EBENEZER ELLIOTT, the Corn Law Rhymer, the great poet of English artisans, I take for the subject of the present discourse. 

    My office here is not that of a political economist, but that of a literary critic.  My office is to consider rather the poetic genius of my author, than his commercial philosophy.  The  poetry of Elliott will remain, when the laws against which he so vehemently   inveighed will have passed away into the tranquil records of remoter history, and his manly verses will hold a life which in every age the brave and the struggling will recognize and feel.  The legislation of Athenians in relation to Macedon has long been silent, but not so the voice of Demosthenes.  That rings upon the air of immortality, and in its solemn tones it sounds along from century to century.  And the poet is not of weaker or shorter life than the orator.  He too will be heard, when the things which aroused his soul shall be known no more.  Death quickly unnerves the arm of Köerner, but all ages will sing his "Song of the Sword."  The character of Napoleon is fast going to the calm meditation of philosophy and history, but it is with the passion of enthusiasm that French patriots will always chant the burning lyrics of Berenger.  The Scots have long since ceased to fight with the Saxons, but through all the future it is in sadness they will pour forth "The Lament on Flodden Field," and in ecstasy "The Ode on Bannockburn."  Party politics lose their importance, temporary laws become obsolete; yet if they enkindle the heart of a true poet into a burst of noble song, it continues imperishable in its melody and its strength.

    Elliott is an English operative, poetically developed.  Let me briefly specify what an English operative is, of ordinary development.  The English operative embodies a very decisive form of the English character.  He is not speculative, but practical.  He is not versatile, but skilful.  His sphere is not a large one, but within it he is a master.  He is attached to order; he is trained to order, both as a workman and a citizen.  Even in revolt, he acts according to a law.  He is patient, but not servile.  He bears inevitable misfortunes manfully; in the best condition he is sure to grumble, but in the worst he disdains to whine.  He is not without aspiration.  He is not insensible to dignity; and by many an effort and many a virtue, he makes good a title to nature's nobility.  He has much pride of nation.  If he glories in nothing else, he glories in his country.  Discontented he may be with his rulers, but he is always proud of England.  By a generalization, satisfactory at least to himself, he identifies the greatness of England with the power of his own order.  The operative classes, in his view, have rendered her the paragon of nations.  By them, the earth and the sea are hers, the riches of the mine, and the treasures of the deep.  Through the means, he considers, of the operative classes, England governs widely, and governs afar; gains her victories, and maintains her dominion.  The English mechanic, even when wanting school instruction, is not wholly ignorant.  Knowledge floats around him, of which he cannot but partake; and despite even of himself, the tendency of events subjects him to a progressive education.  Associated as he is with large masses, he has community in their intelligence, as well as in their passions.  Interests of immediate pressure, which he cannot discard, crowd about him; want, of which he would seek the cause, or for which he would find a remedy, sharpen his sagacity; theories solicit his belief, and tempt examination; events, discussion, speculation, all that agitate a community profoundly complicated, include his mind in their aggregate activities.  When the English mechanic has had his mind opened by reading, he desires to be informed, rather than to be amused; and he is interested in works which treat of society in its principles, rather than in its manners.  With reading or without it, he loves nature; he longs for green fields and the wooded lane; he delights in flowers and the song of birds; and he is seldom without a geranium in his garret window, or a trained canary by his working bench.  

    Such I take to be an honest, but very imperfect estimate of the English mechanic's character.  Let me add something on his general condition.  In skill the English mechanic has no superior, and none excel him in willingness to work.  But still his situation is commonly wretched, and, at best, it is hard.  His situation is a hard one, even when his work is constant and certain; for even then, aided by the toil of his children, he can merely earn for the day what the day consumes.  The hour, therefore, which finds him idle, or finds him ill, comes to him with want; and the hour which refuses him employment, gives him to pauperism.  In his average condition, the British operative is lodged poorly, fed sparingly, and clad imperfectly.  He is also the greatest sufferer by the fluctuation of trade, when it is adverse, and the least a gainer when it is prosperous.  The turns which bring wealth to the capitalist, afford the operative but a temporary subsistence; while those which injure only the little finger of the capitalist, strike at the very life of the operative.  It will be easily inferred, that his intellectual privileges are as few as his physical.  He has had no adequate provision for his instruction; no system of education has been presented to him, which he could claim as a right, and accept without degradation.  Charity-teaching has, here and there, solicited him to learn; but, in general, charity-teaching, to any wide extent, is worse than ignorance; for it instructs a generation to spell their beggary, and to write themselves slaves.  Had educational means been as abundant as they have been scanty, and as elevating as they have been debasing, the British operative could have very imperfectly appropriated them, for his toil began a few steps from the cradle, and it continues till he staggers to the grave.  The Sabbath itself is scarcely his inheritance.  The Sabbath which was made for man, which was given by the good Father for rest and prayer, has slender greeting from the poor mechanic.  Fatigue turns it to apathy, or want clouds it with sorrow.  Nor can his children enjoy it as it should be in their power to enjoy it.  In a right social state, the Sabbath would be to the young a season of repose, a season of gladness, a weekly jubilee, finding them in happy homes, or at altars free.  But no; the youth of the English working classes, to have any escape from absolute ignorance, make it an interval of schooling, and thus, six days' drudgery at the loom is followed by a seventh day's drudgery at the primer.

