easily attained than in Gothic with its infinite | the lines about the washing-tub and some aims. In the writers who followed, so-called others, long current in the ribaldry of critics. classicism degenerated into conventionality But, bating a few almost necessary failures, in subject, in treatment, and in language. In Cowper, as has been said, we see the beginning of the recoil. But it was by Wordsworth that the revolt was most openly proclaimed and most fully effected. The changed spirit was no doubt in the time, and would have made its way independently of any single man. But no one power could have helped it forward more effectually than the capacious and inward-seeing soul of Wordsworth. Whereas the poetry of the former age had dealt mainly with the outside of things, or if it sometimes went farther, it did so with such a stereotyped manner and diction as to make it look like, external work, Wordsworth everywhere went straight to the inside of things. We have seen already how, whether in his own self-revelations, or in his descriptions of the visible creation, or in his delineations of men, he passed always from the surface to the centre, from the outside looks to the inward character. This one characteristic set him in entire opposition to the art of last century. Out of it arose the entire revolution he made in subjects, treatment, and dietion. Seeing deeper truth and beauty in many things which had hitherto been deemed unfit subjects for poetry, than in those which had hitherto been most handled by the poets, he reclaimed from the wilderness vast tracts that had been lying waste, and brought them within the poetic domain. In this way he has done a wider service to poetry than any other poet of his time, but since him no one has arisen of spirit strong and large enough to make full proof of the liberty he bequeathed. The same freedom, and by dint of the same powers, he won for future poets with regard to the language of poetry. First, in his practice he threw himself clear of the trammels of the so-called poetic diction which had tyrannized over English poetry for a century. This diction of course exactly represented the half-courtly, half-classical mode of thinking and feeling. As Wordsworth rebelled against the inward spirit, so against its outward expression. The whole of the stock phrases and used-up metaphors he discarded, returned to living language of natural feeling, as it is used by men, instead of the dead form of it which had got stereotyped in books, And just as in his subjects he had taken in from the waste so much virgin soil, so in his diction he appropriated for poetic use a large amount of words, idioms, metaphors, till then disallowed by the poets. In doing so, be may here and there have made a mistake, the homely trenching on the ludicrous, as in he did more than any other by his usage and example to reanimate the effete language of poetry, and restore it to healthfulness, strength, and feeling. His shorter poems, both the earlier and the later, are for the most part very models of natural, powerful, and yet sensitive English; the language being, like a garment, woven out of, and transparent with the thought. Of the diction of his longer blank verse poems we shall have something to say in the sequel. Then, as to the theory which he propounds in his famous preface, that the language of poetry ought no wise to differ from that of prose, this is only his protest against the old poetic phraseology, too sweepingly laid down. His own practice is the best commentary on, and antidote to, his theory, where he has urged it to an extreme. Coleridge and De Quincey have both criticised the "Preface" severely, so that in their hands it would seem to contain either a paradox or a truism. Into this subject we cannot now enter. This only may be said on the Wordsworthian side, as against these critics, that while the language of prose receives new life and strength by adopting the idioms and phrases used in the present conversation of educated men, that of poetry may go farther, and borrow with advantage the language from cottage firesides. Who has ever listened to a peasant father or mother, as they described the last illness of one of their own children, or spoke of those who were gone, without having heard from their lips words which for natural and expres sive feeling were the very essence of poetry! Poets may well adopt these, for, if they trust to their own resources, they can never equal them. These reflections on the main characteristics of Wordsworth arose out of a survey of the poems written during his first or Grasmere period. But they have passed beyond the bounds for which they were originally intended, and may apply in large measure to his poems of the second period, written at Allan Bank in Grasmere, and during his first years at Rydal Mount. These were "The Excursion," "The White Doe of Rylstone," "The Duddon Sonnets," and, some smaller poems. In these, there is perhaps less of that ethereal light, that spiritualizing power over nature, which forms the peculiar charm of the best of the early poems. But if there is less of naturalistic interpretation, there is a deepened moral wisdom, a larger entering into the heart of universal man. We spoke above of the limitations of his earlier poetry in this latter region. These in his later po only room, but even a call for a fuller enforce- Even to those who may care nothing for the philosophy, if they have feeling hearts, the "Excursion" will always be dear for its pictures of mountain scenes, and its pathetic records of rural life. The two books of the