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ENGLISH RURAL POETRY.

THERE was a time when the term Rural Poetry was regarded as synonymous, or nearly so, with Pastoral Poetry. The most artificial verse ever written, and which, in its legitimate form, was "a slavish mimicry of classical remains," was confounded, at the beginning of the last century, with the poetry that describes the simple sights, sounds, and occupations of country life, the changes of the seasons, the colour of wayside flowers, the song of birds, the beauty of woods and meadows, and the manifold charms of rivers winding through rich pasture-lands, of sunny nooks, and shady lanes, and forest glades lying close to the haunts of rustics. Before Pope's time, and after it, a city poet, who knew nothing about the life of nature, or the ways of country livers, and who had probably never ventured beyond Epsom or Bath, would sing, as a matter of course, of shepherds and shepherdesses, and produce conventional pictures of the country unlike anything that existed outside

a verse-maker's covers. Edmund Spenser, it is true, following the examples of Theocritus and Virgil, had long before introduced this grotesque form of composition; and a still greater poet had also given a slight sanction to it by the publication of his immortal Lycidas;' but these poets-such is the power of genius-could make their shepherd swains discuss dogmatic theology while tending their sheep, without raising a smile; the incongruity of the position being atoned for in these cases by the rare beauty of the song. In the splendid English which Dryden knew how to write, we can enjoy a fable in which the controversy between the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England is discussed by a milk-white hind and a spotted panther.

The Pastorals of Pope, although destitute, as Warton has pointed out, of a single rural image that is new, possess a certain smoothness of versification. They are well-nigh unreadable now, and the praise they won at the time from able critics sounds ridiculous to us. Both the poetry and the criticisms upon it are as foreign to modern taste as the euphuism of Lyly;

but that Pope satisfied a

want of his age-which was eminently artificial and prosaic-is evident from the mass of so-called pastoral poetry that was issued during the first half

of the last century. Nevertheless, Wordsworth is not far wrong in saying that, with one or two insignificant exceptions, "the poetry of the period intervening between the publication of the Paradise Lost' and the 'Seasons'-that is to say, from 1667 to 1728-does not contain a single new image of external nature, and scarcely presents a familiar one from which it can be inferred that the eye of the poet had been steadily fixed upon his object, much less that his feeling had urged him to work upon it in the spirit of genuine imagination.”

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He might have added-for the coincidence is striking-that the year in which Thomson published the Seasons' in a complete form (1730), Allan Ramsay produced his beautiful pastoral of the 'Gentle Shepherd,' a poem which is remarkable in many ways, and especially as presenting pictures of rustic life free from the conventional diction and the allegorical personations which deform other pastorals. Ramsay's poem is written in the Scottish dialect in English we have no poem of the kind at that period that can bear comparison with it, for the Faithful Shepherdess' of Fletcher, exquisite though it be, is wholly devoid of the realism demanded in such a work.

Of the Elizabethan dramatists, by the way, few

care to describe with accuracy the varied aspects of Nature. Jonson has some choice descriptive passages and epithets in his lyrical poems-it was he who called the nightingale "the dear good angel of the spring"-but we recall few in his dramas; and it may be questioned whether all the plays of Webster, Massinger, Middleton, Marlowe, and Shirley could supply a page of imagery drawn from the simple objects of rural life.

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Shakespeare, great in all ways, is pre-eminent also in what the late Lord Lytton somewhat thoughtlessly calls "the very lowest degree of poetry, viz. the descriptive." In perusing dramas like Ben Jonson's Volpone' or his 'Alchemist,' the reader breathes an indoor and somewhat confined atmosphere; in reading Shakespeare he feels as if every window were thrown open, or as if he were inhaling the fresh and fragrant air of the country. And this feeling is often produced by a single line occurring in scenes which are far enough removed from the life of Nature, as, for instance, when in Measure for Measure,' the Duke conversing in a business way with the Provost, suddenly exclaims, "Look, the unfolding star calls up the shepherd;" or when, in 'Cymbeline,' the dullwitted Cloten hires musicians to sing under Imogen's

window that most delicious of Shakespearian songs, "Hark, hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings," Shakespeare's rural descriptions are, as they should be, incidental; but these incidental touches suffice to make the reader feel the open-air influences to which we have alluded. His affection for the violet is as noteworthy as Chaucer's for the daisy, or Wordsworth's for the celandine; and in the description of wild flowers, of birds and animals, of country pursuits, and pastimes, his accuracy is unrivalled. His As You Like It' has been justly called a pastoral comedy. Milton, beautiful though many of his descriptive passages are, and notwithstanding the delicious rural charm that pervades his best descriptive poems-'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso' -appears sometimes to have written from bookknowledge rather than from actual observation, and in his rural imagery he often catches the notes of earlier poets.

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There are two writers, both of whom lived a little earlier than Milton, who deserve a rather prominent place as rural poets. We allude to William Browne, of Tavistock, and to Robert Herrick. Some years ago a folio edition of Browne's 'Britannia's Pastorals,' with MS. notes by Milton, was sold by Messrs. Sotheby and Wilkinson. The notes are not critical,

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