jili1&«ilBtD')3 
 
Ufantell IniuErsity Sjibrarg 
 
 3tt)aca, Ncm lork 
 
 WORDSWORTH COLLECTION 
 
 MADE BY 
 
 CYNTHIA MORGAN ST. JOHN 
 
 ITHACA, N. Y. 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 VICTOR EMANUEL 
 
 CLASS OF 1919 
 1925 
 
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 WiiPiiiti'i', 
 
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 1^ uiy iiL'lklffi!i«MteaM»tt*M^ttni«Piitt!> l««%.lKlli^r 
 
^s imagination hodics forth 
 he forms of tl/ings unknown, 
 
 the -poet's pen 
 
 ' turns them to sJ/apes, 
 
 and gives to airy notJiing 
 ^ local halitation and a name. 
 
 " ^lidsumvier <^%Afi 2)ream." 
 
 'itiow many goodly creatures 
 
 are tljere J^ere ! 
 itiow Icauteous mankind is! 
 
 -Q hrave new world, 
 ■{hai has such people in't! 
 
 " ^evipest." 
 
 iioly Ci-ir\itv ' 
 CKurcK, 
 
or 
 
 
 y=.^Alicc CorRfaiV 
 
 J,l[u>tratet) hy 
 
 S^LlaTL 33 arraLVLcL-, 
 
 "witk 
 Xri"trot)ucti on. hy 
 
 fr^ 6. COeatKerly-. 
 
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 Grnej)t isli^ter. 
 
 2+ S<" Bnde^tre&t e C. 
 
 Prirvted by 6. N i5tcr <=st IsTuremberg, 
 
 New York : 
 
 e.P Dutton 6-C°. 
 
 Jl (jL)c5t Swenty 'Shjird ^'jtreeL, 
 
p^.S^I^^S 
 
 ~t^.y:"%^ 
 
 Ttie Poets' Corner. 
 
 W/iere are the mighty pods gone? 
 
 'Where are their lurning spirits fled? 
 3s it hefond t]^e stars and sun, 
 
 ^nd do t)ey sleep among the dead? 
 i:)r who will wake their songs again, 
 
 i^r strike their silent harps once more, 
 ^rind sing, in these sad days, a strain 
 i^f chivalry and love of yore? 
 
 My 
 
3 tread the wa^'s that know them still, . 
 
 ^Yhere once thep loved and sang of old, 
 X,he Cjidet glele, the hreezv hill, 
 
 Jlhe sunnv lav, the wintrv wold; 
 ^hurchvard and river, hall and tree, 
 
 T^ach has a story of its own ; 
 '^ut where can all the sinners he, 
 
 ^'hcre have their harning spirits flown ? 
 
 tJlnd then 3 tread the ^tt>ey dust, 
 
 iLAnd scan the legends spealiing fair, 
 Xne storied urn, the sculptured hust, 
 
 tiAnd think to find them sleeping there, 
 ^at no ! ^liev ask not such a led, 
 
 ^DeatJ^ hath for them no lot, or part, 
 Ihlie ^oets live ! Z^^y '^''^^ T'-oi dead, 
 
 Xhey live within their peoples heart! 
 
 Fred E. Wealherly, 
 
7^\EAR old England has a picturesque beauty of its own, in hill 
 ^ ^ and dale, in moorland and purling stream ; and this natural 
 loveliness is enhanced by the ■ charms of association. To tht^ 
 antiquarian, the historian, and the lover of literature, ever}' inch of it is 
 ground hallowed by the glorious deeds, sufferings, and achievements of 
 men of genius, of the glorious company of martyrs who perished for 
 their faith, and of warriors who bled for the cause thej^ upheld. It is 
 impossible to think of Warwickshire apart from Shakespeare, or of the 
 Lake Country without recalling the sober figure of Wordsworth, while 
 the mere mention of Surrey and Kent conjures up a vision of Geoffrey 
 Chaucer, and of his merry calvacade of Canterbury pilgrims. The father 
 of English poetry, however, was not country bred, London claims him 
 for its own. 
 
 This soldier, courtier, man of learning, was, tradition says, born in 
 Thames Street, and, if we accept his own statement, his birth occurred 
 somewhere about the middle of the fourteenth century. Himself of gentle 
 birth, his youth was spent in the atmosphere of the Court, as pao-e to a 
 Royal Duchess, and afterwards as valet to Edward IIL, Avith whom 
 he was often at Woodstock, the Summer residence of the Royal 
 Family. The glory of Woodstock has now departed ; its great deer 
 park, the incomparable maze in which Fair Rosamond's bovver stood the 
 glades wherein the boy-poet walked and mused have vanished. It is 
 in London that we must look for traces of Chaucer. When he held 
 
the post of Controller of Customs, 
 the poet lived in a house at Aid- 
 gate, We may picture to ourselves 
 his hooded figure threading its way 
 through the City's narrow lanes to 
 the Postern Gate of the river by 
 the Tower; passing through Fleet 
 Street, along the Strand, and in 
 everj^ corner of the London of those 
 days — a city of stately monasteries 
 and hovels, of fortified mansions, 
 and bishops' palaces surrounded by gardens, of churches, shops, and inns, 
 from which hung innumerable signs. It is in Southwark that his figure 
 seems to us most familiar. There stood the '•' Tabard Inn," the " gentil 
 ostilrie," with its overhanging galleries supported by thick wooden pillars, 
 its wide courtyard, and roomy guest chambers, whence the pilgrims started 
 for Canterbury, to worship at Thomas a Becket's Tomb, one April morning 
 of 1382. 
 
 Ruins of wayside chapels still mark their pleasant halting places. 
 They stopped at Reigate, where the Town Hall stands on the site of 
 one of these chapels. At Dorking, at the corner of Westhumble Lane, 
 they found another, of which nothing now remains but a heap of moss- 
 grown stones. Their route can be plainly traced bj^ a line of yew trees, 
 that winds up hill and down dale, through Surrey and Kent, and still 
 indicates the " Pilgrims' Way." The trees do not grow in an unbroken 
 line. Sometimes a clump of them forms a retreat, through whose shade 
 the summer sun cannot pierce ; sometimes a single tree, a spectre out of 
 the past, flings its wild and twisted branches athwart the road ; though 
 here and there the yews grow in a long and orderly file. It was a 
 gallant band that passed under the shadow of those hoary trees; "Well 
 nine and twenty in a companie of Sondry folk." Among them rode a 
 
" veray parfit gentil knight," with his young squire, who sang and 
 played the flute all day, and 
 
 " Embrouded was he — as it were a mede, 
 Alia ful of freshe flouers white and rede." 
 
 A dainty prioress^ whose smile " was ful simple and coy," was accompanied 
 by a nun, "that was hire chapelleine and preestes three;" and the 
 comely "wife of Bath," wearing hose of fine scarlet red and a "hat as 
 broad as a buckler or a targe," rode among the Pilgrims. Thereafter 
 comes a " gentil pardonere," a " wanton and a mery frere, an able 
 abbot on his palfrey," a "fat swan loved he best of any roast;" and a 
 lusty miliar who 
 
 "A bagg-epipe wel coude he blowe and soune, 
 And therewithal he brought us out of toune." 
 
 Prominent among them all is the poet's familiar figure leading the way. 
 Let us imagine that the pilgrims have reached Canterbury ; hot and dusty 
 they enter Mercery Lane, that is crowded with traders in sacred wares. 
 Before them rises the great cathedral, limned against the eternal freshness 
 of the spring sky. They make their way through the lane, lined on either 
 side with houses, the projecting upper storeys of which nearly meet 
 above their heads. The old "Chequer Inn" stands at the corner of 
 the High Street — every vestige of the inn has long since disappeared, 
 its site, only, is known. The Pilgrims dismount ; they enter the cathedral, 
 through the church-yard, upon which now stands the beautiful angel- 
 sculptured porch. Above the choir, reached by a flight of marble steps, 
 and seen through a vista of columns, stands the shrine of the murdered 
 Archbishop, blazing with gold and precious stones, and laden with offerino-s. 
 Chaucer kneels, the print of his knees helps to wear away the pavement 
 there. Doubtless the Prioress unpins that brooch on which is o-raven 
 " Amor Vincit Omnia " ; the wife of Bath detaches some jewel from her 
 person ; a sturdy franklin parts with one of the rings he wears outside 
 his glove, and all the treasures are dropped into the shrine. There the 
 
GmtcrbL 
 
 Mary's, Westminster, 
 was interred in the 
 a poet, Nicholas . 
 Brigham, caused his 
 remains to be re- 
 moved to the south 
 aisle, where he also 
 erected a monument 
 to the memory of 
 Chaucer, the English 
 troubadour. 
 
 Henry 
 cloister 
 
 offerings will remain, until the day when 
 Henry VHl will order the ashes of Thomas 
 a Becket to be scattered to the winds, 
 and the shrine to be despoiled. Blue 
 Beard, we are told, carried off two heavy 
 chests, and twenty-three carts full of trea- 
 sure from the tomb. Torn stones and a 
 worn pavement alone mark the spot where 
 the shrine, stood five centuries ago ; but 
 the yew trees still point the way, and 
 Chaucer's immortal poem still records 
 that memorable journey. 
 
 The poet died before his work was 
 
 completed. He expired on the 25th of 
 
 October, 1400, in the house situated in 
 
 the quiet garden of the Monks of St. 
 
 VH's. Chapel now covers the spot. Chaucer 
 
 of the Abbey. In the sixteenth century, 
 
rHE great " Kentish shrine," Penshurst, the home of the Sidneys, is 
 closely associated with the name of Edmund Spenser. Every glade 
 and alley of the park awake reminiscences of the poet. It was 
 here he wrote the " Shepherd's Calendar." It is easy to realise how the 
 stately surroundings and the characteristic beauty of Kent, the " Garden of 
 England," gave the decisive moulding touches to Spenser's genius ; and 
 how fortunate it was that the formative period of his life should have 
 been spent in such a house and in such a county. Such w^ere the earl}- 
 environments which helped to shape his spirit to large issues. As we 
 stand imder " Sidney's Oak," we almost expect to see the poet and his 
 host stroll across that grass-grown pleasance, under the shadow of the 
 avenue of mighty limes and beeches, and make their way towards the 
 venerable tree. 
 
 The house speaks eloquently to us of these noble youths. Every 
 room seems to breathe of their presence and of their gentle ways of life. 
 Lady Sidney's mandoline lies in oxie chamber ; but little stretch of 
 imagination is needed to hear a strain of ghostly music wandering through 
 the gallery that is hung with portraits of a vanished race ; or to see 
 the feast laid on the master's raised table, in the Baron's hall, on whose 
 walls glistens the armour of many a gallant Sidney, and of their kinsmen. 
 The retainers are assembled, surely Spenser w^ll shortly enter with the 
 head of the house, 
 
 "The President of noblesse and of chevalrie." 
 
