Thou need na start awa' sae hasty, I wad be laith to rin and chase thee, I'm truly sorry man's dominion Which mak's thee startle At me, thy poor earth-born companion. I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve; 'S a sma' request: I'll get a blessin' wi' the lave, Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin! An' bleak December's winds ensuin', Thou saw the fields laid bare and waste, An' weary winter comin' fast, An' cozie here, beneath the blast, Thou thought to dwell; Till, crash! the cruel coulter passt That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble Has cost thee mony a weary nibble ! Now thou 's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble, But house or hald, To thole the winter's sleety dribble, An' cranreuch cauld! But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane, And lea'e us nought but grief and pain, Still thou art blest, compared wi' me! An' forward, though I canna see, EXERCISE 1.-Mention, in detail, the incidents which suggested to Burns the foregoing piece. EXERCISE 2.-Paraphrase the three stanzas that you like best. POETS AND POETRY. LEIGH HUNT. Enthusiasm, strong feeling ex- Luxuriant, producing in great Verdict, the decision as to the truth of a charge. Sir W. Raleigh, a great court- deal. Claimant, one who seeks to Dante, an Italian poet, who Perceptions, powers by which Shenstone, a graceful writer and poet of the 18th century. Elysian, belonging to the future happy state, as believed in by the ancients. Shelley, a poet of great power: he was drowned in 1822, when only 30 years old. IF a young reader should ask, after all, What is the quickest way of knowing bad poets from good, the best poets from the next best ? and so on, the answer is, the only and twofold way: first, the perusal of the best poets with the greatest attention; and second, the cultivation of that love of truth and beauty which made them what they are. Every true reader of poetry partakes a more than ordinary portion of the poetic nature; and no one can be completely such who does not love, or take an interest in, everything that interests the poet, from the firmament to the daisy, from the highest heart of man to the most pitiable of the low. * If the same person should ask, What class of poetry is the highest? I should say, undoubtedly, the Epic; for it includes the drama, with narration besides; or the speaking and action of the characters, with the speaking of the poet himself, whose utmost address is taxed to relate all well for so long a time, particularly in the passages least sustained by enthusiasm. Whether this class has included the greatest poet, is another question still under trial; for Shakspeare perplexes all such verdicts, even when the claimant is Homer; though, if a judgment may be drawn from his early narratives, it is to be doubted whether even Shakspeare could have told a story like Homer. Next to Homer and Shakspeare come such narrators as the less universal, but still intenser Dante; Milton, with his dignified imagination; the universal, profoundly simple Chaucer, and luxuriant, remote Spenser, immortal child in poetry's most poetic solitudes: then the great second-rate dramatists. It is to be borne in mind, however, that the first poet of an inferior class may be superior to followers in the train of a higher one, though the superiority is by no means to be taken for granted; otherwise, Pope would be superior to Fletcher, and Butler to Pope. Imagination, teeming with action and character, makes the greatest poets; feeling and thought the next; fancy (by itself) the next; wit the last. * * * * * Truth, of any great kind whatsoever, makes great writing. This is the reason why such poets as Ariosto, though not writing with a constant detail of thought and feeling, like Dante, are justly considered great as well as delightful. Their greatness proves itself by the same truth of nature and sustained power, though in a different way. Their action is not so crowded and weighty; their sphere has more territories less fertile, but it has enchantments of its own, which excess of thought would spoil,-luxuries, laughing graces, animal spirits; and not to recognise the beauty and greatness of these, treated as they treat them, is simply to be defective in sympathy. Ariosto occasionally says as fine things as Dante, and Spenser as Shakspeare; but the business of both is to enjoy : and in order to partake their enjoyment to its full extent, you must feel what poetry is in the general as well as the particular, must be aware that there are different songs of the spheres, some fuller of notes, and others of a sustained delight; and as the former keep you perpetually alive to thought or passion, so from the latter you receive a constant harmonious sense of truth and beauty, more agreeable perhaps on the whole, though less exciting. Ariosto, for instance, does not tell a story with the brevity and concentrated passion of Dante; every sentence is not so full of matter, nor the style so removed from the indifference of prose; yet you are charmed with a truth of another sort, equally characteristic of the writer, equally drawn from nature, substituting a healthy sense of enjoyment for intenser emotion. Exclusiveness of liking for this or that mode of truth only shows, either that a reader's perceptions are limited, or that he would sacrifice truth itself to his favourite form of it. Sir Walter Raleigh, who was as trenchant with his pen as his sword, hailed the "Faërie Queen" of his friend Spenser, in verses in which he said that Petrarch was thenceforward to be no more heard of. Yet Petrarch is still living; Chaucer was not abolished by Sir Walter; and Shakspeare is thought somewhat valuable. A botanist might as well have said that myrtles and oaks were to disappear, because acacias had come up. It is with the poet's creations as with nature's, great or small. Wherever truth and beauty, whatever their amount, can be worthily shaped into verse, and answer to some demand for it in our hearts, there poetry is to be found; whether in productions grand and beautiful, as some great event, or some mighty, leafy solitude, or no bigger and more pretending than a sweet face or a bunch of violets; whether in Homer's epic or Gray's elegy, in the enchanted gardens of Ariosto and Spenser, or the very pot-herbs of "The Schoolmistress" of Shenstone, the balms of the simplicity of a cottage. Not to know and feel this is to be deficient in the universality of nature herself, who is a poetess on the smallest as well as the largest scale, and who calls upon us to admire all her productions, not indeed with the same degree of admiration, but with no refusal of it, except to defect. What the poet has to cultivate above all things is love and truth; what he has to avoid, like poison, is the fleeting and the false. He will get no good by proposing to be "in earnest at the moment." His earnestness must be innate and habitual; born with him, and felt to be his most precious inheritance. "I expect neither profit nor general fame by my writings," says Coleridge, in the preface to his poems; "and I consider myself as having been amply repaid without either. Poetry has been to me its own |