There is a storm gathering. Every man to his duty! How the waves arise and dash against the ship! The air is dark! the tempest rages! Our masts are gone! The ship is on her beamends! What next?' 'The long boat! take to the long boat!' shouted the excited crowd. His favorite maxim was, that 'a preacher, when he entered the pulpit, should look upon it as the last time he might preach, and the last time his people might hear.'

In this burning fervor of realization, began the revival of popular religion,—a revolt against the frigid and formal teaching, the easy-going indifference of the dominant church; and this reactionary movement, communicating its impulse to contemporary thought, is premonitory of the general return to rapture and imagination, the grand and the tragic.

Poetry. To arrange words in decasyllabic couplets so that the accents may fall correctly, that the rhymes may strike the ear strongly, that the lines may flow in unbroken cadence, is an art as mechanical as that of mending a shoe, and may be learned by any dunce who will never blunder on one happy thought or expression. Dryden suggested the art; Pope mastered it, and his brilliant success produced a host of dull imitators. His well chosen sounds and symmetrical rhythms were adopted as fashion and fine manners, wherein the point of excellence was not to alter the pattern, but to vary its details of color. Without his powers, they affected his livery, till it became trite, then offensive. In their devotion to form, they forgot the spirit that warms it. Sense was

Sacrificed to sound,

And truth cut short to make the period round.'

Poetry, impoverished, soulless, and hollow, was waiting for a new development.

A few assert their freedom, strike the key-note of a higher strain, and seem to give signs that the human mind is turning on its hinges, that externals are not the true concern of the poet, that a pink doll is not a woman, that gallantry is not love, that amusement is not happiness, that

Kind hearts are more than coronets,

And simple faith than Norman blood.'

Four poems mark the change, -Thomson's Seasons, Young's

Night Thoughts, Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination, and Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Their main current runs in the direction of sentimental reflection.

Thomson was contemplative, affectionate, sympathetic, and artless. He loved nature with those fresh feelings and glad impulses which all would wish to cherish, and he painted his love, in its smallest details, without being ashamed. His lines on the robin in Winter are in his best vein:

• The fowls of heaven,

Tamed by the cruel season, crowd around
The winnowing store, and claim the little boon
Which Providence assigns them. One alone,
The redbreast, sacred to the household gods,
Wisely regardful of the embroiling sky,
In joyless fields and thorny thickets leaves
His shivering mates, and pays to trusted man
His annual visit. Half afraid, he first

Against the window beats; then, brisk, alights
On the warm hearth; then, hopping o'er the floor,
Eyes all the smiling family askance,

And pecks, and starts, and wonders where he is;
Till, more familiar grown, the table-crumbs

Attract his slender feet.'

A passage at the end of Spring contains a well-known line, and is characteristic:

Delightful task! to rear the tender thought,
To teach the young idea how to shoot,
To pour the fresh instruction o'er the mind,
To breathe the enlivening spirit, and to fix
The generous purpose in the glowing breast."

In his mode of thinking and of expressing his thought, he was original.

Young was a clergyman and a courtier, who had aspired in vain to a seat in Parliament, then to a bishopric in the Church; married, lost his wife and children, but made use of his disappointments and sufferings to write meditations on Life, Death, Immortality, Time, Friendship, and similar themes. He was a lover of gloom, of the imagery of the grave, of the awful mysteries of life. When he was writing a tragedy, Grafton sent him a human skull, with a candle in it, as a lamp; and he used it. His poem is a wilderness of reflection, through which his fertile fancy scatters flowers of every hue and odor. Its strength is in the vast number of noble and sublime passages, maxims of the highest practical value, everlasting truths,

'The glorious fragments of a fire immortal,
With rubbish mixed, and glittering in the dust.'

The following may suggest its general complexion:

Too low they build, who build beneath the stars.'
Procrastination is the thief of time.'

In human hearts what bolder thought can rise
Than man's presumption on to-morrow's dawn?'

Shall man be proud to wear his livery,

And souls in ermine scorn a soul without?
Can place or lessen us, or aggrandize?

Pygmies are pygmies still, though perched on Alps,
And pyramids are pyramids in vales.'

'Look nature through, 'tis revolution all!

All change, no death; day follows night, and night
The dying day; stars rise and set, and set and rise;
Earth takes the example. See, the Summer gay,
With her green chaplet and ambrosial flowers,

Droops into pallid autumn: Winter gray,

Horrid with frost and turbulent with storm,

Blows Autumn and his golden fruits away,

Then melts into the Spring: soft Spring, with breath
Favonian, from warm chambers of the south,

Recalls the first. All, to reflourish, fades:

As in a wheel, all sinks to reascend;
Emblems of man, who passes, not expires.'