 A thrill of delight and surprise ran through the Court of Queen 
 Elizabeth, when "The Shepherd's Calendar" was pubhshed. A new poet 
 had arisen ; no great national poet had appeared since Chaucer had passed 
 into the silence nearly two hundred years before. Who was this Edmund 
 
Spenser who once again drew such tender 
 and flexible sweetness from the English 
 tongue? Spenser was born in London, 
 of poor parents. He was educated at 
 " The Merchant Taylors' School," and 
 entered Cambridge as a sizar, or serving 
 clerk. He was an excellent Greek 
 scholar, and had a thorough knowledge 
 of the "natural and moral philosopb.y " 
 of his day. In 1580, he was appointed 
 secretary to Lord Arthur Grey de Wilton — the Artegal of the " Faerie 
 Queene" — whom he accompanied to Ireland to aid in the suppression of the 
 great Desmond uprising in that unhappy land. The English Government 
 determined to plant Munster with English colonists ; Kilcolman Castle and 
 its woods and river were given to Spenser, and it was there he wrote 
 " The Faerie Queene." The ruins of Kilcolman Castle now stand a solitary 
 pile dominating a desolate moorland. In Spenser's time the scene must 
 have possessed some grace, for he speaks of its pleasantness and celebrates — 
 
 "The green alders by Mulla's shore." 
 
 To the north stretched the wild country — half-bog, half-forest and the 
 wooded hill of Aharlo. 
 
 " Of old the best and fairest hill 
 That was in all this Holy Island's heights. 
 In his day Aharlo had become the haunt of outlaws. At Kilcolman, 
 surrounded by the ever present spectacle of desolation, of anarchy and 
 woe, he wrote the adventures of the "Red Cross Knight;" and the poem 
 is coloured and influenced by the author's surroundings and conditions of 
 life. The mournful land is often traversed by his hero ; the solitary 
 tracks barren " both of man and beasts," and the " great woods," where 
 danger lurked, and which Spenser paints in vivid words, form a picture of 
 the Ireland of his day. The famished figures creeping out upon their 
 
hands and knees, "for their legs could not bear them," he says, when 
 describing the result of the wars in Munster, "speaking like ghosts rising 
 out of their graves," inspired some of his weird fancies. Sir Walter 
 Raleigh visited Spenser, and listened, under the shades of the green 
 alders, to the first books of his host's great poem. At the persuasion of 
 the dreamer of " Eldorado," the poet returned to England, and was 
 introduced to Queen Ehzabeth. She bestowed her brightest smile upon 
 him, and accepted the dedication of the poem. It is difficult, now, to 
 realise the enthusiasm that was aroused by the publication of the 
 " Faerie Queene." It became " the delight of every accomplished 
 gentleman, the model of every poet, the solace of every soldier." 
 Spenser lingered awhile in England, then, finding, as Colin Clout explains, 
 that the selfish intrigues of Court life are not suited to the meditations of 
 a lowly shepherd swain, returned to Kilcolman Castle. A year or two 
 later the smouldering discontent in Ireland was fanned anew into open 
 rebellion. Out of the woods of Aharlo, wild figures flocked one night 
 towards Kilcolman. To them, the sweet singer who dwelt there, was 
 but a hated usurper. Spenser, at the time, was writing, or had just 
 written, last words of holy meditation : 
 
 "But, henceforth, all shall rest eternally, 
 
 With him that is the God of Sabaoth hight; 
 
 O! that great Sabaoth God, grant me that Sabbath's sight," 
 
 when the rebels set fire to the Castle. Mystery hangs over the proceedings 
 of that night of terror and anguish. Spenser escaped, with his wife and 
 his children, with the exception of one newly-born babe, who perished 
 in the flames. The poet arrived in England a ruined and a broken- 
 hearted man, and died at an inn in King Street, Westminster. He 
 was buried in Westminster Abbey, by Chaucer's side. The Earl of 
 Essex defrayed the expenses of his funeral. "His hearse," says Camden, 
 " was attended by poets ; and mournful elegies and poems, with the 
 pens that wrote them, were thrown into his tomb." 
 
SHAEiSS'PS^IiS. 
 
 ONE of the few traditions that have been preserved of England's 
 greatest poet relates of his passionate attachment to his native 
 district, that even in the heyday of his career he visited Stratford- 
 on-Avon at least once every year. In 1615 a proposal was made to enclose 
 the adjacent common land of Welcombe. The poet appears to have 
 been consulted on the subject, and, according to the preserved document 
 "Mr. Shakespeare" told the agent "that he was not able to bear the 
 enclosing of Welcombe." This midland district of England was for a 
 youthful genius an ideal environment : 
 
 "With shadowy forests and with champains rich'd, 
 With plenteous rivers, and wide skirted meads." 
 The renowned Forest of Arden, "the highest franchise of noble and 
 princely pleasure," and Charlecote Park, the scene of Shakespeare's 
 reported deer-stealing exploits, are not far distant from Stratford, which 
 was a prosperous important town in the end of the sixteenth century. 
 Only one or two generations previous to the birth of the great dramatist, 
 Warwickshire, and the neighbouring central counties of England had been 
 torn asunder by civil dissensions, had been the battle ground of the prolonged 
 Wars of the Roses. During his childhood many veteran soldiers or their 
 
 immediate descendants were still 
 alive, and doubtless filled the 
 boy's greedy ears with stirring 
 tales of fights and heroic 
 deeds. It is this intimate know- 
 ledge of the struggles between 
 Yorkists and Lancastrians which 
 make his historical dramas the 
 
best chronicles extant of that troublous time. The Royal residence of 
 Woodstock was within easy reach of Stratford, so the youth must have 
 been familiar with the pageantry of Court life long before he came into 
 more personal contact with it in after life. 
 
 Shakespeare was endowed with deep insight into human nature, with 
 broad sympathies, and, in addition to his vivid imagination, he possessed 
 the invaluable faculty of learning through vicarious knowledge ; so 
 that his mind became a great storehouse from which he could draw 
 endless material. His vast knowledge of men and manners was gained 
 principally in England, although it is generally supposed that he visited 
 foreign lands. Nevertheless, the people of his dramas are for the most 
 part of English type ; and his descriptions of Egypt, Greece, Rome, 
 and Medieval Italy find their counterpart in Warwickshire and in London. 
 His merchants, watchmen, gay revellers, nobles, frank-speaking, true- 
 hearted ladies are the inhabitants of the London of Elizabeth. Doubtless 
 he met Falstaff at the " Mermaid Tavern," and stood him many a 
 glass of sack for love of his wit. There he exchanged ssllies with 
 Dame Quickly, and looked of a night through the dark streets for the 
 glimmer of Dogberry's lantern. At the houses of his friends, Lord 
 Southampton, Lord Pembroke, Lord Essex, he saw the flower of English 
 Society, and among them, doubtless, the blithe gallant, the courtier 
 Benedick, the gay Mercutio, Polonius, melancholy Jacques and grave Antonio. 
 Perhaps he was one of the guests on the occasion when the Countess of 
 Pembroke entertained Ben Jonson at Crosby House, and there met and 
 talked with Portia, laughing Rosalind, and beautiful Imogen. 
 
 His own early courtship was the prototype of the many beautiful 
 love episodes in his works, which culminate in the passion and tragic 
 deaths of Romeo and Juliet. A rustic walk of a mile and a half lay 
 between his father's house and the cottage of Ann Hathaway, who 
 became his wife. The path he so often trod runs through fields and 
 grassy lanes sweet in spring and summer witli the perfume of hawthorn 
 
and of wild roses. Hard by, beyond the line of trees, Shottery Brook 
 gleams and ripples ; and when the ardent lover went in quest of his 
 mistress, he caught the first sight of her thatched-roof cottage as he 
 crossed the wooden bridge over the tumbling cascade of the stream. 
 
 Stratford itself was, and is, a perfect model of an English country 
 town. The perfect parish church, is itself an epitome of our history since 
 the Norman Conquest. In Shakespeare's day the crypt or charnel-house, 
 part of the original Saxon church still existed; and very similar to it "to 
 whose foul mouth no loathsome air breathes in," was the vault that Juliet 
 saw, 
 
 " O'ercovercd quite with dead men's rattling bones, 
 With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls." 
 
 In 1597 he bought the "Great House" for his wife and daughters 
 to live in ; thither he retired some years later, and there Drayton and 
 Ben Jonson were entertained by him the day before his death. He was 
 buried in the chancel of the church at Stratford, where his monument holds 
 an honoured place on the north wall above the altar rails. Westminster 
 Abbey also contains a monument in the Poets' Corner to the Immortal 
 Bard, with an epitaph en- 
 graved on the pedestal by Ben 
 Jonson. 
 
 After Shakespeare's death 
 that cynical but faithful friend 
 wrote of him: "I loved the 
 man, and do honour his memory 
 on this side of idolatry as much 
 as any. He was indeed honest, 
 and of an open and free nature, 
 had an excellent phantasy, 
 brave notions and gentle ex- 
 pressions." 
 
CI ^\EAR, Cockney London, has been the birthplace of a long roll of 
 1 y poets. Chaucer, Spenser, Herrick, Cowley, Pope, first drew 
 breath in it ; and Milton was born in Bread Street, Cheapside, 
 well within sound of Bow Bells. Never did poet, we think, change his 
 residence so often as did the author of " Paradise Lost ; " and wherever 
 he went his house had a garden, a peep of sky, a strip of close-shaven 
 lawn, where he might — 
 
 "Rightly spell 
 Of every star that heaven doth show, 
 And every herb that sips the dew." 
 
 Milton was a Puritan, touched with a Greek delight in the joy and 
 loveliness of life. His father, a "scrivener," by profession, and a "man of 
 ingeniose tastes," was a skilled proficient on the lute and the organ ; a 
 composer of madrigals, and, in his day, a famed writer of sacred songs. 
 His son inherited the father's love of music. In his school and college 
 days at St. Paul's, and Christchurch at Cambridge, we can picture Milton, 
 in his leisure moments, playing on the viol, or practising on the organ 
 of the college chapel. It was, probably, his love of trees, which gave rise 
 to the tradition, that mulberry trees had been planted by his hand in 
 Cambridge. There is a hoary patriarch still standing in the Christchurch 
 College garden which is associated with his name. On leaving college, 
 1632, when he was four-and-twenty, the young man gave up all thoughts 
 of taking orders, and returned to his father's property at Horton in 
 Buckinghamshire. Wooded solitudes, and meadows, crowned in the 
 distance by Windsor Castle " bosom'd high in tufted trees," were the 
 haunts wherein he "nourished a youth sublime." Every step of that 
 
Lcaulilul country, whence London 
 
 is so easy of access, is classic 
 
 ground. Its woods, its meadows 
 
 and lieaths are twice hallowed 
 
 by memories of Milton ; for the 
 
 scenes that saw him in the vigour 
 
 and beauty of his manhood, beheld 
 
 him, in after j'ears, old, destitute, and blind. 
 
 These dells and forest aisles that inspired 
 
 "L' Allegro," "II Penseroso," "Comus," 
 
 " Lycidas," saw him brood over the last 
 
 touches of " Paradise Lost," and dream out 
 
 " Paradise Regained." Seldom has poet had so privileged a youth as 
 
 Milton's ; seldom so forlorn an old age. 
 
