events; a prattling voice breaking in occasionally on the deeper tones of men and women; a little creature of flesh and blood:

At first the infant,

Mewling and puling in the nurse's arms,
And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.

of child-life, and when they do speak, pile up conceits and oddities. These men, who would trim the very daisies on a grave into quaint forms and characters, were mostly childless and overshadowed with religious sorrows. When the Restoration came, things were worse still. Our poets played French tunes till the world sickened, and scarcely one natural note

his boy, call him

Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry ! And with what quiet insight Michael Drayton, describing the little infant Moses, enters into the very life and soul of infancy :

Her pretty infant lying in her lap,

portentous collection of nervous English and vicious rubbish, known to the reader as "Dryden's Works," in that dusty legacy of a man who might have become a great English poet, and .who doubtless was our very best English critic, there is nothing natural save the fearless self

guiles,

For yet he plays and dallies with his pap,

To mock her sorrows with his amorous smiles, And laugh'd, and chuck'd, and spread the pretty hands, While her full heart was at the point to break. Moses' Birth and Miracles, Book I. As these men and their contemporaries wrote of children, they wrote of all else— with insight, tenderness, and truth. They were as noteworthy for kindly humanity as for poetic force and range. So too, though in a much less degree, were their immediate successors. The Stuarts began early to create court poets; and the false and artificial verses of Carew and his comrades were already poisoning our Helicon. As we follow our poetic thread further, there are long blanks, and few indeed are the pearls between Drayton and Milton. Milton was a stately singer, not used to unbend to infancy, save as typical of Him who came in infant guise to redeem the world. His lines "On a fair infant dying of a cough" are full of puerile affectations, and the "Ode on the Nativity," though grand and golden beyond parallel, having the effect of a glorious illuminated missal unrolled to sudden music, shows little or no tenderness. In good truth, something of the freshness of English literature had already departed. Great as Milton was, he was academical, and his poetry wanted the natural life of Chaucer's breezy verse, and Shakspeare's ever-varied numbers.

But if we are disappointed in the poets who preceded Milton, and even in Milton himself, what shall we say of his contemporaries and immediate successors? Even the Puritan poets, who were in all respects the finest singers of those days, speak little

creed every lustrum and would gladly have changed his skin had that been possible. Between Dryden and Pope the Muses were silent, save at routs and teaparties; there was no mention of children or any thing else innocent; and there was no true poetry. Pope rose, flourished, lied, and confirmed the artificial tendencies of his age; and Gay, who might have done better than any of his contemporaries, for he had real humor and a large heart, fiddled away his great gifts, leaving posterity his debtor for little more than the Beggar's Opera. About this period, Jonathan Swift sarcastically recommended the poor and fruitful Irish to eat their babies, and showed in divers other ways his contempt for ordinary human ties. Let us do Swift the justice, however, to observe that, in the same spirit of savage and relentless humor, he was demolishing the artificial structure of English poetry, showing its insincerity and worthlessness. English poetry was in a very bad way when Ambrose Phillips wrote his hideous infantine pieces, on the little "Lady Charlotte Pulteney dressed to go to a ball," etc.;-carrying the patch-box and the powder-brush into the very nursery, bedaubing infancy, and hailing it in anacreontics; all his feeling, on seeing a beautiful female child, being that it was not old enough to be made love to. Things were not much better in Johnson's day, though the fresh and wholesome genius of Goldsmith was beginning to woo man back to nature and simple truth, and Bishop Percy published that book which, more than almost any other, renovated our poetic literature-the "Reliques" of

the way,

And tempt the blithe spirit still onward to stray, Itself its own home;-far away! far away!

The butterflies flutter in pairs round the bower, The humble-bee sings in each bell of each flower; The bee hums of heather and breeze-wooing hill, And forgets in the sunshine his toil and his skill; The birds carol gladly-the lark mounts on high; The swallows on wing make their tune to the eye, And as birds of good omen, that summer loves well,

Ever wheeling weave ever some magical spell. The hunt is abroad-hark! the horn sounds its note,

And seems to invite us to regions remote.
The horse in the meadow is stirred by the sound,
And neighing impatient o'erleaps the low mound:
Then proud in his speed o'er the champaign he
bounds,

To the whoop of the huntsman and tongue of the

hounds.

Then stay not within, for on such a blest day We can never quit home, while with Nature we stray far away! far away!

This is delightful, especially as coming from Coleridge; and, indeed, all the great man's child-poems are lovely of their kind -not quite so precious a kind as Blake's or Shelley's, but filling its worthy place in the catalogue of lovely things. Is it not, then, noticeable that all these men whom we have been quoting-Biake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley-men who virtually revolutionized literature, loved to fix their eyes on the dawn of life, with all its undeveloped issues and vague evanescent meanings?