Churchyard among the Mountains, are the most sustained in interest, and most perfect in style, of any books in the Excursion." In themselves, they form a noble poem, full of deep insight into the heart, of attractive portraits of character, and of tender and elevating views of human life and destiny. No one with a heart to feel can read them carefulwithout being the better for it. Of all the lives there portrayed, perhaps there is none to which we more often revert than the affecting story of Ellen : ems greatly disappear, partly from the expansion of the philosophic mind by years of meditation, and by kindly though limited intercourse with men; partly from a gradual lessening of the exclusive bias towards humble life, as his Republican fervour abated. As to the "Excursion," to discuss it as its importance demands would require a long separate treatise. It was a theme worthy of a great philosophic poem, which Wordsworth proposed to himself,-how a man, like the Solitary, who from domestic bereavement and from disappointment of the impatient hopes he had formed of the French Revolution, had sunk into scepticism and despondency, can have his interest in human nature and his faith in God restored. The outward circumstances of such a subject may vary, but itself is of perennial import. French revolutions may not repeat themselves with every generation, but unbelieving cynicism is an evil of continual recurrence, an evil which is not checked by, but would rather seem increasingly to attend on, our much-vaunted march of mind. As to the poet's way of dealing with the problem, we feel the same disappointment as many have felt, that the truths of revelation, though everywhere acknowledged, are nowhere brought prominent-ly ly forward. It is the religion which the poet has extracted from nature and man's moral instincts on which he mainly insists; yet it is such a religion, so pure and so elevated, as these sources, but for the light they receive from a co-existent revelation, never could have supplied. In the crisis of the poem, when the poet has to apply his medicine to the mind diseased, and when the Solitary is importunate for an answer, the poet turns aside, and recommends communion with nature, and free intercourse with men, in a way which to many has seemed like a disavowal of the power of Christian faith. We believe, however, that this is too severe a judgment. Wordsworth knew clearly that there are many cases in which, the passages to the heart having been closed by false reasonings and morbid views, the way to it is not to be found by any direct arguments, however true. What is wanted is some antidote which shall bring back the feelings to a healthful tone, remove obstructions from within, and so Then follows the character of the cottage through restored health of heart, put the un- girl, her love, betrayal, the broken vow; her derstanding in a condition which is open to shame and sorrow, relief by the birth of her power of truth, Awaken healthful sensi- child, the necessity to leave her own and bilities in the heart, and a right state of intel-nurse a neighbour's child; her own child's lect will be sure to follow. This is Words- sickness, and she not allowed to visit it; its worth's moral pathology. And the restora- death, her long vigils by its grave, a weeping tive discipline he recommends is that which Magdalene-ended by her own decline:in his own mental trial he had found effectual. Meek saint! through patience glorified on This we believe to be the true account; and earth! yet we cannot help thinking there was not the แ " As on a sunny bank, a tender lamb Lurks in safe shelter from the winds of March, Speaks for itself; an Infant there doth rest; Shed when the clouds had gathered and dis- The spotless ether of a maiden life; If these may make a hallowed spot of earth In whom, as by her lonely hearth she sate, The ghastly face of cold decay put on it He who afflicts me knows what I can bear; Into that pure and unknown world of love They say that Wordsworth wants passion. For feeling, not on the surface but in the depth, pathos pure and profound, what of modern verse can equal this story and that of Margaret? The very roll of the lines above quoted is oracular. There is in them the echo of a soul, the most capacións, tender, and profound that has spoken through modern poetry. Having spoken of these verses, one word must be said in passing of Wordsworth's blank verse. In the "Excursion," and more still in the "Prelude," it often greatly needs condensation, may even be said to be tediously prolix. When speaking of homely matters, there is circumlocution at times amounting to awkwarkness; and when philosophizing, there is, unlike the smaller poems, too profuse a use of long-winded Latin words, to the neglect of the mother Saxon: Yet even in these passages, there is hardly a page without some "atoning" lines of the true Wordsworthian mould. Even in those abstruser disquisitions of the "Excursion," which seem most prosy, there are seldom wanting some of those glances of deeper vision, by which old neglected truths are flashed with new power on the consciousness, or new relations of truth, which had hitherto lain hidden, are for the first time revealed. Of such apophthegms of moral wisdom, how large a number could be gleaned from that poem alone! But it is in the passages where Wordsworth's inspiration kindles, that the full power of his blank verse is to be seen. Such in the "Excursion" are the account of the Wanderer's feelings, when, a boy, he watched the sunrise over Athole, and indeed the whole description of his boyhood, in