Second Romantic Period of English Literature. 161 



tremendous force of passionate affection. As Professor Saints- 

 bury puts it, "he dared to be passionate." For liim there were 

 no scholastic rules of composition: he laughed to scorn the de- 

 mand of the century that intellect should hold the first place in 

 poetical composition. He loved, and rhyme and song became 

 the spontaneous language of his heart. If it be true that " he 

 prayeth well who loveth well both man and bird and beast," it is 

 no less true that to sing well one must love well. " The wounded 

 hare has not perished without his memorial : a balm of mercy 

 breathes on us from its dumb agonies because a poet was there." 

 A mouse has her nest turned up by the plough, and the wee 

 sleekit, cowrin, timorous beastie is iiiade immortal by her self- 

 appointed poet-laureate. Burns loved all things from God to 

 foam-bells dancing down a stream, and " he dared to be 

 passionate." Nature after all has a good deal to say in the 

 making of a poet, and Burns knew this. 



The Muse, nae poet ever fand her 

 Till by himself he loved to wander 

 Adowii some trolling burns meander. 



And no think lang ; 

 sweet to stray and pensive ponder 



A heartfelt sang. 



The songs of Burns, says Carlyle, do not affect to be set to 

 music, but they actually and in themselves are music. The fire- 

 eyed fury of " Scots wha hae ' ' — it should be sung with the throat 

 of the whirl-wind — the glad, kind greeting of " Auld Lang Syne;" 

 the comic archness of Duncan Gray ; the rollicking conviviality of 

 Willie brewed a peck o' maut; how they crowd upon one! 

 Spontaneous, passionate. Burns broke up the reserve and quietism 

 of the 18th century. He drove into oblivion the demons of con- 

 ventionality, of regular diction, of the proprieties, and all the 

 other bogies that for a hundred and fifty years had scared into 

 silence the singing maid with pictures in her eyes. 



So the old order is changing, yielding place to the new ; and 

 what the new is to accomplish is clearly sounded, though at first 

 and for a time imperfectly understood, in the Lyrical Ballads of 

 1798 — the clarion call of the new poetry. Both Coleridge and 

 '\\ ordsworth have explained in lucid prose the genesis of the 

 volume and the object of the experiment. What Wordsworth 



