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SECOND PART.

The winter was come, 'twas simmer nae mair,
And, trembling, the leaves were fleeing thro' th' air;
"O winter," says Jeanie, "we kindly agree,
For the sun he looks wae when he shines upon me."

Nae longer she mourned, her tears were a' spent, Despair it was come, and she thought it contentShe thought it content, but her cheek it grew pale, And she bent like a lily broke down by the gale.

Her father and mother observed her decay; "What ails ye, my bairn ?" they ofttimes would say; "Ye turn round your wheel, but you come little speed, For feeble's your hand and silly's your thread."

She smiled when she heard them, to banish their fear,
But wae looks the smile that is seen through a tear,
And bitter's the tear that is forced by a love
Which honour and virtue can never approve.

Her father was vexed and her mother was wae,
But pensive and silent was auld Robin Gray;
He wandered his lane, and his face it grew lean,
Like the side of a brae where the torrent has been.

Nae questions he spiered1 her concerning her health, He looked at her often, but aye 'twas by stealth; When his heart it grew grit,2 and often he feigned To gang to the door to see if it rained.

He took to his bed-nae physic he sought,
But ordered his friends all around to be brought;
While Jeanie supported his head in its place,
Her tears trickled down, and they fell on his face.

"Oh, greet nae mair, Jeanie," said he wi' a groan, "I'm no worth your sorrow-the truth maun be known; Send round for your neighbours, my hour it draws near, And I've that to tell that it's fit a' should hear.

"I've wrong'd her," he said, "but I kent 3 it ower late;
I've wronged her, and sorrow is speeding my date:
But a' for the best, since my death will soon free
A faithfu' young heart that was ill matched wi' me.

"I lo'ed and I courted her mony a day,

The auld folks were for me, but still she said nay;
I kentna o' Jamie, nor yet of her vow,
In mercy forgive me-'twas I stole the cow.

"I cared not for Crummie, I thought but o' thee-
I thought it was Crummie stood 'twixt you and me;
While she fed your parents, oh, did you not say
You never would marry wi' auld Robin Gray?

"But sickness at hame and want at the doorYou gied me your hand, while your heart it was sore; I saw it was sore,-why took I her hand?

Oh, that was a deed to my shame o'er the land!

1 Spiered, asked. First-English "spór," a track; "spirian," to track out, inquire.

2 Grit, great, swollen. "The heart is said to be grit when one is ready to cry." (Jamieson.)

3 Kent, knew.

"How truth soon or late comes to open daylight!
For Jamie cam' back, and your cheek it grew white-
White, white grew your cheek, but aye true unto me-
Ay, Jeanie, I'm thankfu'-I'm thankfu' to dee.

"Is Jamie come here yet?"-and Jamie they saw-
"I've injured you sair, lad, so leave you my a';
Be kind to my Jeanie, and soon may it be;
Waste nae time, my dauties, in mourning for me."

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was eight years of age his father when he was thirteen and a schoolboy at Hawkshead, in the vale of Esthwaite. He went to St. John's College, Cambridge, in October, 1787, and was a student at Cambridge, aged nineteen, at the time of the Fall of the Bastille. What he felt in those days, he paints when he represents the lost hopes of the Solitary in "The Excursion."

For lo! the dread Bastile,

With all the chambers in its horrid towers,
Fell to the ground; by violence overthrown
Of indignation and with shouts that drowned
The crash it made in falling! From the wreck
A golden palace rose, or seemed to rise,
The appointed seat of equitable law
And mild paternal sway. The potent shock
I felt the transformation I perceived,
As marvellously seized as in that moment
When, from the blind mist issuing, I beheld
Glory, beyond all glory ever seen,
Confusion infinite of heaven and earth,
Dazzling the soul. Meanwhile, prophetic harps
In every grove were ringing "War shall cease;
Did ye not hear that conquest is abjured?
Bring garlands, bring forth choicest flowers to deck
The tree of Liberty." My heart rebounded;

My melancholy voice the chorus joined—
"Be joyful all ye nations, in all lands
Ye that are capable of joy be glad!

Henceforth, whate'er is wanting in yourselves
In others ye shall promptly find; and all,
Enriched by mutual and reflected wealth,
Shall with one heart honour their common kind."

