Stars that shine and fall, The flower that drops in springing, To which our hearts are clinging. All that's bright must fade, The brightest still the fleetest; Inspired no doubt by the brilliant success of Byron's oriental narratives in verse, Thomas Moore wrote the four Eastern poems which form the contents of Lalla Rookh (1817). The stories themselves, as well as their settings, are very elegant. Lalla Rookh (Tulipcheek), daughter of the Indian King Aurungzebe, is betrothed to one of the royal princes of Bokhara, who comes to her in the guise of a wandering singer, Feramor, beguiles the tediousness of the bridal journey agreeably by four stories in verse, and makes the heart of the Princess his own, in which, as a Prince, he might not have succeeded so well. All is brought to a happy conclusion in the final scene, where the disclosure takes place; and even the chief chamberlain, Fadladin, a severe critic of the poet Feramor, bows humbly before the Prince of Bokhara. The finest of the four poems is Paradise and the Peri, but the three others, The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, The Fire Wor shippers, and The Light of the Harem, are successful examples of Moore's skill in portraying the romances of the East and of his rich poetic language. Even to Orientals Lalla Rookh must have appeared genuine, at any rate it is said that a translation into Persian found many readers. One more point in which Thomas Moore excelled is worthy of notice-his witty satire, at which he was a great adept. The Fudge Family in Paris, a collection of letters in rhyme from an English cockney family abroad to their friends and relations at home, is one of the drollest, and at the same time one of the most poignant pieces that English comic poetry can show. The Intercepted Letters, or the Twopenny Post Bag is a similar collection; it is a witty, brilliant satire on Toryism, in the form of intercepted letters from political personages. In other cases Thomas Moore was not sparing in his satire. One of his keenest shafts was aimed at Leigh Hunt's scandalous Reminiscences of Lord Byron, though, in that respect, Hunt showed himself a truer friend to Byron than did Moore in the matter of the "Diaries" entrusted to him by the great poet. CHARLES WOLFE (1791-1823) died young, and only became known by one poem, which, however, has served to keep his memory alive. This is The Burial of Sir John Moore, an English General who died a hero's death at Corunna (1809); a famous piece, which is to be found in every good collection of poetry. A few stanzas will suffice to show how great was the poetic talent which was lost to the world by Wolfe's early death : Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, O'er the grave where our hero we buried. Not in sheet nor in shroud we wound him; Byron expressed great admiration for this poem. BIBLIOGRAPHY KEATS.-Editions by Forman, Lord Houghton, Drury; R. Monckton Milnes (Houghton), Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats; S. Colvin, Keats (in English Men of Letters); W. M. Rossetti, Life of John Keats; Poems (in the Endymion Series). LEIGH HUNT.-Poetical works and the Autobiography by his son; E. Kemble, Leigh Hunt as Poet and Essayist; Life, by Monkhouse; A. Ireland, List of the Writings of Leigh Hunt (1868). LANDOR.-Complete edition by J. Forster; W. S. Landor, a Biography, by the same; other accounts of his life by Colvin and Evans. MOORE.-Lord John Russell, Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence of Thomas Moore; G. Ballat, Etude sur la vie et les œuvres de Thomas Moore (Paris, 1886); Schorkopf, Ueber Thomas Moore's Leben und Schriften; Symington, Thomas Moore (1880). WOLFE.-Edition of his few writings by Archdeacon Russell. D CHAPTER IV THE LAKE SCHOOL ESPITE their influences upon the literatures of Europe, Byron and the poets akin to him are but as isolated offshoots in the uninterrupted development of English poetry from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, and down to the present day. Burns, too, was a brilliant casual meteor, rather than a necessary link in the chain. Since the time of the Puritans the taste of intellectual mediocrity has characterised English poetry. The current, which flowed forth from Byron and Shelley and ceased with their early death, only flecked the wide floods of English poetry for a moment without blending with the stream. The two opposite lines of thought, represented by Byron and Wordsworth as the strongest contrasts, both personally and poetically, are like a renewal, in later days, of the fight between the Cavaliers and Puritans of the seventeenth century, whose minds were so diametrically antagonistic to each other. In Byron and those of kindred aspirations there arose up once more the spirit of peculiar originality, which speaks to us in the words of the dramatists who lived about Shakespeare's time, and later. The reason why they have left so few traces on the mind of the people and of the poets contemporary with them, is probably that they lacked