smart a lad as his brother Giles, a chip of the old clerkly block. It is in vain: a dunce is a dunce, place him where you will. Giles sits in the counting-house writing invoices, posting the ledger, and playing the gentleman in general; while Ebenezer " does chores," as we Yankees say, in the foundry, sifting sand through coarse sieves, and smutting his face with charcoal dust. His brother's superiority produces no envy in Ebenezer; he loves him too much for that; but he hates himself, he is such a perfect dunce! His only resource is solitude and play. From infancy he has had a passion for solitude, which the scenery around his birthplace is calculated to strengthen; and all his leisure moments are spent in communion with nature. He is the best kite-maker in the place, and may be often seen alone flying his kite. He is a good ship-builder, too, and his chip armadas float along the banks of the canal. Among his relations at Masborough was an aunt who had a son studying botany. The plates of his botanical books were beautifully colored, and very delectable to behold. He found that by holding them to a pane of glass he could copy them "as natural as life." (This process, by the by, is an old one; we remember to have practiced it ourselves, years ago.) In time he became a botanist, and had a hortus siccus of his own, gathering in his holiday rambles the flowers which composed it. And so passed the days and years. One day he heard his brother Giles recite a passage from "Thomson's Seasons," and his attention was turned to poetry. Clare and Bloomfield, it is said, drew their early inspiration from the same source. His first attempt at a poem was a rhymed description of a thunder-storm(your young poet is always fond of thunder)-in which, the story goes, he had a flock of sheep running away after they had been killed by lightning! Now this poetical miracle came to pass because the rhyme would have it so. "Sometimes Kings are not more imperative than rhymes." He read the poem to his cousin, the botanist, and it was mercilessly ridiculed; but the young poet stuck to his mutton. From Thomson he passed to Shenstone, the most insipid of elegiac poets; thence to Milton, and finally to Shakspeare, " the myriad-minded." For a dunce this is something. When he began to write verses he became ashamed of his deficiencies, which he now beheld in their true light. If there is anything in the world that can make a man feel his littleness and insignificance it is the eternal spirit of song. For a while he tried his hand at French, but without success. Then he began English Grammar-about the last thing that we ever really studybut unfortunately began at the wrong end, viz., at the key, and never reached the beginning. The son of his old schoolmaster, who was preparing for the ministry, used to recite Greek to him, and, without understanding a word of the language, he was so charmed with the music of Homer, "the swelling of the voiceful sea," that he learned by heart the opening lines of the Iliad. One of his biographers, who seems to have been troubled by the poet's early complaint-dullness-relates the following anecdote of his fondness for the classic tongues: "Having written a sonorous poem in blank verse on the American Revolution, he wished for a learned title. He wished to call it 'Liberty,' so his learned cousin baptized it in Greek by the name of Eleutheria;' but the poet having found that the name Eleutheria also signified fire, humbled himself to Latin, expunged the Greek, and wrote in place of it 'Jus Triumphans.' He then read Johnson's Dictionary through, and selected several dozen words, fifty-three, we believe, of six and seven syllables, which he wrote on slips of paper and pasted over his verses where they would occur and read grammatically!" But we cannot always be children and youths, reading, and writing verses, and other foolery; the years sweep on, and manhood teaches us other thoughts and loves, and the meaning of that stern word -duty. In a few years the young poet was a man and a father. Concerning his love, marriage, and matrimonial life, we know nothing, further than that it was passed at Sheffield, to which he came one hundred and fifty pounds in debt, with a wife and three or four children. He suffered and endured for a long time as only such men can, and at length began to make money and fame. But he seems to have made the first much the soonest; fame was long in visiting him, and then she only dropped in as it were by acci dent. Some time in 1808, his twenty-seventh year, he seems to have tried to find a pub lisher; for in Southey's Life and Letters, lately published, is a letter to him filled with sound advice about the matter of publication. After saying that a recommendation to the