which Wordsworth reproduces much of his own Esthwaite experience. The story of Margaret already spoken of, the description of the Langdale Pikes, the Solitary's history of himself, the Wanderer's advice to him at the close of “ Despondency Corrected," and we may add almost the whole of the two books of the Churchyard. Of the characters who form the chief speakers in the poem, the Pedlar or Wanderer, the Solitary, and the Pastor, we have not time to say one word. Those who wish to see from what materials Wordsworth framed them, will find some in teresting memoranda from his own lips, in the biography by his nephew, and now, we believe, incorporated in the edition of his Poems of 1857. It seems strange now to look back to the outcry that was long made against the employment of a pedlar as the chief figure of the poem. That this should now seem to most quite natural, or, at least, noways offensive, may serve to mark the change in literary feeling, which Wordsworth himself did so much to introduce. own. The "Excursion" was published in 1814, and the following year produced another long poem, "The White Doe of Rylstone." This poem, pronounced by the great critic of the day to be "the very worst poem he ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume," has a very bewitching and unique charm of its The scene is laid in the days of Queen Elizabeth, and begins and ends with Bolton Priory, and the story of a white doe which haunts it. This doe had been the favourite of Emily Norton, sole daughter of Richard Norton of Rylstone Hall, who, with his eight sons, had marched forth in the army of the Catholic Lords engaged in the insurrection known as the Rising of the North. Emily and a ninth son, Francis, were of the Protestant faith, and disapproved of the enterprise. But he, without taking part in the expedition, follows his father, to be of what use he can; sees him and his eight brothers led to execution, and is himself accidentally slain, and buried in Bolton Priory. The sister's lot is to remain behind, to hear of the utter extinction of her house, and by force of passive fortitude, "To abide The shock, and finally secure The white doe which had been her companion in happier days, comes to her side and seems to enter into her sorrow, attends her when on moonlight nights she visited Bolton and her brother's grave, and, long years after she is gone, continues to haunt the hallowed place. "Everything attempted by the principal personages fails in its material effects, succeeds in its moral and spiritual." This is Wordsworth's own account of it. And certainly the active and warlike parts of the poem, are needlessly tame and unexciting, forming a marked contrast with the way Scott would have treated the same subjects. That Wordsworth could, if he chose, have improved these parts of his poem there can be no doubt, for the song of "Brougham Castle" and several of the warlike sonnets, prove that he could, when so minded, strike a Tyrtæan strain. But if, in the "White Doe," he fails where Scott would have succeeded, he does what neither Scott | mand an extended notice for themselves. nor any one else could equally have done. The rest of the poems of this epoch are Gazing on Bolton's ruined abbey, as it stands memorials of four separate tours; two on the on its green holm, looked down on by majes- Continent in 1830 and 1837, two in Scottic woods and quiet uplands, and lulled by land in 1831 and 1833. Taken as a whole, the murmuring Wharfe, his whole heart is none of these tours produced anything equal filled by the impressive and hallowed scene. to his earliest one in Scotland. But the And all the feelings awakened within him he former of the two continental tours produced gathers and concentrates in this legendary one poem almost equal to any of his prime, creature, making her at every turn, whether that on the Eclipse in 1820. The descrippassing under broken arch, or throwing a tion there of Milau Cathedral, with its white gleam into dark black vault, or crouching in hosts of angels, and its starry zone the moonlight on the Nortons' green grave, bring out some new lineament, call up some fair imagination. She is the most perfectly ideal embodiment of the finer spirit of the place that could have entered into poet's heart to conceive. Of "Peter Bell" and "The Waggoner," both composed long before, but published after "The White Doe," we have not now space to say one word. About this time, while preparing his eldest son for college, Wordsworth studied carefully several of the Latin poets, which led to his attempting two or three poems on classical subjects. One of these, "Laodamia," will always stand out prominent even among his happiest productions. Throwing himself naturally into the situation, he informs the old Achaian legend with a fine moral dignity peculiarly his own: "All steeped in that portentous light, is in his finest style. But that among all these later poems which most wins regard is the beautiful and affecting thread of allusion to Walter Scott that runs through them. Open-minded appreciation of contemporary poets was not one of Wordsworth's strong points. A very strong one-sidedness, not hard to explain, arose out of at once his weakness and his strength. Disparaging remarks about Scott's poetry were reported from his conversation, and these seem to have been present to Lockhart's thought as he penned his last notice of Wordsworth. He might have recalled at the same time the many kind and beautiful lines in which he who never said in verse what he did not truly feel, has embodied his feelings about Scott. Wordsworth