INTRODUCTION.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PERIOD.

THE literature of any period consists of the books written. during that period. These books are apt to be about the subjects that the people of the period are interested in, and they are apt to be written in the style that suits the period. So, though in any period there may be one or more men of genius who set a fashion of their own, we are generally able to find some qualities that belong to the literature of the period taken as a whole.

(When you read the following poems, most of them will probably strike you as "old-fashioned." Poems nowadays are not generally written in lines all exactly ten syllables long, as are the "Traveler" and "Deserted Village." We do not speak of young girls as nymphs, or of young men as swains. We write poetry now without mentioning that we have "kindled incense at the Muse's flame." But these same poems seemed to the people who read them little over a hundred years ago as a wonderfully new departure-as the "new-fashioned" poetry. Let us see what it is that was new in them, and what they retained of the old.

The poetry that preceded these poems is called classic. It was written by scholarly men who took great pains to follow certain Latin and Greek models, and who cared much about the manner in which they expressed themselves. In the eighteenth century the chief poet of the classic period is Pope, whom you will read in another volume of this series. Lowell, an American poet, calls Pope's ten-syllabled line the "rocking