the
alphabet and to put words of two letters together, but he was really his
own schoolmaster, and 'taught himself to write, for example, by copying
the letters from printed bills or notices, when he could get a candle
end,--his paper being the trapdoor, which it was his duty to open and
shut as the wagons passed through, and his pen a piece of chalk.' The
first book he really read was the Bible, and not content with reading it,
he learned by heart the chapters which specially pleased him. When
sixteen years old he was presented with a copy of Lindley Murray's
Grammar, by the aid of which he gained some knowledge of the structural
rules of English. He had already become acquainted with Paradise Lost,
and was another proof of Matthew Prior's axiom, 'Who often reads will
sometimes want to write,' for he had begun to write verse when only 'a
bonnie pit lad.' For more than forty years of his life he laboured in
'the coal-dark underground,' and is now the caretaker of a Board-school
in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. As for the qualities of his poetry, they are its
directness and its natural grace. He has an intellectual as well as a
metrical affinity with Blake, and possesses something of Blake's
marvellous power of making simple things seem strange to us, and strange
things seem simple. How delightful, for instance, is this little poem:

'Get up!' the caller calls, 'Get up!'
And in the dead of night,
To win the bairns their bite and sup,
I rise a weary wight.

My flannel dudden donn'd, thrice o'er
My birds are kiss'd, and then
I with a whistle shut the door
I may not ope again.

How exquisite and fanciful this stray lyric:

The wind comes from the west to-night;
So sweetly down the lane he bloweth
Upon my lips, with pure delight
From head to foot my body gloweth.

Where did the wind, the magic find
To charm me thus? say, heart that knoweth!
'Within a rose on which he blows
Before upon thy lips he bloweth!'

We admit that Mr. Skipsey's work is extremely unequal, but when it is at
its best it is full of sweetness and strength; and though he has
carefully studied the artistic capabilities of language, he never makes
his form formal by over-polishing. Beauty with him seems to be an
unconscious result rather than a conscious aim; his style has all the
delicate charm of chance. We have already pointed out his affinity to
Blake, but with Burns also