poetry, and all things earthly, at thirty-seven. The one was a mild and feminine nature, without passion or any fleshly impulse; the other a strong and headlong being made up of them. It is strange to note how they worked together in absolute unconsciousness of their joint mission. It is difficult even to realise that the "Task was published only two years before that volume of varied and desultory verse which raised the Ayrshire ploughman at once to the rank of poet, not in his own district or country alone, but for the world. We will not ask which of the two was the greatest wonder; though, indeed, in our own mind we have little doubt on the subject, and cannot but feel that a fresh, new, and impassioned spirit was the natural fountain from which new life might be expected to spring. Burns was free by nature of all bondage of models or rules. If any preceding poet could be said to be his master, it was such a homely and unpretending oracle as Allan Ramsay, who died the year before he was born. If the transmigration of souls were a tenable faith, it would be a pleasant superstition to believe that the