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his case.

We are not to charge religion with the affecting peculiarity of It seems to be the nature of the poetic temperament — physical disorder aside- to vibrate between extremes, to carry everything to excess, to find torment or rapture where others find only relaxation. Thus the author of Night Thoughts was in conversation a jovial and witty man. 'There have been times in my life,' says Goethe, 'when I have fallen asleep in tears; but in my dreams the most charming forms have come to console and to cheer me.' 'Alas! it is all outside,' said Johnson; 'I may be cracking my joke and cursing the sun: sun, how I hate thy beams!' So we have the saintly Cowper despairing of Heaven, and the melancholy Cowper singing John Gilpin:

'Strange as it may seem, the most ludicrous lines I ever wrote have been when in the saddest mood, and but for that saddest mood, perhaps, would never have been written at all.'

Never was poet more lonely or sad; yet by none has domestic happiness been more beautifully described. Despondent and remorseful, no one knew better the divine skill of strengthening the weak, of encouraging the timid, of pouring the healing oil into the wounded spirit.

As a writer, his ruling desire was to be useful. Referring to The Task, he says:

'I can write nothing without aiming, at least, at usefulness. It were beneath my years to do it, and still more dishonourable to my religion. I know that a reformation of such abuses as I censured is not to be expected from the efforts of a poet; but to contemplate the world, its follies, its vices, its indifference to duty, and its strenuous attachment to what is evil, and not to reprehend it, were to approve it. From this charge, at least I shall be clear, for I have neither tacitly, nor expressly, flattered either its characters or its customs."

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Influence. He was, if not the founder of a new school, the pioneer of a new era. When he died-one hundred years after the death of Dryden- blank verse was restored to favor, and English poetry was again in possession of its varied endowment. For the first time it became apparent that the despotism of Pope and Addison had passed away.

By the marriage of verse to theology and morals, he secured for poetry a more cordial reception in religious quarters.

He was practically the first to make poetry the handmaid to piety. Religion no longer stood shivering and forlorn,' but attired in the beauty of poetic enchantment, scattering flowers 'where'er she deigned to stray.'

To estimate the scope and endurance of his practical influence, it is sufficient to consider the popularity which his poems gained and still preserve; their meditative and moral tone, ever slipping in between

The beauty coming and the beauty gone;'

and the natural law by which the mind grows into the likeness of its associated images. No good thing is lost. All excellence is perpetual:

'When one that holds communion with the skies
Has filled his urn where the pure waters rise,
And once more mingles with us meaner things,
"Tis e'en as if an angel shook his wings;
Immortal fragrance fills the circuit wide.'

SECOND CREATIVE PERIOD.

Politics.

CHAPTER V.

FEATURES,

E'en now we hear with inward strife

A motion toiling in the gloom,

The Spirit of the years to come

Yearning to mix himself with life.-Tennyson.

A colonial senate had confronted the British Parliament. Colonial militia had crossed bayonets with British regulars; and beyond the Atlantic, on the shores of an immeasurable land, three millions of Englishmen, refusing to be taxed without representation, had founded the English Republic. Across the Channel, where freedom was wholly extinct, the leading fact of the English Revolution, the struggle between free inquiry and pure monarchy, had been repeated. A Versailles audience had greeted with thunders of applause the lines of Voltaire: 'I am the son of Brutus, and bear graven on my heart the love of liberty and the horror of kings.' News of the American revolt had fallen like a spark on the inflammatory mass; and the Bastile, grim symbol of despotism, had been razed to the ground,

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By violence overthrown

Of indignation, and with shouts that drowned
The crash it made in falling.'

Feudal France became a youthful America.

Napoleon, organ

and leader of the popular movement, was the giant of the middleclass. His only nobility, he said, was the rabble. His judicial code taught the equality of man before the law. Revolutionary principles were sown broadcast. Underneath the tumult of universal war, new forces waxed silently strong. Europe rallied, it is true, and the dread apostle of Democracy was banished to the barren rock of St. Helena; but the impulses he created and strengthened lived on. A hollow and insincere tranquillity

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ensued, broken first by the insurrection of the Spanish colonies in America; then by the democratic ardor which their success kindled in Spain herself, and which extended into Portugal on the one hand, into Naples on the other. Emulating the energy of her neighbors, Greece, after four centuries of servitude, asserted and won her independence. Her triumph hastened the French Revolution of 1830, which in turn quickened the republican efforts of the Swiss, roused the unhappy Poles to a vain rebellion, inflamed an anti-papal rising in Italy, and in England intensified the desire for parliamentary reform.

