Chapter VIII: The Age of Romanticism, 1780-1837 (2)

"...And when we chanced
One day to meet a hunger-bitten girl,
Who crept along fitting her languid gait
Unto a heifer's motion, by a cord
Tied to her arm, and picking thus from the lane
Its sustenance, while the girl with pallid hands
Was busy knitting in a heartless mood
Of solitude, and at the sight my friend
In agitation said, ''Tis against _that_
That we are fighting.'"

Just as Wordsworth was prepared to throw himself personally into the conflict, his relatives recalled him to England. When the Revolution passed into a period of anarchy and bloodshed, his dejection was intense. As he slowly recovered from his disappointment, he became more and more conservative in politics and less in sympathy with violent agitation; but he never ceased to utter a hopeful though calm and tempered note for genuine liberty.

Maturity and Declining Years.--Although Wordsworth was early left an orphan, he never seemed to lack intelligent care and sympathy. His sister Dorothy, a rare soul, helped to fashion him into a poet. Their favorite pastime was walking and observing nature. De Quincey estimates that Wordsworth, during the course of his life, mast have walked as many as 175,000 miles. He acted on his belief that--

"All things that love the sun are out of doors,"

and he composed his best poetry during his walks, dictating it after his return.

He must have had the capacity of impressing himself favorably on his associates or he might never have had the leisure to write poetry. When he was twenty-five, a friend left him a legacy of £900 to enable him to follow his chosen calling of poet. Seven years later, friends saw that he was appointed distributor of stamps for Westmoreland, at the annual salary of £400. Years afterward, a friend gave him a regular allowance to be spent in traveling.

The summer of 1797 saw him and Dorothy begin a golden year at Alfoxden in Somersetshire, in close association with Coleridge. The result of this companionship was _Lyrical Ballads_, an epoch-making volume of romantic verse, containing such gems as Wordsworth's _Lines composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, Lines written in Early Spring, We Are Seven_, and Coleridge's _The Ancient Mariner_. "All good poetry," wrote Wordsworth in the _Preface_ to the second edition of this volume, "is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." This is the opposite of the belief of the classical school.

In 1797, after a trip to Germany, he and Dorothy settled at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, in the Lake Country. She remained a member of the household after he married his cousin, Mary Hutchinson, in 1802. The history of English authors shows no more ideal companionship than that of these three kindred souls. Dove Cottage where he wrote the best of his poetry, remains almost unchanged. It is one of the most interesting literary homes in England.

In 1813 he moved a short distance away, to Rydal Mount, where he lived the remainder of his life. In 1843 he was chosen poet laureate. He died in 1850 and was buried in Grasmere Churchyard.

A Poet of Nature.--Wordsworth is one of the world's most loving and thoughtful lyrical poets of Nature. For him she possessed a soul, a conscious existence, an ability to feel joy and love. In _Lines written in Early Spring_, he expresses this belief:--

"And 'tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes."

All things seem to him to feel pure joy in existence:--

"The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare."

It was also his poetic creed that Nature could bring to human hearts a message of solace and companionship. His poem, _Lines composed a Short Distance above Tintern Abbey_, is a remarkable exposition of this faith.

He would have scorned to be considered merely a descriptive poet of nature. He satirizes those who could do nothing more than correctly apply the color "yellow" to the primrose:--

"A primrose by a river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him
And it was nothing more."

He interprets the sympathetic soul of Nature, not merely her outward or her intellectual aspect. He says in _The Prelude_:--

"From Nature and her overflowing soul
I had received so much, that all my thoughts
Were steeped in feeling."

If we compare Wordsworth's line--

"This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,"[14]

with Tennyson's line from _The Princess_--

"A full sea glazed with muffled moonlight,"

we may easily decide which shows more feeling and which, more art.

Many poets have produced beautiful paintings of the external features of nature. With rare genius, Wordsworth looked beyond the color of the flower, the outline of the hills, the beauty of the clouds, to the spirit that breathed through them, and he communed with "Nature's self, which is the breath of God." He introduced lovers of his poetry to a new world of nature, a new source of companionship and solace, a new idea of a Being in cloud and air and "the green leaves among the groves."

Poetry of Man: Narrative Poems.--Wordsworth is a poet of man as well as of nature. The love for nature came to him first; but out of it grew his regard for the people who lived near to nature. His poetry of man is found more in his longer narrative poems, although in them as well as in his shorter pieces, he shows the action of nature on man. In _The Prelude_, the most remarkable autobiographical poem in English, not only reveals the power in nature to develop man, but he also tells how the French revolution made him feel the worth of each individual soul and a sense of the equality of all humanity at the bar of character and conscience. As his lyrics show the sympathetic soul of nature, so his narrative poems illustrate the second dominant characteristic of the age, the strong sense of the worth of the humblest man.

_Michael_, one of the very greatest of his productions, displays a tender and living sympathy with the humble shepherd. The simple dignity of Michael's character, his frugal and honorable life, his affection for his son, for his sheep, and for his forefather's old home, appealed to the heart of the poet. He loved his subject and wrote the poem with that indescribable simplicity which makes the tale, the verse, and the tone of thought and feeling form together one perfect and indissoluble whole. _The Leech-Gatherer_ and the story of "Margaret" in _The Excursion_ also deal with lowly characters and exhibit Wordsworth's power of pathos and simple earnestness. He could not present complex personalities; but these characters, which belonged to the landscapes of the Lake District and partook of its calm and its simplicity, he drew with a sure hand.

