Much of this Scotch poetry is remarkable for showing in that early age a genuine love of nature.  Changes are not rung on some typical landscape, copied from an Italian versifier.  The Northern poet had his eye fixed on the scenery and the sky of Scotland.  About the middle of the century, Robert Henryson, a teacher in Dunfermline, wrote.—­

  “The northin wind had purifyit the air
  And sched the misty cloudis fra the sky."[2]

This may lack the magic of Shelley’s rhythm, but the feeling for nature is as genuine as in the later poet’s lines:—­

  “For after the rain when, with never a stain
  The pavilion of heaven is bare."[3]

William Dunbar, the greatest poet of this group, who lived in the last half of the fifteenth century, was a loving student of the nature that greeted him in his northland.  No Italian poet, as he wandered beside a brook, would have thought of a simile like this:—­

  “The stones clear as stars in frosty night."[4]

Dunbar takes us with him on a fresh spring morning, where—­

  “Enamelled was the field with all colours,
  The pearly droppes shook in silver showers,"[5]

where we can hear the matin song of the birds hopping among the buds, while—­

  “Up rose the lark, the heaven’s minstrel fine."[6]

Both Dunbar and Gawain Douglas (1474?-1522), the son of a Scotch nobleman, had keen eyes for all coloring in sky, leaf, and flower.  In one line Dunbar calls our attention to these varied patches of color in a Scotch garden:  “purple, azure, gold, and gules [red].”  In the verses of Douglas we see the purple streaks of the morning, the bluish-gray, blood-red, fawn-yellow, golden, and freckled red and white flowers, and—­

  “Some watery-hued, as the blue wavy sea."[7]

Outside the pages of Shakespeare, we shall for the next two hundred years look in vain for so genuine a love of scenery and natural phenomena as we find in fifteenth-century Scottish poetry.  These poets obtained many of their images of nature at first hand, an achievement rare in any age.

[Illustration:  EARLY TITLE PAGE OF ROBIN HOOD.]

“Songs for Man or Woman, of All Sizes.”—­When Shakespeare shows us Autolycus offering such songs at a rustic festival,[8] the great poet emphasizes the fondness for the ballad which had for a long time been developing a taste for poetry.  While it is difficult to assign exact dates to the composition of many ballads, we know that they flourished in the fifteenth century.  They were then as much prized as the novel is now, and like it they had a story to tell.  The verse was often halting, but it succeeded in conveying to the hearer tales of love, of adventure, and of mystery.  These ballads were sometimes tinged with pathos; but there was an energy in the rude lines that made the heart beat faster and often stirred listeners to find in a dance an outlet for their emotions.  Even now, with all the poetry of centuries from which to choose, it is refreshing to turn to a Robin Hood ballad and look upon the greensward, hear the rustle of the leaves in Nottingham forest, and follow the adventures of the hero.  We read the opening lines:—­