The "Yes," said Snap, "for we saved Sampson's life." and slowly expressed his surprise at find- you. I cannot even pretend that I am dising it so late. He must have been dozing pleased! I am very thankful." there some time when we had rushed along the ridge, and in our joy and hurry, we had passed without observing him. "So now," replied my mother, "I hope I No one took any notice of us. shall hear no more of this morbid fancy moon was just setting, and I remember of yours. Here you have an easy examseeing mother standing with a pitched fag-ple of how good can come out of evil, so got held high to light us into the cottage don't lie awake again to puzzle about it. by the mill. I remember also, that when The case of Joseph is not a solitary one. first they wished Sampson to try and walk It may be said a thousand times every down to his door, he looked forlornly at day on earth, as it is in heaven. As us, and said slowly, with a deep sigh, "Wo- for you, your thoughts were for evil, men and children- -women and children," but God meant it unto good' - God looked but he was obliged to yield himself to our on this evil, you see, and caused it to help, and we all four pushed, pulled, and bring forth good." supported him till he got into his house, and then he said to my mother, "Well, ma'am, I could humbly wish to know whatever all this means. That one word "humbly" expressed all his manly displeasure and pride at finding himself under personal thraldom to the "women and children." Soon after this I curled myself up in a corner of the warm kitchen, and fell asleep, when no doubt I was carried home to bed, for when I woke there, I was none the worse. The next morning Snap was alternately penitent and exultant, and while we were waiting till my mother came down to breakfast, he made one of those speeches which, because I could not make out its meaning, I could not forget. "Does Snap lie awake when it's dark? " I exclaimed, "I have often tried, but I never could." Thereupon my mother said if I would promise never to try again she would give me a bright new shilling; so I promised, and got the shilling. Amy lost it the very next day down a crack; but a shilling was of no particular use in those days, excepting to play with, so we did not very much care; a penny would spin just as well, and was a great deal larger. From The Cornhill Magazine. ENGLISH RURAL POETRY. THERE was a time when the term Rural Poetry would have been regarded as "I'll tell you what," said this puny phil- synonymous, or nearly so, with Pastoral osopher, "I used always to hate the morals Poetry — that is to say, the most artificial but it's no good! They're in every-verse ever written, and which, in its legitithing. It's my belief they're a part of the world. Yes, they're ingrain." I had generally disliked the morals too; what child takes kindly to "hence we may learn?" but I by no means troubled my self as to Snap's general meaning; and my mother shortly coming down, he gave her a fair and faithful account of our midnight adventure, adding, "It is a wonder how missy ever scrambled out of that drift; it was over her head! I thought for a minute she was lost when she rolled plump into it, and the snow fell together and covered her and so," he added, in a tone of deep reflection - -"and, so mother, I've made up my mind to give it up." "Yes," she answered, " you had bet ter." "For," he continued, "of course we had no business to go out at night and get into danger, and it would be fair if you were to say that was evil." "I certainly do say so," she replied, "though I have no intention of punishing mate form, was "a slavish mimicry of slight sanction to it by the publication of his immortal Lycidas; but these poets such is the power of genius- could make their shepherd-swains discuss dogmatic theology while tending their sheep without raising a smile, the incongruity of the position being atoned for in these cases by the rare beauty of the song. In the splendid English which Dryden knew how to write, we can enjoy a fable in which the controversy between the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England is discussed by a milk-white hind and a spotted panther. dear good angel of the spring"); but we The Pastorals of Pope, although destitute, as Warton has pointed out, of a single rural image that is new, possess a certain smoothness of versification. They are well-nigh unreadable now, and the praise they won at the time from able critics sounds ridiculous to us. Both the poetry and the criticisms upon it are as foreign to modern taste as the euphuisin of Lyly; but that Pope satisfied a want of his age which was eminently artificial and prosaicis evident from the mass of so-called pastoral poetry that was issued during the first half of the last century. an