His longest narrative poem is _The Excursion_ (1814), which is in nine books. It contains fine passages of verse and some of his sanest and maturest philosophy; but the work is not the masterpiece that he hoped to make. It is tedious, prosy, and without action of any kind. The style, which is for the most part heavy, becomes pure and easy only in some description of a mountain peak or in the recital of a tale, like that of "Margaret."

An Interpreter of Child Life.--Perhaps the French Revolution and the unforgettable incident of the pitiable peasant child were not without influence in causing him to become a great poetic interpreter of childhood. No poem has surpassed his _Alice Fell, or Poverty_ in presenting the psychology of childish grief, or his _We Are Seven_ in voicing the faith of--

"...A simple child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,"

or the loneliness of "the solitary child" in _Lucy Gray_:--

"The sweetest thing that ever grew
Beside a human door."

In the poem, _Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower_, Nature seems to have chosen Wordsworth as her spokesman to describe the part that she would play in educating a child. Nature says:--

"This child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make
A lady of my own.
* * * * *
...She shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face."

One of the finest similes in all the poetry of nature may be found in the stanza which likens the charms of a little girl to those of:--

"A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
Fair as a star when only one
Is shining in the sky."

Finally, in his _Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood_, he glorifies universal childhood, that "eye among the blind," capable of seeing this common earth--

"Appareled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream."

General Characteristics.--Four of Wordsworth's characteristics go hand in hand,--sincerity, feeling, depth of thought, and simplicity of style. The union of these four qualities causes his great poems to continue to yield pleasure after an indefinite number of readings. In his garden of poetry, the daffodil blossoms all the year for the "inward eye," and the "wandering voice of the cuckoo" never ceases to awaken springtime in the heart.

His own age greeted with so much ridicule the excessive simplicity of the presentation of ordinary childish grief in _Alice Fell_, that he excluded it from many editions of his poems. We now recognize the special charm of his simplicity in expressing those feelings and thoughts that "do often lie too deep for tears."

Wordsworth was most truly great when he seemed to write as naturally as he breathed, when he appeared unconscious of the power that he wielded. When he attempted to command it at will, he failed, as in the dull, lifeless lines of _The Excursion_. Sometimes even his labored simplicity is no better than prose; but such simple and natural poems as _Michael, The Solitary Reaper, To My Sister, Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower_, and the majority of the poems showing the new attitude toward childhood, are priceless treasures of English literature. Of most of these, we may say with Matthew Arnold, "It might seem that Nature not only gave him the matter for his poem, but wrote his poem for him."

Wordsworth lacks humor and his compass is limited; but within that compass he is surpassed by no poet since Milton. On the other hand, no great poet ever wrote more that is almost worthless. Matthew Arnold did much for Wordsworth's renown by collecting his priceless poems and publishing them apart from the mediocre work. Among the fine productions, his sonnets occupy a high place. Only Shakespeare and Milton in our language excel him in this form of verse.

Wordsworth is greatest as a poet of nature. To him nature seemed to possess a conscious soul, which expressed itself in the primrose, the rippling lake, or the cuckoo's song, with as much intelligence as human lips ever displayed in whispering a secret to the ear of love. This interpretation of nature gives him a unique position among English poets. Neither Shakespeare nor Milton had any such general conception of nature.

The bereaved, the downcast, and those in need of companionship turn naturally to Wordsworth. He said that it was his aim "to console the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight." His critics often say that he does not recognize the indifference, even the cruelty of nature; but that he chooses, instead, to present the world as a manifestation of love and care for all creatures. When he was shown where a cruel huntsman and his dogs had chased a poor hart to its death, Wordsworth wrote:--

"This beast not unobserved by nature fell;
His death was mourned by sympathy divine.

"The Being that is in the clouds and air,
That is in the green leaves among the groves,
Maintains a deep and reverential care
For the unoffending creatures whom he loves."[15]

Whatever view we take of the indifference of nature or of the suffering in existence, it is necessary for us, in order to live hopeful and kindly lives, to feel with Wordsworth that the great powers of the universe are not devoid of sympathy, and that they encourage in us the development of "a spirit of love" for all earth's creatures. It was Wordsworth's deepest conviction that any one alive to the presence of nature's conscious spiritual force, that "rolls through all things"--

"Shall feel an overseeing power
To kindle or restrain."

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, 1722-1834

Life.--The troubled career of Coleridge is in striking contrast to the peaceful life of Wordsworth. Coleridge, the thirteenth child of a clergyman, was born in 1772 at Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire. Early in his life, the future poet became a confirmed dreamer, refusing to participate in the play common to boys of his age. Before he was five years old, he had read the _Arabian Nights_. Only a few years later, the boy's appetite for books became so voracious that he devoured an average of two volumes a day.

One evening, when he was about nine years old, he had a violent quarrel with his brother and ran away, sleeping out of doors all night. A cold October rain fell; but he was not found until morning, when he was carried home more dead than alive. "I was certainly injured;" he says of this adventure, "for I was weakly and subject to ague for many years after." Facts like these help to explain why physical pain finally led him to use opium.

