The cottage-curs at early pilgrim bark;

Crowned with her pail the tripping milkmaid sings;
The whistling ploughman stalks afield; and hark!
Down the rough slope the ponderous waggon rings;
Through rustling corn the hare astonished springs ;
Slow tolls the village-clock the drowsy hour;
The partridge bursts away on whirring wings;
Deep mourns the turtle in sequestered bower,
And shrill lark carols clear from her aerial tower.

O Nature, how in every charm supreme!
Whose votaries feast on raptures ever new!
O for the voice and fire of seraphim,
To sing thy glories with devotion due!
Blest be the day I 'scaped the wrangling crew
From Pyrrho's maze, and Epicurus' sty;
And held high converse with the godlike few,
Who to th' enraptured heart, and ear, and eye,
Teach beauty, virtue, truth, and love, and melody.

THOMAS CHATTERTON.

[THOMAS CHATTERTON was born at Bristol on the 20th of November, 1752. From 1767 to 1770 he produced a mass of poetry, the more noticeable portions of it being the pseudo-antique Rowley Poems which were collected after his death by Thomas Tyrwhitt, in 1777. He died by his own hand in London on the 24th of August, 1770, aged 17 years and 9 months.]

Chatterton has been neglected of late years, but Mr. Skeat's modernised version of the 'Rowley' Poems will, very likely, direct as much attention to them as can be afforded by an age embarrassed already by the wealth it has inherited and by the luxuriance of its own poetic growths. And if in the following selections I have not availed myself of Mr. Skeat's modernised text, but have rather chosen a text of my own, it has been from no defective appreciation of the acuteness, the industry, and the learning apparent in every page of his edition, but because he sometimes seems to miss that peculiar musical movement governing Chatterton's ear, which often renders it impossible to replace, by any modern word whatsoever, an archaism or pseudo-archaism of his, whether invented by himself or found in Bailey or Speght. Dominated as he commonly was by eighteenth-century movements, Chatterton yet showed at times an originality of ear that has never been appreciated. As far as I know, indeed, his metrical inventiveness has never been perceived-certainly it has never been touched upon-by any of his critics, from Tyrwhitt downwards. Yet it seems necessary to touch upon it here-technical as the enquiry may seem-or how can we gauge the undeniable influence Chatterton has had, both as to spirit and as to form, upon the revival in the present century of the romantic temperthat temper, without which English poetry can scarcely perhaps

hold a place at all when challenged in a court of universal criticism?

This influence has worked primarily through Coleridge, who (partly, it may be, from Chatterton's connexion with Bristol) was profoundly impressed both by the tragic pathos of Chatterton's life and by the excellence, actual as well as potential, of his work. And when we consider the influence Coleridge himself had upon the English romantic movement generally, and especially upon Shelley and Keats, and the enormous influence these latter have had upon subsequent poets, it seems impossible to refuse to Chatterton the place of the father of the New Romantic school. As to the romantic spirit, it would be difficult to name any one of his successors in whom the high temper of romance has shown so intense a life. And, as to the romantic form, it is matter of familiar knowledge, for instance, that the lyric octo-syllabic movement of which Scott made such excellent use in The Lay of the Last Minstrel, and which Byron borrowed from him, was originally borrowed (or rather stolen) by Scott from Coleridge, whose Christabel, while still in manuscript, was recited in the hearing of Scott by Coleridge's friend Stoddart. Coleridge afterwards, when Christabel was published in 1816, speaks of the anapaestic dance with which he varies the iambic lines, as being 'founded on a new principle'; and he has been much praised, and very justly, for such effects as this :—

'And Christabel saw the lady's eye,

And nothing else saw she thereby,

Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tall,

Which hung in a murky old niche in the wall.'

That this new principle' was known to Chatterton is seen in the following extract, which has exactly the Christabel ringthe ring which Scott only half caught and which Byron failed to really catch at all.

But when he threwe downe his asenglave,

Next came in Syr Botelier bold and brave,

The dethe of manie a Saraceen,

Theie thought him a devil from Hell's black den,
Ne thinking that anie of mortalle menne

Could send so manie to the grave.

