iod, but most especially of
the reigns of George IV. and William IV. Sir Robert Peel, the elder,
although an employer of nearly a thousand children, felt the spirit of
the time enough to call the attention of Parliament to the abuses of
child labor. As we shall see, this new spirit exerted a strong
influence on literature.

Influence of the New Spirit on Poetry.--The French Revolution
stirred the young English poets profoundly. They proclaimed the birth
of a new humanity of boundless promise. The possibilities of life
again seemed almost as great as in Elizabethan days. The usually
sober-minded Wordsworth exclaimed:--

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!"[1]

In the age of Pope, the only type of man considered worthy a place in
the best literature was the aristocrat. The ordinary laborer was an
object too contemptible even for satire. Burns placed a halo around
the head of the honest toiler. In 1786 he could find readers for his
_The Cotter's Saturday Night_; and ten years later he proclaimed
thoughts which would have been laughed to scorn early in the
century:--

"Is there, for honest poverty,
That hangs his head and a' that?
The coward slave, we pass him by,
We dare be poor for a' that!
* * * * *
The rank is but the guinea stamp;
The man's the gowd[2] for a' that."[3]

Wordsworth strikes almost the same chord:--

"Love had he found in huts where poor men lie."[4]

The tenderness and sympathy induced by this new interest in human
beings resulted in the annexation to English literature of an almost
unexplored continent,--the continent of childhood. William Blake and
William Wordsworth set the child in the midst of the poetry of this
romantic age.

More sympathy for animals naturally followed the increased interest in
humanity. The poems of Cowper, Burns, Wordsworth, and Coleridge show
this quickened feeling for a starved bird, a wounded hare, a hart
cruelly slain, or an albatross wantonly shot. The social disorder of
the Revolution might make Wordsworth pause, but he continued with
unabated vigor to teach us--

"Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels."[5]

New humanitarian interests affected all the great poets of this age.
Although Keats was cut off while he was making an Aeolian response to
the beauty of the world, yet even he, in his brief life, heard
something