The passion of Words

on the breast of Nature." worth was strong in him, though he had read and loved, but did not justly admire, Keats and Shelley. But as he grew older, he was drawn aside from contemplation of Nature by the misery of the poor, by the starvation the Corn Laws, the manufacturers, and the indifferent landlords imposed on the people. Wordsworth, he thought, had only touched the comfortable poor. Crabbe gave him more truth, and was nearer to his heart-"Crabbe, whose dark gold is richer than it seems"-but Byron had most power over his soul. Byron's anger, force, love of freedom, even his gloom, suited one who had to sing the stern and crying suffering of the people.

Elliott quite understood that Byron would not have cared about the English labourer. But the revolutionary spirit in Byron, his fierce scorn of the oppressor, and his dying effort to free Greece, made him a spirit of power in a mind like Elliott's. Soon, leaving Byron, he took his individual turn, and concentrated and consecrated himself as the Poet of the Poor. And well he did that duty, voicing their silent pain and wrath with unbroken courage, truth, and fervour. At first he wrote poems of some length, after the manner of Robert Bloomfield; and if we wish to know the state of rural England in those days, we cannot do betterand this will illuminate the merely political histories with the light of reality-than read The Patriarch of the Village and The Splendid Village. There, in a lurid

light, but a true one, the rustic England of those times is drawn ; and its miseries were only less than those of the peasants of France before the Revolution. Then, as the struggle against the Corn Laws deepened, Elliott wrote rough, keen, rousing lyrics, close to the very truth of things, the passion of which smote like a dagger, the reality of which could not be more lucidly expressed. What he saw, he wrote. But this denunciation, and all the fierceness of his poetry, were relieved throughout by a gracious love of natural beauty, a joy in the lovely and quiet world which knit him to the past poets, and carried him forward into those who were to come. Moreover, the springs of pity and tenderness were deep in him, and with these, the fountain of a strong and humble faith in God. These saved the poetry, gave it that high and loving note which lifted it above the angers of denunciation, and enabled it to live.

I have often thought that, bad as things are still in town and country, and much as I wish that the poetry of our own day should now enter into the battle-the progress made in social good during the last seventy years of the last century has been so great, and so weli founded on steady and well-organized ideas, that it deserves greater praise than has been given to it. To read the Coronation Ode, written for the Sheffield Working Men's Association, and to compare it with the profound feeling which ran through the nation at the death of the Queen, is to realise this change. If

the people had been suffering even half as bitterly as they were suffering when the Queen was crowned, nothing like that which we have seen when she died could have taken place. I quote this ode of his, even though, as poetry, it is not good. It is not, of course, an attack on the Queen, but a cry against the misery, the oppression, and the past policy of the country. Its sad and terrible note sounds almost incredible in our ears.

CORONATION ODE

Victoria, cypress-crown'd! thou, good in vain!

How the red wreath, with which thy name is boundThe page which tells the first deeds of thy reign,

Black, and blood-blotted-cheer the Calmuck hound. Whose growl o'er Brunswick hails thee, cypress-crown'd!

Canada weeps-and yet her dead are free!

Throned o'er their blood! who would not be a Queen?

The Queen of new-made graves, who would not be?

Of glory's royal flowers the loveliest seen!

So young! yet all that the deplored have been !

Here too, O Queen, thy wo-worn people feel
The load they bear is more than they can bear!
Beneath it twenty million workers reel !

While fifty thousand idlers rob and glare,

And mock the sufferings which they yet may share!

The drama soon will end. Four acts are past:

The curtain rises o'er embracing foes.

But each dark smiler hugs his dagger fast!

While Doom prepares his match, and waits the close!
Queen of the Earthquake; would'st thou win or lose?

Still shall the Car of Juggernaut roll on,
O'er broken hearts and children born in vain,
Banner'd with fire! while "thousand men are one"

Sink down beneath its coward wheels of pain,

That crush out souls, through crunching blood and brain.

Stop!-for to ruin Antoinette was led,

By men, who only when they died awoke !

Base nobles who o'er France vain darkness spread,
And, goading her faint steeds with stroke on stroke,
Loaded the wain-until the axles broke!

Stop!" for the blasting engine's iron Laws,"

Then saved not thrones from outraged Heav'n's control,
When hunger urg'd up to the cannon's jaws

A sea of men, with only one wild soul !
Hark! still I hear the echo of its roll!

We can scarcely listen to it without feeling that the main ideas of the Revolution, so long silent in England, were again arising into life. What would England make of them? What would they become in the New Poetry they prophesied and stimulated? The answer poetry gave was no obscure one. The ideas changed their manner; they changed the form of their demands; they were modified by circumstances; but they lived on. They became, not a furious menace from without, but a spirit moving slowly from within, working in quiet ways, infiltrating themselves into almost every sphere of human thought, and moving with dignity, and yet with passion, through the poets from this time till about 1870, when again they began to change their form.

Keble was another precursor of the awakening. That awakening was destined in poetry to be greatly interested in ideas of religion, and one species of these ideas arose in 1827 with the publication of The

Christian Year. In this book Keble created a new method and a new aim in religious poetry. The religious poets of the Eighteenth Century were more hymn-writers than poets, but the greater part of Keble's work was quite apart from the inevitable conventionality of the hymn, even when it was written by Cowper. Nor was it fantastic, like that of Herbert, or philosophical like that of Vaughan or More. It was simple, moving on the common meadow-paths of gentle devotion; and its only philosophy was that of the heart of humble men seeking communion with God. At the same time, it bound up with itself a set of large religious ideas. It seized on, and brought into poetry the mighty, emotionalising traditions of the Church from the earliest times; the weight and passion of two thousand years of thought and associated action. It had not force enough to represent the thousandth part of this, but what it did grasp redeemed religious poetry from the narrow limits which confined it to prayer and praise alone. Moreover, it brought religious poetry out of the closed sphere of the inner life into the home, into the trials and temptations of the social life of men and women. The whole range of devotional poetry was expanded. Again, he brought religious feeling into union with the new love of nature for her own sake. The mountains, rivers, woods, and plains, the glories of the morning, evening, and nightly sky, are in his pages, gently, serenely felt. And he used the tender grace, the beauty of the scenery of