The spirit of the modern revolution broke out first in a Scotch peasant, Robert Burns. Scarcely ever was seen together more of misery and talent. Burns cries out in favour of instinct and joy. Love was his main business. In him for the first time a poet spoke as men speak, or, rather, as they think, without premeditation, with a mixture of all styles. Burns was much in advance of his age, and the life of men in advance of their age is not wholesome. He died worn out at 37. In him old narrow moralities give place to the wide sympathy of the modern man. Now appeared the English romantic school. Among the multitude of its writers we may distinguish Southey, a clever man, a producer of decorative poems to suit the fashion; Coleridge, a poor fellow who had steeped himself in mystical theories; Thomas More, a witty railer; and Walter Scott, the favourite of his age, who was read over the whole of Europe, was almost equal to Shakespeare, had more popularity than Voltaire, earned about £200,000, and taught us all history. Scott gave to Scotland a citizenship of literature. Scott loves men from the bottom of his heart. By his fundamental honesty and wide humanity he was the Homer of modern life. When the philosophical spirit passed from Germany to England, transformed itself and became Anglican, deformed itself and became revolutionary, it produced a Wordsworth, a Byron, a Shelley. Wordsworth, a new Cowper, with less talent and more ideas, was essentially an interior man, engrossed by the concerns of the soul. To such men life becomes a grave business on which we must incessantly and scrupulously reflect. Wordsworth was a wise and happy man, a thinker and dreamer, who read and walked and listened in deep calm to his own thoughts. The peace was so great within him and around him that he could perceive the imperceptible. He saw grandeur and beauty in the trivial events which weave the woof of our most commonplace days. His "Excursion" is like a Protestant temple--august though bare and monstrous. Shelley, one of the greatest poets of the age, beautiful as an angel, of extraordinary precocity, sweet, generous, tender, overflowing with gifts of heart, mind, birth, and fortune, marred his life by introducing into his conduct the enthusiastic imagination he should have kept for his verse. His world is beyond our own. We move in it between heaven and earth, in abstraction, dreamland, symbolism. Shelley loved desert and solitary places, where man enjoys the pleasure of believing infinite what he sees--infinite as his soul. Verily there is a soul in everything; in the universe is a soul; even beyond the sensible form shines a secret essence and something divine which we catch sight of by sublime illuminations, never reaching or penetrating it. The poets hear the great heart of nature beat; they would reach it. One alone, Byron, succeeds.