The need was urgent. The representative system had become corrupt. Two-thirds of the lower house were appointed by peers. Three hundred members, it was estimated, were returned by one hundred and sixty persons. Seats were openly offered for sale, and the purchasers sold their votes. Only a small minority had the privilege of franchise. In Scotland, the county of Bute had at one time but a single resident voter. At an election he took the chair, proposed and seconded his own return, and solemnly announced himself unanimously elected. The House of Commons had ceased to represent the nation. Before the end of 1816, the demand even for universal suffrage was loud. The great work of the next sixteen years was the agitation for the correction of legislative abuses. Then, amid such rejoicing as political victory has seldom awakened, the Reform Act inaugurated forever the government of the people, by the people, for the people,- one more advance against the spirit of exclusiveness, restriction, narrowness, monopoly. That the change was accomplished by the pressure of public opinion is proof decisive of the natural and healthy march of English civilization,-its elasticity and yet sobriety of spirit.

'While men pay reverence to mighty things,

They must revere thee, thou blue-cinctured isle,

not to-day, but this long while

In the front rank of nations, mother of great kings,
Soldiers, and poets.'

Society. The cause which most disturbed or accelerated normal progress, in antiquity, was the appearance of great men; in modern times, it has been the appearance of great inventions. Printing has secured the past, and has guaranteed the future. Gunpowder and military appliances render the triumph of bar

barians impossible. In 1807 the gas-light was tried in London, and soon the cheerful blaze chased away forever the tumultuous vagabonds who were wont, in the darkness, to insult, to plunder, and to kill. In the same year, Fulton made, from New York to Albany, the first successful voyage by steam. Ten years later, steamboats were flying on the Thames. Here is Jeffrey's description of one of these smoke-puffing vessels which surprised him and his wife on Loch Lomond:

'It is a new experiment for the temptation of tourists. It circumnavigates the whole lake every day in about ten hours; and it was certainly very strange and striking to hear and see it hissing and roaring past the headlands of our little bay, foaming and spouting like an angry whale; but, on the whole, I think it rather vulgarizes the scene too much, and I am glad that it is found not to answer, and is to be dropped next year."

Scarcely less important was the application of steam to printing. On a November morning of 1814, the following announcement appeared in a London paper:

The reader now holds in his hands one of the many thousand impressions of the Times newspaper, which were taken last night by a mechanical apparatus. That the magnitude of the invention may be justly appreciated by its effects, we shall inform the public that after the letters are placed by the compositors, and enclosed in what is called a "form," little more remains for man to do than to attend and watch this unconscious agent in its operations. The machine is then merely supplied with paper; itself places the form, inks it, adjusts the paper to the form newly inked, stamps the sheet, and gives it forth to the hands of the attendant, at the same time withdrawing the form for a fresh coat of ink, which itself again distributes, to meet the ensuing sheet, now advancing for impression; and the whole of these complicated acts are performed with such a velocity and simultaneousness of movement, that no less than eleven hundred sheets are impressed in one hour.'

In 1802 the vain experiment was tried of fitting a little engine to a carriage on the common road. Soon after wagers were won as to the weight a horse could draw on an iron train-way. Next the two were combined the iron rail and the steam-carriage. From 1830 the old modes of transit were changed throughout the civilized world. The New England Puritan, when told how by magic a witch rode from Salem to Boston, looked up, trembled, and wished he had the power. A few generations after, in 1837, not a witch, but the lightning, rode, not the crupper of a broom, but a permanent wire, and thought was postilioned across the air.

Machinery superseded forever the spindle and the distaff of the primeval world. Once three hundred women sat a long summer's day on Boston Common, and spun with three hundred wheels, well content with their few hanks of cotton, linen thread, and woollen yarn. But the spinning-wheel sank in turn

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