songs, Nevertheless, Wordsworth is not far heaven's gate sings." Shakspeare's rural wrong in saying that, with one or two in-descriptions are, as they should be, incisignificant exceptions, "the poetry of the dental; but these incidental touches suffice period intervening between the publica- to make the reader feel the open-air inflution of the Paradise Lost and the Seasons ences to which we have alluded. His - that is to say, from 1667 to 1728-does affection for the violet is as noteworthy as not contain a single new image of external Chaucer's for the daisy, or Wordsworth's nature; and scarcely presents a familiar for the celandine; and in the description one from which it can be inferred that the of wild flowers, of birds and animals, of eye of the Poet had been steadily fixed country pursuits and pastimes, his accuraupon his object, much less that his feelings cy is unrivalled. His As You Like It has had urged him to work upon it in the been justly called a pastoral comedy. spirit of genuine imagination." He might Milton, on the contrary, beautiful though have added-for the coincidence is strik- many of his descriptive passages are, and ing that the year in which Thomson notwithstanding the delicious rural charm published the Seasons in a complete form, that pervades his best descriptive poAllan Ramsay produced his beautiful pas-ems - L'Allegro and Il Penseroso — aptoral of the Gentle Shepherd, a poem which pears sometimes to have written from is remarkable in many ways, and especially book-knowledge rather than from actual as presenting pictures of rustic life free observation, and his usual imagery is, from the conventional diction and the alle- therefore, occasionally defective. There gorical personations which deform other are two writers, both of whom lived a litpastorals. Ramsay's poem is written in tle earlier than Milton, who deserve a the Scottish dialect: in English we have no rather prominent place as rural poets. poem of the kind at that period that can We allude to William Browne, of Tavisbear comparison with it, for the Faithful tock, and to Robert Herrick. Some years Shepherdess of Fletcher, exquisite though ago a folio edition of Browne's Britannia's it be, is wholly devoid of the realism de- Pastorals, with MSS. notes by Milton, was manded in such a work. Of the Eliza- sold by Messrs. Sotheby and Wilkinson. bethan dramatists, by the way, few care to The notes are not critical, but they testify describe with accuracy the varied aspects at least to the interest with which Milton of Nature. Jonson has some choice de- had read the volume. In Milton's own scriptive passages in his lyrical poems- works, however, we have stronger proofs (it was he who called the nightingale "the than these notes afford, how carefully - Then he describes girls bringing rushes in Browne's poetry was perused. There can | As children on a play-day leave the schools, be little doubt that the Fourth Eclogue of And gladly run unto the swimming pools, the Shepherd's Pipe suggested to the Or in the thickets all with nettles stung, greater poet his peerless Lycidas, and in Rush to despoil some sweet thrush of her young; Comus, as well as Paradise Regained, we Or with their hats (for fish) lade in a brook find traces of Browne's influence. All his Withouten pain: but when the morn doth look poetry was produced in early life, and it Glide to the schools than they unto their master. Out of the eastern gates a snail would faster won for him instant reputation, and the friendship of such men as Drayton, Ben Jonson, and Chapman. Few readers would have the patience to read pastorals now, in which English shepherds and shepherdesses, English rivers and familiar country places, are curiously associated with river-gods and wood-nymphs; yet the lover of poetry will find much in them to reward him for his toil. Picturesque descriptions, luxuriant fancy, and frequent felicity of expression, are to be found in Britannia's Pastorals. The verse moves sometimes very sweetly, sometimes it is rugged and inpeded, like a stream held in by rocks; but whether rough or smooth, it is rarely without vitality, and you feel that you are in the company of a poet, not of a mere versifier. If Keats owed much to Spenser, it is scarcely possible to doubt that he owed something to Browne. There are passages in Endymion which remind us strongly of the Pastorals, and the wonderful picture of Madeline in the Eve of St. Agnes was probably suggested by a description of Browne's which if marked by conceits, is not wholly without beauty. And as a lovely maiden, pure and chaste, Then on her head a dressing like a crown, Browne, like most young poets, delights in simile, and uses it lavishly. His best bits of rural landscape or description are produced in this way, and indeed his