Akenside, earnest and severe, believed he had a message to deliver to mankind, and wrote in blank verse a philosophical poem on the pleasures of the purified intellect, as it contemplates flourishing groves, murmuring streams, calm seas under moonlight, autumn mists slumbering on the gray sky, noble architecture, music, sculpture, painting. We look, if not for a vision, for something that suggests an element of progress,- at least, a disposition to cease chiselling, and to quarry the living rock:

'Say, why was man so eminently raised

Amid the vast creation; why ordained
Through life and death to dart his piercing eye,
With thoughts beyond the limit of his frame;
But that the Omnipotent might send him forth
In sight of mortal and immortal powers,

As on a boundless theatre, to run

The great career of justice; to exalt

His generous aim to all diviner deeds? . . .

Who that, from Alpine heights, his labouring eye

Shoots round the wide horizon, to survey

Nilus or Ganges rolling his bright wave

Through mountains, plains, through empires black with shade,
And continents of sand, will turn his gaze

To mark the windings of a scanty rill

That murmurs at his feet? . . .

For from the birth

Of mortal man, the sovereign Maker said,
That not in humble nor in brief delight,
Not in the fading echoes of Renown,

Power's purple robes, nor Pleasure's flowery lap,
The soul should find enjoyment; but from these
Turning disdainful to an equal good,

Through all the ascent of things enlarge her view,
Till every bound at length should disappear,
And infinite perfection close the scene.'

Gray, a man of vast and varied acquirements, felt, with a melancholy sweetness, the mystery of the world in its relation to universal humanity, and gave voice to his musings in verse whose audience-chamber is capacious as the soul of man; for it reflects, as in peaceful stream, images in which every mind has an interest, and expresses sentiments which find in every bosom an echo. On the eve of a decisive battle, silently gliding along the St. Lawrence, in view of the hostile heights pencilled upon the midnight sky, Wolf repeated the Elegy, in low tones, to the other officers in his boat. Now, gentlemen,' said he, at the close of the recitation, 'I would rather be the author of that poem than take Quebec!' One stanza, one noble line, must have been fraught with a mournful meaning:

"The boast of Heraldry, the pomp of Power,

And all that Beauty, all that Wealth e'er gave,
Await alike th' inevitable hour:

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

All four, however, while they denote a transition era, show the influence of the artificial school. The intellect triumphs over the emotions; their emotion is formal, their tears are academical. Thomson's muse is often dainty, formal, cold. He saw correctly what was before him, the outward show of things, but had no glimpse of

The light that never was on sea or land,

The inspiration, and the poet's dream.'

Young lashes himself into a never-ending series of antitheses, strikes attitudes, and assumes theatricals. Akenside is stiffly classical in manner, and gives us too much foliage for the fruit. He helps on his age chiefly by his subject. Gray cannot shake off the classical drapery. He is fastidious, scrupulously delicate and exact, rather than fiery, tender, or inventive.

Before any aspect of nature or fact of life is capable of poetic treatment, it must have passed inward,- out of the mere region

of intellect into the warmer atmosphere of imaginative feeling,there have flushed into glowing color, and kindled the soul to 'a white heat.'

Drama.- Of slight literary importance. In 1732, Gay brought society upon the stage, held up the mirror of nature, in which men and women could see themselves as others saw them,— see vice made vulgar,- see their most striking peculiarities and defects pass in gay review before them, then learn either to avoid or to conceal them. The Beggar's Opera was acted in London without interruption for sixty-three days. The characters are highwaymen, who wear,- such was the similitude between high and low, the manners and morality of fine gentlemen. Hear people of quality converse:

"If any of the ladies chuse gin, I hope they will be so free as to call for it." "Indeed, sir, I never drink strong waters but when I have the colic." "Just the excuse of the fine ladies! Why, a lady of quality is never without the colic.""

Tragedy was marked rather by cold correctness and turgid declamation than by the freedom and warmth which lead captive the feelings and the imagination. As a reflection of the movement in literature, Shakespeare, who had been banished from the stage, began slowly to reappear. In 1741, the Merchant of Venice was produced in its original form, after an eclipse of one hundred years. In October of this year, Garrick appeared, for the first time on the London stage, in Richard III. It is worthy of notice that this great actor produced a revolution in the art of acting. He displaced the habit of slow, monotonous declamation, of unnatural pomp, by a more various and rapid intonation, and a more careful regard for the truth of nature and history. 'If,' said Quin, 'the young fellow is right, I and the rest of the players have been all wrong'; and he added, 'Garrick is a new religion,- Whitefield was followed for a time,- but they will all come to church again.' Garrick replied in a happy epigram, 'that it was not heresy but reformation.'

Periodical. The daily miscellany, which Addison's singular humor had made so popular, passed into inferior hands, and fell into disrepute. Johnson, in 1750, and again in 1760, vainly attempted to revive it.

The period is remarkable as the era of the commencement of