    It is not to be expected that the English mechanic should be contented with his political condition; for however sagacious his exclusion from the suffrage may appear to his ruler, it is too much to think it could be satisfactory to himself.  The ruler may decide that he is too poor, too ignorant, or too vicious to be trusted, but such reasons, instead of convincing, insult him.  The working man is told, that unless he holds a house of a certain rent he cannot have a vote.  But why, he inquires?  Every reply directly to this question, implies an injury or an insult.  Is it answered that he is ignorant, that he is poor?  How comes it, that he should be so ignorant or so poor, that he cannot be permitted to exercise the rights of a citizen?  First, he is debased by injustice, and his debasement is then urged against him.  Is it answered that he is vicious, and cannot be trusted?  The injury is made perfect by insult.  But who are you, asks the thinking mechanic, who tell the working poor that they are vicious?  You are those who try to tempt our penury; who come to us with the damning bribe; who take base opportunity of our weakness, and wrench from hunger what you would never get from freedom; who corrupt us to sell our souls; and when you have paid the wages of iniquity, turn round, as Satan does on his victims, and scare us with our crime!  Those who debauch the few poor that have votes, refuse them to the millions; for such extended franchise would annihilate your power of corruption.  Who are you, who tell the working poor that they are vicious?  An idle aristocracy; men who feast in the midst of want, and who would keep closed the gates of plenty; men who revel in luxury, and who lay least restraint on their passions; among many of whom sensuality is so notorious, that it has ceased to be scandalous.  You are the men, who presume to insinuate that a hard working mechanic has not moral qualification to be a free man upon his birth-soil.

    Do you tell the operative that he has no stake in the country?  What, no stake?  Has he not himself?  Has he not his life?  Has his life been rendered so miserable, that it is worth nothing even to himself?  Has he not, then, kindred—the father who carried him in boyhood, the mother who nursed him in infancy?  Has he not a wife and children, as dear to his forlorn heart as if he were a peer?  And will you tell the muscular men of England in the hour of need, that they have no stake in the country; that their partners and little ones do not out-value the world, titles, thrones, and all its other baubles?  Did you tell this to the victors of the Nile, or the heroes of Waterloo?  Was this your watchword upon the heights of Corunna or the walls of Badajoz?  But the working man knows, that base as these imputations against him seem, they are not sincere; he knows, that it is not his ignorance that is feared, but his intelligence; not his vice, but his independence; it is because that he does appreciate his stake in the country, that he is precluded from manifesting the sense he entertains of its worth.  Yet he does not separate this from the rights of others; it is his interest to hold sacred the rights of all classes; and no calumny is more unfounded than that which would ascribe indifference to the claims of property to the English operatives.  The untouched inclosures of the nation; the abodes of elegance at every turn; the castles of grandeur that crown so many forests; the secure luxury of nobles in the sight of dying multitudes; the tranquil order of business, give a universal lie to this aspersion!

    Jealous of practical liberty, the English masses are not easily disturbed about speculative liberty.  They cannot be aroused by abstract ideas; they are stirred to action only by palpable grievances.  Chartism is therefore, the exponent of profound and extended suffering; it is no offspring of theoretical reasoning, but of physical endurance; the evil is radical and national.  Chartism is a simultaneous cry, not by preconcerted design, but in the unity of a common sorrow, for a remedy as radical and as national as the evil.  The Chartists are not, as many suppose, the lowest of the working classes; they are not the disorderly and the ignorant; they are the most sober and the most intelligent.  They are men, who, being aware of the support which they afford to the nation, feel entitled to a political existence; they are willing to be members of society, but not its victims.

