"I am set to light the ground, While the beetle goes his round : Follow now the beetle's hum ; Little wanderer, hie thee home! The surpassing fitness and beauty of the diction (with its instinctive avoidance of all Latinized forms) might have been Webster's, the sentiment might owe something to Sterne or Rousseau, but the originality and imaginative power is Blake's before all the world; the rhythm and metre, too, are singularly appropriate, the same, it will be noted, as Hood adopted for his beautiful Ruth. In the two dozen or so of poems of this stamp that Blake wrote, the ripple is distinctly heard of the identical stream which gushed forth so abundantly in the poetry of the next generation. England had to wait many years for her political revolution, but with 1789 the signal for poetic revolution had duly arrived. After the completion of his Songs of Innocence the mystical side of Blake developed continually at the expense of the normal intelligence. In 1789 appeared the first of his prophetic writings, The Book of Thel. In 1794, as a kind of supplement to Songs of Innocence, was engraved Songs of Experience, containing a few poems, such as the wellknown Tiger, Tiger burning bright, that in lyric intensity and power probably surpass anything he ever wrote. For the imagery of others it is evident that he explored chambers of the brain stored with writings produced in ages of eternity (as he explained to Flaxman), for the delight and study of archangels rather than of men. Henceforth he winged his flight farther and farther into strange and unknown regions. Practically none of his later prophetic works concern the literary student. He remained to the end a visionary and mystic of the inCf. Milton's L'Allegro. 1 tensest convictions, a universalist apparently in religion, communing habitually (like Swedenborg) with sages and prophets of past ages, entirely free in his life from selfseeking, and of a childlike simplicity of character; with this last trait went, however, unfortunately, a semiinfantine irritability and suspicion, recalling in one or two points the like infirmity in Rousseau. He died in Fountain Court, Strand, in August, 1827, maintaining a happy serenity to the very end, remaining to the last in poverty, if not in positive neglect, his genius disregarded by all but a small and narrowing circle of friends. III. Allan Ramsay's School. From the outworn tradition of the school of Pope, by which the southron poets were trammelled, it is a relief to turn to the poets and balladists of Northern Britain, where continuity with the pre-Augustan school had never been so completely severed. The revival, which may be said to have commenced in England with Percy's Reliques of 1765, took its rise much less abruptly in Scotland in the life-work of Allan Ramsay (1686-1758). His various Miscellany collections ranging from 1716 to 1736 inaugurated a spirit of keen emulation in the setting, adapting, and imitation of old vernacular song. Ramsay was followed by David Herd with his Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs in 1769. Then came Evans's Old Ballads of 1777, Pinkerton's Scottish Tragic Ballads, 1781, and his Select Scottish Ballads of 1783. Joseph Ritson, a pedant without peer, a spider' with a huge gall-bag and his lair in the British Museum, who decried the efforts of all his fellow-workers, must yet be allowed an honourable place in the literature of his generation as an illustrator of ballad literature, folk-song, and ancient minstrelsy, and as one of the earliest and most scrupulous collectors of local verse. His Northern Garlands appeared between 1783 and 1793, his Select Collection of English Songs in 1783, his Robin Hood Ballads in 1795, and his Scottish Song in 1794. These and similar compilations culminated in James Johnson's Scot's Musical Museum, commenced in 1787, to which Burns contributed many new songs, and in Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, the two first volumes of which appeared in 1802. A link between Allan Ramsay, whose Evergreen and Tea-Table Miscellany did so much to stimulate this kind of literature, and the age of Fergusson and Burns, is afforded by the two William Hamiltons. William Hamilton of Gilbertfield (1665-1751) hardly comes into the Age of Johnson, for he was The Hamiltons. a close associate of Ramsay, to whose miscellanies he contributed, and he died in Lanarkshire in May, 1751; but he is indissolubly connected with the poets of a later generation. His Willie was a Wanton Wag was an unrivalled model for the festive verse of his countrymen; his Bonny Heck was the recognized prototype of one of Burns's masterpieces, The Dying Speech of Poor Mailie. But, above all, his Familiar Epistles marked out the classic stanza (derived originally from Robert Semple or Sempill),1 adopted by Fergusson and Burns for their ever-memorable work in this literary genre; and the perfect fitness of this stanza for its burden entitles Gilbertfield' (as Burns fondly calls him) to a distinguished place as a metrist. William Hamilton of Bangour (1704-1754), the volunteer laureate of the Jacobites, was of Linlithgowshire, of a good family, from which he inherited perhaps the tradition of Caroline love-poetry. He fought at Prestonpans, and 1 Cf. Morel, Thomson: sa Vie et ses Euvres, 1895, p. 253. after the suppression of the rebellion of 1745 migrated to France, dying at Lyons on March 25th, 1754. Like his namesake, he was an enthusiastic admirer of The Gentle Shepherd, and contributed to The Tea-Table Miscellany of 1724. His Poems on Several Occasions first saw the light at Glasgow in 1749. In The Book of Scottish Song there is the same mutual inspiration and homogeneity that there is in The Book of Psalms. The spirit of one age is transfused into that of another. The immemorial Dowie Dens of Yarrow was evidently breathing the charm of an ancient strain upon Hamilton when he composed his exquisite ballad' (as Wordsworth, in his Yarrow Unvisited, justly calls it): 'Busk ye, busk ye, my bonny bonny bride, And think nae mair on the Braes of Yarrow.' Other permanent contributions to our treasury of national song were the natural products of a countryside in which half the inhabitants were real connoisseurs of a song, and where a large section of the population had a tincture of literary culture. Thus, in 1756, while driving home after nightfall, as her contribution to some talk about Flodden Field and the cruelty of the loss sustained in half the homes of the Lowlands, Jean Elliot of Minto (1727-1805) composed a ballad, justly admired as one of the most perfect we possess. The old refrain of The Flowers of the Forest was sounding in the writer's ears and helped to shape the moving lyric: 'I've heard them liltin' at our yowe milkin', Lasses a liltin' before the dawn of day; 'At e'en in the gloamin' nae younkers are roamin', The Flowers of the Forest are a' wede away.' In 1772, in the room of some trivial words that accompanied a plaintive old melody that she loved, Lady Anne Lindsay (Lady Barnard, as she became), little more than a girl at the time, composed the immortal ballad of Auld Robin Gray, the name 'Robin Gray' being taken from that of the old herd at her native Balcarres. Four years later, in 1776, was published that 'grand Scots song,' a mighty favourite with Burns, the Tullochgorum of John Skinner (1721-1807), an Aberdeenshire parson.' The same spirit of eld' that inspired these beautiful songs helped to preserve the minor poets of the north from the banality of the successors of Pope in the south of the island. James Beattie (1735-1803). In the van of unmistakably minor poets stands another Aberdeenshire bard, James Beattie, who by his various writings came to occupy a position of great influence among his contemporaries, but who is remembered now by one poem only, The Minstrel. He was, it is true, scarcely a follower of Ramsay, and ought perhaps of right to have a place to himself as a link of a modest sort between Thomson and Wordsworth. Born at Laurencekirk on October 25th, 1735, Beattie's father, a small farmer and shopkeeper, died when 1 1 Fergusson was no less appreciative of its jovial numbers: 'Fidlers, your pins in temper fix, Frae out your quorum, Nor fortes wi' pianos mix- Gie's Tullochgorum.' The Daft Days. |