fects can be distinctly traced in all subsequent poetry, even to the present day. (See Lockhart's Life of Scott.) The principal historical events of the age were the downfall of Napoleon and the war of 1812. The authors will be divided into two classes : I. THE POETS, represented by Byron, Shelley, Moore, Keats, Campbell, and Wordsworth. II. THE PROSE WRITERS, represented by Scott, Southey, Coleridge, De Quincey, Lamb, and Hallam. Scott, Southey, Coleridge, and Campbell were distinguished both in poetry and prose. I. POETS OF THE AGE OF SCOTT. LORD BYRON. 1788-1824. George Gordon Noel Byron, the most splendid genius of the age, was born in London in 1788. He graduated at Cambridge, and then travelled for about two years. On his return he married Miss Milbanke, who left him in about a year, soon after the birth of their daughter, Ada. He then quitted England forever, and passed the rest of his life, in the grossest dissipation, on the Continent, mostly in Switzerland and Italy. In 1824 he went to Missolonghi to assist the Greeks in their struggle for liberty, where he died in the same year, at the age of thirty-six, thus gloriously ending an inglorious and wretched life. Byron was a great genius, but not in the best sense a great poet. He was great in a small way. Instead of giving voice to the healthful impulses and aspirations of the universal heart, he filled the universe with the scoffs and sneers and fancied woes of Lord Byron. His works contain some magnificent descriptions, fine imagery, and noble sentiments; but their general tone is misanthropic, irreligious, immoral, and therefore unhealthful. His finest poem-and, indeed, one of the grandest poems of the century-is Childe Harold. Among the best of his other works are- -The Dream, The Prisoner of Chillon, Mazeppa, The Bride of Abydos, Parisina, The Giaour, and The Siege of Corinth. His longest and most brilliant poem is Don Juan, but is unfit to read, on account of its coarseness. Beside these he wrote Cain, Manfred, Marino Faliero, and several other dramas. These contain powerful passages, but are on the whole very defective on account of their want of variety in action and characters. (See "Life and Letters of Lord Byron," by Thomas Moore.) EXTRACTS. Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow. II. The drying up a single tear has more Of honest fame than shedding seas of gore. III. All who joy would win, Must share it; Happiness was born a twin. IV. The sky is changed! and such a change! O night, From peak to peak, the rattling crags among, Leaps the live thunder!-not from one lone cloud, Childe Harold, C. III., St. 92. SHELLEY. 1792-1822. Percy Bysshe Shelley, the most poetical of all poets, was born in 1792, and was drowned in the Bay of Spezzia, Italy, in 1822. He is the author of several powerful dramas and of some long nar.. rative and descriptive poems, but he is essentially a lyric poet, and as such is unexcelled. The Skylark, The Sensitive Plant, and The Cloud are embodiments of the very spirit of poesy, and shine with "the light that never was on sea or land." I. 3. 6. 13. 21. EXTRACT. Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert, That from heaven, or near it, Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. In the golden ligh.ning Of the sunken sun, O'er which clouds are brightening, Thou dost float and run Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun. All the earth and air With thy voice is loud, As, when night is bare, From one lonely cloud The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflowed. That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine. Teach me half the gladness That thy brain must know, Such harmonious madness From my lips would flow, The world should listen then, as I am listening now. The Skylark (selected stanzas). MOORE. 1779-1852. Thomas Moore, the great Irish song writer, was born in Dub lin in 1779, and died in 1852. His principal poetical works are his exquisite Oriental tale entitled Lalla Rook, and his songs and hymns, many of which—such as The Last Rose of Summer, Those Evening Bells, Come ye Disconsolate, etc.—are known and sung wherever the English language is spoken. EXTRACT. Let Fate do her worst, there are relics of joy, KEATS. 1795-1821. John Keats, a young poet of the highest promise, died in 1821, in his twenty-sixth year. His principal poems are Endymion, Hyperion, The Eve of St. Agnes, Ode on a Grecian Urn, and Ode to a Nightingale. They are characterized by a profusion of beautiful imagery, and great wealth of classical learning and allusion. Thomas Campbell was distinguished as a poet and a prosist. His principal poems are-Pleasures of Hope, Gertrude of Wyoming, Lochiel's Warning, O'Connor's Child, and Hohenlinden. His principal prose work is his Lectures on Poetry. EXTRACTS. The world was sad, the garden was a wild, And man, the hermit, sighed till woman smiled. 11. Pleasures of Hope. 'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view, Pleasures of Hope. WORDSWORTH. 1770-1850. William Wordsworth, the principal of the "Lake Poets," was born in 1770, was educated at Cambridge, passed a tranquil and uneventful life, and died at Rydal Mount in 1850,--the PoetLaureate of England, and loved and admired by all the world. In him poetry reached its completest emancipation from the artificiality of the age of Queen Anne. The love of nature expressed in the lines, "To me the meanest flower that blows can give pervades all his works, and forms their leading characteristic. For Wordsworth's principal work is The Excursion, a long philosophical poem in blank verse; but most readers prefer his shorter poems, such as Ode on Immortality, Ode to Duty, Tintern Abbey Lucy, We are Seven, etc. EXTRACTS. I. The child is father of the man, And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety. The Rainbow. |