    Physically, then, intellectually, morally, and politically, the condition of English mechanics has long been one of irritation and discontent.  Ebenezer Elliott became the impersonation of this discontent.  His voice was raised for millions who had no voice.  Dumb under the goad, they found in their brother a heart of pity and a tongue of power.  Elliott's voice was mighty, and mighty in complaint.  Elliott cried aloud, and spared not.  With impetuous and ringing tones, with the stern boldness of an ancient seer, and the vehement eloquence of a modern reformer, he denounced the hard-handed and the proud.  He summoned them to trial; he hung up, as witness against them, the skinny skeleton of hunger; he evoked the fiend of want to scare them at their feasts; and he breathed into his terrible verses, the howl of starving multitudes, imploring vindication and relief.  We must not regard Elliott as a mere poet.  He is a prophet.  He needs not fear criticism; but a critical judgment of him, would not be the true judgment.  A moral feeling, rather than one of art, must guide our thoughts.  He wrote for the suffering; and to the suffering he has clung.  He has devoted rare abilities to that side in the social struggle, which, personally, could promise him neither victory nor spoils.  "I am sufficiently rewarded," he says, "if my poetry has led one, poor, despairing victim of misrule, from the ale-house to the fields; if I have been chosen of God, to show his desolate heart, that though his wrongs have been heavy, and his fall deep, and though the spoiler is yet abroad, still in the green lanes of England, the primrose is blowing, and on the mountain top the lonely fir is pointing with her many fingers to our Father who is in heaven; to Him whose wisdom is at once inscrutable and indubitable; to whom ages are as a moment; to Him, who has created another and a better world, for all who act nobly and suffer unjustly here; a world of river-feeding mountains, to which the oak will come in his strength and the ash in her beauty; of chiming streams and elmy vales, where the wild flowers of our country, and among them the little daisy, will not refuse to bloom."

    The distinctive characteristic of Elliott as a poet, is strength; strength of idea, and strength of word; strength in concentration of thought and in singleness of purpose.  Elliott has strength, and he has also the directness which accompanies strength.  The courage which belongs to the strong is, therefore, a natural quality of Elliott.  Fearless and uncompromising, impassioned and sincere, he is, of course, individual and independent.  He is confident of the power that is in him; he is confident of its worth, and he is honest in its direction.  He is the creature of no patron; he is the pet of no coterie; he is simply a man of deep feelings and of earnest words; a man that writes because necessity is laid upon him, and because his heart is full.

    But mere strength will not make a poet; nor will enthusiasm, added to strength, make a poet.  To be a poet, a man must have a sense of the beautiful; and he must have capacity to express this emotion.  Elliott feels the beautiful in creation, and hence his delight in nature.  The rural sentiment is ever active in his breast.  Nature is dear to him, and nature, especially as manifested in the English landscape.  The fancy of Elliott seldom transcends his sympathies.  He wanders not through space in the chariot of Queen Mab; a ramble by a native rivulet contents him.  He flies not to the vales of Indus, or to the bowers of Samarcand; he is satisfied with the velvet fields, and the sheltered lanes of England.  He paints entirely from observation, and therefore his pictures are all from the scenery of his country.  His descriptions are fresh and striking; at times, perhaps, elaborate, but never unnatural.  His images are excellent, and they are numerous.  Occasionally redundant, but always vigorous, they are as different from the conceits of sentimentalism, as mountain oaks from hot-house plants; they are vital forms, not colored shadows; the drapery of living beauty, not wreaths on the brow of a corpse, or garlands hung upon a tomb.

    This sympathy with natural objects is a most salutary element in such a mental constitution as that of Elliott.  It is this that leads him from the forges to the hill-side, and from the crowded street to the quiet valley.  It finds him companions in trees and flowers; it gives him pleasant music in the songs of the grove and the ripple of the stream.  It is, therefore, a relief to us, when he takes us from corn laws and cotton lords to peaceful haunts beyond the smoke of town; haunts that soothe the turmoil of his thoughts, and brighten the spirit of his dreams.  Though he may still carry with him the tale of his grievance, we love to hear it under the equal and the open sky, rather than in garret or cellar, foundery or mill.  Alive as Elliott is to social disorders and social wrongs, it is also well that he should be alive to things which the passions of the fighting world cannot mar.  It is well that an ear so tortured with the groans of man, should often give itself to the hymn of nature.  It is well that an eye so familiar with the sinful parts of earth, should find a region of consolation which wickedness cannot defile.  The breeze upon the cheek; the free winds making choral harmonies with the forest; the joy of animals; the blessed influences of holy light, tend mightily to cleanse the bosom from foul and perilous stuff; to wash from the sicklied brain the corrosions which it has gathered by unhealthy thoughts.  Amidst the mountains, beside the ocean, upward among the stars, our mean irritations expire; they are lost in the presence of majesty and vastness; our concentrating littleness is absorbed in the silent immensity of lustre.

