Wordsworth: "their poetry is the poetry of mere sentiment, Burns' is a very highly sublimated essence of animal existence." And it is a contrast which does much to account for the enormous popularity of Burns. It has won a way for his genius into the hearts of thousands who have remained cold before the more ethereal poetry of Shelley, Keats, or Coleridge. And this may be said without accepting Hazlitt's implied sneer at at "mere sentiment," or denying that to give imaginative form to such sentiment is the noblest function of the poet.

A higher flight was offered by satire; and in no direction does Burns break more markedly with the traditions of the century. Compare his

His satire. satire with that of Pope. Both poets excel in dramatic portraits. But, alike in method and temper, the contrast is significant. Pope's portraits are masterpieces of analysis; those of Burns are dramatic creations. Pope's thrusts are prompted by deadly hatred; Burns, scornful though he may be, has something of the good-humour of Dryden. The contrast, no doubt, may easily be pushed too far, at least as regards method. It would be absurd to maintain that Pope's method in Sir Balaam is unreservedly analytic. It would be absurd to deny that his character of Atticus, with all its dissections and antitheses, is, in the fullest sense of the term, a creation. But, though the elements of humour are present in the latter portrait, they are prevented from crystallising by the sheer malice of the painter. And, even had they done so, the "civil

leer" of Atticus hardly cuts so deep into the roots of things as the unsuspecting hypocrisy of Holy Willie, who thinks his vices aloud with the complacent rhetoric of one trained professionally to the conviction that all his qualities must be virtues. So it remains true that the Prayer, though its method recalls that of Hudibras, is a new thing in a century which is pre eminently that of satire; and that, as a distinct form of poetry, unless we except the self-revelations of Byron's Southey, the way here opened by Burns is a way since practically untrodden.

It is in song, however, that the powers of Burns are at their brightest in the one song which embodies for all time the Scot's devotion to his

His songs.

fatherland; in the many which embalm the various moods of love. Which of our poets has sung of love so simply, so naturally, so irresistibly from the heart? There is no need to repeat here what has already been said about the imagery of these poems. But what is the secret of their marvellous rhythm? It is that, like so many of the Elizabethan lyrics, they were actually written to music,-music which had rung itself into his heart and become part of his very being. "Until I am complete master of a tune," he writes to Thomson, "I can never compose for it. When one stanza is composed-which is generally the most difficult part of the business-I walk out, sit down now and then, look out for objects in nature around me that are in unison and harmony with the cogitations of my fancy and workings of my bosom, humming every now

and then the air with the verses I have framed." Certainly, not only as to melody, but also as to imaginative quality and imagery, this accounts for much.

With the narrower aspects of the romantic revival Burns has little in common. Except in his love for all that savours of the soil-its speech, its rhythms, and its melodies-he can hardly be said to touch them. With the wider bearings of romance, however, he went heart and soul. He has the rich humour, he has the lyric fervour, he has the genius for idealising common things, which are of its essence. And he has these in greater measure than any of his forerunners. For this reason it may fairly be said that, with the publication of Poems, chiefly in the Scottish dialect, the triumph of the romantic revolt was practically ensured. If recognition came to Burns sooner than to other poets of his day, for Blake (1757-1827) it was delayed till long after death. His first volume, Poetical Sketches (1783), appeared before The Task, before the early poems of Burns. All, or nearly all, his poetry-such of it as countswas published before the Lyrical Ballads.1 But for all practical purposes it might never have been issued. A handful of personal friends knew and loved it from the first; "his poems are as grand as his pictures," Fuseli is recorded to have said. As time went on, but not until it had been twenty or thirty years before the public, it became known to

Blake.

1 Songs of Innocence, 1789; Songs of Experience, 1794; the Prophetic Books from 1789 to 1804 and even later.

Wordsworth and Coleridge.1 But to the world at large it was a sealed book. And the middle of the nineteenth century had passed before the rare greatness of its author was in any way generally acknowledged.

This long neglect was doubtless partly due to accident-the accident of Blake's lifelong warfare with the publishers. But the cause is to be sought mainly in the poetry itself: in its childlike simplicity; in its profound mysticism; in its anticipation of tendencies which did not come to ripeness till the days of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. It is to be sought, that is, in the very originality of the poet-a poet born, it may truly be said, out of due time; in the very qualities which, with his magical symbolism and his subtle, if fitful, ear for melody, are now recognised as the surest marks of his greatness.

His poems of child life.

The poems written for and about children are perhaps those which are now most widely known and understood. And few are more characteristic of his genius. If he does not, like Wordsworth, seize the aloofness of the child's life, that which makes the child like a spirit of an abiding world moving among creatures of a day, he shares the every-day joys and sorrows of children, their openness to sudden gusts or lingering memories of terror and ecstasy; he feels the poetry of their grief and their gladness, the grace of their rest and

1 I infer from a passage in Crabb Robinson's Diary (i. 201) that Wordsworth first became acquainted with Blake's poetry in 1812; it is certain that Coleridge did not discover it till 1818 (see Letters, p. 687).

their motion, as no other poet has felt or shared them except Hugo. The open-eyed curiosity of childhood, its genius for welcoming each new experience as it comes-all this to Blake was familiar as the day. For throughout life, behind the subtle instinct of the artist, he had himself the heart of a child. And this came to be more and more so as years went on. His first volume, composed mostly in boyhood and very early youth, is without direct evidence to it. The Songs of Innocence and Experience are full of it. Yet behind this simpler strain there is an undertone of mysticism, deeper than that of Wordsworth himself. And it is the union of the two that makes the specific quality of his poetry. It is a quality of which there had been practically no trace in our poetry since the seventeenth century mystics.

spirit.

It was just because of his feeling for children that Blake was, like them, a confirmed visionary. He was His visionary so in both senses of the term. He lived in a world of visions. And he saw those visions as vividly as other men see trees and houses. This is apparent not only in the Designs, which fall beyond our scope; not only in the Prophetic Books, to which no passing notice can do justice; but also, and hardly less so, in the Poems. With all his love of form and colour, of sunshine and flowers, and the "human form divine," it was not in the world of outward things that he either sought or found them. It was in his own heart, and in the " shaping spirit," which built up again from