Gray be excepted, the Reliques and Ossian are perhaps the only works in which its action is clearly to be traced. But the beginnings, though small, were rich in the promise of the future. The least of all seeds was destined, within comparatively few years, to become the greatest among herbs. The period inaugurated by these two books-one of them, no doubt, questionable enough-was to prove one of the most brilliant in the history of European literature.

The romantic movement owes much to each of these Collections. But, as regards style at any rate, the debt in the two cases is of very different kinds. The style of Ossian is charged, if not overcharged, with colour; it is emphatic and declamatory. The Reliques, on the other hand, are simplicity itself. There are few books in which effects so strong and deep are wrought with so little effort. The same difference is reflected in their narrative methods. The narrative of Ossian is cloudy, not to say confused. That of the Ballads is a model of directness. If, as in Edward of the Bloody Brand, the hearer is ever left to gather the story for himself, it is for a special purpose-to intensify the horror by forcing us to follow step by step the emotions of those who prompted the deed and who did it. In no other way could the tragic motive of the poem have been either so briefly or so powerfully driven home. In Ossian, on the other hand, the allusive method wearies from its very sameness. It is seldom used for any purpose that might not have been served as well, or better, by a

And it is commonly not only

plain statement. allusive but obscure.

The very defects of Ossian, however, are not far removed from the sources of the power. The emphasis, the heavy colouring of the style, the wailing note which rises from its cadences, the suggestion of sombre majesty which hangs over both style and narrative-all these fall in with one at least of the currents which went to swell the flood - tide of Romance. They found a responsive chord in the hearts of Coleridge and Byron, of Schiller and the youthful Goethe, of Chateaubriand and George Sand. Nor were they, if only through Chateaubriand, without effect upon certain sides of the genius of Hugo.

The Reliques strike an entirely different, and it must be admitted a more stirring, note. It is the note to be heard in the poetry, above all in the songs and ballads, of Scott; in the ballads of Bürger, Schiller, and Goethe; in the more inspired part of the poetry of Coleridge.

Once more, however, differently as the two Collections may have worked in some respects, in others they can never be disjoined. Both of them deepened as well as widened the range of human passion; both brought men once more face to face with the supernatural; both, finally, led men to recognise the undying poetry of the legends, the memories, the heroic figures, of popular tradition. In this sense we may say that Europe owes to them not merely the works indicated above, but the seed which bore fruit in Old Mortality and Faust and La Légende des Siècles.

The opening years of our period did not promise well for the future of Romance. A harsh fate had followed the poetic innovators of the action against previous generation. Gray had "never Romance. spoken out"; Collins, Goldsmith, and

Apparent re

Chatterton had all died before their time: the two former cut off in middle life, the last before he had even reached the threshold of manhood. The two survivors of the movement, Macpherson and Percy, had been received, as has been said, far more coldly in their own island than on the Continent. Macpherson's credit had been destroyed partly by his own shuffling and arrogance, partly by the relentless scorn of Johnson. Percy himself had the regard of the dictator; but that is more than could be said for his ballads. The star of Johnson, of the old order, was for the moment in the ascendant; and the Lives of the Poets, advertised since 1777, was completed in 1781. Any observer might well have been excused for supposing the romantic revolt to be irrevocably crushed.

Ended by

Prophecies in such matters are notoriously unsafe. The very next year (1782) saw the standard of rebellion raised afresh. In that year apCowper. peared the first acknowledged publication of Cowper, Table Talk, with other poems, serious and sportive. On the surface there was little to show the real leanings of the new poet, and they might easily have escaped a careless reader. The bulk of the volume was taken up with didactic verse, interspersed with satire on the religious and

social levities of the day. It was couched in the heroic couplet; it contained a compliment, though with something of a double edge, to Pope, and even some few echoes of his style. On these grounds, and perhaps yet more on account of its fervent avowal of Christian belief, it secured the praise of Johnson. Whether the champion of poetic orthodoxy would have felt thus, had he penetrated the extent of the new writer's heresies, or known his private views about the Lives of the Poets, may reasonably be doubted. As it is, Johnson's benevolent verdict may be taken to represent the judgment of those who were pleased to see so vigorous a writer follow Goldsmith in preserving the traditional metre of the Augustans, who were attracted by his religious fervour, and who, for these reasons, were willing to overlook his innovations.

His innovations.

For the innovations are there, and they are not far beneath the surface. The language of Cowper, with rare exceptions, is singularly free -freer even than that of Goldsmithfrom the artificialities and inversions which marked the school of Pope, the "poetic diction" from which even Collins had not been able wholly to escape. Raised but little above the ordinary language of prose, it is probably the purest English which any poet had written since Dryden. The couplet in his hands-Churchill was probably his model-regains the freedom of movement which, in the main, it had lost since Dryden. The lines flow on with varied pauses, not couplet by couplet but paragraph by

B

paragraph. There is none of that forced antithesis, that laboured balance of line against line, hemistich against hemistich, which is so wearisome in Pope's disciples, and even in many passages of Pope himself. And there are, if only in one passage, touches of nature which for their genius of imaginative observation are a new thing in English poetry; the essentially romantic contrast between the "green meads" and the "yellow tilth"; the vision of the streams edged with osiers, upon which the poet gazed in his daily walks; the image of the "blue rim where skies and mountains meet," which, by a flash of intuition, he transfers from the highlands he had never seen to the rolling pastures of the Ouse.

His religious

Even more significant are the glowing outbursts in which Cowper gives utterance to the thoughts which lay nearest to his heart-his pæan fervour. to liberty; his moving tribute to those who had toiled in the service of man or God; his denunciation of slavery; his fervent exaltation of the Gospel and the ministry of the Gospel; his story, simple almost as that told by the evangelist himself, of the journey to Emmaus. With these must be taken the hymns, nearly seventy in all, which a few years earlier (1779) he had contributed to the Olney Collection. They are among the noblest in our language, and place Cowper in the same rank with the other great hymn - writers of the century-with Isaac Watts, with Toplady, with Charles Wesley.

This side of Cowper's genius is memorable in itself.