    Sympathy with external nature also influences the character of Elliott's religion.  The piety of Elliott is not ritual, but primitive.  He worships God, not in human forms, but in his own consecrated universe.  In the spirit of a worshipper, he seeks the copse or dell; in such a spirit he strolls by the river, or muses in the shade.  The spirit of devotion breaks through the roughest of Elliott's denouncings; it comes ever and ever, like a hymn in the mountains between the gusts of a thunder-storm.  Darkly as social existence is reflected in his thoughts, he does not leave out from his faith, that a wise and gracious Providence cares for humanity.  With the wealthy he is often angry; even with the poor he is, at times, impatient; but before his Maker he is always humble and believing.  Elliott dwells but too constantly in the land of Mesech, and sojourns amid the tents of Kedar; the forms most present to his sight and to his musings, are those of faded women and despairing men; but still he holds fast in his piety, and bows in reverence to his Maker in mournful submission.  In Elliott's lines on "Forest Worship," we have a fair illustration of his devotional temper.  Though shaded with his habitual gloom, there are beamings through them of hope and resignation.

    Imagination, in its creative force, does not, as I apprehend, belong to Elliott; but fancy is his; fancy that teems with poetic illustration, and that burns with eloquent impulses.  Yet though the fancy of Elliott is strong and rich, it is not plastic; and this appears especially in his management of numbers and language.  His verse wants music; it is obstinate; rugged; of difficult enunciation.  It is pervaded with fire; it is not a fire, however, which renders expression liquid, but a fire which makes it hard; it does not give to language harmony, but intensity.  Elliott is copious, but not select; and though evidently master of an abundant vocabulary, he uses favorite epithets and phrases with a constancy of repetition, which would be intolerable in a writer of less ability.  There is an artistic command by which the poet uses words as the painter uses colors; by which his verses become to the ear what a picture is to the eye; by which variety and sweetness of modulation have similar effects to a just disposition of light and shade; by which diction commingles into one the spirit of thought and the beauty of the universe.  Such I apprehend to be the essence of poetic harmony.  This, is not, as I conceive, the distinctive excellence of Elliott.  I say distinctive, because I would not assert that Elliott never has it.  Occasionally, his verse has a gentle sweetness or a high choral sounding, which would entitle it to a lofty place in the music of poetry.

    In the nature of his topics, Elliott has some resemblance to Crabbe.  Both have selected their subjects from humble life; and both have dealt with their subjects in a tone of earnestness, and conformably to reality.  Here the resemblance closes.  Elliott admits the suggestive action of Crabbe's genius upon his mind, yet Elliott is not his imitator.  He has more passion than Crabbe, more fancy, and more sympathy.  His verse, assuming every diversity of structure, does not contain the variety of incident which quivers beneath the simple and monotonous lines of Crabbe.  He is not, like Crabbe, minute and literal; nor has he Crabbe's fearful power of tragic narrative.  He cannot, as that writer, work up a picture of sin and sorrow, until the heart is chill; he cannot freeze the blood, but he can heat it; he can kindle anger, but he cannot inspire terror.

    I have said, that Elliott has great love for external nature; he has, also, great love for man.  This love has been rendered angry by his circumstances; it has been turned into indignation by the wrong which humanity inflicts upon humanity.  He has companioned with the afflicted, and he has taken up the burden of their lamentation, and their curse.  He is, therefore, a prophet in the wilderness of calamity, and his voice is as sad as it is vehement.  There is a mighty heart in the man, but the big veins of it are filled with grief; they swell with a huge suffering, and groans not loud, but deep, come out of the heavings.  The brotherhood of Elliott have literally been " men of sorrows," and Elliott's is a temper to make such sorrow all his own.  He had no need to stir his imagination with thoughts of fictitious woe; the presence of actual misery was always before him.  It met him at every turn; it stared on him at every corner; it pressed on him at every sense; it peered up to him from the foggy cellar; it gazed down upon him from the dizzy garret; he heard it in the whine of breadless childhood; he saw it in the pale faces which crowded from the nightly factory to meet the sleepy dawn; it sat before him in the worn mother with her sickly infant; it staggered by him in the drooping father leading out his consumptive boy, to lie upon the grass, and pluck a flower ere he died.  How could a man like Elliott, a man, almost made of fire, escape being stirred to fury?  How was any temperance of humanity preserved in him?  Only, because he had pity equal to his anger, and his weeping was even more bitter than his wrath.