booksellers, which the young poet seems to have solicited, was of no use whatever, that poetry was a drug in the market, etc., he says: "From that specimen of your productions which is now in my writing-desk, I have no doubt that you possess the feeling of a poet, and may distinguish yourself." He then advises him to send his poems to the newspapers, and see what success they meet with there. In 1809 he wrote him again: "In your execution," he says, "you are too exuberant in ornament, and resemble the French engravers, who take off attention from the subject of their prints by the flowers and trappings in the foreground. This makes you indistinct; but distinctness is the great charm of narrative poetry. See how beautifully it is exemplified in Spenser, our great English master of narrative, whom you cannot study too much, nor love too dearly. Your first book reminds me of an old pastoral poet, William Browne; he has the same fault of burying his story in flowers; it is one of those faults which are to be wished for in the writings of all young poets. I am satisfied that your turn of thought and feeling is for the higher branches of the art, and not for the lighter subjects. Your language would well suit the drama; have your thoughts ever been turned toward it?" The hint was not lost; what hint poetical ever is by a young poet? he turned his attention to the drama, and wrote plays. In 1811 Southey had to write him again concerning a play of his, the name of which is not mentioned. Without doubt the juvenile mutton was in it, and the juvenile thunder and lightning. But all this time he is struggling with fortune in the iron business, now up and now down, yet on the whole rather increasing his means, and certainly increasing his family. Any one visiting Sheffield at this period might have found him in his shop, ready to supply orders at the shortest notice. William Howitt, who visited the place some years ago, calls it a lowish, humblish sort of a building. "On entering the front door, which, however, you are prevented from doing till a little iron gate in the door-way is first opened for you, you find yourself in a dingy place full of steel and iron of all sorts and sizes, from slenderest rods to good massy bars, reared on almost every inch of space, so that there is just room enough to get among them; and in the midst of all stands aloft a large cast of Shakspeare with the Sir Walter Raleigh ruff about his neck, and mustache. Your eye glancing forward penetrates a large warehouse behind, of the like iron gloom and occupation. On the left hand is a small room, into which you directly look, for the door is open, if door there be, and which is properly the counting-house, but is nearly as crowded with iron bars as the rest. The center of the room is occupied by a considerable office-desk, which, to judge from its appearance, has for many a year known no occupation but that of being filled with the most miscellaneous chaos of account-books, invoices, bills, memorandum-books, and the like, all buried in the dust of the iron age in which they have accumulated. To be used as a desk appears to have ceased long ago; it is the supporter of old chaos come again. And a couple of portable desks set on the counter under the window, though elbowed up by lots of dusty iron, and looked down upon by Achilles and Ajax in wonder, seem to serve the real purposes of desks. "But Achilles and Ajax, says some one, what do they here? All round the room stand piles of bars of iron, and amid these stand, oddly enough, three great plaster casts of Achilles, Ajax, and Napoleon. The two Grecian heroes are in the front on each side of the window, and Napoleon occupies an elevated post in the center of the side of the room, facing the door. Such was at once the study and warehouse of Ebenezer Elliott." If anything came from such a place, what could it be but discord and strength? Is it a wonder that the poet wrote iron lines, as well as weighed iron bars, -a wonder that a certain energy and sternness brooded over his heart, like the heroic busts over the window? We must look elsewhere for "the lascivious pleasing of the lute;" here is the falling of hammers, and the ringing of anvils, and such clouds of dust! In 1819, eight years since the date of the letter from which we made our last extract, Southey wrote to Elliott again, acknowledging the receipt of a volume of his poems which had just been criticised in the Monthly Magazine: "There are," he says, "abundant evidences of power in it. It is also a hateful story, pre senting nothing but what is painful. You may do great things, if you will cease to attempt so much; if you will learn to proportion your figures to your canvas. Cease to overload your foreground [the laureate