 A visit to Italy, which lasted some fifteen months, closed the first 
 blissful period. The traveller hastened his return to serve with 
 his pen Cromwell's Parliamentary party, then rising to power. The 
 second period of his life began with a deplorable blunder. A dismal 
 
 JMiitc^u'5 Moose, 
 CKaIJoat-3t- Qlle3. 
 
chapter in life's "Comedy of Errors" might be furnished by a record 
 of the mistakes made by men of genius in the choice of their wives. 
 The story of Milton's first matrimonial venture would rank among the 
 foremost of such blunders. The poet had removed to a house in 
 Aldersgate, large enough to accommodate pupils. One day Milton went 
 to Shotover, in Oxfordshire, apparently for a holiday ; he returned at the 
 end of a month with a wife of seventeen. Mary Powell, the girl he had 
 chosen for his life's companion, was the daughter of a jovial Royalist, 
 who kept open house. Her life had been spent amidst gay and reckless 
 surroundings. She cared nothing for intellectual pursuits. Before the 
 honeymoon was over the bride's soul quailed at the dulness, the solitariness, 
 the frugahty of her lot. 
 
 She asked, and obtained permission, to visit her family. She then 
 refused to return to her Puritan husband, and her family, under pretence 
 of disapproval of the poet's political views, sanctioned her disobedience. 
 Wounded to the quick by the ignominy heaped upon him, passionately 
 resenting the thraldom of a marriage that was no marriage, Milton wrote 
 his treatises on the justification of divorce. Two years later, when the 
 King's cause was lost, and Milton was one of the foremost figures of the 
 rising party, his father-in-law was ruined, and the wife then sought 
 reconciliation with her husband. Concealed in a friend's house at which 
 Milton visited, she flung herself at his feet ; he forgave her, took her 
 home, and magnanimously provided for her impoverished parents. The 
 house in the Barbican to which he then removed has disappeared. There 
 he published his first volume, containing " L'Allegro," " II Penseroso," 
 " Comus," " Lycidas." Mary Milton died seven years later in giving 
 birth to her fourth child. 
 
 The house, 19, York Street, Westminster, comparatively lately taken 
 down, occupied the site of the abode where many important domestic 
 events occurred in the life of the poet. There, he became totally blind* 
 there, he wrote some of his most important prose works. There he took 
 
his second wife, Catherine Woodcock, commemorated in one of his 
 sonnets as "his late espoused saint" in whose person "love, sweetness, 
 and goodness shined." All traces of this home has disappeared— the 
 cotton willow-tree the poet planted, the grounds in which he walked, have 
 vanished; workshops and other buildings cover the place. 
 
 Milton's third marriage seems to have been a prosaic and comfortable 
 union. If according to his tenets — 
 
 " Nothing lovelier can be found 
 
 In woman than to study household good." 
 
 Ehzabeth Minshull, his third wife, must have proved a thoroughly 
 satisfactory partner. " God have mercy, Betty," he is reported to have 
 said to her, one day, when she had prepared some dainty for his dinner, 
 " I see thou wilt perform according to thy promise, in providing me such 
 dishes as I think fit while I live, and when I die thou knowest I have 
 left thee all." 
 
 In his old age, in his ruin and blindness, the poet appeals to our 
 
 tenderest veneration. We seem to see him as his friend, the Quaker 
 
 Elmwood saw him at Chalfont, as Dryden describes him, sitting at 
 
 the organ under those rusty green hangings. We see his pale serene face 
 
 which life's tragedy has marked with lines of noble beauty. His clear 
 
 grey eyes seek the light that for him was quenched ere half his days 
 
 were counted. 
 
 " though bUnd of sight, 
 
 Despised, and thought-extinguislied, quite, 
 
 With inward eyes illuminated, 
 
 His fiery virtue roused 
 
 From under ashes into sudden flames." 
 Milton died of an attack of gout, on Sunday, November 8th, 1674, 
 and was buried in the chancel of St. Giles, Cripplegate, near his father. 
 His name marks the spot ; but there is much reason to fear that the 
 report of the profanation of the leaden coffin, in 1790, and of the 
 dispersion of his bones by the parochial authorities, is true. 
 
SHSLLSr. . 
 
 ^^HELLEY'S personality is one of the most puzzling in literature. Of 
 (J no one is it so easy to narrate episodes far from flattering to good 
 sense and right judgment, and yet, of no other poet are there 
 more charming stories to prove how winsome, and loveable, and noble- 
 minded he was. Matthew Arnold was wont to declare that, while every 
 poet "had a bee in his bonnet, Shelley had a whole hive." Of a truth, 
 this strange complex being either repels or irresistibly fascinates, both as 
 a man and as a poet. An eminent French critic has declared that it 
 is impossible to say whether Shelley was more a saintly sinner or a 
 sinful saint. The remark is apt, for the poet is much more the " fallen 
 angel," than the " born sinner." 
 
 His childhood, with its early sorrow ; his agony of boyhood ; his 
 turbulent, enthusiastic youth at Oxford, in Ireland, and in London; his 
 premature and ill-fated marriage ; and his abrupt departure for abroad, 
 with his beloved Mary, daughter of his "friend and master," Godwin; 
 these and other episodes make the story of his life in England, one of 
 singular pathos, as well as of puzzling contradictions. It is to Italy, 
 that we look for happy associations of Shelley — always excepting the 
 brief period when he haunted the Thames-reaches about Waldergrave 
 and Marlow, and wrote " Alastor," that wonderful unconscious poetic 
 biography. 
 
 The poet's writing and reading-rooms were ever the glens, the moun- 
 tain-sides, the woods and shores. "Prometheus Unbound" was composed 
 among the solitary wastes of the then weed-grown ruins of the Baths 
 of Caracalla, overlooking Rome. "Adonais," that incomparable dirge for 
 Keats, was first sung near the banks of the Serchio. The exquisite 
 
"Cloud" was inspired by the brooding sweetness of the Pisan sky. At 
 Leghorn, one evening, as he wandered among the myrtle groves, through 
 which darted the fire-flies, a lark poured from the sun-set sky the music 
 that found words in the lyric we all know and love. 
 
 At Naples a melancholy oppressed Shelley. Our illustration shows 
 the scenes upon which he looked — the Bay, the blue and everchanging 
 waters of which reflected Vesuvius, " A smoke by day and a flame by 
 night." There, also, the " Stanzas Written in Dejection," that most 
 wonderful poem of despondency ever penned, was inspired by a romantic 
 incident in the poet's life. 
 
 How beautiful is this verse — 
 
 "Yet now despair itself is mild, 
 Even as the winds and waters are ; 
 I could lie down like a tired child, 
 And weep away the life of care 
 Which I have borne, and yet must bear, 
 Till death, like sleep, might steal on me, 
 And I might feel in the warm air, 
 My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea 
 Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monoton)^" 
 " Epipsychidion," that perfect lyrical poem which the poet ' described 
 to a friend as an " idealised history of my Hfe and feelings," owed its 
 creation to Shelley's ideal love for Emiha Viviani. The young contessina, 
 a girl of great beauty, and of varied mental accomphshments, was shut 
 up, together with her sister, in a convent by their jealous stepmother. The 
 chivalrous, emotional poet heard of it, and he and his wife, after consider- 
 able trouble, succeeded in gaining access to the immured one, and 
 
 solaced her with frequent visits, books, and flowers. 
 Shelley, for a time, fell deeply in love with her, 
 worshipping in her his Ideal of Beauty. Later, 
 he was disillusioned, but fortunately not until he 
 had written this masterpiece. 
 
Boating was ever Shelley's favourite recreation. He was on the water 
 by night and day, in moonHght and sunshine, whether on the lagoons of 
 Venice, on the lake of Como, on the wild and beautiful Gulf of Spezzia ; 
 as, in his younger days he had been on the Thames, at Marlow. A 
 short time before the journey from which he was never to return, he 
 rowed out to sea, in a light skiflf, with the wife of the friend who was so 
 soon to perish with him. He took her out far from the shore and pausing, 
 rested absorbed in his thoughts, and watched the varying spectacle of sky 
 and sea. She spoke to him, he did not answer ; he had forgotten the 
 presence of his terrified companion. The flat-bottomed boat was one which 
 would upset with the slightest jerk. "I will never again put my foot in 
 that horrid coffin — he is seeking after what we all avoid — death," cried his 
 companion, as at length she jumped on shore, little guessing how prophetic 
 were her words. 
 
 At Casa Magni, shortly before the fatal journey, two strange, portent- 
 like incidents occurred to Shelley. He saw a vision of Allegra, Byron'a 
 daughter, rise from the sea, joyously clap her hands and beckon to him. 
 On another occasion he saw a cloaked figure approach his bedside and 
 sign to him to follow, and when it reached the sitting-room the figure 
 unveiled its face, in which Shelley, horrified, recognised his own features. 
 
 On the I St July, 1822, Shelley and Captain Wilhams went to Leg- 
 horn in their httle yacht, the And, and there met the Leigh Hunts, who 
 had then arrived from England. On the 8th they set sail to return home. 
 A storm was gathering. Their progress was watched by Captain Roberts 
 from the top of the Leghorn lighthouse, till in the hurricane a whirlwind 
 enveloped the frail boat and hid it from sight. Twenty minutes later, 
 when the darkness of the tempest had cleared away, no sign of the yacht 
 was to be seen. Days of miserable expectancy passed, and at length, 
 news came to the anxious watchers at San Terenzo that the two bodies 
 had been washed ashore. The faithful friend, Trelawney, recognised Shelley 
 by the two volumes in his pocket : one of Keat's poems, with the page 
 
turned down at " The Eve of St. Agnes," the other a Greek tragedy. 
 The bodies were cremated on the shore near Viareggio ; wine, myrrh 
 and frankincense were cast into the flames. " More wins was poured 
 over Shelley's dead body, than he drank during the course of his life," 
 says Trelawney, grimly. The poet's ashes were laid in the cemetery 
 adjoining the burial-ground where his little son and Keats lay buried. 
 *' I think it is the most beautiful and solemn cemetery I ever beheld," 
 Shelley had once written to a friend. In " Adonais," he had sung — 
 
 " The soft sky smiles — the low wind whispers near: 
 'Tis Adonais calls! Oh! hasten thither! 
 No more let life divide what death can join together." 
 
 The flat stone, encircled with acanthus and violets, which marks the 
 place where the ashes rest, lies under the shadow of one of the weed-grown 
 towers of the ancient Roman wall, and near to the Pyramid of Caius 
 Cestius. The Poet's name, the dates of his birth and death, 4th August, 
 1792, and 8th July, 1822, and the words Cor Cordiiim, are graven on the 
 stone, with a snatch of "Ariel's" song beneath — 
 "Nothing of him that doth fade, 
 But doth suffer a sea-change 
 Into something rich and strange." 
 
"POT'S. 
 
 (» # HERE are some advantages accruing from a genius to poetry, 
 X and they are all I can think of: the agreeable power of self- 
 ' amusement when a man is idle or alone ; the privilege of 
 
 being admitted into the best company ; the freedom of saying as many 
 careless things as other people, without being so severely remarked 
 upon." Alexander Pope found yet another advantage which he does 
 not enumerate, the acquisition of fame, which was the ruling passion 
 of his life. 
 