pages are studded with similes like spring meadows with buttercups. Two or three examples will suffice as specimens of Browne's style. The following will remind the reader of a passage in Shakspeare. when The day is waxen old And 'gins to shut in with the marigold; and afterwards "shortens the dew'd way" with a song newly learnt, and the melancholy angler- (evidently Browne knew nothing of his contemporary Walton, the "common father of anglers," and the happiest of men) — standing on a green bank with "a wriggling yellow worm thrust on his hook." We forget the dreary mythological rubbish which Browne inserts in his Pastorals, in the bright, accurate, and simple representations of English_rural life with which his pages abound, and the hearty love he shows for the country, and especially for the beautiful county in which he was born, wins the sympathy of the reader. Here is a brief apostrophe to Devon, which, allowing for its quaintness, all Devonshire men will appreciate : Hail thou, my native soil! Thou blessed plot, Such rocks, in whom the diamond fairly shines; the country dull. He calls London his home, and the blest place of his nativity, and laments that a hard fate had condemned him to a long and irksome banishment. He describes the people as "currish," and "churlish as the seas," and sings in a sort of doggerel, More discontents I never had Since I was born than here, Where I have been, and still am sad, In this dull Devonshire. The lyrical sweetness of some of Herrick's verse is unmatched by any poet of his age He sings, bird-like, without a care, and with a freedom that seems to owe more to nature than to art. But it is the perfection of lyric art to appear artless, and in this respect he has, we think, scarcely a rival. Many of his love poems have a musical charm, a playful fancy, and at times a tenderness of feeling which take the reader captive. He will be alternately allured and repelled, won by dainty thoughts daintily expressed, and disgusted by sensuality and coarseness which must have appeared strange even in Herrick's days as coming from the pen of a clergyman. In his Noble Numbers, however, the poet redeems to some extent the folly of what he calls his "unbaptized rhymes." His felicity of description as a rural poet seems to show that his dislike of rural life was more feigned than real. We cannot, indeed, agree with Mr. Robert Buchanan that Herrick's best things are his poems in praise of the country life," because we hold that the lyric beauty of many of his love poems The Night Piece: To Julia, To Anthea, Gather ye Rosebuds while ye may, for example, - is of the rarest order, but doubtless many of his rural pictures are very charmingly coloured. And they are true to the life. Herrick never produces fancy landscapes. He described what he saw, and it is evident that his knowledge of rural life was not gained through "the spectacles of books." In a pleasant piece called The Country Life he dwells upon its felicities with a feeling that could scarcely have been feigned, and observes which is not quite true, by the way that the farmer's lot is the happiest because the freest from care. The festivities of the country, many of them no longer known, are thus pithily enumerated: : For sports, for pageantry and plays, Tripping the comely country round, In another piece he describes the Harvest Home as if many a time he had joined in the merriment; and in another, there is an invitation to his Corinna to go a-Maying, which, although written two hundred years since, has the fresh dew of youth and beauty about it still. There's not a budding boy or girl this day And some have wept, and woo'd, and plighted troth, And chose their priests ere we can throw off sloth.. Many a green-gown has been given; and then he adds, with an epicurean conviction, that since the future will bring sorrow, and life is short, and our days "once lost can ne'er be found again," the present should be seized for enjoyment. Come let us go while we are in our prime, Strange that Herrick - whose Hesperides was the favorite volume of country gentlemen in the days of Charles II., whose songs were set to music by Henry Lawes and other musicians of the day, and who, with all his faults, literary and inoral, was a true poet-should have been allowed no place in our anthologia, while such mean rhymesters as Smith, Duke, Halifax, and Harte men who never wrote a line betokening genius - have had their miserable productions mummified among the works of British poets. Both Herrick and Browne are included in the list of poets "sealed of the tribe of Ben," whom Jonson, in his mature age, and in the plenitude of his power, collected round him in the Apollo Club. The famous dramatist affirmed that Browne's worth was good "upon the exchange of let ters." Browne