on the breast of Nature." The passion of Wordsworth was strong in him, though he had read and loved, but did not justly admire, Keats and Shelley, But as he grew older, he was drawn aside from contemplation of Nature by the misery of the poor, by the starvation the Corn Laws, the manufacturers, and the indifferent landlords imposed on the people. Wordsworth, he thought, had only touched the comfortable poor, Crabbe gave him more truth, and was nearer to his heart—"Crabbe, whose dark gold is richer than it seems"—but Byron had most power over his soul. Byron's anger, force, love of freedom, even his gloom, suited one who had to sing the stern and crying suffering of the people.
Elliott quite understood that Byron would not have cared about the English labourer. But the revolutionary spirit in Byron, his fierce scorn of the oppressor, and his dying effort to free Greece, made him a spirit of power in a mind like Elliott's. Soon, leaving Byron, he took his individual turn, and concentrated and consecrated himself as the Poet of the Poor. And well he did that duty, voicing their silent pain and wrath with unbroken courage, truth, and fervour. At first he wrote poems of some length, after the manner of Robert Bloomfield; and if we wish to know the state of rural England in those days, we cannot do better—and this will illuminate the merely political histories with the light of reality—than read The Patriarch of the Village and The Splendid Village, There, in a lurid
