WORDSWORTH.

During the last twenty years, the poetry of William Wordsworth has been the subject of much critical writing. The interest in him and the regard for his poetry, which waned during the decades immediately following his death, were revived by the thoughtful essays of Mr. Matthew Arnold. The tendency of the present day to seek for dominant impulses of literary periods was gratified by finding in him one of the first expressions of the modern feeling for nature. He was far enough removed in point of time to have some of the dignity of an antique a slight "relish of the saltness of time" but not far enough to be an ancient. The traditions of our early youth lingered round his name. Our ancestors are interesting to most of us in less degree the more remote they are, and on the whole the tales of a grandfather are more entrancing than those of a great-grandfather. Mr. Swinburne looks back to Shelley and Wordsworth and Coleridge with something of the filial reverence with which

Thackeray looked back to Swift and Prior and Fielding. And, further, reminiscences of Wordsworth are listened to with pleasure for the unaffected simplicity and dignity of his private character, and the independent, unadorned manner of his life, so refreshing to contemplate in this age of complex social needs and ponderous domestic paraphernalia. One element of the feeling with which the present age looks on Wordsworth, as distinguished from his contemporaries, depends on the fact that he was a liberal in literary matters only. Shelley and Byron were protestants, not against the heroic couplet alone, but against many of the heroic virtues. In rejecting old forms they rejected some of the valuable ideas the old forms had embodied. Even Coleridge was disposed to Consider English institutions sacred only as they contained something worthy of respect. But Wordsworth was a conservative in thought and a liberal only in poetic theory. As an eminently safe poet and a well-conducted person, he has escaped all of the obloquy that followed Byron's defection from morality and Shelley's defection from conventionalism. Philistinism has always felt a certain gratitude to Wordsworth for proving that a man may be a poet and yet eminently respectable, may be progressive, yet not destructive,- may dwell in

the world of ideas, and yet have a Tory reverence for the world of institutions. Society is very apt to regard with exceptional tenderness the reputable member of a brilliant but ill-regulated family, and "good, grey poets" were so rare in Wordsworth's day that his posthumous reputation, if not enhanced by time, has never - been lessened by malicious detraction.

Americans, especially, should always feel a certain kinship to Wordsworth. There is something essentially democratic in his tone of mind. His habit of life, his simplicity and domesticity, and his wide communal sympathies have many points of resemblance to the character of intellectual New Englanders one hundred years ago. When we read of his living for six or seven years with his sister on a capital of forty-five hundred dollars, and encroaching on his principal less than one thousand dollars, though devoted to intellectual improvement and living up to a high intellectual standard, we are irresistibly reminded of the judge or the minister of the last generation in many a village of Connecticut, or Massachusetts, or New Hampshire, who kept, under so many material disadvantages, the life of dignified simplicity which created the tough intellectual fibre, the respect for mental culture, the recognition of earnestness, the old-fashioned honor, alas, that we should call it old-fash

ioned!

which have laid the foundations for so many great commonwealths.

We, Americans, have one great advantage; we can select our moral and intellectual ancestors and brethren among the sacred band. We have no disgraceful period behind us; no Louis the Fifteenth, no Charles the Second, no Georges whom we cannot erase from our national annals. We can say: "Those are not the Englishmen from whom we derive. Those are the men who staid at home, the men of insular development." But the men of universal development, the Raleighs and Sidneys, the Bacons and Shakesperes, the men whose sympathies spread over the globe, who set sail on unknown seas, of these we can say: "Some landed in America, or their winged thoughts rested in the hearts of those who carried them to the new world." It is certainly a great privilege to be able to select our literary and political forefathers and brethren out of the chosen names of the greatest literary and political nation of history, the more valuable that every one can make his own selection of relatives. One advantage of the relationship of third cousins is that it can be claimed or ignored according to the more spiritual kinship of taste and sympathy. Thus we can say of Bulwer and Byron: "They are not related to us; there is nothing

American about them." And of Wordsworth and Southey and Coleridge: "They are Americans our countrymen in the sense not only that they belong to the intellectual men of England but that their thought has come over here and taken root; that they spoke not only our language but our ideas; and that many a New England boy has "kindled under their words. with the flame of a kindred enthusiasm." They had a youthful plan to settle on the banks of the Susquehannah-their thoughts settled all along the banks of the Connecticut.

Wordsworth was a thorough Englishman, and indeed a conservative Englishman, but he believed less in the rights of lords than in the rights of man. A century earlier he would have been a Puritan, and, indeed, there was not a little of the toughness and self-sufficiency, and perhaps of the intolerance, of the Puritan in his bearing and appearance. He was a more "diluted Milton" in this respect than in his poetic quality. His passionate interest in the French Revolution was the result of a deeper comprehension of popular movements than could possess the mind of any Englishman not having an instinctive sympathy with the old, Teutonic conception of the people and the people's law. Thus, when Burke shrank in affright from the ill-regulated retaliations of the first Terror, Wordsworth