 His education was of the most desultory description. His school- 
 days were of short duration on account of his physical delicacy, but he 
 was an insatiable reader, and especially of the English, French, Italian, 
 Latin and Greek poets. " I followed," he says, " everywhere my fancy 
 led me, and was like a boy gathering flowers in the woods and fields 
 just as they fell in his way." He began to write poetry very early: 
 
 "As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, 
 1 lisped in numbers, for the numbers came." 
 
 The genius of the little Englishman revealed itself in the Ode to 
 Windsor, part of which was composed when he was sixteen, and in which 
 Diana is described as having 
 
 " Cynthus' top forsook for Windsor shade," 
 
 and where every glade and alley of the English wood is over-run with 
 Greek Nymphs and Gods. 
 
 A nostalgia for the intellectual life of the metropolis, drew Pope, in 
 early manhood, to London. When he was twelve, a friend had once taken 
 him to Wills' coffee-house, and he had there seen Dr3'den, his master in 
 
the metrical art, presiding over the assembled 'wits of the da}', all drinking 
 punch and smoking big clay pipes. Now, Dryden was dead, and the glory 
 of Wills' coffee-room had set. Addison reigned over a senate of wits at 
 Buttons' coffee-house, at a stone's throw from Covent Garden. Pope was 
 
 C_-\v-icken.k.an-\_.. 
 
 early admitted into the circle; but ere long we find the sensitive, irritable 
 little man engaged in quarrels with the master and disciples. When his 
 translation of the " Illiad" first appeared, the diminutive deformed poet 
 was courted by the leading members of the fashionable world, by 
 publishers and critics, and the self-taught cripple became the dread of 
 his enemies, and the leading literary man of his day. 
 
Life in London proved too exciting an ordeal for the poet's "tender, 
 crazy little carcase." In 1715, he therefore bade the "dear, droll, distract- 
 ing town farewell," and settled in Twickenham. 
 
 He was comparatively rich ; by his translation of Homer, alone, he 
 made ^g,ooo. The embellishing of his cottage and grounds, sufficed to 
 fill his days, together with the writing of poetry, which was " my only 
 profession, and idleness my only pleasure." 
 
 Pope's quaint little drawings of ground plans, of porticoes, of columns, 
 arches, etc., may be seen in the British Museum ; they are scribbled, for 
 the most part, on backs of letters. His cottage and everything about 
 it dehghted him; the Thames washed the edge of the lawn — 
 
 "No seas so rich, so gay no banks appear, 
 No lake so gentle and no springs so clear." 
 
 His garden measured about five acres, and was enclosed by three lanes. 
 Pope, Horace Walpole tells us "twisted, twirled, rhymed and harmonised 
 this bit of ground till it appeared two or three sweet little lawns 
 opening on one another, and the whole surrounded by impenetrable woods." 
 The "impenetrable woods" were a plantation at the back of the house 
 on the other side of the road, which cut the poet's property in two. 
 To unite "his wilderness" to his lawns the poet built his underground 
 grotto. The building of this famous "shadowy cave" was his hobby. 
 His friends indulged him in it, and sent for its adornment pieces of 
 spar, coral, crystals, humming-birds' nests. Pope has commemorated 
 this grotto in verse and prose. It is "a temple wholly composed of 
 shells in the rustic manner." The shells are interspersed with "looking- 
 glasses in regular form," and one of these in the shape of a star, adorns 
 the ceiling. When the alabaster lamp is lit the cave glistens as "with 
 lingering drops." 
 
 "There my retreat the best companions grace, 
 Chiefs out of war and statesmen out of place." 
 
Then came Bolingbroke, proud of his thirty years' Iriendship with 
 the poet ; also Lord Peterborough, the amazing soldier who boasted he 
 had seen more kings and postillions than any man in Europe. Bathurst 
 who had a craze for landscape gardening, and came down to discuss his 
 hobby with Pope, and fat, genial Gay wrote a special poem to celebrate the 
 completion of the grotto. Swift, too, made a short stay at the cottage, and 
 departed, vowing that the house was too sm.all to accommodate two valetu- 
 dinarians. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whom Pope began by flattering 
 outrageously and ended by loathing, was numbered among his guests. A 
 host of wits, poets, statesmen, fair ladies, a crowd of candidates for 
 fame, all eager for Pope's approval, wended their way to the cottage, 
 of which not a stone now remains. Only the grotto survives. In its cool 
 shade we may pause a moment and picture the friends who there sat watch- 
 ing on a Summer day "the sails on the river passing suddenly and vanishing 
 as through a perspective glass." In the shadowy crowd we discern two 
 women's figures, Maria Blunt, the woman he loved best after his mother, 
 and that simple, homely mother, whose letters the poet treasures, whose 
 dead face appears to him like that of a saint. It is pleasant to think 
 of Pope at Twickenham, driving up to London, from time to time, in 
 his coach, a " Homer in a nutshell," as Atterby called him ; or rowed 
 down the river by the waterman whose constant service rendered him a 
 member of the establishment. " Paper sparing Pope," as Swift ironically 
 dubbed him, because of his habit of scribbling down every fleeting thought 
 on scraps of paper, sums up his whole life in the line he wrote of 
 himself "The life of a wit is a warfare upon earth." 
 
 Pope died in his cottage at Twickenham, May, 1744, ^^'^ ^^^s buried 
 in Twickenham Church, by the side of his parents. 
 
OLNEY, in North Bucks, with its adjacent flats, is not noted for 
 picturesque beauty; but it was here that an eminent English poet 
 found such peace as he was destined to enjoy. It was but the 
 peace of an Orestes pursued by the Furies, an interval of calm between 
 the dire torments of a mental disorder, but perhaps all the more precious 
 and all the more beautiful on that account. For it was at Olney that 
 Cowper first came regularly under the care of the Unwins, and while 
 that care lasted he always had a solace, and a refuge against the clouds 
 of mental darkness which threatened to overwhelm him. Without some- 
 one to guide and care for him this, in a very literal sense, "child" of 
 genius could not have steered his way through the rough world. He was 
 constitutionally insane. It is absurd to attribute his malady to a mere 
 disappointment in love. It was an inherited tendency, and it required but 
 the slightest shock to his exquisitely refined susceptibilities for its rapid 
 development. Sensibility, which is a grace in others, was in him a disease. 
 As a young man, he became insane with terror at the prospect of receiving 
 a good appointment on the Parliamentary establishment of the House of 
 Lords. The dread of a short oral examination by members of the House 
 unsettled his mind. He tried to hang himself at his chambers in the 
 Temple, where he was at that time studying for the bar. That desperate 
 attempt conclusively proved to his friends his inability to pursue any 
 public vocation. He was well-connected, the son of a clergyman, the 
 great nephew of an earl, and at the time of his birth in 1731, interest was 
 the great passport to success in all the professions, and in this particular 
 he would have encountered no difficulties. It came to be understood in 
 his family that he was to be watched over; but a visit to Huntingdon led 
 to his acquaintance with the Unwins, and his final adoption into their 
 
household. The mode of Hfe in the Unwin household was eminently 
 suited to his spirit, deeply tinged as this was with religious melancholy. 
 "We breakfast commonly between eight and nine," he writes in 1766: 
 " till eleven, we read, either the Scripture, or the sermons of some faithful 
 teacher of these holy mysteries ; at eleven, we attend Divine service, 
 which is performed here once a day, and from twelve to three we separate 
 and amuse ourselves as we please." The nature of the social relaxations 
 may be inferred from his well-known lines : 
 
 "Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast, 
 Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round, 
 And, while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn 
 Throws up a steamy column, and the cups, 
 That cheer, but not inebriate, wait on each. 
 So let us welcome peaceful evening in." 
 
 What a picture of quiet contentment ! Yet beneath the peace 
 quiet of his outward lifi lies the haunting 
 terror ever present with him, that he is doomed 
 to eternal damnation. 
 
 After the death of Mr. Unwin by a fall 
 from his horse, the widow removed to Olney, 
 and as the unhappy man of genius could not 
 possibly exist without her, Cowper accompanied 
 her. Southey describes Olney as the most 
 northerly town in Buckinghamshire, consisting 
 of one long street, with the houses built of 
 stone, but thatched; and with a great church 
 remarkable for its lofty spire. At Olney, the Ct>/^r 
 course of the Ouse becomes so winding thai 
 the distance thence to St. Neots, which is J *" ^"^ 
 
 and 
 
about twenty miles by land, is about seventy by the stream. Here Cowper 
 met the fatahstic Mr. Newton, a clergyman of the most pronounced 
 Calvmistic views, who, in spite of his genuine friendly feeling to the poet, 
 rendered his depression the gloomier by suggesting that he was possibly 
 shut out from all hope of the Divine mercy. Cowper acquired a certain 
 resignation of despair by constantly dwehing on the thought, but at times 
 it quite unsettled his reason. While Mrs. Unwin was with him, however, 
 her exquisitely tender ministrations partially banished the haunting spectres 
 from his mind. She taught him to find the purest and the most soothing 
 delights in his garden, his summer-house, and in his tame hares— Puss, 
 Tiney, and Bess — whose characters, as well as habits, he has himself 
 so felicitously described. "Puss," he says, "would leap into my lap, 
 raise himself up upon his hinder-feet, and bite the hair from my temples. 
 He would suffer me to take him up, and to carry him about in my 
 arms, and has more than once fallen fast asleep upon my knee." His 
 literary work was, at first, merely the private diversion of an afflicted 
 mind, in its lucid intervals ; and though he had written much, he 
 published little before his fiftieth year.' He was encouraged to publish, 
 as he had been encouraged to write, by his faithful mentor Mrs. Unwin, 
 and he suddenly realised that he had become the most famous poet of 
 his time. The recluse in his garden was soon the chief literary figure 
 in England ; his summer-house was the British temple of the Muse. 
 " He calls it his boudoir," says Lady Hesketh, in one of her lively 
 letters to her sister Theodora, Cowper's boyhood's love. " It has a doer 
 and a window, just holds a small table with a desk and two chairs, but 
 though there are two chairs, and two persons might be contained therein, it 
 would be with a degree of difficulty. For this cause, as I make a point 
 of not disturbing a poet in his retreat, I go not there." "The Task" 
 is a notable poem, though it is too didactic for the taste of the present 
 da3\ Like all his works, it was directly inspired by feminine counsel, but 
 in this instance not that of IMrs. Unwin. It was Lady Austen who 
 
suggested to him 
 his theme. He is 
 eminently the poet 
 of the home, atri 
 of all its associ 
 tions. When he 
 was not writing 
 poems full of moral 
 maxims and good 
 advice, or some of 
 the most beautiful 
 hymns in our 
 language, he was 
 turning an ode on ^- -^ 
 
 "An Inkstand Dried in the Sun," on "The Death of Mrs. Throckmorton's 
 Bullfinch," or on " The Feather Hangings of Mrs. Montagu." It is 
 impossible to think of him without recalling to mind the gentle lady — 
 whose death he survived but two or three years — his garden, his summer- 
 house, and Olney Church. The hills of Surrey, as the nearest approach 
 to mountains he had ever seen, frightened him. He longed for the 
 
 plain with its placid beauties, for the 
 gentle, but tortuous river, which was, 
 in some sense, the image of his un- 
 !^,. eventful, yet troubled life. He wrote 
 
 of himself: — 
 
 ^ "I was the stricken deer, that left the herd, 
 Long since." 
 " Here much I ruminate, as much I may, 
 With other views of men and manners now 
 Than once, and others of a life to come." 
 