groweth skillful in painter's phrases] with florid ornaments, and be persuaded that in a poem, as well as in a picture, there must be bright lights and shades; that the general effect can never be good unless the subordinate parts are kept down; and that the brilliancy of one part is brought out and hightened by the repose of the other. One word more. With your powers of thought and language you need not seek to produce effect by monstrous incidents and exaggerated characters. These drams have been administered so often that they are beginning to lose their effect, and it is to truth and nature that we must come at last. Trust to them, and they will bear you through. You are now squandering wealth, with which, if properly disposed, you may purchase golden reputation." No one can dispute the correctness of Southey's advice: whether Elliott could have followed it, is another matter. It was easy for a man of Southey's limited imagination (limited in all save the creation of incident) to talk of Elliott's "florid ornaments," but not so easy for Elliott himself to get rid of them. A more thorough education, and more correctness of taste, might have prevailed to their ostracism, and they might not. In the case of Shelley, they were of no avail. Among the whole range of English poets was not a more cultivated scholar than Shelley, and certainly none whose poems are so floridly ornamented. The volume to which Southey alluded was entitled "Night." How far it corresponded with its title we know not; but it was, doubtless, no misnomer; and, be sure, Ajax was there, and "Through all that dark and desperate night, The prayer of Ajax was for light!" "For twenty years," to quote Howitt again "The poet went on writing and publishing; but in vain. Volume after volume, his productions fell dead from the press, met a contemptuous sneer, or were damned with faint praise.' But living consciousness of genius was not to be extinguished; the undaunted spirit of Elliott was not to be frozen out by neglect. He wrote, he appealed to sense and justice; but in vain. He became furious, and hurled a flaming satire at Lord Byron, in the hight of his popularity, in the hope that the noble lord would give him a returning blow, and thus draw attention upon him. It was in vain-neither lord nor public would deign him a look, and the case seemed hopeless." Money matters were, however, brightening with him. He struck into the right track at last; and such was at that time the prosperity of Sheffield, that he used to sit in his chair, and make £20 a day without ever seeing the goods that he sold. The corn-laws changed all this, and made him glad to retire from business with a part of what he had made; the great panic in 1837 sweeping away some thousands at once. easily led to alloy the pure ore of song. Their eyes, however, are keen to see, and their hearts are quick to warm over sorrow and suffering. And when they do see and feel, it is with the fullness of their souls, especially if they keep company with Achilles, Ajax, and Napoleon. From childhood, as we have said, Elliott was noted for mildness and tenderness; but it was time now to put away childish things; for the very bread that he ate was taxed to support a useless aristocracy. And not his own bread only, (that he might have borne, for he was naturally a peaceful man; and he could afford it now, having learned something of arithmetic,) but the bread of all the poor in the kingdom. This touched his heart. Every pale mechanic, weary with excessive labor; and every pale mechanic's wife, sickly with want and sorrow ; every unprotected widow, and every orphan child; none were exempted from the crushing influence of these accursed cornlaws. Was it not enough to make any man, much less a poet, lift up his voice in wailing and denunciation? enough to make almost any man a poet, if it be the poet's province to sing songs of defiance and war? He who said, "Let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws," was right. Certainly the songs of Elliott, under God, unmade the corn-laws of England. One purpose was, however, served by those accursed corn-laws; they drew the attention of the public to the corn-law rhymer. His volumes no longer fell dead from the press, but were widely read and reviewed. His twenty years of neglect were atoned for by a general burst of popularity; Achilles, Ajax, and Napoleon. were in the ascendant at last. And thus it happened: When the corn-law excitement was at its hight, chance or business led Dr. Bowring, the translator of The Russian Anthology, to Sheffield, where some one put into his hands Elliott's Ranter and The Corn-Law Rhymes. He at once recognized their merit, and began to talk of the poet of Sheffield: not James Montgomery, author of The Wanderer of Switzerland, nor Robert ditto, author of Satan, a poem, but a new man, one Ebenezer Elliott, a dealer in old iron. Among others to whom he spoke of him was Howitt, who instantly procured his poems. Wordsworth was at that time When or how Elliott first became a corn-law rhymer is not known; the probability is, that his change from poetry to politics was gradual. These poets are not | Howitt's guest, and, for a wonder, was VOL. III, No. 3.