INTRODUCTORY. IN studying the progress of Poetry from earliest times, you will see that like laws, or government, or religion, it is subject to many changes, and that there are revolutions in literature, as much as in history. The poets of one period have all a certain likeness; even though each may be in his way original, his work will bear the mark of his own time, and follow the prevailing fashion. This continues till some man of great originality and power appears, who by his genius turns taste into new channels, and drawing after him a crowd who imitate him in his manner, founds what we call a new school of poetry. We have seen how Pope had thus made a school in which, as somebody says "French taste was ruled by English understanding," and for almost a century his influence kept poetry in smooth, easy, flowing rhymes; but, yet, very artificial beside the naturalness of the earlier poets. Coleridge, of whom I am now going to speak, says, "the Pope school sacrificed the heart to the head, " and that is, I think, as good a statement as can be made of it. I pointed out in my last talk that in Cowper there is an effort to make the head and heart work together; and showed that in the Scotch poet Burns, we have the first outburst of the real minstrel poet since the seventeenth century. But neither Cowper nor Burns was a man to found a school of poetry, they were only men who influenced it. Such work as Percy and Macpherson had done also aroused a taste for a new order of verse; but the great departure from Pope, and the setting up of new ideas as the basis of poetry, was begun by what we call the Lake School. It is of this school that I am going to give you a brief account. You remember I have said that Robert Burns began to write between two great revolutions—the revolution of the people in America and in France. In both these revolutions there was everything to stir up men's thoughts, and in the stirring up of thoughts there must always follow a stimulus to poetry, because poetry is only the highest thought of the most poetical minds, inspired by the most stirring events. The thought underlying the American and French revolutions was, that all men, even the poorest and lowest, have supreme rights-rights to life, freedom, and to the largest amount of happiness possible. They were the same thoughts that the best minds in America put into our Declaration of Independence—the same that Burns put into his Man's a Man for a' That. It is plain, is it not, that these thoughts, which in their birth, shook governments, religion and society, as if they were reeds in a tempest, must enter into and move the poet more than any other man of his time. When these doctrines of liberty, equality, and brotherhood among men, were spreading far and wide by the French Revolution there were two young men in England in whose minds they took root. The first of these young Born 1770, men was William Wordsworth, a student in CamDied 1850. bridge college, who early in youth had felt himself consecrated as a poet; the other was Samuel Taylor ColeBorn 1772. ridge, who was in London, at Christ Hospital school, Died 1834. and who was also fired with a poetical ardor as intense as that of Wordsworth. Of these two young men William Wordsworth was the elder by two years. They had not met each other when the revolutionary fire broke out in them, although they |