After his father's death, young Coleridge became, at the age of ten, a pupil in Christ's Hospital, London, where he remained eight years. During the first half of his stay here, his health was still further injured by continuing as he was in earlier childhood, "a playless daydreamer," and by a habit of almost constant reading. He says that the food "was cruelly insufficient for those who had no friends to supply them." He writes:--

"Conceive what I must have been at fourteen; I was in a continual
low fever. My whole being was, with eyes closed to every object of
present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny corner, and read,
read, read--fancy myself on Robinson Crusoe's island, finding a
mountain of plumcake, and eating a room for myself, and then eating
it into the shapes of tables and chairs--hunger and fancy!"

A few months after leaving Christ's Hospital, Coleridge went to Cambridge, but he did not remain to graduate. From this time he seldom completed anything that he undertook. It was characteristic of him, stimulated by the spirit of the French Revolution, to dream of founding with Southey a Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna. In this ideal village across the sea, the dreamers were to work only two hours a day and were to have all goods in common. The demand for poetry was at this time sufficiently great for a bookseller to offer Coleridge, although he was as yet comparatively unknown, thirty guineas for a volume of poems and a guinea and a half for each hundred lines after finishing that volume. With such wealth in view, Coleridge married a Miss Fricker of Bristol, because no single people could join the new ideal commonwealth. Southey married her sister; but the young enthusiasts were forced to abandon their project because they did not have sufficient money to procure passage across the ocean.

The tendency to dream, however, never forsook Coleridge. One of his favorite poems begins with this line:--

"My eyes make pictures when they are shut."[16]

He recognized his disinclination to remain long at work on prearranged lines, when he said, "I think that my soul must have preëxisted in the body of a chamois chaser."

In 1797-1798 Coleridge lived with his young wife at Nether-Stowey in Somerset. Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy moved to a house in the neighborhood in order to be near Coleridge. The two young men and Dorothy Wordsworth seemed to be exactly fitted to stimulate one another. Together they roamed over the Quantock Hills, gazed upon the sea, and planned _The Rime of the Ancient Mariner_, which is one of the few things that Coleridge ever finished. In little more than a year he wrote nearly all the the poetry that has made him famous.

Had he, like Keats, died when he was twenty-five, the world would probably be wondering what heights of poetic fame Coleridge might have reached; but he became addicted to the use of opium and passed a wretched existence of thirty-six years longer, partly in the Lake District, but chiefly in a suburb of London, without adding to his poetic fame. During his later years he did hack work for papers, gave occasional lectures, wrote critical and philosophical prose, and became a talker almost as noted as Dr. Johnson. It is only just to Coleridge to recognize the fact that even if he had never written a line of poetry, his prose would entitle him to be ranked among England's greatest critics.

Coleridge's wide reading, continued from boyhood, made his contemporaries feel that he had the best intellectual equipment of any man in England since Francis Bacon's time. Once Coleridge, having forgotten the subject of his lecture, was startled by the announcement that he would speak on a difficult topic, entirely different from the one he had in mind; but he was equal to the emergency and delivered an unusually good address.

Young men used to flock to him in his old age to draw on his copious stores of knowledge and especially to hear him talk about German philosophy. Carlyle visited him for this purpose and speaks of the "glorious, balmy, sunny islets, islets of the blest and the intelligible," which occasionally emerged from the mist of German metaphysics. He spent the last eighteen years of his life in Highgate with his kind friend, Dr. Gillman, who succeeded in regulating and decreasing the amount of opium which Coleridge took. He died there in 1834 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery. Westminster Abbey does not have the honor of the grave of a single one of the great poets of this romantic age.

Poetry.--_The Ancient Mariner_ (1798) is Coleridge's poetical masterpiece. It is also one of the world's masterpieces. The supernatural sphere into which it introduces the reader is a remarkable creation, with its curse, its polar spirit, the phantom ship, the seraph band, and the magic breeze. The mechanism of the poem is a triumph of romantic genius. The meter, the rhythm, and the music have well-nigh magical effect. Almost every stanza shows not only exquisite harmony, but also the easy mastery of genius in dealing with those weird scenes which romanticists love.

The moral interest of the poem is not inferior to its other charms. The Mariner killed the innocent Albatross, and we listen to the same kind of lesson as Wordsworth teaches in his _Hart-Leap Well_:--

"The spirit who bideth by himself
In the land of mist and snow,
He loved the bird that loved the man
Who shat him with his bow.'"

The noble conclusion of the poem has for more than a hundred years continued to influence human conduct:--

"He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all."

His next greatest poem is the unfinished _Christabel_ (1816). A lovely maiden falls under the enchantments of a mysterious Lady Geraldine; but the fragment closes while this malevolent influence continues. We miss the interest of a finished story, which draws so many readers to _The Ancient Mariner_, although _Christabel_ is thickly sown with gems. Lines like these are filled with the airiness of nature:--

"There is not wind enough to twirl
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky."

In all literature there has been no finer passage written on the wounds caused by broken friendship than the lines in _Christabel_ relating to the estrangement of Roland and Sir Leoline. After reading this poem and _Kubla Khan_, an unfinished dream fragment of fifty-four lines, we feel that the closing lines of _Kubla Khan_ are peculiarly applicable to Coleridge:--

"For he on honey dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise."

Swinburne says of _Christabel_ and _Kubla Khan_: "When it has been said that such melodies were never heard, such dreams never dreamed, such speech never spoken, the chief things remain unsaid, unspeakable. There is a charm upon these poems which can only be felt in silent submission and wonder."