-R struck with poetry that was not his own, nor of his own quiet school. Bowring went up to London, and talked of the new genius there. Meeting Bulwer one night at a party, he prevailed upon him to read his poetry, and Bulwer shortly after reviewed it and its author in The New Monthly, in an article entitled, "Uneducated Poets." Returning to the Lakes, Wordsworth mentioned the poems to Miss Jewsbury at Manchester, and she noticed them in The Athenæum. Carlyle did the same in the Edinburgh Review. Of course the smaller fry of critics, who never have any opinions of their own, save those that are weak and damnatory; the timid gentlemen, who had given Elliott the cold shoulder for so many years, now made the discovery that he was a great genius. Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart, little dogs and all, they barked for him. He was a famous man, that Ebenezer Elliott! Surely it was time. Twenty years of neglect were quite sufficient to establish his right to a niche in the temple of Fame. Our good friend Southey was not over pleased at the success of his pupil: he either felt that he, too, had neglected Elliott, or else he trembled for his own aristocratic bread and butter. In one of his letters to Lord Mahon, he alludes to Elliott as "this man," and says he shall give him some good advice in The Christian Magazine. Any amount of Southey's could not then have stopped Elliott's fame. Till the repeal of the corn-laws in 1846, Elliott continued to pour out his stirring songs in behalf of the people. Finding at last that he was growing old, he gave up to his sons the principal part of his business, and retired from Sheffield to Darfield, a village hard by, where he spent the remainder of his days in quiet and ease among his friends and books, dying, in 1849, at the age of sixty-eight. Since his death there has been some talk of a monument to his memory; and one is now, we believe, under way in the city of Sheffield. While his poems live, however, and they bid fair to live long, there is no great need of "piled stones" to keep him alive in the hearts of men. The poetry of Ebenezer Elliott, and some other of the late English poets who have followed in his track, embodies the political element of the age. For the first time in English literature we recognize politics as the soul of poetry: heretofore we have had gleams of it; it has shown itself covertly in satire; has occasionally turned the point of a song, but never before pushed boldly and prominently forward, as it does now, sternly and fiercely unfolding its truths, and uttering its terrible denunciations. Freedom, which before only fought, now sings, and has a place in the choir of Apollo, the oracular Tenth Muse. Few poets have sung her praises as well, or have served her as truly, as Ebenezer Elliott, the cornlaw rhymer. A greater difference than exists between his poetry and that of the preceding age, can scarcely be conceived. In the ages of Elizabeth and Charles, and even so late as those of Anne and the Georges, the mass of the so-called English poets were abject and groveling flatterers of all the then existing royal and aristocratic institutions; and the aim and end of their worthless poems, and still more worthless lives, was patronage, nothing but patronage. It was not, "How much genius does my book contain?" but, "To whom can I dedicate it, and make the most money!" My Lord This, it is true, is a rake, and my Lady That a fool; but then they are rich, and will give me fifty or a hundred guineas for a dedication extolling their virtues; and they shall have it, the simpletons, and I, cunning knave, shall have the coin. Somewhat different from this tribe of butterflies is Ebenezer Elliott. There is nothing of the popinjay about him, nothing of the lord and fine gentleman; he is only a man; a dealer in old iron, if you will, rusty and dusty, and even perhaps vulgar, (that horrid word!) but in his soul he is a king, "ay, every inch a king!" The word "politics," that we have applied to his poetry, hardly conveys our meaning, so much and so little does that single word sometimes embrace. As a politician, Elliott neither supports nor refuses to support any particular party; he ignores the names "Whig," "Tory," and uses no Shibboleth of his own in their stead. He is simply the