ymer," and grew familiar with the
stormy march of his verse, it was discovered that he was something more
than a mere political party song-writer. He was a true poet, whose
credentials, signed and sealed in the court of nature, attested the
genuineness of his brotherhood with those children of song who make the
world holier and happier by the mellifluous strains they bring to us,
like fragments of a forgotten melody, from the far-off world of beauty
and of love.

Elliott will not soon cease to be distinctively known as the "Corn Law
Rhymer;" but it will be by his non-political poems that he will be
chiefly remembered by posterity as the Poet of the People; for his name
will still be, as it has long been, a "Household Word," in the homes of
all such as love the pure influences of simple, sensuous, and natural
poetry. As an author he did not make his way fast: he had written poetry
for twenty years ere he had attracted much notice. A genial critique by
Southey in the "Quarterly," another by Carlyle in the "Edinburgh," and
favorable notices in the "Athenaeum" and "New Monthly," brought him into
notice; and he gradually made his way until a new and cheap edition of
his works, in 1840, stamped him as a popular poet. His poetry is just
such as, knowing his history, we might have expected; and such as, not
knowing it, might have bodied forth to us the identical man as we find
him.

As we have said, Nature was his school; but flowers were the especial
vocation of his muse. A small ironmonger--a keen and successful
tradesman--we should scarcely have given him credit for such an
exquisite love of the beautiful in Nature, as we find in some of those
lines written by him in the crowded counting-room of that dingy
warehouse. The incident of the floral miscellany; the subsequent study
of "The Seasons;" the long rambles in meadows and on hill-sides,
specimen-hunting for his _Hortus Siccus_, sufficiently account for the
exquisite sketches of scenery, and those vivid descriptions of natural
phenomena, which showed that the coinage of his brain had been stamped
in Nature's mint. The most casual reader would at once discover that,
with Thomson, he has ever been the devoted lover and worshiper of
Nature--at wanderer by babbling streams--a dreamer in the leafy
wilderness--a worshiper of morning upon the golden hill-tops. He gives
us pictures of rural scenery warm as the pencil of a Claude, and glowing
as the sunsets of Italy.

A few sen