ILLUSTRATIONS.

"The change shall please, nor shall it matter aught
Who works the wonder, if it be but wrought..
'Tis time, however, if the case stands thus,
For us plain folks and all who side with us
To build our altar, confident and bold,
And say, as stern Elijah said of old,

The strife now stands upon a fair award,
If Israel's Lord be God, then serve the Lord;
If he be silent, faith is all a whim,

Then Baal is the God, and worship him.""

"Murmuring and ungrateful Discontent,
That scorns afflictions mercifully meant;
Those humors, tart as wine upon the fret,
Which idleness and weariness beget,

-Conversation.

These and a thousand plagues that haunt the breast,
Fond of the phantom of an earthly rest,

Divine communion chases, as the day

Drives to their dens the obedient beasts of prey.

See Judah's promised king, bereft of all,

Driven out an exile from the face of Saul;

To distant caves the lonely wanderer flies,

To seek that peace a tyrant's frown denies."—Retirement.

"Have we not track'd the felon home, and found
His birthplace and his dam? The country mourns,
Mourns because every plague that can infest
Society, and that saps and worms the base
Of the edifice that Policy has raised,

Swarms in all quarters; meets the eye and ear,
And suffocates the breath at every turn.
Profusion breeds them; and the cause itself
Of that calamitous mischief has been found—
Found, too, where most offensive, in the skirts
Of the robed pedagogue! Else let the arraign'd
Stand up unconscious and refute the charge.
So, when the Jewish leader stretch'd his arm,

And waved his rod divine, a race obscene,
Spawn'd in the muddy beds of Nile, came forth,
Polluting Egypt: gardens, fields, and plains
Were covered with the pest; the streets were fill'd;
The croaking nuisance lurk'd in every nook;
Nor palaces nor even chambers 'scaped;

And the land stank-so numerous was the fry."

-The Task.

12. Simplicity - Genuineness

Naturalness.

"His verses are full of personal emotions, genuinely felt, never altered or disguised.”—Taine.

"He had preserved in no common measure the innocence of childhood."-Macaulay.

"An earnest, tender writer and true poet enough to be true to himself."-Mrs. Browning.

"Cowper's virtue was in his simplicity and his genuineness, rare qualities then. His good fortune was in never belonging to the literary set or bowing to the town taste."-G. E. Woodberry.

.

"He delivered English verse from the graveclothes of French drapery, and bade it come forth and live in its own natural manly life. .There is the classic slang. I hate it. I heartily wish some one would put Pegasus out of the way. The muses are a set of old frumps, and I heartily wish some one would pension off the whole tuneful nine' of them, so that I may never hear of them again. I am weary and sick of Mars and Jove and Helicon and Ilissus and the whole collection of stage properties. When I leave these for 'The Task' it is like walking out of an evening party into the fresh moonlight, under the glorious stars, and talking about them, not finely, but simply, heartily, plainly, truly. I regard Latin verse, Greek verse, and piano-strumming as the three-headed Moloch to which England offers up brains and Cowper wrote English poetry into the English language."-George Dawson.

sense.

"No English poet has ever excelled Cowper when he writes of the daily human affections. In him, one might almost say, began in English poetry that direct, close, impassioned representation, in the least sensational manner, of such common relations as motherhood, filial piety, friendship, married love, the relation of man to animals-and in him they are made religious. Cowper's treatment of all moral subjects is distinguished from his treatment of his personal religion by an essential manliness of tone. Nowhere in our poetry is there heard a finer scorn of vanity, ambition, meanness; nowhere is truth more nobly exalted or justice more sternly glorified. . . did of one or two classes of men."-Stopford Brooke.

Cowper talks as naturally of all men as Pope

"There is something in the sweetness and facility of the diction that diffuses a charm over the whole collection [of Cowper's letters] and communicates an interest that is not often commanded by performances of greater dignity and pretension."-Francis Jeffrey.

"His observation was remarkably nice and true in certain departments of life. . . . The most truly poetic phases of Cowper's verse are the portions devoted to rural and domestic subjects. Here he was at home and alive to every impression." -H. T. Tuckerman.

ILLUSTRATIONS.

"No noise is here, or none that hinders thought.
The redbreast warbles still, but is content
With slender notes and more than half suppress'd;
Pleased with his solitude and flitting light

From spray to spray, where'er he rests he shakes
From many a twig the pendant drops of ice
That tinkle in the wither'd leaves below.
Stillness, accompanied with sounds so soft,
Charms more than silence. Meditation here

May think down hours to moments. Here the heart
May give a useful lesson to the head,

And Learning wiser grow without his books."-The Task.

"A poet's cat, sedate and grave
As poet well could wish to have,
Was much addicted to inquire
For nooks to which she might retire,
And where, secure as mouse in chink,
She might repose, or sit and think.

I know not where she caught the trick-
Nature perhaps herself had cast her
In such a mould philosophique,

Or else she learn'd it of her master.
Sometimes ascending, debonair,
An apple-tree or lofty pear,

Lodged with convenience in the fork,
She watch'd the gardener at his work;
Sometimes her ease and solace sought
In an old empty watering-pot :
There, wanting nothing save a fan,
To seem some nymph in her sedan
Apparell'd in exactest sort,
And ready to be borne to court."

-The Retired Cat.

"Whence is it that, amazed, I hear From yonder wither'd spray,

This foremost morn of all the year,

The melody of May?

And why, since thousands would be proud

Of such a favor shown,

Am I selected from the crowd

To witness it alone?

Sing'st thou, sweet Philomel, to me

For that I also long

Have practised in the groves like thee,

Though not like thee in song?"

-To the Nightingale.

KEATS, 1795-1821

Biographical Outline.-John Keats, born October 31, 1795, at Moorfields, London; father a livery-stable employe; the childhood home of Keats is at the stable in Finsbury Circus; the family remove in 1801 to Craven Street, City Road; Keats is put into an excellent school in his eighth year; in April, 1804, his father is killed in an accident, and his mother marries one William Rawlings, a stable-keeper, but is soon separated from him; Keats's mother then retires with her children to her father's home at Edmonton; the maternal grandfather dies in March, 1805, and leaves a fortune of £13,000, which places Keats in easy circumstances during his youth; he attends school at Enfield, where he forms a friendship with Charles Cowden Clark, an usher and a son of the master; as a boy, Keats is "of extraordinary mettle, vivacity, and promise," courageous, high-minded, and generous; after two school years of " fighting and frolic," he begins to study and read voraciously, devouring much literature, criticism, and classical mythology; he leaves school with a fair knowledge of Latin and general history and some acquaintance with French; although a "true Greek," he knew nothing of the language of Greece; Keats's mother, to whom he was passionately devoted, died in February, 1810, and in the July following Keats's maternal grandmother places him, with his sister and brothers, in the care of two guardians, and makes over about £8,000 to be held in trust for their use; at the direction of Mr. Abbey, one of the trustees, John is withdrawn from school in 1810, at the close of his fifteenth year, and is apprenticed for five years to a surgeon