the landscapes, the changes of seasons, the human types and employments of the rural world about him, as well as his own simple pleasures and occupations. The poem was published in 1785, as The Task. A large portion of The Task is conventional enough, but here and there one comes upon little vignettes,-the figure of a teamster driving homeward in a snowstorm, a postman hurrying through the village with his eagerly awaited bag of news from the great world, ploughmen at work in the flat fields by the river Ouse,-which are instinct with vivid natural life. The amusing ballad of "John Gilpin" also belongs to this bright period of Cowper's life. He afterward relapsed into melancholia, broken at intervals by a ray of poetic inspiration such as produced his touching lines, "On the Receipt of my Mother's Picture out of Norfolk," deservedly the best known of his poems. His last poem, entitled "The Castaway," is a cry of despair from the depths of visionary anguish into which he was now hopelessly plunged.

Blake. William Blake (1757-1827), was by profession an engraver, and the most important part of his work is his drawings, many of which are in illustration of his own poems and the strange mystic writings which he called "prophecies." When a very young child, he one day screamed with fear, because, he said, he had seen God put his face to the window. In boyhood he saw several angels, very bright, standing in a tree by the roadside. In his manhood, the earth and the air were for him full of spiritual presences, all concerned with his fate or with that of his friends. He saw everywhere about him "armies of angels that soar, legions of demons that lurk." His fame as a poet rests chiefly on his Poetical Sketches, and on his Songs of Innocence and Experience. Amid much that is unfinished, and no little that is obscure, these little volumes contain some of the simplest and sweetest, as well as some of the most powerful, short poems in the language. At his best, as in "The Tiger," and "Hear the Voice of the Bard," Blake has a simplicity as great as Wordsworth's, and a magic which reminds us of Coleridge, together with a startling depth and intensity. Like a true mystic, he moves us less by what he says than by

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what he hints, and these hints are often so shadowy that they elude us at the very moment when we seem about to grasp them.

III. ROBERT BURNS (1759-1796)

Burns's Early Life and Poetry.-Robert Burns was born in a two-roomed clay cottage in Ayrshire, West Scotland, in 1759. His parents were God-fearing peasants of the best Scotch type, who worked heroically to keep the wolf from the door, and to give their children an elementary education. There have been preserved to us many glimpses of the family life which Burns shared, and all of them show us how earnest and wholesome was its atmosphere. The father, as he walked to the morning's labor with his sons Robert and Gilbert, would talk to them as man to man, drawing their thoughts to serious themes of conduct and belief; and he would often visit his daughter, where she tended the flock afield, to teach her the names of the plants and herbs which grew about. The local schoolmaster brought books to the family and read to them regularly. Once, when he was reading from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, and had reached a particularly harrowing passage, with one voice they cried out for him to desist, as they could not endure the cruelty of the pictures which the drama evoked. In all this we see that Burns's early life, though full of privation and harsh toil, was passed among gentle influences.

The privation, however, was severe, and the toil bitter. At fifteen Robert did a grown man's work in ploughing and reaping. The various farms which the elder Burns leased in succession, proved too poor to repay the labor put upon them. In spite of all frugality and industry, ruin was seldom far away. Looking back upon his youth in after years, Burns described it as the "cheerless gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing toil of a galley-slave." But this is clearly an exaggeration, for we have his youthful poems to prove him wrong.

He had had a few books of poetry to read, and had heard, as every Scotch peasant hears, the floating ballad verse of

the country-side. Then he had begun to rhyme, almost as spontaneously as a bird begins to sing, or, as he says himself, "for fun," as he followed his plough "in glory and in joy, along the mountain-side." The youth who wrote the lines "To a Mountain Daisy" and "To a Mouse," with their searching sympathy, the "Epistle to Davie," with its manly philosophy and genial temper, the "Address to the De'il," with its rich humor and fun, "The Cotter's Saturday Night,' bathed in its tender light of fireside happiness,-was neither a hermit nor a galley-slave, but simply a healthy, impetuous farm-lad, with a warm heart, a rich nature, and a God-given genius for song.

Between his twenty-third and his twenty-sixth year, at Mossgiel, Burns wrote the larger number of those poems which have made his name loved wherever the lowland dialect is understood. In these he revealed with wonderful completeness the rural Scotland of his day. He illuminated with a blended light of humor and tenderness the common experiences of his peasant world. He celebrates "Scotch Drink," holds up to laughter the praying hypocrite "Holy Willie," and paints the riotous games of Hallowe'en; but he turns also to mourn over the "wee, modest, crimson-tippèd flower" uprooted in the furrow on the mountain-side, and finds in a field-mouse whose snug home has been broken up by the ploughshare, a thing to touch the springs of human pity.

Burns's temporary residence at Irvine, whither he went in 1782, with the plan of learning the flax-dressing industry, marks a great change in his life, and the beginning of those dissipations into which his eager and abounding temperament only too casily led him. Here and at his home-village of Mauchline his reputation as poet and wit threw him into the company of "buckish young squires, roaring lawyers and half-heretical divines," who welcomed him as a brilliant addition to their circle, and spurred him on to wild extravagances of word and deed. His was a nature which loves to shine, to which the exercise of its charm and power is a necessity. Even in his sober earlier years he had "worn his plaid in a particular manner, and of a particular color," and had had "the only tied hair in the parish." Now he

threw himself headlong into pleasure; it was not long before he had earned his title of "Ranting Rob."

Publication of the "Poems": Burns in Edinburgh.-By the time he reached his twenty-sixth year, his wild ways had got him into desperate trouble. His father was dead, and the hand-to-hand fight which he and his brother Gilbert were waging with poverty, bade fair to end in absolute failure. Distracted and despairing, Burns determined to go to the West Indies. In order to raise the passage money, someone suggested that he should publish the poems which lay in his desk in the cottage at Mossgiel. Neither the author nor anyone else hoped for more than a local popularity. The little book was published at Kilmarnock in 1786, with the title, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. The few pounds brought in by the small edition were in his pocket, his trunk was sent forward, and he had written the solemn and moving song, "The Gloomy Night is Gathering Fast," as his farewell word, when a letter from Edinburgh arrived which changed the whole face of his fortunes. It was from an eminent scholar and critic, who praised the book highly and called for another and larger edition. Burns posted to Edinburgh, heralded and fêted on the way like a hero of romance. winter in the Scotch capital followed, during which he was petted and lionized by the brilliant society gathered there. Learned doctors, famous critics and men of letters, not to speak of "Duchess Gordon and all the gay world," were eager to flatter and amuse the "ploughman poet." In this sudden revolution of his fortunes, his powerful sense and his native dignity never deserted him. His head was not turned; he refused to be anything but himself. Walter Scott, then a young boy, on one occasion saw Burns at close range in an Edinburgh drawing-room, and has left a charming description of him as he looked at this time-the burly figure in boots and buckskins, blue coat and buff-striped waistcoat, "like a farmer in his Sunday best," the large head with its air of thoughtful melancholy, the great dark eyes which "literally glowed" as he spoke. "I never saw such another eye in a human head," Scott adds, "though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time."

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