    What a martyrdom for life is his, who cannot help but feel?  Who cannot escape from the wretchedness about him, nor yet from the sensibility within, which gives to that wretchedness its utmost gloom?  There is, to be sure, an idealism, which discerns a glorious hope, or the state would not be martyrdom, but perdition.  The martyr, in the midst of agonies, sees the heavens opened, and the light streaming down upon him from the throne of God; and in the very chokings of torture, he puts forth the anthems of faith.  The poet has such faith in the worst of hours; and poets such as Elliott need it.  His song is truly the hymn of the martyr.  A vast difference, there is, between imaginary woes, and the woes of imagination; a vast difference between the regrets of a coquette for the loss of a worthless lover, and the grief of that man who can hear the prisoner's sigh in the lowest dungeon of earth, who can realize in its terrible extent the empire of wrong, upon which, indeed, the sun never sets.  To speak simply of personal afflictions, how exceeding heavy are they on the man of imagination, in whom there is a true sensibility.  To mere instinct they are soon over.  They are clouds that spread shadows as they pass, but are melted in the first gush of the sun.  With imagination, in which the heart's life keeps fresh, they are spectres that disappear, but come back again at the slightest touch.

    The vividness and intensity which belong to genius, are sources of perennial suggestiveness.  The common mind, dependent ever on the senses, weeps away its grief in the hour when it comes, but to the strong and keen imagination, sorrow starts up from the grave of years, more killing than ever in its first visitation.  Often the man of genius seems to want ordinary sensibility while affliction is present; his voice is firm, and his eye holds no tear; but when the event is nothing to those who moaned the loudest, it will come back to him; it will cross the paths of his solitary walks; it will sit by him in his thoughtful indolence; it will lean with him over the declining embers; it will start on him in the midst of his reasonings; it will interrupt his meditations with sobbings as of a child.  What, then, must life have been to such a man as Elliott?  With a heart that could not be otherwise than unhappy, while his fellows groaned; with that capacity which gathered into its range of perception, the cotton mill, the forge, the ten thousand varieties of poor men's homes, the bald monotony of poor men's histories, the hopeless fardel of toil and destitution, how could he be otherwise than sad; his bosom a fountain of tears, and his utterance a voice of wailing!  I will not say, that Elliott's gloom is desirable either for poetry or usefulness.  It is well, indeed, that there should be always souls to burn for evils that are rampant in the habitable world; it is well there should be a sympathy, which will not hold its peace, while the weak are crushed; it is well there should be an anger which will not quit the warfare against injustice, while injustice triumphs.  Yet, for strong and healthy action, there must be points of rest, and many associations of peace; there must be serene spaces, from which the soul can shut out the cares that oppress it.  Even to ameliorate the disorders for which we grieve, and to acquire energy against them, we must often take ourselves away from their company.  Sympathy, itself, droops in an unvarying contemplation of wretchedness; and therefore, to sustain the mission of philanthropists, we must carry the cheerfulness of hope into the toils of mercy.  I will not say, that the feelings of Elliott are not often too prejudiced and one-sided.  The poet must be more than an advocate.  The anger of the poet like that of the prophet, must be an anger more solemn than that of the passions.  The poet, too, who wishes to outlive the strifes of a generation, must have that tolerance which marks the permanent and the comprehensive manifestations of humanity; he must have the eye of wisdom, and the heart of charity.  The poor man, however, so absorbs Elliott, so attracts his sympathy, that the rich man has little from him but resistance.  He forgets, too often, that humanity, in the peer as in the beggar, is a thing of frailties, subject to folly and to grief; a thing which, under the brightest gaud, bears anguish enough to claim our pity.