the faculty to interpret for a whole nation, or at any rate, the more highly cultivated part of it. The Byronic poets did not take the trouble to enter into Englishmen's feelings, and speak English to them. The following, in chronological order, are the links of the chain, uniting the English poetry of the present day with that of the eighteenth century: Thomson, Young, Crabbe, Campbell, Wordsworth. The accidental, the revolutionary, the exciting influenced the earlier period; the regular, the tedious, the peaceful the later. The so-called "Lake School" (compare p. 407) was no sudden literary phenomenon; it was, generally speaking, opposed to everything sudden. It was only the simplifying of what had been for some time common in English poetry: the humorous representation, in an instructive form, of common life. The great master of this art is a poet really not belonging to the group known as the Lake School, GEORGE CRABBE (1754-1832). His principal work, The Village (1783), followed by another of a similar character, The Borough (1810), was the best piece of descriptive poetry that had appeared since Thomson's Seasons. Crabbe is the greater poet of the two; he sees more deeply than Thomson, and describes men more truly, but at the same time less pleasantly. Crabbe's sense of reality is inexorably acute, and he differs essentially from Burns, whose aim was to glorify country life. Much that Crabbe has written is as repulsively true as a picture of Hogarth's. THOMAS CAMPBELL (1777-1844) and his poetical works belong rather to the eighteenth century; on the other hand, his fondness for German literature and philosophy assigns him a by no means unimportant part in the movement which led to a total rupture with French classicism and to a return to the German ideal of poetry. From his youth Campbell had travelled in Germany, and his love for the German language and poetry never left him. It is true that he found nothing new in Kant, and he esteemed Wieland as "the most perfect German poet"; nevertheless he showed such a man as Coleridge how to understand Schiller. One of his finest poems is Roland the Hero, founded on the legend of Rolandseck. Another, England to Germany, is a piece of good political verse, and proves Campbell to have been a staunch friend of liberty. For England, his best-known poem is that on the navy of his native land, Ye Mariners of England: Ye Mariners of England, That guard our native seas; Whose flag has braved a thousand years, The battle and the breeze! To match another foe! While the stormy winds do blow; His longer poem, The Pleasures of Hope (1799), a didactic piece, full of good observations of a commonplace kind, is nearly forgotten. His somewhat lachrymose tale, Gertrude of Wyoming, has not fared much better; but it is at any rate worthy of notice, as being the first work in which the "noble Indian " was introduced into English literature. In France, Chateaubriand had already made this discovery earlier; his Atala appeared in 1801. Even in America, Cooper did not bring the Indian into prominence till later. Campbell's excellent anthology, entitled Specimens of the British Poets, is also forgotten, but undeservedly so. There is not one of the more recent collections, not even Chambers's well-known Encyclopadia, in which the selection has been made with less prejudice. Three lines of Campbell's are still household words in England; indeed, they have become so completely naturalised in all languages that only very few persons think of the man who first spoke them. The proverbs, "Distance lends enchantment to the view," and "Coming events cast their shadow before," are in this form Campbell's property likewise the beautiful expression, "Angel-visits, few and far between." SAMUEL ROGERS (1763-1855) is the only one of the non-Byronic circle to whom Byron was united by friendly relations. He had the making of a genuine poet in him, as appears from many passages of his great poem Italy, describing his travels there; but he had no talent for song-writing. His sketches of foreign lands and people are perhaps the most poetical pieces in English descriptive verse. The Pleasures of Memory (1792) are nothing but didactic commonplace; but on the other hand Italy (1822), in spite of its mainly itinerary character, is a collection of poems, certain passages of which will long remain valuable specimens of the English language. The fifty-two metrical descriptions of his journeys, of which Italy consists, are chaste, noble, and manly both in language and in thought. We can recommend this little work as an agreeable travelling companion on a journey through Italy. The most beautiful part of it is "Bologna," where Lord Byron and Rogers met for the last time; the most tender piece of verse that any English poet has ever written on Lord Byron. It ends with these beautiful lines, which will ever keep Rogers in the memory of all who honour Byron : He is now at rest; And praise and blame fall on his ear alike, Dazzling, perplexing. Yet thy heart, methinks, |