General Characteristics of his Poetry.--Unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge is not the poet of the earth and the common things of life. He is the poet of air, of the regions beyond the earth, and of dreams. By no poet has the supernatural been invested with more charm.

He has rare feeling for the beautiful, whether in the world of morals; of nature, or of the harmonies of sound. The motherless Christabel in her time of danger dreams a beautiful truth of this divinely governed world:--

"But this she knows, in joys and woes,
That saints will aid if men will call:
For the blue sky bends over all."

His references to nature are less remarkable for description or photographic details than for suggestiveness and diffused charm, such as we find in these lines:--

"...the sails made on
A pleasant noise till noon,
A noise like of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune."

Wordsworth wrote few poems simpler than _The Ancient Mariner_. A stanza like this seems almost as simple as breathing:--

"The moving moon went up the sky,
And nowhere did abide;
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside."

Prose.--Coleridge's prose, which is almost all critical or philosophical, left its influence on the thought of the nineteenth century. When he was a young man, he went to Germany and studied philosophy with a continued vigor unusual for him. He became an idealist and used the idealistic teachings of the German metaphysicians to combat the utilitarian and sense-bound philosophy of Bentham, Malthus, and Mill. We pass by Coleridge's _Aids to Reflection_ (1825), the weightiest of his metaphysical productions, to consider those works which possess a more vital interest for the student of literature.

His _Lectures on Shakespeare_, delivered in 1811, contained epoch-making Shakespearean criticism. We are told that every drawing-room in London discussed them. His greatest work on criticism is entitled _Biographia Literaria_ (2 Vols., 1817). There are parts of it which no careful student of the development of modern criticism can afford to leave unread. The central point of this work is the exposition of his theory of the romantic school of poetry. He thus gives his own aim and that of Wordsworth in the composition of the volume of poems, known as _Lyrical Ballads_:--

"...it was agreed that my endeavors should be directed to persons
and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to
transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of
truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that
willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes
poetic faith.

Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his
object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to
excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the
mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to
the loveliness and wonders of the world before us."[17]

Coleridge does not hold Wordsworth's belief that the language of common speech and of poetry should be identical. He shows that Wordsworth does better than follow his own theories. Yet, when he considers both the excellencies and the defects of Wordsworth's verse, Coleridge's verdict of praise is substantially that of the twentieth century. This is an unusual triumph for a contemporary critic, sitting in judgment on an author of an entirely new school and rendering a decision in opposition to that of the majority, who, he says, "have made it a business to attack and ridicule Mr. Wordsworth... His _fame_ belongs to another age and can neither be accelerated nor retarded."[18]

GEORGE NOEL GORDON, LORD BYRON, 1788-1824

Life.--Byron was born in London in 1788. His father was a reckless, dissipated spendthrift, who deserted his wife and child. Mrs. Byron convulsively clasped her son to her one moment and threw the scissors and tongs at him the next, calling him "the lame brat," in reference to his club foot. Such treatment drew neither respect nor obedience from Byron, who inherited the proud, defiant spirit of his race. His accession to the peerage in 1798 did not tend to tame his haughty nature, and he grew up passionately imperious and combative.

Being ambitious, he made excellent progress in his studies at Harrow, but when he entered Cambridge he devoted much of his time to shooting, swimming, and other sports, for which he was always famous. In 1809 he started on a two years' trip through Spain, Greece, and the far East. Upon his return, he published two cantos of _Childe Harold's Pilgrimage_, which describe his journey.

This poem made him immediately popular. London society neglected its old favorite, Scott, and eagerly sought out the handsome young peer who had burst suddenly upon it. Poem after poem was produced by this lion of society, and each one was received with enthusiasm and delight. Probably no other English poet knew such instant widespread fame as Byron.

Suddenly and unexpectedly this adulation turned to hatred. In 1815 Byron married Miss Milbanke, an heiress, but she left him a year later. Although no reason for the separation was given, the public fastened all the blame upon Byron. The feeling against him grew so strong that he was warned by his friends to prepare for open violence, and finally, in 1816, he left England forever.

His remaining eight years were spent mostly in Italy. Here, his great beauty, his exile, his poetry, and his passionate love of liberty made him a prominent figure throughout Europe. Notwithstanding this fame, life was a disappointment to Byron. Baffled but rebellious, he openly defied the conventions of his country; and seemed to enjoy the shock it gave to his countrymen.

The closing year of his life shone brightest of all. His main activities had hitherto been directed to the selfish pursuit of his own pleasure; and he had failed to obtain happiness. But in 1823 Byron went to Greece to aid the Greeks, who were battling with Turkey for their independence. Into this struggle for freedom, he poured his whole energies, displaying "a wonderful aptitude for managing the complicated intrigues and plans and selfishnesses which lay in the way." His efforts cost him his life. He contracted fever, and, after restlessly battling with the disease, said quietly, one April morning in 1824, "Now I shall go to sleep." His relatives asked in vain for permission to inter him in Westminster Abbey. He was buried in the family vault at Hucknall, Notthinghamshire, not far from Newstead Abbey.