had hail "Elysian beauty, melancholy grace, Brought from a pensive, though a happy ed The Lay of the Last Minstrel with de place." And now but a word on the third period of Wordsworth's poetry. This began, we may say, about the year 1818 or 1820, and lasted till the close of his poetic life. It was the time when he wrote the "Ecclesiastical Sonnets;" which, though containing here and there some gems-such as that on "Old Abbeys" "Once ye were holy, ye are holy still; Your spirit freely let me drink, and live;"are not, on the whole, equal to many of his earlier ones. Sonnet-writing, begun at Grasmere, had long been a favourite relaxation with him in the midst of larger works. The sonnets are like small off-lets from the main stream of his poetry, into which whatever thoughts from time to time arose might overflow. This form is well fitted for the detached musings of a meditative poet. As each new thought awakes, a new form for it has not to be sought, the vehicle is here ready, and all the poet has to do is to cast the liquid metal into the mould. Wordsworth's sonnets are so numerous and so important that they form quite a literature, which, if justice were done them, would de light, and always continued to like it best of In 1814, as he descended from Traquair, accompanied by the Ettrick Shepherd, he exclaimed "And is this-Yarrow?-This the stream An image that hath perished!" In the autumn of 1831, Wordsworth and his daughter Dora set out on a visit to Abbotsford, to see Scott once more before he left Tweedside in hopes of repairing his broken health in Italy. It was but a short visit, as Scott was on the very eve of his departure, but, ere they parted, they snatched one more look at Yarrow,-the last both to Scott, and to Wordsworth: "Once more by Newark's Castle-gate, Long left without a warder, I stood, looked, listened, and with thee, : Though the hand of sickness lay heavy | Once more, the last time, when on a tour upon Scott, they did their best “To make a day of happy hours, Their happy days recalling." But throughout the Yarrow Revisited," written in remembrance of that day, there is visible the pressure of an actual grief, little in harmony with the ideal light that is upon the two former Yarrows."On our return in the afternoon," says Wordsworth, we had to cross Tweed (by the old ford) directly opposite Abbotsford. The wheels of our carriage grated upon the pebbles in the bed of the stream, that there flows somewhat rapidly. A rich, but sad light, of rather a purple than a golden hue, was spread over the Eildon Hills at that moment, and thinking it probable that it might be the last time Sir Walter would cross the stream, I was not a little moved, and expressed some of my feelings in the sonnet beginning "A trouble not of clouds, or weeping rain."" This is the sonnet in which he says "The might Of the whole world's good wishes with him goes; Blessing and prayers in nobler retinue Than sceptred king or laurelled conqueror knows, Follow this wondrous Potentate." "At noon, on Thursday," Wordsworth continues, "we left Abbotsford, and on the morning of that day, Sir Walter and I had a serious conversation, tête-à-tête, when he spoke with gratitude of the happy life which, upon the whole, he had led. He had writ ten in my daughter's album, before he came into the breakfast-room that morning, a few stanzas addressed to her; and while putting the book into her hand, in his own study, standing by his desk, he said to her in my presence, I should not have done anything of this kind, but for your father's sakethey are probably the last verses I shall ever write.'" We remember one most affecting stanza of these lines, which we heard from one who had seen them in the album,—that same album which contained autograph and unpublished lines written by Coleridge, Southey, and other poets of the time, for Wordsworth's daughter. Wordsworth visited Scotland once again in 1833, but by that time Scott was lying in the ruined aisle at Dryburgh, within sound of his own Tweed. Two years after this, in the autumn of 1835, on hearing of the death of the Ettrick Shepherd, he poured forth that fine lament over his brother poets who had so fast followed each other "from sunshine to the sunless land." In it he alludes once again to his two visits to Yarrow, the one with the shepherd-poet for his guide, the other with Sir Walter. " in Italy in 1837, his heart reverts to Scott in the Musings near Aquapendente." Seeing the broom in flower on an Italian hill-side, his thoughts turned homeward to think how it would be budding on Fairfield and Helvellyn. Then the thought strikes him, what use of coming so far to see these new scenes, if his thoughts kept wandering back to the old ones : 1 "The skirt of Greenside fell, And by Glenridding-scree, and low Glencoign, Places forsaken now, though loving still The muses, as they loved them in the days Of the old minstrels and the border bards." One there was, he says, who would have sympathized with him "Not the less Had his sunk eye kindled at those dear words "Years followed years, and when, upon the eve Or by another's sympathy was led, Knowledge no help; Imagination shaped No promise. Still, in more than ear-deep seats, Survives for me, and cannot but survive Peace to his spirit! why should Poesy For them who in the shades of sorrow dwell, This poem and the one suggested by Hogg's death, burst from out the somewhat tamer reflections of his later days as the last gleams of his old fervour. Henceforth he wrote little more poetry, but he continued almost to the end to keep retouching his former poems. |