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THE

POETS AND POETRY

OP

ENGLAND,

IN

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

BY

RUFUS W. GRISWOLD.

WITH ADDITIONS BY R. H. STODDARD.

A DRAINLESS SHOWER

OF LIGHT 18 POESY. 'TIS THE SUPREME OF POWER ;

'TIS NIGHT HALF SLUMBERING ON ITS OWN RIGht arm.

JOHN KEATS.

CAREFLY REVISED, MUCH ENLARGED AND CONTINUED TO THE PRESENT TIME.

With Portraits on Steel.

VOL. II.

NEW YORK:

PETER FENELON COLLIER, PUBLISHER.

PREFACE.

THE rise and progress of English poetry form one of the most delightful and instructive chapters in the intellectual history of the world. We trace its glimmering dawn in the ballads of the early minstrels, its brilliant morning in the Canterbury Tales, and its rich and bold development in the literature of the age of Elizabeth, in which British genius reached an elevation unparalleled in the history of mankind. BACON and HOBBES and COKE, BARROW and TAYLOR and HOOKER, RALEIGH and SELDEN and SIDNEY, SPENSER and SHAKSPEARE and MILTON, breathed in the same generation the air of England, and though they did not all give a lyrical expression to thought and passion, they were nearly all ́ poets, in the truest and highest sense of the word, and they formed with their contemporaries the most wonderful constellation of great men that ever adorned a nation or an age.

It is a remark of HUME, that when arts come to perfection in a state they necessarily decline, and seldom or never revive there. In England the decline of poetry, was as rapid as had been its rise, and in the long interregnum which succeeded the Restoration, scarcely a work was produced which nas an actual and enduring popularity. The artificial school introduced from the Continent by the followers of CHARLES the Second, attained its acme at last, however, in the polished numbers of POPE, and a gradual return to nature became visible in the productions of THOMSON and COWPER and BURNS, who ushered in the second great era of British literature, a general view of the poetical portion of which I have endeavoured to present in this volume.

There is at the present time, it seems to me, great need of a work of this sort. The surveys and selections of English poetry from CHAUCER to the close of the last century, are numerous, and some of them, especially those of CAMPBELL and HAZLITT, are made with singular candour and discernment. But there has hitherto been no extensive review of the Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, more rich and varied than that of all other periods, excepting only the golden one of SHAKSPEARE.

From those whose entire works have been republished in this country, and of whom a knowledge may safely be presumed I have deemed it in some instances

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