    Elliott has been a fertile writer.  His productions I cannot minutely examine, or even specify.  Among his shorter poems, there are some that come out from the heart's fulness, and speak at once to the heart's sympathies.  Among these I may mention, "The Dying Boy to the Sloe Blossom," "Mary's Dream," "Preston Mills," "He went, He wrote, He came."  Elliott has had woe and trials in his own home; he has wept on the waste spaces which death made in his little circle; and in all these expressions of grief-inspired genius, we feel the man in the poet, and the poet in the man.  "The Village Patriarch" is the longest, poem of Elliott, and perhaps his best.  It is thoughtful and elevated.  Enoch Wray, the village patriarch, has numbered a hundred years.  A humble man was Enoch Wray.  He was poor, but had genius.  He had the wisdom of the head, and the cunning of the hand; his speaking and his work showed he had ideas, and that these ideas were his own.  In his youth he became blind by too intense a perusal of Schiller's drama of "The Robbers;" the French Revolution having increased the agitation, until it destroyed his sight.  When the poet introduces us to the old man eloquent, he is the chronicle of his neighborhood, the impersonation of a century.  The glory of the world has departed from his eye, but truth and wisdom are a more excellent glory to his soul.  The beauty of things visible has given place to the beauty of things immortal.  He is resigned, but despondent; his home has been afflicted, and his country has become degenerate.  England, he thinks, is not the England of his youth.  The peasants are sparingly fed, and the nobles are no longer generous.  But nature is ever dear to Enoch.  He loves the odor of the primrose, and the texture of the violet; he loves to sit in summer by his cottage door, and to feel the breath of evening upon his sightless brow.  He loves with friendly help to climb the mountain, and there, upon its lonely summit, amidst the silence of infinitude, to commune with the Eternal.  Enoch soon walks no more with man.  After some gropings to familiar places, after some farewells to old companions, Enoch gives up the ghost, and is gathered to his fathers.  The whole poem is impressed with genius, but the whole must be read that the genius may be felt.  Enoch's own character is shrouded in a dim religious grandeur; with impassioned lamentation, there are gentle musings that tell of hard days passed in toil, and quiet Sabbaths passed in prayer; there are elevation and seriousness, the elevation of a solemn faith, and the seriousness of a profound experience.

    The Corn-law Rhymes, are the verses by which Elliott is most extensively known; and though by no means the best of his works, they are those which give him his literary designation.  They are verses of extra ordinary power; but of power to be thoroughly understood only by those who know the poverty of England.  These poems are fierce, scornful, indignant, sarcastic, sweeping boldly along in thundering rebuke, or fiery denunciation.  Take this battle song as an instance—and I think it is a fair one—of their spirit and their energy:

    But they are not all thus.  Here is a rhyme of more sober character:

    And here is a truly noble chant on "The Press:"

    Elliott has the poetic nature in him in its elemental strength; but he differs from most poets as to the manner in which it works through him, and in which it finds expression.  Elliott seems to feel a passion in its utmost power, then to be troubled for its limitations, until he becomes angry unto wrath, or saddened to despair, for the wronged or the wretched, in whom nature is either maddened or destroyed.  Take a case.  Wordsworth's heart leaps up when he beholds a rainbow in the sky.  Elliott, with as deep appreciation, would feel his heart bowed down.  Wordsworth would find companions in the stones and sheep, to gaze with him, and to enjoy the sight.  Elliott would think of men, with hearts like his own, who had not often seen a rainbow, or the sun that makes one.  Take another case.  In the gallows, with all its terrible and retributive associations, Wordsworth beholds the solemn action of society upon guilt, and he pours around it the mystic halo of his genius in high-sounding sonnets.  Were it not almost profane, we might call some of them the Hangman's Hymns.  Elliott would see in the gallows, especially the English gallows, the fatal consummation of a social tragedy, in which the poor were victims, - the poor, ignorant by neglect, vicious by ignorance, and exterminated by vice.

            Take one case more.  "Love" is with all poets a universal passion; and in prose and verse it is the inspiration of all that is ideal and imaginative in literature.  Elliott's very heart is on fire with it, and strike the chord as poet may, no bard sounds a higher note than his.  But bards in general warble the song as one in which all beings can join chorus, the captive with the king, the beggar with the bird.  Elliott, feeling the truth and power of love in his own soul, but in an equal degree knowing, from practical sympathy, how the oppressed are deprived of it, sings rather differently.  He is right, most right; for a slave there is no genuine love, and bravely thus, and honestly, he chants it:

    Elliott, in description, overlays his subject.  He is prolific and luxuriant to a fault.  The characteristic beauties of an object, or a scene, are lost in his profusion and his amplitude.  But perhaps this is more than compensated for by his wild wealth of power.  Out of this he pours a prodigal irregularity, even as Nature herself pours it.  Elliott makes poor work when he attempts humor.  It is the elephant essaying the gambols and grimaces of the monkey.  His mind is too large, too massive, and too unwieldy for the lighter graces of humor.  It is too sad, too earnest, too dark, too passionate, for the gigantic banter, the Polyphemuslike laughter of Pantagruelism.  It is too tender, too full of sympathy and humanity, for the sardonic and sarcastic ridicule of Mephistophelianism.  Pensive in the field, excited in the crowd, mixing sensations and impressions from both with the workings of his fine but sombre imagination, and with the pantings of his strong but gentle heart, he becomes truly great; great, because then he combines his poetic with his actual life; and therein consists his power.  He is a Titanic workman, singing his terrible song of Labor.  He is the Æschylus of toil.  He is the solemn tragic genius of England's artisans.  Hood was the femalemind of those who earn Death by the sweat of the brow.  Of such, Elliott is the masculine mind.  The genius of Elliott is to that of Hood, as the song of the sledge would be to "The Song of the Shirt;" and yet, withal, he has ever and again tones of such sweetness as need a pen dipped in tears to write them.  Here is a gush of this kind:

    Then hear this scathing, this fierce, this indignant cry:

An excellent aphorism is the following couplet, one that should live in the hearts of statesmen:

    Elliott, poet as he is, nay, just because he is a poet, cannot see all deformity in the steam-fed city.  Poetry is not all beauty.  Poetry is power, freedom, and passion as well.  Indeed, beauty is subordinate in comparison to these.  Whatever exhibits human power in connection with human passion, has poetry in it, and greatest poetry.  It is in cities, therefore, that the mightiest of poets have been trained.  Steam is a marvellous agency, an almost miraculous adaptation of man's invention to man's wants.  It were strange if the poets in the nineteenth century could pass it over, or only find it prosaic and repulsive.  Elliott could not do so; and his lines accordingly, on "Steam at Sheffield," are among the grandest and the most inspired of his compositions.  Steam does not, as some assert, put man behind the mechanism.  Not so.  Man is in the mechanism.  What is man at any time without a machine?  But steam becomes more and more united with man's life, and interests, and fate; and I repeat, it were strange, passing strange, if out of these no poetry could be extracted:

"The Ranter" is a noble strain, and in the highest mood of Elliott's genius.  Here is a blast trumpettoned on the Puritan pilgrims:

    I cannot fancy any words that toil-starved poverty can conceive of sadder pathos than this low plaint:

    An extract from a poem entitled "Win-Hill," * or "The Curse of God," will show to what sublimity Elliott can attain.

And now a gentle tone:

    Take the following as a specimen of Elliott's pathos:

Yet here is an illustration, if possible, more touching:

I find that I could, did I follow my inclination, make a volume, and not an essay, by mere extracts; but I must deny my desire, and close with two short poems, which paint in glowing words the author's own character and genius.

    The battle for labor has been manfully carried on; and the battle for labor has been a battle for freedom.  Every gain to the rights of industry has been equally a gain to the rights of liberty.  The franchise of toil has advanced the franchise of thought; and the independence of handicraft has extended the independence of humanity.  The man of privilege is the man of the Past; the man of labor is the man of the Future.  The man of the Future, even in England, gains on the man of the Past; but the man of the Past, though enfeebled, is not destroyed, and it is not desirable that he should be.  He is a portion of the national memory, and he is worthy of existence as an agent in national civilization.  As yet he has had no reason to complain.  He still stands upon dark and massive battlements, and proudly unfurls the banner which was won at Cressy or Agincourt.  Commerce, however, has stripped forests from his hills, to spread mightier forests on the sea; his flag is obscured in the smoke of increasing manufactures, and the music of his halls grows faint in the din of surrounding looms and hammers.

    The social changes of England have been anticipated by no extended foresight, and they have been met by no adequate preparation.  The external greatness of the country has been enlarged, but the poor man's comforts have been diminished; and this wretchedness the poor man endures under the heavy aggravation of most painful contrast.  His lair is in the midst of palaces; his empty basket is surrounded by luxury, which earth is exhausted to supply; he faints by the odor of feasts upon his weakness, as he passes by the halls of banqueting, and his squalid rags are spurned by the pampered menial that shrinks from him in the street.  And why, he asks himself, is this?  Why, with honesty and hands, have I not at least leave to toil?  When toil is given me, why have I not leave to live?  Because my hands have been manacled by restrictive legislation; because idleness has become necessity, and starvation, law; because my wages have been swallowed in maintaining privilege; because debts, which cause nations to stand aghast, have been contracted to pay the mercenaries of foreign despots.  This money has but sold my days to hopeless servitude; and the victories of my brave compatriots have given nothing to me and to my children, but an everlasting inheritance of hunger.