rHE thought of Gray is closely associated with that of Burnham 
 Beeches, which the gentle poet may be said to have discovered. 
 During a college vacation, Gray visited an uncle at Burnham, in 
 the neighbourhood of Stoke-Pogis. The old gentleman had been a 
 famous hunter in his day, but, owing to the gout, was at this time, 
 reduced to a state of grumbling inactivity. He held his delicate, dreamy 
 nephew in contempt for preferring walking to riding, and reading to 
 hunting. The ex-sportsman's dogs sat on all the chairs in the house, 
 and completely ousted the poet. In self-defence, one day, Gray wandered 
 off in search of some quiet spot, where he could absorb himself in a 
 favourite book unmolested. He came upon a beautiful glade, "a vale 
 and hill covered with most venerable beeches, and other very reverend 
 vegetables, that, like most ancient people, are always dreaming out their 
 old stories to the wind." There he read Virgil by the hour ; and the 
 hares and squirrels played about him in his retreat as they played about 
 Adam in Paradise. Thus he writes to Horace Walpole, his brilliant 
 college chum, who had taken an immense fancy to Gray from the 
 moment they met when small boys at Eton. An avenue of lime trees 
 in the college grounds called the " Poets' Walk," is dedicated to Gray, 
 and his friend who, it is said, often paced up and down it together. 
 Walpole has told us that they were not athletes, that they "never made an 
 expedition against bargemen, or won a match at cricket;" nevertheless, in 
 the famous " Ode to Eton,'' the poet paints a robust and healthy boyhood : 
 " Say, Father Thames, for thou hast seen 
 
 Full many a sprightly race, 
 
 Disporting on thy margent green, 
 
 The paths of pleasure trace ; 
 
Who foremost now, delight to cleave 
 With pliant arm, thy glassy wave ? 
 The captive linnet which enthral? 
 What idle progeny succeed 
 To chase the rolling circle's speed 
 Or urge the flying ball?" 
 
 When his student days were over, he and Horace Walpole made 
 an interesting tour in France and Italy. Unfortunately the friends 
 quarrelled, and Gray returned to England alone. It is said that since 
 Milton, no such accomplished English traveller had visited those classic 
 shores. Gray reached London in time to see his father die : the elder 
 Gray had been a squanderer, a bad husband, a careless father. Mrs. Gray 
 had procured the money for her son's education, by carrying on a business, 
 in partnership, with her sister. After the death of his father. Gray, who 
 was devotedly attached to his mother, took her down to the sylvan village 
 of Stoke-Pogis, in Bucks, and there established her and her two sisters 
 in a comfortable home. West End House — where the three ladies lived 
 
 to the end of their days, and 
 to which the poet paid constant 
 visits — was situated at the end 
 of the lane leading to Stoke 
 Common. It was a simple 
 farmstead, two stories high, 
 with a porch over the front 
 door opening out into a garden 
 stocked with flowers. There 
 we picture our poet 
 
 *' Brushing with hasty steps 
 
 the dew away 
 To meet the sun upon the 
 upland lawn," 
 
or loitering In the rising field behind the house — crowned by a height on 
 which a summer-house still stands — and observing the habits of the birds 
 and flowers ; noting down as was his wont, such delicately thrilling announce- 
 ments as the arrival of the first white butterfly, the first song of the lark, 
 and the first blossom on the almond-tree. There he wrote "The Ode to 
 Eton College," and there, seven years after its commencement, he finished 
 the immortal " Elegy in a Countr}^ Churchyard." The ivy-covered church, 
 with the tombstones gathered round it, the simple, peaceful scenes in the 
 gathering twilight, inspired that exquisite poem, one of the most perfect 
 in our language, whose popularity no changes of taste or fashion have 
 diminished. General Wolff, as he rowed up to Quebec on the eve of 
 his death is said to have repeated those sweet and solemn words. Gray 
 lived the life of a recluse and student in College Chambers, of Pembroke 
 Hall, Cambridge, but every vacation he came down to the quiet house, 
 in the peaceful tree-embowered country town. We can picture the gentle 
 poet, made much of by the three old ladies who loved and were proud of 
 him ; and with good reason, for Gray was considered in his own day 
 to be " Perhaps the most learned man in Europe." The great people 
 of Stoke Manor House also courted the poet. These ladies had 
 discovered that at West End House there "lurked a wicked imp they 
 call a poet," and vowed they must make his acquaintance. One day 
 they arrived, and finding him out, left a mysterious message, requesting 
 his presence at Stoke House. Gray and his hostesses soon became 
 warm friends. There are traces of a long flirtation between the middle- 
 aged poet and the heiress ; in his note-book appears dehghtful jottings 
 concerning the stately gardens at Stoke, with its old-fashioned flowers, 
 and south wall covered with clusters of fruit. 
 
 After ]\Irs. Gray's death, and that of the two old aunts, West End 
 House was shut up and Gray betook himself to London. The British 
 Museum was thrown open for the first time to the public on the 15th of 
 January, 1759, and Gray was among the visitors that day. He had 
 
settled down in Southampton Row, to be near the shrine of learning. 
 In one of his delightful letters we have a picture of the Bloomsbury of 
 those days. " Here is air, sunshine, and quiet to comfort you," he writes. 
 On the death of Gibber, Gray was offered the laureateship, but declmed 
 it. In 1768, "the gentleman v/ho sometimes writes for his amusement," 
 
 was elected Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, where he lived 
 the life of a recluse, in quaintly decorated chambers in Pembroke Hall, 
 until his death on the 22nd July, 1772. He was buried at Stoke Pogis 
 by the side of his mother, and in the adjacent Park, a monument has 
 been erected to his memory. 
 
jryO'Be'R^T "BUI^OX^S is the lyric poet of joy, of love, of nature. 
 ^ i_ Born in days of decorous ideals, ever chasing the fleeting phan- 
 toms of delight, and dying in the ardour of his vain quest. Burns 
 reminds us of those mythical Greek figures, half-animal, half-god, those 
 fabled Centaurs and Fauns, with their exuberant delight in physical 
 life, their gift of music and wise speech. It is easy to understand 
 Burns' impatience of restraint, his imperious demand for enjoyment at 
 any price, his sympathy with the drunken Tam O'Shanter's triumphant 
 mood of mind, 
 
 " Kings may be blest, but Tam was glorious, 
 O'er the ills of life victorious — " 
 when we think of the hardships and privations of his youth, which he 
 describes as " this kind of life, the cheerless gloom of a hermit, the 
 unceasing gloom of a galley slave. 
 
 He was a perfect Don Juan in his susceptibility to the charms of 
 the "Lassies O!" the rustic Jeans, Nannies, and Marys. 
 
 He had a manly sympathy with the weak, tenderness for all dumb 
 creatures. Saint Francis could not have worded a gentler address to 
 the frightened mouse — 
 
 ** Wee, sleekit, cow'rin', tim'rous beastie, 
 O, what a panic's in thy breastie. 
 I'm truly sorry man's dominion 
 Has broken nature's social union, 
 An' justifies that ill opinion, 
 
 Which makes thee startle 
 At me, thy poor earth-born companion, 
 
 An' fellow mortal — " 
 
which he had crushed with his plough, or uttered more pitying words 
 to the wounded hare ; or spoken more touchingly to the 
 " Wee, modest crimson-tipped flower." 
 His love of country, his ambitious independent spirit, his pride in 
 the exploits of Wallace, make him the representative of Scottish genius. 
 It was his desire 
 
 "That I, for poor auld Scotland's sake, 
 Some useful plan or book could make, 
 Or sing a song at least." 
 
 He has touched with sweetness and glory the hills, the rivers, the 
 braes of his dear native region, Ayrshire. Born on the banks of his 
 "Bonnie Doon," in an "auld clay biggin," built by his father, the poet 
 was familiar since early childhood with " Alloway Kirk," the haunted 
 burying ground which was the scene of " Tam's " adventure. Distressing 
 poverty surrounded his early years ; a poverty that was ennobled by the 
 father's heroic struggle against adversity, his paternal solicitude for his 
 children's education, his patriarchal piety, all of which the son com- 
 memorated in " The Cotter's Saturday night." 
 
Burns was fifteen when " a bonnie, sweet sonsie lass," a year 
 younger than himself, his partner in the labours of the harvest field 
 inspired him to write. His first song was adapted to the melody of her 
 favourite reel. From that time the lad was always in love, or the 
 confidant of other love-smitten swains. The lassies, Wallace, and Nature, 
 inspired his songs. 
 
 When Burns settled near Mauchline he was head of the family. His 
 ambition to distinguish himself was not confined to literature, he was 
 proud of his personal appearance and his conversational powers. He was 
 the only man in the parish who wore his hair tied up ; his gaudy red 
 and white check plaid was draped in a peculiar way. 
 
 With his fine dark eyes, the finest Sir Walter Scott had ever seen 
 in any man's head, his gift of winning words in speech and song, 
 Burns was a brilliant personality. One evening, when, with his little dog 
 following at his heels as he danced, he assisted at a penny ball given by 
 the young men and women of Mauchline, he expressed a loud wish 
 " that he could get any of the lasses to like him as well as his dog." A 
 few days later the dog, the four-footed "Dens ex machinae " in this 
 unhappy affair, ran over some linen a young girl was bleaching on 
 Mauchline Green. The girl was Jean Armour, who laughingly inquired of 
 the poet if he had found a lassie to love him as well as did his dog. 
 Burns was not long in replying : — 
 
 " Though mountains rise, and deserts howl, 
 
 And oceans roar between ; 
 Yet, dearer than my deathless soul, 
 
 I still would love my Jean." 
 
 Shortly after, when Mauchline village was ablaze with indignation, 
 when the Kirk authorities invited the dark-eyed Don Juan to come and 
 sit on the stool of repentance ; when the door of Jean's home was shut 
 upon him, we find our poet standing upon one of the banks of Ayr, 
 with Highland Mary on the ether, holding a Bible between them, and 
 
vowing eternal fidelity. The dainty copy of the 
 Scriptures in two volumes, presented by Burns 
 to his new love on this occasion, is preserved in 
 the Burns' Monument at Alloway, near Ayr. On 
 
 the fly-leaf are inscribed 
 ,3 - texts, as to the binding 
 
 nature of an oath. The 
 betrothed couple parted, 
 and Mary went to visit 
 her family in the High- 
 lands before joining Burns 
 as his wife. She never 
 returned; death took her 
 from the poet, who years 
 afterwards wrote the well- 
 known poem, "To Mary 
 in Heaven." 
 
" That sacred hour can I forget, 
 Can I forget the hallowed grove, 
 Where by the winding Ayr we met, 
 To live one day of parting love ? " 
 
 In Edinburgh, where, shortly after, we find Burns, all society goes 
 mad in its reception of the "ploughman-poet." The "Duchess of Gordon 
 and all the gay world" made him welcome. When society grew weary 
 of the lion of the 'season. Burns returned to Mauchline, married Jean 
 Armour, his old love, and settled down on a farm — Ellisland — close 
 to Dumfries. In the beautiful grounds of " Friar's Carse," " Tam 
 O'Shanter " was written, in a single day. Burns composed it, as he 
 walked up and down his favourite path at Nithside. 
 
