no comparison must be drawn between Bloomfield and Clare; the Shoemaker must unbonnet to the Ploughman; the former never exercises or seems to possess a reflective power. Clare is Bloomfield's successor, but he is very far his superior, dwelling among the ever-varying scenes of nature. He is not merely a rustic poet or a rural bard; such poets take merely the impression of a georgic world, but they do not reflect themselves; their bucolics abound in prettinesses and generalities, without the boldness of generalization. Clare has more fully individualized his scenery than any poet of his class, always excepting Burns. It is the poetry of rural life and taste, but rural life with the dignity of the man, not with the rudeness or manners of the clown. It is worth some inquiry what makes the evident distinction between the methods of Cowper and Wordsworth, and Keats and Tennyson, in describing nature; and between these, again, and our humbler friend of whom we are now speaking. All love the country, but few love it as Clare loves it; yet it seems indispensable to the proper appreciation of rural scenery that we should not only take our walks there, but find our work there. The poems of Clare are now, even in literary circles, almost unknown, and quite unreferred to. Their purity, their excessive modesty, their intense devotion to nature in the woods and fields, in an age when the woods and fields have been comparatively forsaken: these may be assigned as some of the reasons for the obscurity which has gathered round the name of one of the sweetest singers of the children of labour—one of the saddest names in the Peerage of Poverty.

CHAPTER III.

THE DIVINITY OF LABOUR.

T is difficult for Pride to put its ear to the ground, and listen to the teachings of a lowly humanity." The highly educated know but little of the great mental achievements of the children of toil, the noble labours of those who have had to rely upon their own exertion and diligence for all that they have done; who have been trained very far from the professor's chair, and the college hall and library. If this little book should fall in the way of those whose happy position in life has enabled them to command tutors, books, travel; who, with comparative ease, are able to utter the "sesame," to pronounce the Shibboleth or the Cabbala, by which languages unlock their stores, and all arts their beauties, it will show that taste, and refinement of manners and of language, are catholic; and that genius, too, is universal; that there are no barriers fencing in one section of humanity from perceptions and spiritual enjoyments peculiar to another section. The reader of Plato and Homer, of Horace and Virgil, will find the love of the spiritual life glowing in the bosoms of men upon whom he has been in the habit of looking with contempt; he will learn that true beauty unveils her charms and graces to the peasant who seeks her in a loving and humble spirit, as readily as to the learned savant, and the titled and wealthy bibliopolist and patron :

Bancroft Author of "History of America."

he will learn that genius spurns the social tariffs, the castes and distinctions, which the guilds and corporations of Traditionary and Mechanical Scholarship seek to impose; that it lives in its own world, wings its way through its own heavens, sails over its own seas, nor ever asks permission to indulge in its dreams, or to enjoy its domain and territory. The rich and the wealthy scholar, the elegant lounger of literature, may learn that his poorer brother, although he possesses no rent-roll, no title-deeds to vast and wide estates, holds possession of what to him furnishes far more ample enjoyment and satisfaction; is the owner and lordwarden of many a castle in the air, and possessor of many a glorious field in the realms of fairy-land and imagination, whither he can at all times wander, and for the tenantry of which he pays no income or property tax -territories of which he cannot be deprived, where in thought he meets and holds communion with the best and bravest of earth's departed spirits; where he freshens his own mind with the gales, the waters, and the dews of the Delectable Mountains of Thought; and returning thence, pours the richness and the majesty of his musings over his brethren, till they follow him through his inheritance and pathway of light.

This is one thing done by the resurrection and inscription of names of genius in humble life upon some suitable page; but there is another good resulting from it, and that is the chief one aimed at ; it may be a cause of pride and emulation in the cottage of the poor; the lowly labourer may read it and learn how glorious is his brotherhood; that it may prove to him an incentive, an encouragement, to endurance, intellectual progress, and self-reliance.

"We have not forgotten," says Professor Wilson, "an order of poets, peculiar, we believe, to our own enlightened land. A high order of poets sprung from the lower orders of the people; and not only sprung from them, but bred as well as born in the huts where poor men lie,' and glorifying their condition by the light of song. Such glory

LETTERS AND LABOUR-DAVID.

81

belongs, we believe, exclusively to this country and to this age. Burns, Hogg, Cunningham, Bloomfield, Clare. It must be a strong soil-the soil of this Britain-which sends up such products; and we must not complain of the clime beneath which they grow to such height, and bear green fruitage. The spirit of domestic life must be sound, the natural knowledge of good and evil high, the religion true, the laws just, and the government on the whole good, methinks, that can have all conspired to educate these children of genius whose souls Nature had framed of the finer clay."* But it is true, not only of our day, but of all times, that the mind-life has, in innumerable instances, been associated with bodily labour and toil. These two Priesthoods-the Priesthood of Labour and of Letters, have frequently been combined in one person. This volume is to be mainly devoted to an account of the lives and writings of the men in whom they were united.

For Literature and Labour have been united together in illustrious names. "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want; He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, and leadeth me beside the still waters." When may we suppose the touching words of this most beautiful poem were composed? Not by David, when sitting upon his ivory throne, and wielding the sceptre of sovereignty, when Abner, and Joab, and the statesmen and generals of Israel stood by his side: not when the rude lustre and magnificence of the young kingdom stretched around him: but in the pastures of Bethlehem, when he stretched himself beneath some gentle over-hanging hill; when the flocks upon the pleasant pasturage and by the cool stream, lay at ease before him; then, from his own relation to his flock, his mind reverted to God's relation to him; and, touching that wonderful harp, which he so well knew how to touch, he sung, “The Lord is my shepherd." How could it be else but that, in his pastoral wanderings, the gorgeous and magnificent

imagery of the Hebrew land would most impress his mind; from the retired depths of the wilderness his spirit would rise to that awful Being "who layeth the beams of His chambers in the waters, making the clouds His chariots, and walking on the wings of the wind." There, in the fierceness of the eastern day, sheltered in some pleasant cave or quiet glen, he would say, "He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High, shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty." While, in the more tender season, "the outgoings of the morning and the evening" would seem to "rejoice"; thus, too, in the still, profound, and gorgeous Eastern night the shepherd would read the awful pages of the stars: "When I consider the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon, and the stars which Thou hast ordained, Lord, what is man?" The dews, “from the womb of the morning," gleaming with Oriental brightness, would inspire another hymn, "The heavens declare Thy glory, the firmament showeth Thy handiwork; day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge; and there is no speech nor language where Thy voice is not heard." All these are pastoral images drawn from the scenery surrounding the young shepherd. Thus, also, if Moses was the inspired author of the Pentateuch, and especially of that noblest historical poem, the Book of Genesis, and that extraordinary divinely human utterance, the Book of Job, we may well conceive these were written, not when he sat at the entrance of the Tabernacle, giving laws to Israel, but rather when in the cleft of Horeb, he kept the flocks of Jethro, his father-in-law.

"Is not this the carpenter's son?" Then it is probable that those hands used the hammer, the adze, the saw; and has not this circumstance for ever and for ever hallowed the implements of labour? The consecration of the divinest life descends on the humble workman; he can boast of hereditary honours, to which the wearers of the surplice, the alb, and the gown, the wielders of the crosier, and the readers of rubrics, can make no claim.

"For by their