the two sea-songs (1802), is perhaps still finer as a poem. It is as vivid; it is far deeper in its suggestion of the horrors of battle; and the opening contrast between the calm of nature and the trampling of warriors and the garments rolled in blood strikes a sombre note which is heard again and again to the very close. To the same year belongs Lochiel's Warning, which-with a different, though kindred, motive -may be held to dispute the palm with Hohenlinden. In his remaining poems he turns to the softer side of romance, and here his best achievement is Lord Ullin's Daughter, a ballad finer than any written in that generation of British poets, if we set aside the masterpieces of Scott; yet, even here, there is a beat of the hard, metallic ring from which his poetry is seldom free. A more elaborate venture in something of the same field is Gertrude of Wyoming (1809), a red Indian tale, the matter of which is akin to that of Wordsworth's Ruth, while its stanza, the Spenserian, was in all probability suggested by The Female Vagrant. But neither Wordsworth, nor any other writer, could ever have been eager to claim parentage. For the poem, like the later Theodric (1824), is singularly feeble. On the whole, Campbell seems to have left on his contemporaries the impression that his powers were greater than his performance, and that his reputation would have stood higher if he had not been so shy of risking it.

Thus the classical revival, which bulked so largely

1 Published in 1804; written about the same time as the Pleasures of Hope.

D

in the eyes of Byron, in fact amounted to very little. No one of its authors had any serious quarrel with the romantic tendencies of the time. All of them came to be more and more deeply penetrated by those tendencies as years went on. The use of the heroic couplet was, in truth, the one badge of the alleged reaction; and even that, though for obvious reasons retained to the end by Crabbe, was eventually deserted both by Rogers and Campbell. It is true, however, that the names of those three men mark a certain slackening in the onward movement of romance. We now return to the full tide of that movement with the publication of Lyrical Ballads.

From Thomson to Burns and Blake the reaction against the ideals and methods of classical poetry

Lyrical had persistently grown in strength. A Ballads. new world of song had been silently built up, before which the classical models paled into insignificance. But, in the main, the revolt had been carried out in silence. With the exception of Blake, few or none of its authors had troubled themselves to declare open war upon the poetic creed which they denied. The Lyrical Ballads (1798), with its successive Advertisements, Prefaces, and Appendices from the hand of Wordsworth (published respectively in 1798, 1800, 1802, 1815), may be regarded as such a declaration. "Both by precept and example" they raise the standard of open revolt against the school of Pope. And that is one of their many claims to mark an epoch in literary history.

With the details of Wordsworth's theory of "poetic diction" we are not concerned. His statement of it was strangely maladroit, and in some respects conveyed an impression exactly the contrary of that which was intended. In appearance, it swept away the distinction between poetry and prose. In reality, it was a plea for the emancipation of poetry; for a riddance of the bondage which had reduced it to something hardly distinguishable from rhymed and stilted prose; for a return to the passion and vividness which the Augustans had banished alike from its language and its thought.

Previous poetry

Both

This was not the first time that either Wordsworth or Coleridge had appeared in print. had been known to the public for some of Coleridge. years; and known for qualities which the modern reader finds some difficulty in recognising as their own. Coleridge (1772-1834), whose later poetry is more fastidiously distilled than that of any other Englishman, was notorious for the "turgid ode and tumid stanza," of which Byron was to make sport in his youthful satire. He had, in fact, written nothing better than the Ode on the Departing Year (1796) and a considerable number of sonnets, none of which can be said to rise above mediocrity. All these betray the romantic ferment which was working among the younger poets of the time. But they have nothing of the imaginative genius, and nothing of the unerring craftsmanship, which belong to the poems written in and after 1797, the year of his first unbroken intercourse

with Wordsworth, and which were first revealed to the world in the fateful volume of 1798. It is enough to stamp his earlier work that the god of his idolatry at that time was the romantic, but insipid, Bowles.

Bowles.

Bowles (1762-1850)—if a short account of his work may be inserted here was a poet whose importance Influence of mainly consists in his influence on Coleridge and, to a less degree, on Wordsworth; and it is his earliest work, Fourteen Sonnets (1789), ultimately increased to thirty, which earned this distinction. The sonnets are lax in form, but, like all Bowles' poetry, they have an undeniable charm of rhythm. They are, perhaps, too much in the nature of an itinerary; and, with the exception of one on the Cherwell, are strangely lacking in the sense of scenery. But what took Coleridge captive was their obviously romantic intention, and the strain of pensive sentiment-of "mild and manliest melancholy," as he not very aptly called it-which runs through them. The reminiscences of Spenser and of Milton's earlier poems, of Collins and Cowper, which abound in them, are also significant of the poet's bent. In after years, Bowles seems to have come to a fuller consciousness of his own aims and ideals. Some of his later poetry-a description of tropical scenery, for instance, in The Missionary of the Andes (1815) -is curiously minute and, what is more, singularly beautiful in its local colouring. And it is the romantic leaning implied in these qualities that prompted him to the attack on Pope (1806) which

Thus, of

so deeply stirred the spleen of Byron. the poets actually writing when Coleridge was a youth at school and college, it is intelligible enough that Bowles-for of Burns at that time he seems to have known nothing-should have stood out as the rising hope of the romantic cause.

With Wordsworth (1770-1850) the case is still stranger. It is not merely that his powers were Previous poetry undeveloped, but that they took a direcof Wordsworth. tion the very opposite of that which was his true bent. The Descriptive Sketches (1793) have all the contortions and all the "glossy, unfeeling diction" of the most extreme disciple of the school of Pope. It is true that both they and the Evening Walk, written a few years earlier, contain touches of nature and a sense of the life in nature which foreshadow the real Wordsworth of the Tintern poem and the Prelude. It was such things which caused Coleridge, then at Cambridge, to conclude that "a new star had risen above the literary horizon." But to most readers it must have appeared that the new poet was mainly remarkable for the most pious devotion to the orthodox couplet, and the most righteous reluctance to call a spade a spade.

Of the work composed in the interval between 1793 and 1797 the public knew nothing. But it is the work which, more than any other except the Prelude, bears the stamp of the mental conflict through which Wordsworth passed during the later stages of the French Revolution; and it is the work which gives the key to the achievement of the ten