 As a means of adding to his livelihood. Burns accepted the post of 
 exciseman, offered to him by Government, and fulfilled its distasteful duties 
 with energy, if not always with tact. Thereupon he gave up Ellisland, 
 and settled in Dumfries, on his salary of £']o a year. There is no sadder 
 story than that of the close of Burns' life. Out of the darkness float 
 songs of ineffable sweetness, the strains of "Auld Lang Syne," of "Wander- 
 ing Willie," and of "Highland Mary." In his 37th year, on July 21st, 
 1796, death came as a deliverer to him. He was buried with pomp and 
 much mourning in Dumfries Kirk-yard. 
 
 
 
rHE plainest of plain men, gifted with genius, a peasant with the 
 insight of a God ; thus Wordsworth appears to us. He did not 
 i-dealize, in the ordinary sense of the word : he saw too straight for 
 that, but he saw the folk around him, as their Maker might see them. 
 He saw through their common exterior to the soul within them, and the 
 poor, the prosaic, the disgraced, became heroic and pathetic. Lucy Gray, 
 Peter Bell, Widow Blake, might seem to most of us unworthy of notice, 
 to Wordsworth, they are as notable as the gifted and high-born. He has 
 been called, or rather miscalled, the chief of the Lake Poets. Had he been 
 placed in the Tropics, he would have described the pine forests with the 
 same exquisiteness of detail and grandeur of general effect as he has 
 written of his native country ; he would have interpreted the dwellers 
 there, with the same spiritual recognition of the dignity or ignominy of 
 their lot. It was this sense of the sacredness of all human beings, that 
 made him espouse so passionately the cause of the French Revolution. 
 When the plain man in Wordsworth is in the ascendant, he becomes 
 tedious, for his strength and his weakness lie in this union of supreme 
 insight with the bald simplicity of a peasant. 
 
 It is a common error to regard Wordsworth as a prosaic rhymer, 
 who occasionally rises to the heights of great poetry, and indeed one is 
 led to this conclusion by whole desert tracts of his verse varied but by 
 the slightest oasis of beauty. And one feels annoyed that he should 
 have written so much that is wortliless, but when one finds from his 
 own confession, that his baldness of language, his dullness of description 
 are intentional, the whole of his work assumes a different aspect. 
 
Wordsworth was consciously, and of set purpose, leading a revolution 
 against the ornate artificial-flowery style of the eighteenth century poets — 
 a revolution in which Burns unconsciously bore his part, and of which 
 our Tennyson is the eldest born son — and in this effort Wordsworth 
 fought against his own soul's impulses — as much pains was taken to 
 avoid poetic diction as other men take to produce it — and thus he 
 sacrificed his poetry to his idea, and produced a thousand bald lines 
 for one gem, such as the poems to Lucy, but he did what he meant to 
 do, and how many of us can say as much ? 
 
 The tawdry sentiment of the powder-puff and patch-box poets of 
 the eighteenth century is a thing of the past, and it is to Wordsworth 
 and Burns that we owe its extinction. It is in his poems to Lucy and 
 his sonnets that Wordsworth is at his greatest, that he rises above 
 criticism, " into the Heaven where the immortals sit." 
 
 Youth rarely loves Wordsworth — he has none of the glow and 
 glitter that catch "sweet and twenty" — Twenty often prefers the ball- 
 room to a hill-side — and Byron to Wordsworth — but as we grow older, 
 we love more and more, the elm-trees and meadows, the moorlands and 
 the fens, the sunset lights, the dews of dawn awake new and more 
 intense delight, and Wordsworth's poetry grows to be "as a beloved 
 hand laid cool upon our forehead when it burns of some wild fever." 
 
 Every part of the Lake country is sanctified by his genius. He has 
 breathed a soul into its hills, its dales, its tarns. About Grasmere 
 and Rydal, however, cluster the most intimate associations with his life. 
 Born at Cockermouth, on the outskirts of that beautiful region, the poet's 
 childish recollections were of Derwent Water and of Skiddaw, which caught 
 the sunset glory as it reared its head against the eastern sky. He went 
 to school at Hawkshead, " the beloved vale," near Esthwaite Water, and 
 there with the spirits of a healthy ten-year-old boy joined in the sports of 
 his comrades. But even at this early age he held "unconscious intercourse 
 with beauty, old as creation." To the age of fourteen Wordsworth dates 
 
his " consciousness of 
 the infinite variety of 
 natural appearances 
 which had been un- 
 noticed by the poet 
 of any age or country, 
 so far as I was ac- 
 quainted with them. 
 I made a resolution 
 to supply in some 
 degree this deficiency." 
 
 In the " Prelude," 
 events of his life, 
 
 XVater. 
 
 we folloAv the history of the outward and spiritual 
 until the time when, disappointed with the results of 
 the French Revolution, he returns to 
 Grasmere with his sister Dorothy. If 
 .ever there comes to be written the 
 history of the worthy sisters 
 of great men, Dorothy Words- 
 worth's name^vill figure in the 
 
 'first rank, beside tha'fj 
 of Herschell's siste: 
 and of Eugenie de 
 ^' Guerin. 
 
 Rydcu 
 
To Wordsworth 
 
 " Her voice was like a hidden bird that sang, 
 The thought of her was like a flash of light, 
 Or an unseen companionship, a breath 
 Of fragrance independent of the wind." 
 The house where the brother and sister spent frugal days, was covered 
 with roses and honeysuckles. It had a bit of orchard and a garden. They 
 boated together, took long excursions together, read together. Both had a 
 passionate love of nature. Dorothy kept a diary, and in it she noted 
 down simple stories of country folk ; some of the delicate effects of nature 
 that she saw and recorded furnished themes for her brother's poems. On 
 an expedition to Ullswater, as they approach the lake, she describes how 
 they came upon daffodils close to the water's edge. "I never saw daffodils 
 so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about them ; some rested 
 their heads on the stones as on a pillow ; the rest tossed, and reeled, and 
 danced, and seemed as if they verily danced with the wind, they looked 
 so gay and glancing." These were the daffodils of which the poet sang, 
 
 " I wandered lonely as a cloud 
 That floats on high, o'er vales and hills, 
 
 When all at once I saw a crowd, 
 A host, of golden daffodils ; 
 
 Beside the lake, beneath the trees, 
 
 Fluttering and dancing in the breeze." 
 
 After her brother's marriage Dorothy continued to be an inmate of his 
 house. The road from Grasmere to Keswick, where Southey and Coleridge 
 lived, and that over Kirkstone to Ullswater, are peopled with memories of 
 the Wordsworths of Thirlmere. The fair lake which the Corporation of 
 Manchester has turned into a reservoir was the trysting place of the poets, 
 and the rock, on which the friends and Dorothy Wordsworth carved their 
 initials, is now doubtless submerged. 
 
 When Wordsworth was appointed to the Distributorship of stamps for 
 Westmoreland and Cumberland, the family removed to Rydal Mount. 
 The white house stands in "a sea of foliage" some yards from the road. 
 
<^^-^: 
 
 . -::u ^i.j_ 
 
 '■'■'a, VJ'SiVsjv 
 
 
 "H:r 
 
 A flight of steps leads to the entrance. 
 In Wordsworth's time, the rooms 
 on the ground floor, the dining- 
 room, breakfast-room, and hbrary 
 were simply furnished. The library 
 contained a good collection of 
 standard books, busts of Scott and 
 Wordsworth, and some fine engrav- 
 ings. In the garden was centred 
 the poetry and distinction of the 
 poet's home. There was the larch 
 tree from which for years sang a 
 faithful thrush, and among the 
 
 branches of the laburnum tree hung the osier cages of the doves. We can 
 picture the sweet old-fashioned flowers, the grasses and wild plants that 
 grew in the interstices of the stone steps ; the terraced walks rising 
 behind the house under the shadow of Nab's Scar's, and from which the 
 eye travelled over a tossing sea of verdure to the gleaming waters of 
 Rydal Lake, with its fairy islands. ■ As with mOst poets, Wordsworth's 
 study was in the open air. " Here," said a servant to a visitor who asked 
 to see her master's study, "is his library, but his study is out of doors." 
 The country folk watched with affectionate interest the gaunt figure of 
 the poet wrapped in a plaid, and wearing a pair of green glasses to 
 protect his delicate eyes, and a large hat, as he went murmuring aloud — 
 "booing about" as they called it, and — 
 
 " Scattered to the winds 
 The vocal raptures of fresh poetry." 
 
 The road between Rydal and Grasmere speaks to us of the poet. 
 Here one evening, as the glow-worms were all alight in dusky nooks, he 
 thought of " The Pilgrim's Dream;" there he saw that monument of ice on a 
 Winter day, "like marble, white, like ether pure." It was at Rydal Mount 
 
that he wrote of that sunset where the mountains and the glowing mists 
 formed a kind of Jacob's ladder. The rocks, the flowers, are all glorified 
 by the touch of his passionate sympathy ; nature is still but the background 
 upon which are drawn the pathetic and heroic figures of the dalesmen and 
 women, whose simple souls he understood, reverenced, and interpreted. 
 
 Wordsworth, "sole king of rocky Cumberland," died at Rydal Mount in 
 April, 1850, as the cuckoo-clock, the sound of which had often beguiled 
 him to feel as in a world where nothing can go wrong, struck noon. He 
 was buried at Grasmere, according to his wish, close to the church where 
 he was married, and near the children and sister who had preceded him. 
 He had won the desire of his youth, to be numbered among 
 
 "The poets, who on earth have made us heirs 
 Of truth and pure dehght by heavenly lays." 
 
 
7\ T'O one can study the life of Byron without feeling a burning 
 j[^ \ indignation against his mother, who, undoubtedly, by her treat- 
 ment of him, italicised the faults, and half obliterated the qualities 
 of his nature. Unreasonable indulgence, equally unreasonable punishment, 
 a constant change of tutors and of studies, and a ceaseless system of 
 worry, had the worst possible influence on Byron's character. That a 
 different up-bringing would have produced a different result is seen from 
 the fact that at Dr. Glennie's school at Dulwich, away from his mother's 
 influence, he showed a marked improvement in temper and industry. 
 
 To the student of human nature, the days of childhood, and of 
 school life of a boy, are the epitome of the future man. This is 
 notably the case with Lord Byron, " the wild northern colt " as his 
 school fellows called him. The whole contradictory tendencies of his 
 manhood's care were foreshadowed in his life at Harrow. The lad we meet 
 there, is father to the man who died at Missolonghi, for the indepen- 
 dence of Greece. He is the Byron in embryo, whose verse was to be the 
 awakener of the English conscience against oppression. At Harrow, we 
 find foreshadowed in him the poet of burning thoughts and words ; one 
 also who knew how to launch the epigram of heroic emotion. The note 
 of rebellion, which was so characteristic of Byron's genius, rang through 
 his school career. On the occasion of a school revolt when the rebels 
 proposed to burn down the class-room, Byron, though usually the ring- 
 leader, opposed the scheme, and averted its execution by pointing to the 
 names of their fathers carved on the walls and desks. We recognise 
 in the passionate hatred of oppression that inspired him at school to 
 
protect the weak against the strong, the precursor of the man, who saw 
 the inner meaning of the French Revolution, and denounced the Holy 
 Alliance in its endeavour to repress the impulse of nations to win their 
 liberty. It is fascinating to see the aristocrat sighing for the freedom 
 of the human race ; and in those fagging scenes at Harrow when Byron 
 appeared as the protector of the feeble to those he rescued, he appeared 
 as of a nature superior to their own, as a god helping mortals, but 
 always as a helper. The magnanimity with which, as a child, he held 
 out his arm to receive half the lashes a bully, too big for him to fight, 
 was inflicting upon another child, was prompted by the same spirit which 
 sent him to suffer for Greece. 
 
