to the gospel of Free-trade.  In his eyes the Corn-laws had gathered into their black bosoms every human wrong:  repeal them, and lo! the new heavens and the new earth!  A poor and shallow theory of the universe, you will say; but it is astonishing what poetry he contrives to extract out of it.  It is hardly possible, without quotation, to give an idea of the rage and fury which pervade these poems.  He curses his political opponents with his whole heart and soul.  He pillories them, and pelts them with dead cats and rotten eggs.  The earnestness of his mood has a certain terror in it for meek and quiet people.  His poems are of the angriest, but their anger is not altogether undivine.  His scorn blisters and scalds, his sarcasm flays; but then outside nature is constantly touching him with a summer breeze or a branch of pink and white apple-blossom, and his mood becomes tenderness itself.  He is far from being lachrymose; and when he is pathetic, he affects one as when a strong man sobs.  His anger is not nearly so frightful as his tears.  I cannot understand why Elliott is so little read.  Other names not particularly remarkable I meet in the current reviews—­his never.  His book stands on my shelf, but on no other have I seen it.  This I think strange, because, apart from the intrinsic value of his verse as verse, it has an historical value.  Evil times and embittered feelings, now happily passed away, are preserved in his books, like Pompeii and Herculaneum in Vesuvian lava.  He was a poet of the poor, but in a quite peculiar sense.  Burns, Crabbe, Wordsworth, were poets of the poor, but mainly of the peasant poor.  Elliott is the poet of the English artisans,—­men who read newspapers and books, who are members of mechanics’ institutes, who attend debating societies, who discuss political measures and political men, who are tormented by ideas,—­a very different kind of persons altogether.  It is easier to find poetry beneath the blowing hawthorn than beneath the plumes of factory or furnace smoke.  In such uninviting atmospheres Ebenezer Elliott found his; and I am amazed that the world does not hold it in greater regard, if for nothing else than for its singularity.

There is many another book on my shelf on which I might dilate, but this gossiping must be drawn to a close.  When I began, the wind was bending the trees, and the rain came against the window in quick, petulant dashes.  For hours now, wind and rain have ceased, the trees are motionless, the garden walk is dry.  The early light of wintry sunset is falling across my paper, and, as I look up, the white Dante opposite is dipped in tender rose.  Less stern he looks, but not less sad, than he did in the morning.  The sky is clear, and an arm of bleak pink vapour stretches up into its depths.  The air is cold with frost, and the rain which those dark clouds in the east hold will fall during the night in silent, feathery flakes.  When I wake to-morrow, the world will be changed, frosty forests will cover my bedroom panes, the tree branches will be furred with snows; and to the crumbs which it is my daily custom to sprinkle on the shrubbery walk will come the lineal descendant of the charitable redbreast that covered up with leaves the sleeping children in the wood.