ART. I.-Wordsworth: The Man and the

Poet.

THE great stirring of men's minds, with which the last century closed, and the present set in, expressed itself in no way more conspicuously than in its prodigality of poetic genius. What gave the impulse to the broader, profounder, more living spirit, which then entered into all regions of thought, who hall determine? To recount the common erary commonplaces on this subject, to refer that great movement of mind to the French Revolution, or to the causes of that Revolution, is easy; but such vague talk does not really increase our knowledge. Perhaps it may be for the present enough to say, that the portentous political outbreak in France was itself but one manifestation of the new and changed spirit, which throughont Europe had penetrated all departments of human thought and action. Whatever the causes, the fact is plain, that with the opening of this century there was in all civilized lands a turning up of the subsoil of human nature, a laying bare of the intenser seats of action, thought, and emotion, such as the world had seldom, if ever before, known. The new spirit reached all forms of literature, and changed them; in this country it told more immediately on poetry than on any other kind of literature, and recast it into manifold and more original forms. The breadth and volume of that poetic outburst can only be fully estimated by looking back to the narrow and artificial channels in which English poetry since the days of Milton had flowed. In the hands of Dryden and Pope, that which was a natural, free-wandering river became a straight-cut, uniform canal. Or, without figure, poetry was withdrawn from country N-1

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life, made to live exclusively in town, and affect the fashion. Forced to appear in courtly costume, it dealt with the artificial manners and outside aspects of men, and lost sight of the one human heart, which is the proper haunt and main region of song. Of nature it reproduced only so much as may be seen in the dressed walks and gay parterres of a suburban villa. As with the subjects, so with the style. Always there was neatness of language, and correctness, according to a conventional standard; often there was terseness, epigrammatic point, manly strength; but along with these there was monotony, constraint, tameness of melody. Those who followed,-Collins and Gray, Goldsmith and Thomson,-though with finer feeling for nature, and more of melody, could not shake themselves wholly free of the tyrant tradition, and throw themselves unreservedly on nature. Burns, if in one sense an anticipation of the nineteenth century poetry, is really, in reference to his contemporaries, to be regarded as an accident: he grew so entirely outside, and independently, of the literary influences of his time. Yet, though little affected by contemporary poets, he was powerful with those who came after him. Wordsworth owns that it was from Burns he learnt the power of song founded on humble truth. It was Cowper, however, who, first of English poets, brought poetry back from the town to the country. His landscape, no doubt, was the tame one of the English midland counties; there was in it nothing of the stern wild joy of the mountains. His sentiment moved among the household sympathies, not the stormy passions. But in Cowper's power of simple narrative and truthful descriptions, in his natural pathos and religious feeling, more. truly than elsewhere, may be discerned the

dawn of that new poetic era with which this | century began. When we remember, that during its first thirty years appeared all the great works of Wordsworth, Scott, Byron, Southey, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, not to mention many a lesser name, we may be quite sure that posterity will look back to it as one of the most wonderful eras in English literature. What other age in this, we had almost said in any country, has been, within the same space of time, so lavish of great poets In England, at any rate, if the Elizabethan and the succeeding age had each one greater poetic name, no age can show so goodly a poetic company. Those who began life, while many of those poets were still alive, and who can perhaps recall the looks of some of them, while they still sojourned with us, may not perhaps value to the full the boon which was bestowed on the generation just gone. Only as age after age passes, and sees no such company again appear, will men learn to look back with the admiration that is due to that poetic era. To sum up in one sentence the manifold import of all that those achieved, we cannot perhaps do better than borrow the discriminative words of Mr. Palgrave in his Golden Treasury. They "carried to further perfection the later tendencies of the century preceding, in simplicity of narrative, reverence for human passion and character in every sphere, and impassioned love of nature: whilst maintaining on the whole the advances in art made since the Restoration, they renewed the half-forgotten melody and depth of tone which marked the best Elizabethan writers; lastly, to what was thus inherited they added a richness in language and a variety in metre, a force and fire in narrative, a tenderness and bloom in feeling, an insight into the finer passages of the soul, and the inner meanings of the landscape, a larger and a wiser humanity, hitherto hardly attained, and perhaps unattainable even by predecessors of not inferior individual genius." It is now our purpose to call attention for a little to one of that poetic brotherhood, the eldest born, and the hardiest, most original innovator of them all. For a survey of Wordsworth and his poetry there would seem to be now the more, room, because his popularity, which during his lifetime underwent so remarkable vicissitudes, has during the fourteen years since his death receded, and seems now to be at the ebb.

It would form a strange chapter in literary history to trace the alternate rise and fall in poetic reputations. To go no farther back than the contemporaries of Wordsworth, how various have been their fortunes! Some, as Byron, were received, almost on their first appearance, with a burst of applause which