 He retained the fondest recollections of Harrow : — 
 
 "Ye scenes of my childhood, whose loved recollection 
 Embitters the present, compared with the past ; 
 Where science first dawned on the powers of reflection, 
 And friendships were formed, too romantic to last." 
 
 He overcame the disadvantages of his lameness. He was leader in 
 ** cricket's manly toil," in swimming, boxing, riding. He rebelled against 
 routine in study ; performed occasional prodigies of intellectual activity, 
 and then relapsed into idleness. " He always," says a friend, "pre- 
 ferred hockey to Horace, relinquished even Helicon for duck-puddle, 
 and gave up the best poet who ever wrote hard Latin for a game of 
 cricket on the common." His passionate friendships are memorable, 
 and he was loyal to them through life — 
 
 " If chance some well-remembered face, 
 Some old companion of my early race 
 Advance to claim his friend with honest joy, 
 My eyes, my heart, proclaimed me yet a boy : 
 The glittering scene, the fluttering groups around, 
 Were all forgotten, when my friend was found!" 
 
 When Byron was at Harrow, he fell in love with Miss Chaworth — 
 
the Mary of his poems. In after Hfe, looking 
 upon this one pure passion, he fancied that if 
 Mary Chaworth had returned his love, it would 
 have been his salvation. The melancholy and 
 moodiness that grew upon him in his manhood, 
 seem to have cast their shadow over him in 
 those school days A gravestone in the churchyard 
 on the hill is still called "Byron's Tomb." There 
 the future poet would sit for hours in dreamy 
 abstraction. 
 
 On leaving Cambridge, Byron, at nineteen, 
 took up his residence, for a time, at Newstead 
 Abbey, the home of his ancestors. ^ But he was 
 rlArroM^. possessed by that eternal unrest, which is so 
 
 often a part of the poets' nature. He travelled abroad for two years, 
 and then returned to Newstead ; he was profoundly lonely and wretched ; 
 his marriage proved unhappy. He plunged into politics as a distraction, 
 until after the publication of " Childe Harold," when " I awoke one 
 
 /(arrow 
 oiA-tK. Hill 
 
 V 
 
morning and found myself famous.' Then he realized " that, Society, as 
 now constituted, is fatal to all great original undertakings," and he quitted 
 his native country for ever. He lived in Italy, where he became 
 acquainted with many of the eminent folk of his time, wrote his 
 immortal works, and, finally, threw himself with ardour into the War 
 of Independence in Greece. At his death, Stanhope wrote of him : 
 " England has lost her brightest genius — Greece her noblest friend." 
 T'he cities of Greece contended for the honour of giving him a grave. 
 Athens wished him to be interred in the Temple of Theseus. His 
 popularity in England had by this time waned, and his country refused 
 him a place in Westminster Abbey ; and he was buried in the quiet 
 little village-church of Hucknall. His most enduring monument is the 
 panel in the school-room at Harrow, on which his name is carved. 
 
LO^gPSLLOTF. 
 
 ^ <' t # HE Forest City," as Portland in the State of Maine is called, was 
 ^ the native town of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. At the beginning 
 of the century it well deserved the sylvan title it bore. Built 
 under the shadow of a primeval forest, its houses, stores, and churches of 
 timber, its streets shaded by patriarchal trees, the hills surrounding it 
 clothed with verdure, it had an idyllic charm. Situated on the sea, there 
 were added to the town's pastoral sweetness associations of war and of 
 adventure. A naval combat was fought within sight of Portland, when 
 Longfellow was a small jchild ; and often there would come into the harbour 
 some great ship, laden with merchandise from a distant land. Memories 
 of his native city always exercised a fascination over the poet whose genius 
 is idyllic and chivalric. 
 
 " Often I think of the beautiful town 
 
 That is seated by the sea ; 
 Often in thought go up and down 
 The pleasant streets of that dear old town, 
 
 And my youth comes back to me. 
 
 * * * ♦ 
 
 " 1 remember the black wharves and the slips, 
 
 And the sea-tides, tossing , free ; 
 And Spanish sailors, with bearded lips, 
 And the beauty and mystery of the ships, 
 And the magic of the sea." 
 The boy loved poetry, romance, and music. To the end of his life 
 he remembered his mother playing the harpischord of an evening; and 
 the mention of certain stories or poems seemed to bring back snatches of 
 
the old melodies, to which, as a child, he had listened as she read. He 
 loved his mother tenderly ; and, as he trudged by her side to the 
 Unitarian Chapel, he proudly carried her footstool in winter, her posy 
 in summer. At fifteen the future poet had acquired all the learning the 
 academy of Portland could bestow upon him, and was sent to Bowdoin 
 College, the Alma Mater of the State of Maine. There he acquitted 
 himself with honour, and gave evidence of a native gift of language by the 
 brilliancy of his translations. The College authorities offered to keep 
 open for him the post of Professor of Foreign Languages should he feel 
 inclined to fit himself for the discharge of its duties. After he had taken 
 his degree, Longfellow set sail for Europe, and travelled through France, 
 Spain, Italy, and part of Germany ; . in each country he learned the 
 language, studied its literature, and gathered a store of memories that 
 became the inspiration of his poetry. 
 
 When he returned to Bowdoin, some two 5^ears later, he was an 
 accomplished linguist. Appointed to the Chair of Foreign Languages he 
 settled down close to the College, and at the age of twenty-two, he was 
 the youngest and the most popular of professors. He rose at six, he 
 went to bed at midnight, he taught French, Italian, Spanish, and lectured 
 on their literatures ; he wrote grammars, and compiled speakers. In 1832 
 he married the daughter of one of his father's neighbours at Portland, 
 who had been the love of his boyhood. The fame of the young professor 
 spread, and two years later the University of Harvard sought him out, and 
 offered to him the Chair of Modern Languages left vacant by the resignation 
 of Mr. Ticknor. The offer was accompanied by a leave of absence to 
 enable him to travel in Europe for a year. 
 
 Longfellow had already appeared as a poet before the world ; as 
 a poet he was received in London, and welcomed in the best literary 
 society. He' met Carlyle, and took tea with the Sage of Chelsea and his 
 wife, in their house in Cheyne Row. His object in coming to Europe 
 had been to study the Scandinavian tongues and literatures. He went 
 
JiA f-ke 
 Pocti Gl|^e^ 
 Vve'itinLaotei 
 
 to Sweden and learnt Swedish, 
 Finnish, and Danish. He next 
 proceeded to Holland to master 
 Dutch ; and at Rotterdam the first 
 sorrow of his lifetime occurred. 
 His wife died — she it is of whom he 
 speaks in "The Footsteps of Angels." 
 
 "The being beauteous, 
 Who unto my youth was given, 
 More than all things else to love me — 
 And is now a saint in Heaven." 
 
 Fongfellow left Holland broken-liearted and 
 travelled to Switzerland, At Interlacken, 
 
 he met his college friend, 
 Mr. Appleton, who was taking 
 a driving tour through 
 Switzerland with his father 
 and sister. They offered to 
 the young widower the 
 vacant seat in their carriage. 
 He accepted it and sat 
 opposite the lady, whose 
 
 
 J_on.6J-ellow-^ 
 
 I-TnmP 
 
j^tuy 
 
 beauty, grace and angelic smile he has 
 celebrated as attributes of Mary Ashburton, 
 the heroine of " Hyperion." Hers " were 
 the deep unutterable eyes, with down- 
 falling eyelids full of dreams and slumber." 
 The poet and the lady parted as friends ; 
 some years later Miss Appleton became 
 his wife. 
 
 During this interval Longfellow's 
 name had taken rank as that of the first living American poet. His was 
 a brilliant personality ; he became one of the lights of the intellectual circles 
 in Boston ; he was moreover the glass of fashion to the youth of the 
 period. Singularly handsome, and an exquisite by nature, the poet-professor 
 was the best dressed man of those parts. His waistcoats, his walking- 
 sticks, the shade of his gloves were carefully copied, just as his lectures 
 were attended by crowded audiences and his poems were read, by all 
 America. 
 
 When Longfellow married Miss Appleton, the bride's father gave as 
 a wedding gift to the young couple Craigie House and estate. The 
 mansion had belonged to General Washington, and there is a fitness in 
 the thought of Longfellow, the poet of the affections, and the singer of 
 his country's romantic annals, inhabiting the home of the founder of 
 American Independence. The poet's love of beauty was apparent in the 
 adornment of the house. The poet's writing-table was placed in the room 
 where Washington had worked among his charts and memorials of his 
 canjpaigns. The golden brown of the curtains, repeated in the furniture, 
 gave a subdued richness to the background. Faded portraits of the great 
 soldier and his wife hung among pastel portraits of Longfellow's chosen 
 friends — Emerson, Hawthorne, Charles Felton, Sumner. A bust in marble 
 of the historian, G. W. Green, occupied a conspicuous place. The walls 
 were lined with bookcases filled with rare editions — finely-bound books and 
 
presentation copies. The room was always full of the scent of flowers ; 
 an orange tree stood in one of the windows; in the other a high desk. 
 
 Every room of the mansion contained valuable and curios or 
 beautiful objects. It was a museum stored with rehcs of travels in 
 foreign lands, with works of art and curios. The drawing-room, where, 
 in the old days, Mrs. Washington and the General had held their 
 simple court, was now a splendid apartment where stores of art were 
 accumulated, and which also was sweet with tokens of home life. On the 
 first landing of the staircase leading to the upper rooms, stood a magnificently 
 carved Dutch clock with chimes telling the hour — 
 
 " Half-way up the stairs it stands, 
 
 It points and beckons with iLs hands 
 
 From its case of massive oak, 
 
 Like a monk, who under his cloak 
 
 Crosses himself, and sighs. Alas ! 
 
 With sorrowful voice, to all who pass — 
 " Forever — never! 
 Never — forever!" 
 In spite of the rare treasures it contained, the latch of the door of Craigie 
 House was left ever open, that all who wished might enter in. 
 
 The shadow of death, crossed the 
 threshold of his beautiful home, and this 
 time it came in an appalling form. Mrs. 
 Longfellow was here burnt to death. One 
 evening, as she was playing with her 
 children, the draperies of her light dress 
 caught fire, and she died of the injuries she 
 received. 
 