Early Works.--The poems that Byron wrote during his brilliant sojourn in London, amid the whirl of social gayeties, are _The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Parisina, Lara_, and _The Siege of Corinth_. These narrative poems are romantic tales of oriental passion and coloring, which show the influence of Scott. They are told with a dash and a fine-sounding rhetoric well fitted to attract immediate attention; but they lack the qualities of sincere feeling, lofty thought, and subtle beauty, which give lasting fame.

His next publication, _The Prisoner of Chillon_ (1816), is a much worthier poem. The pathetic story is feelingly told in language that often displays remarkable energy and mastery of expression and versification. His picture of the oppressive vacancy which the Prisoner felt is a well-executed piece of very difficult word painting:--

"There were no stars, no earth, no time,
No check, no change, no good, no crime--
But silence, and a stirless breath
Which neither was of life nor death;
A sea of stagnant idleness,
Blind, boundless, mute, and motionless!"

Dramas.--Byron wrote a number of dramas, the best of which are _Manfred_ (1817) and _Cain_ (1821). His spirit of defiance and his insatiable thirst for power are the subjects of these dramas. Manfred is a man of guilt who is at war with humanity, and who seeks refuge on the mountain tops and by the wild cataract. He is fearless and untamed in all his misery, and even in the hour of death does not quail before the spirits of darkness, but defies them with the cry:--

"Back to thy hell!
Thou hast no power upon me, _that_ I feel!
Thou never shall possess me, _that_ I know;
What I have done is done; I bear within
A torture which could nothing gain from thine;
* * * * *
Back, ye baffled fiends!
The hand of death is on me--but not yours!"

Cain, while suffering remorse for the slaying of Abel, is borne by Lucifer through the boundless fields of the universe. Cain yet dares to question the wisdom of the Almighty in bringing evil, sin, and remorse into the world. A critic has remarked that "Milton wrote his great poem to justify the ways of God to man; Byron's object seems to be to justify the ways of man to God."

The very soul of stormy revolt breathes through both _Manfred_ and _Cain_, but _Cain_ has more interest as a pure drama. It contains some sweet passages and presents one lovely woman,--Adah. But Byron could not interpret character wholly at variance with his own. He possessed but little constructive skill, and he never overcame the difficulties of blank verse. A drama that does not show wide sympathy with varied types of humanity and the constructive capacity to present the complexities of life is lacking in essential elements of greatness.

Childe Harold, The Vision of Judgment, and Don Juan.--His best works are the later poems, which require only a slight framework or plot, such as _Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, The Vision of Judgement,_ and _Don Juan_.

The third and fourth cantos of _Childe Harold_, published in 1816 and 1818, respectively, are far superior to the first two. These later cantos continue the travels of Harold, and contain some of Byron's most splendid descriptions of nature, cities, and works of art. Rome, Venice, the Rhine, the Alps, and the sea inspired the finest lines. He wrote of Venice as she--

"...Sate in state, throned on her hundred isles!
* * * * *
She looks a sea Cybele, fresh from ocean,
Rising with her tiara of proud towers
At airy distance."

He calls Rome--

"The Niobe of nations! there she stands.
Childless and crownless, in her voiceless woe;
An empty urn within her wither'd hands,
Whose holy dust was scattered long ago."

The following description, from Canto III, of a wild stormy night in the mountains is very characteristic of his nature poetry and of his own individuality:--

"And this is in the night:--Most Glorious night!
Thou wert not sent for slumber! let me be
A sharer in thy fierce and far delight--
A portion of the tempest and of thee!
How the lit lake shines, a phosphoric sea,
And the big rain comes dancing to the earth!
And now again 'tis black,--and now, the glee
of the loud hills shakes with its mountain-mirth
As if they did rejoice o'er a young earthquake's birth"

When George III. died, Southey wrote a poem filled with absurd flattery of that monarch. Byron had such intense hatred for the hypocrisy of society that he wrote his _Vision of Judgment_ (1822) to parody Southey's poem and to make the author the object of satire. Pungent wit, vituperation, and irony were here handled by Byron in a brilliant manner, which had not been equaled since the days of Dryden and Pope. The parodies of most poems are quickly forgotten, but we have here the strange case of Byron's parody keeping alive Southey's original.

_Don Juan_ (1819-1824), a long poem in sixteen cantos, is Byron's greatest work. It is partly autobiographic. The sinister, gloomy Don Juan is an ideal picture of the author, who was sore and bitter over his thwarted hopes of liberty and happiness. Therefore, instead of strengthening humanity with hope for the future, this poem tears hope from the horizon, and suggests the possible anarchy and destruction toward which the world's hypocrisy, cant, tyranny, and universal stupidity are tending.

The poem is unfinished. Byron followed Don Juan through all the phases of life known to himself. The hero has exciting adventures and passionate loves, he is favored at courts, he is driven to the lowest depths of society, he experiences a godlike happiness and a demoniacal despair.

_Don Juan_ is a scathing satire upon society. All its fondest idols,--love, faith, and hope,--are dragged in the mire. There is something almost grand in the way that this Titanic scoffer draws pictures of love only to mock at them, sings patriotic songs only to add--

"Thus sung, or would, or could, or should have sung
The modern Greek in tolerable verse,"

and mentions Homer, Milton, and Shakespeare only to show how accidental and worthless is fame.

