conclusion to which this sad humanity is subject: while he, fallen into the very depths of visionary anguish, sat "still and silent as death," speaking to no one, asking nothing, dwelling in a gloomy world of his own, from which in heaven or earth there seemed no outlet. When his Mary died he made no sign of feeling, being lost in the stupor of his own gathering malady. He sat silent with wild sad eyes in the Norfolk parsonage, to which he had been removed, and had novels read to him the livelong day (Evelina for one), finding in them, heaven knows what pitiful solace for woes that were never to be cured in this world. Sometimes the moaning of the sea would soothe him; sometimes he would rouse up to make a mechanical correction of his Homer; sometimes even he would write a cold and gloomy letter for one of his delusions was that he had ceased to be capable of affection for any one-to his cousin. All that tender care and affection could do for him was done. He survived his faithful companion more than three years, but they were years of darkness, without hope or consolation. A year

before his death an incident in a book he was reading, Anson's Voyages, caught his troubled fancy, and he wrote the last of all his poems, and the saddest. Pacing up and down in the failing light of the evening, the picture of the drowning sailor, "such a destined wretch as I," grows before him.

"He long survives, who lives an hour

In ocean, self-upheld :

And so long he, with unspent power,
His destiny repelled :

And ever, as the minutes flew,
Entreated help, or cried-' Adieu !'

"At length, his transient respite past,
His comrades, who before
Had heard his voice in every blast,
Could catch the sound no more:

ows.

For then, by toil subdued, he drank
The stifling wave, and then he sank.

"No poet wept him; but the page
Of narrative sincere,

That tells his name, his worth, his age,
Is wet with Anson's tear :

And tears by bards or heroes shed
Alike immortalise the dead.

"I therefore purpose not, or dream,
Descanting on his fate,

To give the melancholy theme
A more enduring date :

But misery still delights to trace
Its semblance in another's case.

"No voice divine the storm allayed,
No light propitious shone,

When, snatched from all effectual aid,

We perished, each alone :

But I, beneath a rougher sea,

And whelmed in deeper gulphs than he.”

This is the last sound that comes to us out of the kness in which Cowper was fast disappearing. Never a harmless life so miserable an ending. He went n in those deep waters without even that gleam of light he last, which so often gives pathetic gladness to an ing life. Unconsoled, he was swallowed up by those The last words he said were, when he was red a cordial, "What can it signify?" What, indeed, it matter, an hour of weakness, more or less, a pain greater? By that time the gloom had reached its ackest, the light was near. What did it signify? Who doubt that all the ceaseless sufferings of his life, 1 his miseries, some hours thereafter, had become as eams to him in the great and new revelation that waited him at the gates of heaven?

His life had been a harmless life; but yet it had

been full of trouble to himself, and all who were concerned in it, as unsatisfactory a human existence as ever was. But what he failed altogether to accomplish for himself he did for literature. He had not force enough to break any bonds of his own; on the contrary, his hapless feet were always getting entangled in new ones, and at the very last, after his partial escape from the potent sway of such a man as Newton, he made a poor little dictator for himself out of a pompous village pedagogue, to whom he laid bare all the tortures of his, heart. But while he was bound in spirit he was free in his genius, as no man else in his generation was free. Academical rule and precedent had no sway over him; he went out of the schools of the poets a gentle rebel, casting all their leading strings to the winds, not saying a word of revolt, but with a quiet obstinacy taking his own way. He would not be bound even to logic or sequence, but waved all those limitations lightly from him, and did as Fancy bade, with no defiance, but only a gentle natural waywardness. He saw, with eyes as clear as truth itself, what was before him in the soft fresh outside world, in which there was no intoxicating loveliness but only a modest English landscape; and taste and inclination at once refused to bring in any foreign images, finding that enough, and the genuine humanity that peopled it. He was bold to say what was in him, and to say it his own way; he had the courage to step back in the course of time, and bring his model from higher sources than those of the Augustan age. He broke the spell of Pope, and opened the way to Wordsworth and all the singers that were being born, while he languished and agonised. The world would have been a different world for them if Cowper had not been.

CHAPTER II.

ROBERT BURNS.

WHILE Cowper was wasting his early manhood in London doing nothing, and knowing nothing either of the misery or the importance of his future life, a child was born in a clay hut among the Ayrshire wilds, in that far-distant and unknown realm of Scotland, which, though united to England by the closest bonds, was yet almost as little known to Englishmen as any foreign country. It is very difficult to realise to ourselves, indeed, what that country was before Burns and before Scott. No country in the world has owed so much to literature; and we doubt if all the enterprise and spirit of the race could ever have produced the prosperity and wealth which is now its portion, without the stimulating touch of that revelation which made Scotland enchanted ground to all Europe, and has made her sons proud, wherever they have gone, to claim her name. No two men in the world were ever more unlike than the English gentleman, gently bred and well connected, but indolent, timid, and helpless, and the impassioned peasant, full of strong desires and impulses, rash, headstrong, and daring, whose lamp of genius was infinitely more vivid, and his place in poetry greater, but whose warm flesh and blood encumbered his way even more than madness and misery did that of his contemporary. They never met, and knew