EBENEZER ELLIOTT-A POET OF NATURE. 57 alternately the laureate of cursing and swearing, and of sympathetic emotions and tears; frequently we have a line or couplet sweet and full as any Wordsworth uttered, and presenting as bright a picture to the imagination as when he paints to us a scene "Where the old woods worship God, No poet is more at home "Within the sun-lit forest, Beneath the bright blue sky, Where fountains flow and wild flowers blow." And he so sensitive to beauty felt the power and majesty of nature in an equal degree, as when he says, in imagery which many will think too daring, "Alone beneath the sky I stood the storm before; What an Hogarthian Deserted Village we have in the "Splendid Village," and in the "Ranter," and the "Village Patriarch." "When daisies blush, and wind-flowers wet with dew; When the Elm blossoms o'er the brooding bird, And wild and wide the plover's wail is heard; 58 EBENEZER ELLIOTT-A POET OF NATURE. No more the shouting youngsters shall convene, And youth's first raptures cheer the gazing sire. The poor man's cow, and weary, stopp'd and gazed." This was the burden of most of Elliott's Poetry-English Scenery-England's "Blasted homes and much enduring men." But this sentiment as we have said intruded too much into his poetical inspiration; for wherever we feel or see a joy or sorrow too powerfully, that broader view in which nature and time become the ministers of providence, and thus the inspiration of the poet,-is lost, and the personal emotions of the mere author become inferior to those wider views which make the artist the minister and prophet of God. This it is too which frequently gives to Elliott so much pungency and force, the memory of which will occur to the reader of his poems. From what we have said, our readers will gather that Elliott was in no sense an Esthetic Poet; he did not subject and school his impulses and his passions; he wrote on no method or principle of composition, but he had a keen ear for the sounds of beauty, as he had a keen eye for all the sights of loveliness. He, like Wordsworth, has also localized his impressions throwing over the scenery of his neighbourhood the DIFFICULTIES OF LIFE. 59 hallowing lustre of his genius; but the writings of our author glow like glorious and full-orbed planets through the clear, calm, cold light of memory, Elliott's verses have all the splendour of the day-beam about them. We are sure that the eye shone brighter while they were composed, and the heart beat more quickly with the rapture of the inspiration. He mounted upwards in a chariot of fire, but his steed plunged and floated through lightning, and through sunbeams, and sometimes sunk down sprawling in bogs of very unpoetic expletive. He was a poet of nature, but not of a calm, and holy and purified nature-the poet of sensuousness-but the sensuousness of colouring and sound and scenery, the poet of passion, but passion winged not by lusts but by lightnings, and filled and inflamed not by wild and evil desires, but by wrath for wrongs unatoned, and evils unexpiated. He exaggerated sentiments therefore as all such men do-or seem to doand hurled his bolts sometime for the purpose of crushing a demon, and sometimes to annihilate a gnat. To return, from dissertation to narrative. The early years of Wordsworth's life are very suggestive of thought. It would seem that his friends were most desirous that he should eventually enter the Church, and for the Church he would seem to have been eminently qualified; it is perhaps doubtful how far in his first years he was the subject of impressions transcending the religion of nature, and the absence probably of profound convictions, and the presence of that affection 60 DIFFICULTIES VANISHING. orders; he therefore was the cause of no little anxiety to his friends. What was to be his ultimate destination, his prospects were not bright in life at present; the whole of the money which should have been a source of income to his family, was kept by the bad Lord Lonsdale. There appeared even in the event of its being paid to the Executors, as it was ultimately, no probability of monetary independence. What was he to do? His education had been desultory; he had taken we have seen a degree of bachelor of arts, but we have also seen that the week before he took his degree, he spent his time in reading Clarissa Harlowe. Some of his friends proposed that he should attempt to write on a London Newspaper, and this was determined on. Owing to a most singular and providential circumstance he never attempted that work, for which it is difficult to conceive how he could ever have become fitted; writing to him was so great a toil and physical effort that we have in his life the record of his allowing three months to elapse without taking a pen in his hand; and it is as difficult to conceive how his style of prose, so singularly destitute of ease or humour, or flexibility, could ever have accommodated itself to the pages of a newspaper; life however was beginning to assume to his eyes a very serious, almost a frowning aspect; writing of his brother Christopher, he says, "He is a lad of talents and industrious withal. This same industry is a good old Roman quality, and nothing is to be done without it." His life was quite aimless. The law, and the church he determined against; his friends were displeased and DIFFICULTIES VANISHING. 61 disappointed; it is clear that he was looked upon by them with suspicious eyes; he was not likely to turn out well; he had wasted years in continental wanderings and travellings, and the question was constantly recurring to his uncles, who were his guardians,-and now more frequently to him-what is to be done? how are you going through life.? The newspaper idea was determined on, and our juvenile poet wrote to a friend in London expressing his views and feelings; but he wrote from Penrith, where he was engaged in attendance on a sick friend, "My friend," he writes "has every symptom of a confirmed consumption, and I cannot think of leaving him in his present debilitated state." In a short time his friend died, and it was found on opening his will that he had left to the companion of his dying hours and days, the sum of nine hundred pounds. Thus was the poet saved from much anxiety, and many difficulties, perhaps not too soon; not before he had so clearly realised the difficulty of his way that he was prepared in some measure to sympathise with those who were doomed to suffer without the friendly hand held out to relieve. The friend who thus aided him was Raisley Calvert, son of R. Calvert, Esq., the Steward of the Duke of Norfolk; he was no poet himself, says the nephew of Wordsworth, but he was endowed with that faculty almost as rare as genius-the power to perceive and know genius-to know a man likely to benefit mankind, he determined to do what he could to procure |