Amid the splendid confusion of pathos, irony, passion, mockery, keen wit, and brilliant epigram, which display Byron's versatile and spontaneous genius at its height, there are some beautiful and powerful passages. There is an ideal picture of the love of Don Juan and Haidee:--

"Each was the other's mirror, and but read
Joy sparkling in their dark eyes like a gem."

"...they could not be
Meant to grow old, but die in happy spring,
Before one charm or hope had taken wing."

As she lightly slept--

"...her face so fair
Stirr'd with her dream, as rose-leaves with the air;
Or as the stirring of a deep clear stream
Within an Alpine hollow, when the wind
Walks o'er it."

General Characteristics.--The poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge shows the revolutionary reaction against classicism in literature and tyranny in government; but their verse raises no cry of revolt against the proprieties and moral restrictions of the time. Byron was so saturated with the revolutionary spirit that he rebelled against these also; and for this reason England would not allow him to be buried in Westminster Abbey.

As Byron frequently wrote in the white heat of passionate revolt, his verse shows the effects of lack of restraint. Unfortunately he did not afterwards take the trouble to improve his subject matter, or the mold in which it was cast. Swinburne says, "His verse stumbles and jingles, stammers and halts, where is most need for a swift and even pace of musical sound."

The great power of Byron's poetry consists in its wealth of expression, its vigor, its rush and volume of sound, its variety, and its passion. Lines like the following show the vigorous flow of the verse, the love for lonely scenery, and a wealth of figurative expression:--

"Mont Blanc is the monarch of mountains,
They crowned him long ago
On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds
With a diadem of snow."[19]

Scattered through his works we find rare gems, such as the following--

"...when
Music arose with its voluptuous swell,
Soft eyes looked love to eyes which spake again,
And all went merry as a marriage bell."[20]

We may also frequently note the working of an acute intellect, as, for instance, in the lines in which he calls his own gloomy type of mind--

"...the telescope of truth,
Which strips the distance of its phantasies,
And brings life near in utter nakedness,
Making the cold reality too real!"[21]

The answers to two questions which are frequently asked, will throw more light on Byron's characteristics:--

I. Why has his poetic fame in England decreased so much from the estimate of his contemporaries, by whom he seemed worthy of a place beside Goethe? The answer is to be sought in the fact that Byron reflected so powerfully the mood of that special time. That reactionary period in history has passed and with it much of Byron's influence and fame. He was, unlike Shakespeare, specially fitted to minister to a certain age. Again, much of Byron's verse is rhetorical, and that kind of poetry does not wear well. On the other hand, we might reread Shakespeare's _Hamlet_, Milton's _Lycidas_, and Wordsworth's _Intimations of Immortality_ every month for a lifetime, and discover some new beauty and truth at every reading.

II. Why does the continent of Europe class Byron among the very greatest English poets, next even to Shakespeare? It is because Europe was yearning for more liberty, and Byron's words and blows for freedom aroused her at an opportune moment. Historians of continental literature find his powerful impress on the thought of that time. Georg Brandes, a noted European critic, says:--

"In the intellectual life of Russia and Poland, of Spain and Italy,
of France and Germany, the seeds which he had sown, fructified...
The Slavonic nations ...seized on his poetry with avidity... The
Spanish and Italian exile poets took his war cry... Heine's best
poetry is a continuation of Byron's work. French Romanticism and
German Liberalism are both direct descendants of Byron's
Naturalism."

Swinburne gives as another reason for Byron's European popularity the fact that he actually gains by translation into a foreign tongue. His faulty meters and careless expressions are improved, while his vigorous way of stating things and his rolling rhetoric are easily comprehended. On the other hand, the delicate shades of thought in Shakespeare's _Hamlet_ cannot be translated into some European tongues without distinct loss.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, 1792-1822

Life.--Another fiery spirit of the Revolution was Shelley, born in 1792, in a home of wealth, at Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex. He was one of the most ardent, independent, and reckless English poets inspired by the French Revolution. He was a man who could face infamy and defy the conventionalities of the world, and, at the same moment, extend a helpful hand of sympathy to a friend or sit for sixty hours beside the sick bed of his dying child. Tender, pitying, fearless, full of a desire to reform the world, and of hatred for any form of tyranny, Shelley failed to adjust himself to the customs and laws of his actual surroundings. He was calumniated and despised by the public at large, and almost idolized by his intimate friends.

At Eton he denounced the tyranny of the larger boys. At Oxford he decried the tyranny of the church over freedom of thought, and was promptly expelled for his pamphlet, _The Necessity of Atheism_. This act so increased his hatred for despotic authority that he almost immediately married Harriet Westbrook, a beautiful school girl of sixteen, to relieve her from the tyranny of her father who wanted her to return to school. Shelley was then only nineteen and very changeable. He would make such a sudden departure from a place where he had vowed "to live forever," that specially invited guests sometimes came to find him gone. He soon fell in love with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the brilliant woman who later wrote the weird romance _Frankenstein_, and he married her after Harriet Shelley had drowned herself. These acts alienated his family and forced him to forfeit his right to Field Place.

His repeatedly avowed ideas upon religion, government, and marriage brought him into conflict with public opinion. Unpopular at home, he left England in 1818, never to return. Like Byron, he was practically an exile.

The remaining four years of Shelley's life were passed in comparative tranquillity in the "Paradise of exiles," as he called Italy. He lived chiefly at Pisa, the last eighteen months of his life. Byron rented the famous Lanfranchi Palace in Pisa and became Shelley's neighbor, often entertaining him and a group of English friends, among whom were Edward Trelawny, the Boswell of Shelley's last days, and Leigh Hunt, biographer and essayist.