mouthpiece of the people; the voice of the down-trodden and the oppressed of England; the embodiment of popular sentiment the world over; the current opinions of the world in matters of every-day life and thought; its protest against an aristocratic and privileged class, whether of prophets, priests, or kings; the scorn and indignation which it feels at the constant exhibition of tyranny, as yet too strong for it to overthrow; in short, the nineteenth century itself, in its work-day clothes. This is the subject of Elliott's poetry. He is not a poet, a scholar, a wit, though he possessed the distinctive qualities of all; but a man among men; a thorough flesh-andblood man, with a warm heart and a hard hand; sincere and honest, with universal sympathies, especially for the poor. His poetry is real; it gives us a feeling of the man himself; strong, sensible, earnest, indignant, often bitter and willful; yet tender and gentle withal; full of the milk of human kindness. Were he less gentle, he would be less harsh; he is cruel only to be kind. In some respects he resembles the great Scottish peasant, Burns; he lacks, it is true, his richness and warmth of genius; but he also lacks his frailties and errors. He pushed the quality of mind in which they resembled each other, namely, a certain scornful independence and freedom, much further than did Burns, making it the staple of nearly all his poems; while Burns was gradually drawn away from it, by the versatility of his genius, into the enchanted regions of romance, the world of fictitious joy and sorrow. While the one poured out the rarest of love-songs, the other shouted the stormiest of battle-odes. The amount of Burns's revolutionary poetry, as it was considered in his own day, is small compared with the bulk of his writings. The general tendency of Man is made to mourn, especially the half stanza, "If I'm design'd yon lordling's slave, The glorious, A Man's a Man for a' that; Bruce's Address; and one or two local ballads, comprise it all; while that of Elliott extends to, we know not how many volumes. Elliott has never said any single thing as fine as "The rank is but the guinea's stamp, But he has said that, in common with other brave thoughts, over and over again. It is the key-note and substance of his poetry; and a nobler could not be found. There is also another, and a twofold aspect in his verse, seldom found in that of the modern poets. Whether dealing with man or nature, with the squalor and wretchedness of the town, or the beauty and gladness of the country, it is equally fine and true. He unites the best qualities of Crabbe and Wordsworth; the minute detail and love of still life, the genre painting of the one, with the antique pastoral feeling of the other. The dew lies thick in his fields; the dust lies thick on his streets. The birds sing in his clouds, free and joyous; the children weep in his factories, dying of work. In his love for, and intimate knowledge of, nature, he is equal to the best of the pastoral poets; much finer, we think, than Thomson and his vaunted Seasons. Old Chaucer himself is not more profuse in his admiration of spring; Milton and Shakspeare, so famous in this respect, (see the flower lines in Lycidas and The Winter's Tale,) have not given us a finer catalogue of flowers than can be culled at random from any of his dewy pages. His love of nature is not "got up" for effect, but is real; the result of his solitary rambles when a dunce of a boy; the fruit of his incipient botanizing, and his holiday walks when a man along the banks of the Don and the Rivilin. His landscapes are not Arcadian, but English, drawn from Sheffield and the country adjacent. One might pick his way anywhere about there, with a volume of Elliott in his hand for a guide-book. The chief fault of his verse, for he has now and then a fault, like many of his betters, is a kind of lashing of Pegasus, a straining after force and power. It is too declamatory and abrupt, full of gulfs and chasms, and the lightnings that he managed so ill in youth. The Village Patriarch, his longest poem, and The Splendid Village, a merciless satire, are already enrolled among the English classics. Many of his minor poems are "beautiful exceedingly." No complete edition of his works has ever been issued, that we are aware of, either in this country or England. A small volume of selections was published in Philadelphia some years ago, but it does him no justice. LIFE.-What a serious matter our life is! How unworthy and stupid it is to trifle it away without heed! What a wretched, insignificant, worthless creature any one comes to be who does not, as soon as possible, lend his whole strength, as in stringing a stiff bow, to doing whatever task lies before him!-Sterling. |