returned the praise with interest, and Herrick, upon the death of Jonson, whom he terms "the rare archpoet," pronounced that the glory of the stage had departed. any reader's insight into the most poetical aspects of poetry." It is possible, as we have seen, to discover many gems of rural verse hidden amidst the works of our earlier poets; but just as Ben Jonson, it will be remembered, landscape painting in England may be said walked to Scotland to see his friend Drum- to have commenced with Gainsborough mond of Hawthornden - a poet, who lived, and Reynolds, although English landscape as he himself describes it, in a "sweet soli-painters existed before their day, so, speaktary place," and who might have known ing broadly, may Thomson and Cowper be much of Nature from direct intercourse; accounted the genuine fathers of English but his knowledge is bookish, and his son- rural poetry. Their descriptions of Nature nets, graceful though many of them be, are are fuller, and, if we except the incidental the fruits of culture, and exhibit a second- touches of our greatest poets, more truthhand acquaintance with natural objects. ful than those produced at an earlier period, Probably, the most lovely piece of rural de- and they led to the more profound, and scription produced by any of Drummond's even more accurate, study of Nature excontemporaries is the Complete Angler of hibited by Wordsworth, Shelley, Scott, and Izaak Walton-a perfect prose pastoral, Tennyson. Thomson's artificial diction, full of simplicity and tenderness and nat- and his frequent conventionality of thought, ural feeling, and of an intense enjoyment have greatly lessened the popularity he of Nature in her simplest forms. Beauti- once enjoyed. At the beginning of this fully does Wordsworth say that "Fairer than Life itself is this sweet Book" of Walton's; and the reader who is familiar with it will have marked the fine sympathy with which Mr. Field has expressed the feeling and poetry of the volume in his picture this year at the Royal Academy. Walton, who has left such valuable records of Hooker and Donne, of Sanderson, Wotton and George Herbert, appears to have known nothing of Milton, who was born fifteen years after him, and died nine years before him, nor of Marvel, who died four years after his friend, the great epic poet. It is probable that men were separated more widely in those days by theological and political differences than they were united by a common love of literature and learning. Milton, the iconoclast, the priesthater, the friend of Cromwell, makes no allusion to the most eloquent writer of his or, perhaps, of any age-Jeremy Taylor; nor does Taylor, the Royal chaplain, betray the slightest acquaintance with the greatest of his contemporaries. and one of the greatest of English poets. Marvel made himself chiefly famous as a politician; but he claims our attention as having written a few beautiful poems, which are impregnated with a fine rural flavour. One of these Thoughts in a Garden in which he speaks of the mind withdrawing into its happiness and Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade, century every school-girl possessed a copy of the Seasons, and could recite long passages from the poem. It is a pretty safe prediction to affirm that, at the close of it, if the Seasons are still found upon the shelf, they will be dust-covered, and unknown to all but students of poetry; yet Thomson did a great work in his time, for he brought Nature nearer to us, and proved, what ought never to have needed proof, but seemed to have been long forgotten, that poetic thought can gain some of its richest nutriment from natural objects. Pope, who could not describe Nature, spoke sneeringly of descriptive poetry; but no poet since Thomson's day has adopted Pope's view. Between the publication of the Seasons and of the Task lived two lyric poets, whose united verse can be compressed within a tiny volume. "A great wit," said Cowley, "is no more tied to live in a vast volume than in a gigantic body: on the contrary, it is commonly more vigorous the less space it animates." This remark may be fittingly applied to Gray and Collins. They wrote very little, but what they did write is exquisite. Probably, the two best descriptive poems in the language are the L'Allegro and Il Penseroso of Milton; but Gray's Elegy contains something more than description. The rural imagery of the piece is very lovely; but its pathetic sentiment touches every heart. So perfect is the poem, that there is not a line-scarcely, indeed, a word that one could wish to see altered; yet it is difficult to believe that Gray's taste was not a little finical when it led him to omit this lovely stanza as beautiful, surely, as any one that is may be regarded, according to Mr. Palgrave |