posterity is not likely fully to reverberate. Some, as Scott (we speak only of his poetry), were at first welcomed with nearly equal favour, afterwards for a time retired before a temporary caprice of public taste, but have since resumed what was their earliest, and is likely to be their permanent place; others, as Campbell, had at once the poetic niche assigned them, which they are likely hereaf ter to fill; while others, as Shelley and Keats, received little praise of men, till they themselves were beyond its reach. Wordsworth had a different fortune from any of these. For more than twenty years after his earlier poems appeared, he experienced not simply neglect, but an amount of obloquy, such as few poets have ever had to encounter. But cheered by his own profound conviction that his work was true and destined to endure, and by the sympathy of a very few discerning men, he calmly and cheerfully bode his hour. In time the clamour against him spent itself, the reaction set in between the years 1820 and 1830, reached its culmination about the time of his Oxford welcome in 1839, and may be said to have lasted till his death in 1850. Since then, in obedience to that law which gives living poets a stronger hold on the minds of their own generation than any poet, even the greatest, of a past age, Wordsworth may seem to have receded somewhat in the world's estimate. But his influence is, in its nature, too durable to be really affected by these fashions of the hour. It is raised high above the shifting damp and fogs of this lower atmosphere, and shines from the poetic heaven with a benign and undying light. The younger part of the present generation attracted by newer, but certainly not greater luminaries, may not yet have learnt fully to recognise him. But there are many now in middle life, or past it, who look back to the time of their boyhood or early youth, when Wordsworth first found them, as a marked era in their existence. They can recall, it may be, the very place and the hour, when, as they read this or that poem of his, a new light, as from heaven, dawned suddenly within them. The scales of custom dropped from their eyes, and they beheld all nature with a splendour upon it, as of the world's first morning. The common sights and sounds of earth became other than they were. Man and human life, cleared of the highway dust, came home to them more intimately, more engagingly, more solemnly, than before. For their hearts were touched by the poet's creative finger, and new springs of thought, tenderer wells of feeling, broke from beneath the surface. And though time and custom may have done much to dim the eye, and choke the feelings, which

Of his mother, who died when he was eight years old, the poet retained a faint but tender recollection. At the age of nine, William, along with his elder brother Richard, left home for school. It would be hard to conceive a better school-life for a future poet, than that in which Wordsworth was reared at Hawkshead. This village lies in the vale, and not far from the lake, of Esthwaite, a district of gentler hill-beauty, but in full view, westward and northward, of Kirkstone Pass, Fairfield, and Helvellyn. Hawkshead school, as described in the "Prelude," must have been a strange contrast to the highly-elaborated school-systems of our own day. High pressure was then unknown; nature and freedom had full swing. Bounds and locking-up hours they had none. The boys lived in the cottages of the village dames, in a natural friendly way, like their own children. Their play-grounds were the fields, the lake, the woods, and the hill-side, far as their feet could carry them. Their games were crag-climbing for ravens' nests, skating on Esthwaite Lake, setting springes for woodcocks. For this latter purpose they would range the woods late on winter nights, unchallenged. Early on summer mornings, before a chimney was smoking, Wordsworth would make the circuit of the lake. There were boatings on more distant Windermere, and, when their scanty pocket-money allowed, long rides to Furness Abbey and Moorcombe Sands. In Wordsworth's fourteenth year, when he and his brother were at home for the Christmas holidays, their father, who had never recovered heart after the death of his wife, followed her to the grave. The old home at Cockermouth was broken up, and the or phans were but poorly provided for. Their father had but little to leave his children. For large arrears were due to him by the strange, self-willed then Earl of Lonsdale, and these his lordship never chose to make good. But the boys, not the less, returned to school, and William remained there 'till his eighteenth year, when he left for Cambridge.

From Hawkshead, Wordsworth took several good things with him. In book-learning, there was Latin enough to enable him to read the Roman poets with pleasure in after years; of mathematics, more than enough to start him on equality with the average of Cambridge freshmen; of Greek, we should suppose not much, at least we

lish poets which he afterwards perfected; while for amusement he read the fictions of Fielding and Swift, of Cervantes and Le Sage. But neither at school, nor in after life, was he a devourer of books.

Of actual verse-making his earliest attempts date from Hawkshead. A long copy of verses, written on the second centenary of the foundation of the school, was much admired, but he himself afterwards pronounced them but a "tame imitation of Pope." Some lines composed on his leaving school, with a few of which the edition of his works of 1857 opens, are more noticeable, as they, if not afterwards changed, contain a hint of his maturer self. But more important than any juvenile poems, or any skill of verse-making acquired at Hawkshead, were the materials for after thought there laid up, the colours laid deep into the groundwork of his being. In the "Evening Walk," composed partly at school, partly in college vacations, he notices how the boughs and leaves of the oak darken and come out when seen against the sunset. "I recollect distinctly," he says nearly fifty years afterwards, "the very spot where this first struck me. It was on the way between Hawkshead and Ambleside, and gave me ex-. treme pleasure. The moment was important in my poetical history; for I date from it my consciousness of the infinite variety of natural appearances, which had been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country, so far as I was acquainted with them; and I made a resolution to supply in some degree the deficiency. I could not have been at that time above fourteen years of age." Not a bad resolution for fourteen! And he kept it. It would be hardly too much to say that there is not a single image in his whole works which he had not observed with his own eyes. And perhaps no poet since Homer has introduced into poetry, directly from nature, more facts and images which had not hitherto appeared in books.

But more than any book-lore, more than any skill in verse-making, or definite thonghts about poetry, was the free, natural life he led at Hawkshead. It was there that he was smitten to the core with that love of nature which was the prime necessity of his being; not that he was a moody or peculiar boy, nursing his own fancies apart from his companions. So far from that, he was foremost in all schoolboy adventures,-the sturdiest oar, the hardiest cragsman at the harrying of the raven's nest. Weeks and months, he tells us, passed in a round of school tumult. No life could have been every way more unconstrained and natural. But school tumult