For his life to John Rumsee he render'd his thanks
Descended from Godred the King of the Manks.'

D d

With regard to octo-syllabics with anapaestic variations, it may be said no doubt that some of the miracle-plays (such as The Fall of Man) are composed in this movement, as is also one of the months in Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar; but the irregularity in these is, like that of the Border ballads, mostly the irregularity of makeshift, while Chatterton's Unknown Knight, like Christabel, and like Goethe's Erl King, has several variations introduced (as Coleridge says of his own) 'in correspondence with some transition in the nature of the imagery or passion.' The 'new principle,' in short, was Chatterton's.

Again, in the mysterious suggestiveness of remote geographical names—a suggestiveness quite other than the pomp and sonority which Marlowe and Milton so loved-the world-involving echoes of Kubla Khan seem to have been caught from such lines as these in Chatterton's African eclogue Narva and Mored:

'From Lorbar's cave to where the nations end..
.....

Explores the palaces on Lira's coast,

Where howls the war-song of the chieftain's ghost....
Like the loud echoes on Toddida's sea,

The warrior's circle, the mysterious tree.'

And turning to the question of Chatterton's influence upon Keats, it is not only indirectly through Coleridge that the rich mind of Keats shows signs of having drunk at Chatterton's fountain of romance: there is a side of Chatterton which Keats knew and which Coleridge did not.

It is difficult to express in words wherein lies the entirely spiritual kinship between Chatterton's Ballad of Charity and Keats's Eve of St. Agnes, yet I should be sceptical as to the insight of any critic who should fail to recognise that kinship. Not only are the beggar and the thunderstorm depicted with the sensuous sympathy and melodious insistance which is the great charm of The Eve of St. Agnes, but the movement of the lines is often the same. Take for instance the description of Keats's bedesman, 'meagre, barefoot, wan,' which is, in point of metrical movement, identical with Chatterton's description of the alms-craver, 'withered, forwynd, dead.'

More obvious perhaps, yet not more essentially true, is the likeness between the famous passage in Keats's Isabella, beginning— 'For them the Ceylon diver held his breath, And went all naked to the hungry shark,' &c.,

and these four lines in Chatterton's Narva and Mored

'Where the pale children of the feeble sun
In search of gold through every climate run,
From burning heat to freezing torments go,
And live in all vicissitudes of woe.'

It was perfectly fit therefore that Keats should dedicate his Endymion to the memory of Thomas Chatterton. Not that Keats or Coleridge stole from Chatterton: no two poets had less need to steal from any one. But the whole history of poetry shows that poetic methods are a growth as well as an inspiration.

So steeped indeed was Chatterton in romance, that, except in the case of the African Eclogues, his imagination seems to be never really alive save when in the dramatic masquerade of the monk of Bristol. And here we touch the very core and centre of Chatterton's genius-his artistic identification. This is what I mean: Pope 'lisped in numbers, for the numbers came'; and the Ode to Solitude written at twelve, shows how early may begin to stir the lyrical impulse—the impulse to give voice to the emotions of the soul that is born to express. The young Chatterton on a summer's day would lie down on the grass and gaze for hours at the church of St. Mary Redcliffe, not in order to gather and focus for expression the personal emotions caused by the spectacle, as the child Cowley or the child Pope might have done, but in order to reproduce the picturesque antique life he imagined to have once moved there; and, as metrical language is but the ideal and quintessential form in which a writer embodies that which in the world around him is ideal and quintessential, Chatterton 'lisped in numbers' too. Not that his egotism was less intense than theirs: far from it. Such energy as his can only exist as the outcome of that enormous egotism which is at the heart of all lyric production. Yet his dramatic instinct was stronger still.

Here indeed is the keynote of Chatterton's work, and, if we will consider it, of his life too. As a youthful poet showing that power of artistic self-effacement which is generally found to be incompatible with the eager energies of poetic youth,-as a producer, that is to say, of work purely artistic and in its highest reaches unadulterated by lyric egotism, the author of the Rowley Poems (if we leave out of consideration his acknowledged pieces), however inferior to Keats in point of sheer beauty, stands alongside him in our literature, and stands with him alone.