which, as from a background, stands out the solitary figure of Wordsworth's Leech-gatherer. Nor shall we forget the youthful preacher or ranter, who chooses the mountain-side for his pulpit, and has a better gospel, he thinks, to preach than that of Methodism grown respectable and rich; we love him, with his eager eye, his wistful expression, his hectic cheek, and pleading hands, as we love some pale sunbeam on a day of gloom, predestined to be quickly swallowed by the darkness.

And around these figures we see the streets, the houses, the hamlets, the veritable Yorkshire hedgerows, and hills, and streams, the majestic barrenness of the Yorkshire moors. The one spiritual presence which breathes through universal nature in the poetry of Wordsworth we are not aware of in like manner or degree in the poetry of Ebenezer Elliott. Nor have the objects of external nature dear to him received that mould of shapely beauty which water and vale in Wordsworth's lake country possess. But the air is pure and free; beautiful wild things lie around us in a kind of harmonised confusion; we hear the singing of birds and the voices of rivers, and everywhere are unluxurious, hardy, yet delicate flowers. The silence or vital sounds of the open country bring healing and refreshment to an ear that has been harassed by the din of machinery; the wide peaceful light is a benediction to the eye that has smarted in blear haze of the myriad-chimneyed city. We become familiar with recurrent names of hill and stream, until the least musical of them, with its sharp northern edge, acquires a pleasantness like the keen flavour of some rough-rinded fruit.

"Flowers peep, trees bud, boughs tremble, rivers run;
The redwing saith it is a glorious morn.
Blue are thy Heavens, thou Highest! and thy sun
Shines without cloud, all fire. How sweetly, borne
On wings of morning o'er the leafless thorn
The tiny wren's small twitter warbles near!

Five rivers, like the fingers of a hand,

Flung from black mountains mingle and are one
Where sweetest valleys quit the wild and grand,
And eldest forests, o'er the silvan Don,
Bid their immortal brother journey on,
A stately pilgrim, watch'd by all the hills.

Say, shall we wander where, through warriors' graves,
The infant Yewden, mountain-cradled, trills

Her Doric notes? Or where the Locksley raves

Of broil and battle, and the rocks and caves
Dream yet of ancient days? Or where the sky
Darkens o'er Rivilin, the clear and cold,

That throws his blue length like a snake from high?
Or, where deep azure brightens into gold
O'er Sheaf, that mourns in Eden?"

This poetry of external nature has not the rich and soft feeling to which agricultural or pastoral life gives rise. Elliott sings no half-humorous, half-tender elegy to a Puir Mailie, like that in which the Scotch peasant laments his pet yowe. He does not, like that tendersouled lyrist of Revolution in France-Pierre Dupontconfess the deep comradeship which binds his life to

"Les grands boeufs blancs marqués de roux."

The wilderness, in Elliott's conception, belongs to God and to the poet; the wide enclosures of land are the property of the peer by day, and of the poacher by night.

At the time when "The Village Patriarch" was gaining the attention it deserved, English poetry had

A

touched low-water mark after the spring-tide of the early part of the century. It was not Elliott's billowy incursion of song that foretold the turn of the tide. little ripple of poetry, edged with silver spray, went quivering up the sand. Some few eyes noticed it, and Triton out to seaward blew his triumphant conch. Enoch Wray was stalwart and real. The Claribels, and Adelines, and Sea Fairies of Mr Tennyson's volume of 1830 seem a faint impalpable troop of poetic creatures; yet it was they and their successors who were destined to call back the singing-tide with insupportable advance upon our shores. Man does not live by bread alone. We are all conscious that we have received from Mr Tennyson something which is real, substantial, and correspondent to our needs. He is not a poet of the Revolution; his part has been to assert that freedom must be one with order, that highest liberty consists in obedience to law. The revolt against ancient wrongs had accomplished part of its work; now the temperate wisdom of England was to qualify the passionate hopes and energies which had been born in France; duties were to assert themselves by the side of rights; the liberal conservatism of Mr Tennyson was to exhibit order united with progress; the radical conservatism of Mr Carlyle was alike to initiate and to restrain.

THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT AND

LITERATURE.

THAT Some of the finest and most generous spirits of our time should be driven into opposition, almost into isolation, and should now, as it were in the desert, prophesy against us who heed them not, is a significant, perhaps an alarming fact. A minority which consists of an élite body is always a witness for some despised or neglected truths. Some among our elder writers, who were indeed spiritual masters, look with an estranged, sad gaze at what we call our progress, our "triumphs of civilization;" and where among our younger writers is there promise of any spiritual master to take their place, any prophetic soul? Is the hardy and aspiring school of Positivist thinkers to be succeeded by a pessimist school, and the reverence which gathers around the name of Comte to transfer itself to that of the great Buddhist of Frankfort? Is humanity to prove itself less capable of self-worship than of self-abhorrence? Meanwhile a few persons may look back to the days when spiritual faith and hope and love were the air which young souls breathed, days when a man would go to the seers to inquire of God, and when God Himself seemed to be not far from every one of us.

The admirable working man, who on the first day of each month hastens to expend his tenpence on the

purchase of Mr Ruskin's Fors Clavigera, and meditates until the appearance of the succeeding number upon its melancholy vaticinations, must by this time be convinced that he has fallen on evil days. The democratic movement, inaugurated by the French Revolution, is the object of Mr Ruskin's bitterest hostility. From it have been derived our loss of reverence, our loose morals, our bad manners, our mammon-worship, our materialism, our spirit of pushing self-interest. The modern scientific movement appears to Mr Ruskin to be in great part a ludicrous imposture, a dull kind of learned ignorance, with which names take the place of things, diagrams the place of vision, and death the place of life. More robust spirits than Mr Ruskin will refuse to be thwarted or turned aside by what is ugly and repulsive in some aspects of our material civilization. They will refuse to expect that the crude years of an industrial epoch, in which everything acts upon so vast a scale, should exhibit the coherence, order, and grace of civilizations which were small in scale, which themselves took long to emerge from barbarism, and which are happily remembered not as they were in their totality, but through some highly favoured types and examples that have survived the oblivion which overtakes the chaff and draff of the time. It is enough if we can see within its rough envelope the living germ of future order.

Those who possess a moderated but steadfast confidence in the beneficent tendencies of the laws of the world, would not set forward on behalf of the present age its select and illustrious persons; they would not set an Abraham Lincoln over against a Saint Louis,