On July 7, 1822, Shelley said: "If I die to-morrow, I have lived to be older than my father. I am ninety years of age." The young poet was right in claiming that it is not length of years that measures life. He had lived longer than most people who reach ninety. The next day he started in company with two others to sail across the Bay of Spezzia to his summer home. Friends watching from the shore saw a sudden tempest strike his boat. When the cloud passed, the craft could not be seen. Not many months before, he had written the last stanza of _Adonais_:--

"...my spirit's bark is driven
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;
Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are."

Shelley's body was washed ashore, July 18, and it was burned near the spot, in accordance with Italian law; but the ashes and the unconsumed heart were interred in the beautiful Protestant cemetery at Rome, not far from where Keats was buried the previous year.

Few poets have been loved more than Shelley. Twentieth century visitors to his grave often find it covered with fresh flowers. The direction which he wrote for finding the tomb of Keats is more applicable to Shelly's own resting place:--

"Pass, till the Spirit of the spot shall lead
Thy footsteps to a slope of green access,
Where, like an infant's smile, over the dead
A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread."[22]

Works.--_Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude_ (1816) is a magnificent expression of Shelley's own restless, tameless spirit, wandering among the grand solitudes of nature in search of the ineffably lovely dream maiden, who was his ideal of beauty. He travels through primeval forests, stands upon dizzy abysses, plies through roaring whirlpools, all of which are symbolic of the soul's wayfaring, until at last,--

"When on the threshold
of the green recess,"

his dying glance rests upon the setting moon and the sufferer finds eternal peace. The general tone of this poem is painfully despairing, but this is relieved by the grandeur of the natural scenes and by many imaginative flights.

The year 1819 saw the publication of a work unique among Shelley's productions, _The Cenci_. This is a drama based upon the tragic story of Beatrice Cenci. The poem deals with human beings, human passions, real acts, and the natural world, whereas Shelley usually preferred to treat of metaphysical theories, personified abstractions, and the world of fancy. This strong drama was the most popular of his works during his lifetime.

He returned to the ideal sphere again in one of his great poems, the lyrical drama _Prometheus Unbound_ (1820). This poem is the apotheosis of the French Revolution. Prometheus, the friend of mankind, lies tortured and chained to the mountain side. As the hour redemption approaches, his beloved Asia, the symbol of nature, arouses the soul of Revolution, represented by Demogorgon. He rises, hurls down the enemies of progress and freedom, releases Prometheus, and spreads liberty and happiness through all the world. Then the Moon, the Earth, and the Voices of the Air break forth into a magnificent chant of praise. The most delicate fancies, the most gorgeous imagery, and the most fiery, exultant emotions are combined in this poem with something of the stateliness of its Greek prototype. The swelling cadences of the blank verse and the tripping rhythm of the lyrics are the product of a nature rich in rare and wonderful melodies.

_The Witch of Atlas_ (1820), _Epipsychidion_ (1821), _Adonais_ (1821), and the exquisite lyrics, _The Cloud, To a Skylark_ and _Ode to the West Wind_ are the most beautiful of the remaining works. The first two mentioned are the most elusive of Shelley's poems. With scarcely an echo in his soul of the shadows and discords of earth, the poet paints, in these works, lands--

"...'twixt Heaven, Air, Earth, and Sea,
Cradled, and hung in clear tranquillity;"

where all is--

"Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise."[23]

_Adonais_ is a lament for the early death of Keats, and it stands second in the language among elegiac poems, ranking next to Milton's _Lycidas_. Shelley referred to _Adonais as "perhaps the least imperfect of my compositions." His biographer, Edward Dowden, calls it "the costliest monument ever erected to the memory of an English singer," who

"...bought, with price of purest breath,
A grave among the eternal."

Mrs. Shelley put some of her most sacred mementos of the poet between the leaves of _Adonais_, which spoke to her of his own immortality and omnipresence:--

"Naught we know dies. Shall that alone which knows
Be as a sword consumed before the sheath
By sightless lightning?
* * * * *
He is a portion of the loveliness,
Which once he made more lovely."

Although some of Shelley's shorter poems are more popular, nothing that he ever wrote surpasses _Adonais_ in completeness, poetic thought, and perfection of artistic finish.

Treatment of Nature.--Shelley was not interested in things themselves, but in their elusive, animating spirit. In the lyric poem, _To Night_, he does not address himself to mere darkness, but to the active, dream-weaving "Spirit of Night." The very spirit of the autumnal wind seems to him to breathe on the leaves and turn them--

"Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes."[24]

In his spiritual conception of nature, he was profoundly affected by Wordsworth; but he goes farther than the older poet in giving expression to the strictly individual forms of nature. Wordsworth pictures nature as a reflection of his own thoughts and feelings. In _The Prelude_ he says:--

"To unorganic natures were transferred
My own enjoyments."

Shelley, on the other hand, is most satisfying and original when his individual spirit forms in night, cloud, skylark, and wind are made to sing, not as a reflection of his own mood, but as these spirit forces might themselves be supposed to sing, if they could express their song in human language without the aid of a poet. In the lyric, _The Cloud_, it is the animating spirit of the Cloud itself that sings the song:--

"I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.
* * * * *
I sift the snow on the mountains below
And their great pines groan aghast."

