Hark! to those sounds! they're from distress at sea: How quick they come! What terrors may there be ! Yes, 'tis a driven vessel: I discern

Lights, signs of terror, gleaming from the stern;
Others behold them too, and from the town
In various parties seamen hurry down;

Their wives pursue, and damsels urged by dread,
Lest men so dear be into danger led;

Their head the gown has hooded, and their call
In this sad night is piercing like the squall;
They feel their kinds of power, and when they meet,
Chide, fondle, weep, dare, threaten, or entreat.

See one poor girl, all terror and alarm,
Has fondly seized upon her lover's arm;
'Thou shalt not venture;' and he answers 'No!
I will not:'--still she cries, 'Thou shalt not go.'
No need of this; not here the stoutest boat
Can through such breakers, o'er such billows float,
Yet may they view these lights upon the beach,
Which yield them hope, whom help can never reach.
From parted clouds the moon her radiance throws
On the wild waves, and all the danger shows;
But shows them beaming in her shining vest,
Terrific splendour! gloom in glory dress'd!
This for a moment, and then clouds again
Hide every beam, and fear and darkness reign.
But hear we not those sounds? Do lights appear?

I see them not! the storm alone I hear:

And lo! the sailors homeward take their way;

Man must endure-let us submit and pray.

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CHAPTER IX

THE FORERUNNERS

BETWEEN 1780 and 1791 Mozart was bringing into music a new kind of imaginative power, a 'sweet and serious earnest', a sense of the infinite significance of things, which gives to his latest compositions a special depth and poignance. In his G-minor quintet, in his Ave Verum, in his unfinished. Requiem we approach a new chapter in the history of musical art; the page was to be turned by the hand of Beethoven, but it was the hand of Mozart that prepared for the turning. During the same years a similar change took place in English poetry; a similar preparation for the supremely imaginative work of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Blake's Poetical Sketches were printed in 1783, Cowper's Task in 1785, Burns's first poem in 1786; in 1798 appeared the Lyrical Ballads.

Of the three forerunners Blake exercised at the time the least influence. He was flouted as a madman, his mysticism was ridiculed, his poetry was decried, his engravings were cynically dismissed as 'good to steal from '; not until our own day has he come to his reputation and been acknowledged at his true value. His exquisite sensitive genius is too delicate for the hand of criticism: you must take it and be enriched or leave it and be impoverished. He was in no sense a learned poet: his vocabulary was small, his knowledge limited, his ear not always perfectly trained. But his inspiration is at the centre, it comes white-hot from the celestial flame, it burns to ashes all cavil and all censure. His Edward III contains lines which no other man but

Shakespeare could have written; his lyrics could have been written by no one else in the world. We hardly think of his soul as inhabiting this common earth; it has been caught into the seventh heaven, and has there heard unspeakable words. What wonder if he sometimes speaks to us with stammering lips! His message was not delivered to him in the language of everyday utterance.

Cowper approaches that frontier in a very different frame of mind. His early work was light, playful, occasional; at one time it seemed as though he would be satisfied to wear the laurels of Prior. Then came the blinding flash of religious emotion which altered the whole course of his life, and which expressed itself now in exaltation, now in gentle and tender patience, now in the blackness of despair. There are passages in The Task which read like prophecy; there are stanzas in The Castaway which read like the cry of a lost soul. All the work that he wrote at Olney is touched by this influence; the commonplace descriptions are moments of relief, the humour is the smile of a sick man who holds to life by a slender thread; if he recalls his old vein it is to describe his pets or to blame some current abuse. In our strenuous times his poetry, except at its highest moments, may appear languid and infirm : it did not appear so to his contemporaries. Nay, mamma,' says the heroine of Sense and Sensibility, 'if he is not to be animated by Cowper'-and the rest is eloquent silence.

Blake and Cowper stand at the edge of the unknown world: the one in splendid confidence, the other with bowed head and beating heart. Robert Burns is not a saint of either kind, but a poet of human frailties and human emotions. His religion. is the staid sober worship of the Cotter's Saturday Night; he is no mystic, no enthusiast, he has no taste for abstract problems or ascetic practice. His

great gifts, apart from the flawless perfection of his lyric poems, are a wide sympathy with all things weak and suffering, a keen and deadly satire, especially of hypocrisy or pretentiousness, and above all such power of genuine passion as no love-poet except Heine has ever manifested. At his touch conventions and unrealities crumble away, and the soul of man in its most intimate affections of joy and sorrow stands revealed before our gaze.

NOTE. Among other poets who preceded or overlapped the work of the Lake School must be mentioned Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770), whose brief career revealed a genius that he did not live to develop, and Samuel Rogers (1762-1855), a frigid and elegant writer, the whole of whose principal writings fall between 1786 and 1828. During the same period a more natural note was being struck in English comedy by the successors of Goldsmith, Colman, Foote, and, above all, R. B. Sheridan.

WILLIAM COWPER (1731-1800) was educated at Westminster, and in 1749 entered at the Middle Temple. During his resi dence there he wrote a good deal of occasional poetry and some translations, including one of Voltaire's Henriade. In 1763 he was attacked with religious melancholy, and obliged to give up all thoughts of a public career. In 1765 he became an inmate of the Unwin's home at Huntington, and in 1767 accompanied them to Olney, where he resided until the death of Unwin in 1786. From that date to 1800 he lived partly at Weston and partly at East Dereham. His principal work was the Olney Hymns (1771-9), John Gilpin (1782), The Task (1783-5), Translation of Homer (1785-91), Lines on my Mother's Picture (1790), and The Castaway (1799). His name was mentioned for the office of Poet Laureate in 1790, and in 1794, the year of his last and most serious attack, he was granted a pension of £300 a year by the Government.

THE WINTER EVENING

OH Winter, ruler of th' inverted year,

Thy scatter'd hair with sleet like ashes fill'd,
Thy breath congeal'd upon thy lips, thy cheeks
Fring'd with a beard made white with other snows
Than those of age, thy forehead wrapt in clouds,
A leafless branch thy sceptre, and thy throne

A sliding car, indebted to no wheels,

But urg'd by storms along its slipp'ry way,

I love thee, all unlovely as thou seem'st,

And dreaded as thou art! Thou hold'st the sun

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A pris'ner in the yet undawning east,
Short'ning his journey between morn and noon,
And hurrying him, impatient of his stay,
Down to the rosy west; but kindly still
Compensating his loss with added hours
Of social converse and instructive ease,
And gath'ring, at short notice, in one group
The family dispers'd, and fixing thought,
Not less dispers'd by day-light and its cares.
I crown thee king of intimate delights,
Fire-side enjoyments, home-born happiness,
And all the comforts that the lowly roof
Of undisturb'd retirement, and the hours
Of long uninterrupted ev'ning, know.

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ON THE RECEIPT OF MY MOTHER'S PICTURE OUT OF NORFOLK

THE GIFT OF MY COUSIN ANN BODHAM

OH that those lips had language! Life has pass'd
With me but roughly since I heard thee last.
Those lips are thine-thy own sweet smiles I see,
The same that oft in childhood solaced me;