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Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth,
The beauty wore of promise, that which sets
(As at some moment might not be unfelt
Among the bowers of paradise itself)
The budding rose above the rose full blown.
What temper at the prospect did not wake
To happiness unthought of? The inert
Were roused, and lively natures rapt away.
They who had fed their childhood upon dreams,
The playfellows of fancy, who had made
All powers of swiftness, subtilty, and strength
Their ministers, who in lordly wise had stirred
Among the grandest objects of the sense,
And dealt with whatsoever they found there
As if they had within some lurking right

To wield it;-they, too, who, of gentle mood,
Had watched all gentle motions, and to these

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Had fitted their own thoughts, schemers more mild, 30
And in the region of their peaceful selves :-

Now was it that both found, the meek and lofty
Did both find, helpers to their heart's desire,
And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish;
Were called upon to exercise their skill,
Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,

Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where,
But in the very world which is the world
Of all of us, the place where in the end
We find our happiness or not at all.

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Wordsworth was in Paris a month after the September massacre, and felt that hope was failing only because the better minds could not secure their mastery over the passions of a people set suddenly free after centuries of degradation. His desire then was to use his knowledge of French by throwing in his lot with the men who were seeking to direct the storm; he would have written, spoken, and acted with the thoughtful section of the Revolutionists. But his friends wisely compelled his return to England. Soon after his return there was the execution of the king on the 21st of January, 1793, and on the 1st of the next month began the war against the Revolution, which lasted until the Peace of Amiens on the 27th of March, 1802. The spirit of Wordsworth rebelled strongly against this war; England seemed to him to be leagued with the despotic powers of Europe for extinction of whatever chance was left of good to come from the great effort that had stirred so many hopes.

At Christmas, in 1794, Wordsworth was at Penrith by the bedside of a young friend, Raisley Calvert, like himself the son of a law agent, and fatherless. Calvert died in January, 1795. He had £900 to leave, and left them to his friend Wordsworth to enable him to give up vain labour towards other life than that for which he seemed to have been born, and be a poet free to shape his own career. With frugality Wordsworth could make £900 last long; he did, in fact, with aid of a little that came to him from other sources, make it last nearly eight years. Within that time he found his place in life; and then there was the long-delayed payment of a debt due to his father, that was all the father had to leave, and William and his brothers and his sister Dorothy received about £1,800 each. After Raisley

ITERATURE

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vert's death Wordsworth called his sister Dorothy one year younger than himself to his side, to be h him thenceforth, and so they lived together til death, for a short time, divided them. They st settled near Crewkerne, in a quiet place where post only came in once a week, and then Wordsrth began to prepare himself for the fulfilment of andatever he might find to be his highest duty as a et, with a religious earnestness like that of Milton en he said, with his life yet before him—

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Wordsworth and Dorothy in their quiet home at hacedown, near Crewkerne, suddenly there entered amuel Taylor Coleridge.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, born in October, 1772, as the youngest of thirteen children-ten being by the second wife-of the Rev. John Coleridge, vicar help Ottery, in Devonshire, and head-master of the

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rammar School there, known as the King's School, Henry VIII.'s Free Grammar School. Before moleridge had reached his seventh year the father, hose health was delicate, died at the age of sixtyJudge Buller, who had been one of his father's pupils, obtained the child a presentation to Christ's Hospital, and thither he was sent in July, 1782. here he had Charles Lamb for a schoolfellow, and Phe friendship between Lamb and Coleridge was egun. In February, 1791, Coleridge, in his nineeenth year, entered at Jesus College, Cambridge. In is school days he had been stirred by the hopes of he time. The Bastille fell when he was a youth of seventeen, and in his first year at Cambridge he obtained the prize for a Greek Ode on the subject of The Slave Trade." But in his first year also, by passive want of discretion in management of affairs, rather than by any active imprudence, he slipped into debt to the amount of about a hundred pounds. With this load on his conscience he went home in the summer of 1793, and it was then that "The Songs f of the Pixies" came of one day's holiday that gave a lighter heart. When he returned to Cambridge he had so changed his religious opinions that he could neither enter the Church nor hope for a college fellowship. Resolving, therefore, to give all up and be no more a burden on his family, he left Cambridge and enlisted, as Silas Titus Cumberbatch, in the 15th Light Dragoons. After some months he was disWe covered and returned to Cambridge; but as there still seemed to be no career before him there, and as he heard of the fame of Citizen Southey at Oxford, he resolved to take counsel with that young sage.