    The statesmen of England have been wanting in the grand sagacity which a mighty country in extraordinary times demanded.  The manufacturing power of England has in half a century grown to a hugeness unexampled in the history of trade; but nothing comparatively was done in reference to this immense revolution.  While squires declaimed in Parliament on the iniquity of poaching, and called for rigid laws to save partridges from the infamy of being shot by plebeian gunpowder, —while ministers taxed the country for millions, to place one fool on a rickety throne, instead of another, — masses of human beings were silently conglomerating within limited districts, forming a dense and a peculiar population.  Who were those, let us ask, who constituted this population?  They were families, who, leaving their cabins behind them in the wilds of Ireland, sought to escape famine in the country, and found it in the city.  They were families, who, streaming down from Welsh and Scottish mountains, were tempted from their cloudy solitudes to pursue fortune in strange crowds, and met with hardships which their sterile hills had never threatened.  They were families from the green dells and quiet hamlets of England, whom high rents and bad times had scourged from the open light of nature to the filthy cellars of the smoky town.  Collected thus from various districts, by similar distress, they had nothing in common but ignorance and want.  Once involved in factory labor, their condition was destiny.  They had no other refuge on which to fall back; live they might, while work was for them, and when it failed, they must be paupers, or they must die.  From the plough to the cotton mill, was like the passage to the grave; it could be made but once, and could never be retraced.

    Here, then, a distinctive class was incorporated with the nation; and this class had distinctive wants.  What had been done for these people?  Did each person bring from his native district a decent education, with which his native district had supplied him?  No provision existed for any such supply.  Armies abounded for the peninsula of Europe and the peninsula of India, but schoolmasters were scarce for the cottages of Ireland and the cottages of Britain.  With solemn cathedrals, and venerable colleges, with triumph of arms, and conquest of empires, England has allowed generations of her children to live and die in a most forlorn ignorance; with vast revenues for state, for nobles, for hierarchies, she has nothing to spare for the souls of the poor.  Would it be wonderful, then, if masses, thus goaded for mere existence, thus neglected, should start up in the madness of their want and the fury of their passions, and stain their age with deeds which history would shudder to record?  But no.  Gloriously they have borne misfortune; patiently they have endured injustice; valiantly, wisely, and humanely they will redress their wrongs.

    There is hope for the toilsmen of England!  Yes; but where?  In themselves; not in peers and princes, not in parties or statesmen; but in their own stout hearts, in their own enlightened exertions, in their own moral and intellectual exaltation.  The virtuous cannot be despised, and the wise cannot be conquered; and no one can doubt, who has watched the progress of events, that, within a few years, virtue and wisdom have made progress among the operatives of Britain.  Thousands and thousands have passed blamelessly through suffering, which in other times would have had the praise of martyrdom.  Imprisoned men, forgetting all vindictive feeling, have used their hours of confinement to send forth instruction to their brothers clad in noble diction, and breathing a high philosophy.  Humble men from the Chartist ranks, dragged to jail for sedition, have shown their power for such lofty, intellectual, and moral achievement.  Let English toilsmen take courage; ay, and English toilswomen also.  Have we not evidence of graceful and elegant attainment in this country among a laboring class of the fair sex; evidence, that heads are not idle, while hands are busy?  American factory girls, with a vivacity of mind which no fatigue can depress, have added to our literature; and their contributions are distinguished by an excellence of thought which needs but small indulgence from the critical, and by a purity of sentiment which merits all the praises of the good.

    Let this voice from the heart of toiling womanhood go from the girls of America, and fall upon the weary spirits of their British sisters; and let it come back across the wild Atlantic in joyous echoes of exulting hope.  The daughters of labor, even in England, may not despair of redemption.  The sons of labor can gain it for themselves, and help their weaker companions.  They have many examples and predecessors; kingly men, from plough and hammer, from hill-side and dyke.  An era, I would fain believe, is coming for the English toilsman, when his labor will purchase him more than a living death; when an existence will be fairly within his reach, which will include whatever confers pure enjoyment and moral elevation; he will then be sustained in his own self-respect.  He will not be ashamed of a virtuous calling; and none will dare to regard his position with contempt; no dastard blush will suffuse the brow which has been wrinkled by the care of a hard but honest occupation; and the hand will seek no concealment, which has been roughened by industry, but has never been soiled by corruption.  Under any circumstances, in any state of things, in any country, if we appreciate truth and reality; if we are not cheated by sham, and glare, and vanity; if we are not deceived by gaud and shadow, —the fustian which covers an upright soul is a garb of honor; and that is the most kingly sheen which clothes the most kingly worth.