 Some of Longfellow's sweetest poems 
 were written at Nahant — his home by the 
 sea ; a green retreat, where the woods grow 
 to the water's edge. His two-storied house, 
 
 
built of wood, was Italian in style, surrounded by a portico supported by 
 pillars; it commanded a noble view of the sea and country. The airy 
 rooms were always full of the perfume of flowers; the furniture was simple, 
 but on the wails hung some fine pictures, and in the poet's study could 
 always be found the newest books, and the oldest classics. Here at sunset, 
 sweeping over the sea came borne on the wind the sound of the bells of 
 Lyn, from the opposite shore : — 
 
 "Oh, curfew of the setting sun ! O Bells of Lyn, 
 Oh requiem of the dying day ! O Bells of Lyn! " 
 
 " The Secrets of the Sea " was inspired by the sound of the waves 
 beating against the shore of Nahant. 
 
 Longfellow died on March i8th, 1882, in Craigie House — the beautiful 
 home, thronged with heroic memories and poetic visions. The lilacs had not 
 then put out their buds ; and the lilac was the poet's favourite spring flower. 
 The year before his death he had made a friend promise to place on his 
 grave a branch of one of the lilac-trees that grow in the garden of Craigie 
 House. 
 
 In England, Longfellow's popularity is second only to that which he 
 enjoys in America. His bust is placed in Westminster Abbey among 
 the poets which the nation loves to honour. 
 
 -^^ 
 
 
 
CHzA'llLSS Ej^gsLsr. 
 
 rO many people, Kingsley is only a novelist — a great novelist— 
 whose work is full of virile force, and illuminated not only by 
 flashes of genuine insight and inspiration, but by the steady 
 shining of a high ideal. But he is not only a novelist — he is a poet, 
 and above all, a song-writer. Most of his novels have faults — spots on 
 the sun — but his songs are perfect— "The Sands of Dee," "Three Fishers," 
 and " When all the World is Young." There are no songs like these. 
 
 He was born in Devonshire, and, when he was five years' old his 
 father went to live in Lincolnshire. Here Kingsley gathered memories 
 of " shining water, golden reed-beds, countless waterfowl, strange gaudy 
 insects — the wild nature of the deep fens " — memories to be set in his 
 masterpiece "Hereward the Wake." Then the living of Clovelly was 
 given to Kingsley's father, and the family returned to Devonshire. 
 
 For years Charles Kingsley was too poor to marry the woman he 
 loved, but when he was made Rector of Eversley, where he had been 
 curate, he married, and lived at Eversley, till his death. 
 
 He was a thorough sports- 
 man, and his religious belief 
 was only stronger than his sporting 
 spirit. It came natural to him to 
 talk at one moment to a man 
 about the points of a horse, and 
 the next about the mercy of God 
 to sinners. 
 
 He had a full and sufficing 
 faith, and his last words were — 
 " It is right — all as it should be." 
 
scorr. 
 
 ^ylR WALTER SCOTT, like his great predecessor, Shakespeare, was 
 i A passionately attached to the district in which his childhood was 
 passed. Though born in Edinburgh, his youth was spent in the 
 wild and romantic Border Country. It was an environment which 
 deeply impressed and influenced the natural bent of his mind, 
 stored with legends and traditions of the Lowlands and of the 
 Highlands. Although he was the re-awakener of rom-ance in fiction — 
 a new force, and an inspiration in the literature of his day, not only 
 in England, but also in France, Germany, and America — he is, never- 
 theless, in his tastes and ambition, a remarkable survival of the feudal 
 days. The picturesqueness, excitement, and hospitality of the middle- 
 ages, fascinated him ; and it was his dream, to resuscitate this pageantry. 
 
 The novels in which he has given free play to this strongest impulse 
 of his genius, are acknowledged to be masterpieces of historical por- 
 traiture. Love is the great teacher, and no other man has so completely 
 caught the mediaeval spirit, because no other man of our century has 
 looked back along the dim vistas of history with so loving an e3'e. 
 
 The inaccuracy of detail, to which even his warmest admirers cannot 
 be blind, does little to mar the beauty of his work. The soul of the 
 thing is right ; the man believed in what he wrote, and this is the secret 
 of his power. 
 
 In poetry, Scott's greatest triumphs were his ballads. There is not 
 in the English language a more stirring ballad than " Bonnie Dundee," 
 of which, however, few people seem to know more than the few verses 
 usually sung. 
 
Than this verse, no modern ballad offers us anything more fiery: 
 "There is brass on the target of bark and bull-hide, 
 There is steel in the scabbard that dangles beside ; 
 And the brass shall be burnished, the steel shall flash free. 
 
 At a toss of the bonnet 
 
 of Bonnie Dundee!"' 
 
 He died on 
 September 31st, 
 1S32. 
 
 " I have seen 
 much, but no- 
 thing like my ain 
 house," said Sir 
 Walter, when he 
 returned to die at 
 Abbotsford. 
 
7 HERE is no public man of whom we may say, we know so little and so 
 much, as we do of our Poet Laureate. In these days of interviewers, 
 he has eluded every attempt that has been made to encroach upon his 
 privacy. He remains "the poet hidden in the light of thought," and yet 
 by this light of thought, he is intimately revealed to us. It illuminates his 
 jojrs and his sorrows, and it brings out with pre-Raphaelite distinctness his 
 haimts and his homes. The exquisitely faithful transcripts of Nature he 
 gives us, conjure up before our mind, not only the outward features of the 
 scene, but also arouses a corresponding sentiment in the imagination. 
 
 Mr. Grindon, the President of the Botanical Society, stated in an 
 an address which he delivered on " The Flora of Tennyson," that the 
 poet has mentioned some hundred flowers and trees in his works, character- 
 izing each with an accuracy of observation, which gives an almost 
 scientific value to his descriptions, while for poetic purposes he uses each 
 with a delicate apprehension of its peculiarities. 
 
 By close and constant communion with Nature, our Poet Laureate has 
 caught the very note of its soul — the gay accent in the babbling rhythm 
 of the brook, which hurries by thirsty hills, singing : 
 
 " I come from haunts of coot and hern, 
 
 I make a sudden sally, 
 And sparkle out among the fern, 
 To bicker down a valley." 
 contrasts with the torrent-voice of that other brook he knew so well in 
 
 his boyhood. " Drawing into his narrow earthen urn, 
 
 In every elbow and turn 
 The filter' d tribute of the rough woodland." 
 
Tennyson was born in Somersby Vicarage. His earliest associations 
 are of the fen country, the melancholy and fascination of which he has 
 interpreted for us. He brings magically near the secret spiritual beauty 
 of those wide horizons, " The level waste, the rounding gray," that for 
 leagues are marked by no other tree but a poplar, " all silver-green with 
 gnarled bark;" "The wild waste enormous, where the trenched waters 
 run from sky to sky, emblems of eternity." 
 
 The favourite haunt of his boyhood was the " Glen," the wooded 
 ravine from which Somersby brook issues. The pathlessness, the tangled 
 vegetation, the depth of shade, the wind-echoing sonorities of this wild 
 spot, impressed his imagination. In miniature it represented to him the 
 crime and sorrow-haunted corners of the world. 
 
 Blocks of sandstone lay at the entrance of this glen. One May 
 morning, 1824, Tennyson, then in his fifteenth year, wrote on one of 
 these rocks " Byron is dead." The news of the death at Missolonghi 
 had just reached the retired Lincolnshire Vicarage, and everything seemed 
 at an end to the boy poet. " I thought nothing else mattered," he said, 
 some time ago to a friend, as he recalled the memories of his youth. 
 
 He and his brother Charles were inseparable comrades. They are 
 remembered by the "oldest inhabitant" of Somersby and Louth, where 
 they went to school, 
 as shy youths, who 
 kept very much to 
 themselves ; Alfred, es- 
 pecially, was a dreamer. 
 The poet treasures 
 many spirited memories 
 of his boyhood, and re- 
 members encounters with 
 village boys, when he 
 and Charles held the 
 
 
 ^r^ 
 
Somersby brook in mimic warfare against an invading force of rustic 
 lads. Among the poet's favourite trees the poplar takes the first rank. 
 Memories of his childhood cling round 
 
 " Poplars four 
 That stand about my father's door." 
 
 These guarding trees at the rectory gate have disappeared, but still the 
 Ecven elms and the sycamore are there of which he sings in his " Ode 
 to Memory." The house is no longer the rectory; it 'belongs to the Lord 
 of the Manor, who has attached another house to the living in its stead. 
 In one gable the boy poet had his "den," through the window an owl 
 flew, which he tamed, talking to it with that power of reproducing the 
 notes of birds which Lord Tennyson still retains. The rectory garden, 
 with its trailing roses, its twilight grotto, its sweetness of purple spiked 
 lavender, rose carnations, lilies, sunflowers, was the perfumed background 
 to much of his life at Somersby. 
 
 There his brother Charles put a slate into his hand one morning, and 
 bade him write a poem on the flowers. To this garden, in later years, 
 Arthur Hallam came constantly; and in "In Memoriam," we have the 
 picture of idyllic days and evenings spent there. We see the 
 
 " Witch-elms that counterchange the floor 
 
 Of this flat lawn, with dusk and bright ; 
 And thou, with all thy breadth and height 
 Of foliage, towering sycamore." 
 
 In "In Memoriam" also occurs the farewell to the house, that the 
 Tennysons quitted some time after the father's death, the lament for the 
 garden, the brook, the windy grove. 
 
 Three mills near Somersby have long contended for the honour of 
 having suggested to the poet, "The Miller's Daughter" — the idyll that won 
 for him the Queen's notice, and was the first step towards the laureateship. 
 The poet has denied that any of these mills inspired the poem ; if the 
 
thought of a mill was 
 in his mind as he wrote, 
 it was beautiful Grant- L 's^ 
 Chester Mill near Cam-/- ' -'*^ 
 bridge — on the tree- oiclwortK 
 sheltered road, up which ^ 
 he often walked in his 
 student days with 
 Arthur Hallam. 
 
 Two years after his 
 Tennyson purchased Farringford at Freshwater. The 
 beautiful island home is embowered in trees. A 
 sylvan barrier protects the poet from the gaze of prying eyes. 
 
 marriage 
 
 The 
 
 house is roomy and unpretentious in appearance. Its chief beauty lies 
 
in the mantle of verdure thrown over it by creepers, that covers it from 
 base to roof. The house is situated just below the crest of the moorland 
 hill and overlooks 
 
 " Green Sussex fading into blue, 
 With one grey glimpse of sea." 
 
 During the season, the poet is away ; when Freshwater is compara- 
 tively empty, he returns. Then the figure of the venerable genius of the 
 place, wrapped in a long loose cape that catches the wind, and adds to 
 the romantic weirdness of his appearance, may be seen, pacing the summit 
 of the down behind Farringford, with his son Hallam, or with one of his 
 grand-children. 
 
 The house to which the Laureate resorts during the holiday season 
 in the Isle of Wight is called Aldworth, on the top of Blackdown. 
 It is surrounded by an open expanse of country, fragrant with heather, 
 bracken, and wild flowers. We wade, knee deep, through the ferns 
 and whortleberry bushes, a magic carpet of vegetation, from which the 
 birds spring, and through which shy woodland creatures start at our ap- 
 proach, before we reach the gate of the solitary domain. Not a human 
 dwelling is near. The poet lives apart, " hidden in the light of thought." 
 
 'PamK^oiu). 3. 6f^^/^'''-■