Robert Southey, born in August, 1774, was the son of a linen-draper at Bristol. The father was unprosperous, and the child was educated chiefly under the care of a maiden aunt, Miss Tyler, who was a half-sister of his mother's. A brother of his mother's, the Rev. Herbert Hill, Chaplain to the English factory at Lisbon, joined Aunt Tyler in sending Southey to Westminster School. When near the end of his time there-in his eighteenth year-Southey was expelled from Westminster School by Dr. Vin

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cent, the head-master, for a youthful jest upon the despotism of the rod. In the little world of school, as in the great world, the upholders of constituted authority believed it necessary to crush out revotionary sentiment. Uncle Hill resolved that his nephew's career should not be stayed by a boyish indiscretion, and sent Southey to Oxford, where he was refused at Christ Church, but admitted at Balliol early in 1793. Here he soon showed his revolutionary tendencies by refusing to have his hair cut, or to use hair-powder, and he wrote to a friend: "Would you think it possible that the wise founders of an English University should forbid us to wear boots? What matters it whether I study in shoes or boots? To me it is a matter of indifference; but folly so ridiculous puts me out of conceit with the whole." With Southey and other congenial spirits at Oxford, Coleridge presently developed the plan of an escape from the forms of an old society, hopelessly corrupt. They would go-a band of pure spiritsacross the Atlantic, and, on freer ground, would found a Pantisocracy (an All-Equal-Government) on the banks of the Susquehanna. Robert Lovell, George Bennett, and others enrolled themselves as Pantisocrats. Some of them went with Southey to Bristol, where of the four daughters of a small tradesman of the place, the three who were marriageable became the chosen brides of three poets, who were to be among the founders of the new and happy commonwealth. Robert Lovell was to marry and did marry Miss Fricker, who was an actress in a small way. wrote verse with promise in it, and died young, leaving a widow and infant, who owed much to Southey's kindness. Southey was to marry and did marry Edith Fricker, who kept a small day-school; and Coleridge married Sarah Fricker, who was a mantuamaker. Southey, invited by his Uncle Hill to go with him for a few months to Lisbon, married before he left, and came home to acknowledge his wife, and work hard for his living. Divers difficulties, to say nothing of the main difficulty of finding passage-money to the Susquehanna, put an end to the Pantisocracy, and Coleridge lectured for a time on revolutionary history. He was living at Clevedon when, in 1795, he published his "Conciones ad Populum," and said in the preface, "The two following addresses were delivered in the month of February, 1795, and were followed by six others in defence of natural and revealed religion. There is a time to keep silence,' saith King Solomon; but when I proceeded to the first verse of the fourth chapter of the Ecclesiastes, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun; and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of the oppressors there was power,' I concluded this was not the time to keep silence,' for truth should be spoken at all times, but more especially at those times when to speak truth is dangerous." To be near a generous friend, Mr. Thomas Poole, of Nether Stowey, Coleridge had settled in Nether Stowey, by the Bristol Channel, when he heard that Wordsworth, author of "The Descriptive Sketches," which he had read and liked when a BlueCoat boy, was living not far off. Therefore, he went to see him at Racedown, and close friendship was

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established soon between them. To be near Coleridge, Wordsworth and his sister removed to Alfoxden, about three miles from Nether Stowey; and out of their intercourse there, arose The Lyrical Ballads," first published in 1798. They agreed on a holiday walk by the shore of the Bristol Channel, towards Linton, and would pay the cost of it by producing a poem that might be sent to a magazine. A friend of theirs, Mr. Cruikshank, had been dreaming about a skeleton ship they would take his dream for groundwork of a poem. Wordsworth had been reading Shelvocke's "Voyage round the World by Way of the Great South Sea" (published in 1726), and had there met with the sailors' superstition about albatrosses; he, therefore, suggested the shooting of an albatross. In this way "The Ancient Mariner" was planned by both, and produced by Coleridge, with only about two touches in the verse from Wordsworth's hand. It proved to be too important to be sent to a magazine, and gave rise to the suggestion that it might form part of a book. Work at the "Lyrical Ballads" thus began. Coleridge tells us in his "Biographia Literaria" how the division of labour was first planned :

"During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry,-the power of exciting the sympathy of a reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real; and real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life: the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them when they present themselves.

"In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads,' in which it was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself, as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us,-an inexhaustible treasure; but for which, in consequence of the feeling of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

"With this view I wrote the Ancient Mariner,' and was

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The lady strange made answer meet,

And her voice was faint and sweet :"Have pity on my sore distress,

I scarce can speak for weariness."

"Stretch forth thy hand, and have no fear,"
Said Christabel, "how camest thou here?"
And the lady, whose voice was faint and sweet,
Did thus pursue her answer meet :--

"My sire is of a noble line,

And my name is Geraldine :

Five warriors seized me yestermorn,

Me, even me, a maid forlorn:

So free from danger, free from fear,

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