He thus begins the song, _To a Skylark_--

"Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert,"

and he likens the lark to "an unbodied joy."

He peoples the garden in his lyric, _The Sensitive Plant_, with flowers that are definite, individual manifestations of "the Spirit of Love felt everywhere," the same power on which Shelley enthusiastically relied for the speedy transformation of the world.

"A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew."

The "tulip tall," "the Naiad-like lily," "the jessamine faint," "the sweet tuberose," were all "ministering angels" to the "companionless Sensitive Plant," and each tried to be a source of joy to all the rest. No one who had not caught the new spirit of humanity could have imagined that garden.

In the exquisite _Ode to the West Wind_, he calls to that "breath of Autumn's being" to express its own mighty harmonies through him:--

"O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
* * * * *
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness."

We may fancy that the spirit forms of nature which appear in cloud and night, in song of bird and western wind, are content to have found in Shelley a lyre that responded to their touch in such entrancing notes.

General Characteristics.--Shelley's is the purest, the most hopeful, and the noblest voice of the Revolution. Wordsworth and Coleridge lost their faith and became Tories, and Byron was a selfish, lawless creature; but Shelley had the martyr spirit of sacrifice, and he trusted to the end in the wild hopes of the revolutionary enthusiasts. His _Queen Mab, Revolt of Islam, Ode to Liberty, Ode to Naples_, and, above all, his _Prometheus Unbound_, are some of the works inspired by a trust in the ideal democracy which was to be based on universal love and the brotherhood of man. This faith gives a bounding elasticity and buoyancy to Shelley's thought, but also tinges it with that disgust for the old, that defiance of restraint, and that boyish disregard for experience which mark a time of revolt.

The other subject that Shelley treats most frequently in his verse is ideal beauty. He yearned all his life for some form beautiful enough to satisfy the aspirations of his soul. _Alastor, Epipsychidion, The Witch of Atlas_, and _Prometheus Unbound_, all breathe this insatiate craving for that "Spirit of Beauty," that "awful Loveliness."

Many of his efforts to describe in verse this democracy and this ideal beauty are impalpable and obscure. It is difficult to clothe such shadowy abstractions in clear, simple form. He is occasionally vague because his thoughts seem to have emerged only partially from the cloud lands that gave them birth. At other times, his vagueness resembles Plato's because it is inherent in the subject matter. Like Byron, Shelley is sometimes careless in the construction and revision of his verse. We shall, however, search in vain for these faults in Shelley's greatest lyrics. He is one of the supreme lyrical geniuses in the language. Of all the lyric poets of England, he is the greatest master of an ethereal, evanescent, phantomlike beauty.

JOHN KEATS, 1795-1821

Life.--John Keats, the son of a keeper of a large livery stable, a man "fine in common sense and native respectability," was born in Moorfields, London, in 1795. He attended school at Enfield, where he was a prize scholar. He took special pleasure in studying Grecian mythology, the influence of which is so apparent in his poetry. While at school, he also voluntarily wrote a translation of much of Vergil's _AEneid_. It would seem as if he had also been attracted to Shakespeare; for Keats is credited with expressing to a young playmate the opinion that no one, if alone in the house, would dare read _Macbeth_ at two in the morning.

When Keats was left an orphan in his fifteenth year, he was taken from school and apprenticed to a surgeon at Edmonton, near London.

When seventeen, he walked some distance to borrow a copy of Spenser's _Faerie Queene_. A friend says: "Keats ramped through the scenes of the romance like a young horse turned into a spring meadow." His study of Grecian mythology and Elizabethan poetry exerted a stronger influence over him than his medical instructor. One day when Keats should have been listening to a surgical lecture, "there came," he says, "a sunbeam into the room and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in the ray: and I was off with them to Oberon and fairy land."

He made a moderately good surgeon; but finding that his heart was constantly with "Oberon and the fairy land" of poesy, he gave up his profession in 1817 and began to study hard, preparatory to a literary career.

His short life was a brave struggle against disease, poverty, and unfriendly criticism; but he accomplished more than any other English author in the first twenty-five years of life. Success under such conditions would have been impossible unless he had had "flint and iron in him." He wrote:--

"I must think that difficulties nerve the spirit of a man. They make
his Prime Objects a Refuge as well as a Passion."

Late in 1818, after he had published his first volume of verse, he met Fanny Brawne, a girl of eighteen, and soon fell desperately in love with her. The next six months were the happiest and the most productive period of his life. His health was then such that he could take long walks with her. In the first spring after he had met her, he wrote in less than three hours his wonderful _Ode to a Nightingale_, while he was sitting in the garden of his home at Wentworth Place, Hampstead, near London, listening to the song of the bird. Most of his famous poems were written in the year after meeting her.

In February, 1820, his health began to decline so rapidly that he knew that his days were numbered. His mother and one of his brothers had died of consumption, and he had been for some time threatened with the disease. He offered to release Miss Brawne from her engagement, but she would not listen to the suggestion. She and her mother tried to nurse him back to health. Few events in the history of English authors are tinged with a deeper pathos than his engagement to Miss Brawne. Some of the letters that he wrote to her or about her are almost tragic. After he had taken his last leave of her he wrote, "I can bear to die--I cannot bear to leave her."