When they had given mankind the poe

try and philosophy of the business, it behoved gentle Tom Hood to chronicle its comicality, which he did delightfully in his "Parental ode to my son, aged three years and five months:"

Thou pretty opening rose, (Go to your mother, child, to wipe your nose!) Balmy and breathing music like the south, (He really brings my heart into my mouth.) Fresh as the morn, and brilliant as its star,(I wish that window had an iron bar!) Bold as the hawk; yet gentle as the dove,(I tell you what, my love,

I can not write unless he's sent above.)
But there is another and deeper glimpse,
in Hood's noblest vein, to be found in
such pictures as that of the little schoolboy
reading the "Death of Abel" in the play-
ground, and listening to the frightful
"dream" of Eugene Aram; in the deli-
cious lines commencing

I remember, I remember,
The house where I was born;

And generally among the pure serious pieces of this great and only half-appreciated English master.

In England, we must look for poems of this kind among the works of the great singers; but if we go to Scotland, we shall find a lyric in every cottage and a song for every cradle. The lowly Scotch are a home-loving and child-loving people; and express themselves almost instinctively in song. The fields, the highways, and the woods swarm with humble poets. Greatest, perhaps, of all Scotchmen who have written about children is a poet almost unknown in England, but crowned long ago as the laureate of the nursery in a thousand Scottish homes. His name is William Miller, and he is still living. Before hearing another word on the score of his literary pretensions, read the following, and confess that it would be hard anywhere to find its peer:

THE WONDERFU' WEAN.

Our wean's the most wonderfu' wean e'er I saw;
It would tak' me a lang summer day to tell a'
His pranks, frae the morning till night shuts his
When he sleeps like a peerie 'tween father and
e'e,

And wha made the first bird that sang on a tree?
And the water that swims a' the ships in the sea?
But after I've told him, as weel as I ken,
Again he begins wi' his wha? and his when?
And he looks aye sae watchfu' the while I ex-
plain,

He's as auld as the hills,-he's an auld-farrant

wean.

And folk wha hae skill o' the lumps on the head, Hint there's mae ways than toiling o' winning ane's bread;

How he'll be a rich man, and hae men to work for him;

Wi' a kyte like a bailie's, shug, shugging afore him;

Wi' a face like the moon, sober, sonsy, and douce, And a back, for its breadth, like the side of a house.

'T weel I'm unco ta'en up wi't, they mak' a' sae plain ;

He's just a town's talk-a by-ordinar wean.

I ne'er can forget sic a laugh as I gat,
To see him put on father's waistcoat and hat;
Then the lang-leggit boots gaed sae far ower his
knees,

The tap loops wi' his fingers he grippit wi' ease.
Then he march'd thro' the house, he march'd but,

he march'd ben,

Come, hairst-time, then, unto my bairn,
Drest in thy gayest gear,
Wi' saft and winnowing winds to cool
The gloaming of the year!

In others we find the oddest turns of humor, as in "Cockie-leerie-la," where the farm-yard cock gets his apotheosis as "a country gentleman who leads a thrifty life," whose "step is firm and even," his "bearing bold," as if he said, "I'll never be a slave," and who, if he had a "pair of specks on his nose," and a "dickie," or

shirt-front, on his neck, would look uncommonly like "Doctor Drawblood," of vilBut mark the moral, old lage notoriety.

boys as well as young

So hain wi' care each sair-won plack, and honest pride will fill

Your purse wi' gear,-e'en far-off friends will bring grist to your mill;

And if, when grown to be a man, your name's without a flaw,

Then-rax your neck and tune your pipes toCockie-leerie-la.

William Miller may not be recognized by the great world; but he is at any rate certain of his immortality. Other poets have written admirably in the same vein; but his is the master-touch, as unmistakable in its humble way as the coloring of a Titian or the magic "smudge" of a Turner.

Since Wordsworth and the rest, a whole school of child-poetry has arisen; we do not hear of poetry written for children to read, which is quite another thing, but of poetry more or less connected with childlife. In one of Tennyson's finest Idyls, that of "Dora," a child is the mysterious agent curing human wrong and misinterpretation; and child-life is the subject of Browning even has unbent in the same dimany of the same writer's best lyrics. rection, and given us, besides many more serious pieces such as the profound little vignette called "Protus," his immortal "Piper of Hamelin." It would be impossible to enumerate, much less to quote, all the writers who have followed suit.

But in any chronicle of this sort, honor should be paid to the anonymous author of "Lilliput Levee,"-one of the most pleasant little volumes of pot-pourri in our language. In other quarters, childish subjects have been carried to the verge of namby-pamby, and we have had a great deal of sickly twaddle-chiefly by ladies. The infantine manner is very offensive when persisted in beyond a certain point.

Here must cease our very imperfect sketch of a most interesting subject. Surely we have shown unmistakably that those poets have ever been the greatest whose hearts have been in tune with all innocent. loveliness; and that where among the poetry of any epoch we do not see a Child's Face peeping out somewhere or other, we may safely conclude that the society and the poetry of the said epoch were in a low and miserable condition.