touched was not without its great power on his poetry. He knew and felt the stormy doings of the heavens, the grim things done in the grim hollows of the hills, the roaring tempests in the sky and in the groaning woods. They suited one part of his character. He had known the inward storms which imperil the soul, and when he had worked through them to peace, could watch the elemental turmoil with a quiet mind, intimately attentive to its sublimity and splendour, even to its grave beauty, and seeing beneath the tempest of it a central calm. In song he recorded these wild passions of nature; in song he also recorded the fierce and stormy spirit which in earlier days had so often ruled his character; in song he recorded the quiet into which the tempest had passed. And at every point of storm and peace and of the passage between them, the scenery of his Valley was the image and the symbol. Moreover, the terrible majesty of these goings-on of nature, their enormity of action, awoke in him, when they were transferred to his mind and transmuted into thought, ideas of the infinite workings of the infinite Intelligence. Out of these were born conceptions by which he bound all the universe together, imaginations of an endless variety in a constant unity. He saw one Spirit thinking and loving in and through the whole, and making, as it thought and loved, day by day the whole. With this his graver poetry is full; and I quote one passage out of many to illustrate this point.

The immeasurable height

Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,

And in the narrow rent at every turn

Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,

The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black, drizzling crags that spake by the wayside
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light—
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;
Characters of the great Apocalypse,

The types and symbols of Eternity,

Of first and last and midst and without end.

Once more on this matter of the scenery in his valley and the soul of the poet, there was that in Wordsworth's character, in the native essence of the man, which felt a sympathy with the grim, severe, fierce aspects of nature in the recesses and heights of the ancient mountains. The hard Cumbrian grit was at the root of his character-that grit which came down to him from the Danish, far more than from the Celtic blood; which, when he was young, made half his thought rugged, and his action as steadfast as the cliffs of Helvellyn,-an iron foundation for life and character. That foundation underlies all his tender, gracious, and joyous poetry, and sends its force upwards through its verse. It was this that made him sympathise with the strength and endurance of the shepherds of the hills, with the power of thought which lay hid behind the silence of the poor, with the sturdy republicanism of the 'statesmen' of the vale. It was this grim element in him which sent him across the seas to France when France was torn with revolution, and made him the patriot of humanity. Southey and Coleridge talked of revolution, planned their republic in America—and stayed at home. Wordsworth, austere, determined, adventurous, went straight to the

heart of the fierce strife; walked with the men who were maddened by oppression, looked with sleepless eyes on Paris when the September massacres had cried to the city, 'Sleep no more,' joined the Brissotins, and barely escaped with his life. This was in his mountain nature; the cliffs and gorges of his soul suffered and faced the tempests which upturned a nation. We forget too much this fierce strength in the man when we estimate his poetry. We forget the solidity of this passion, not cast away on youthful love but given to the cause of man, which was in his manhood like a core of heated rock, and which not one of the other poets possessed in the same way or with a similar strength.

When, in his steady self-development, as we have it recorded in the Prelude, he had worked through these storms of thought and feeling, tamed to his will the fiercer passions which were in his character, subdued the grimness in his will, and shed from him, like withered leaves, the evil extremes of his rugged nature -he emerged into tenderness and joy and love, and poured them forth for man in his verse. These graces were also in his character, and had they not had as companions those sterner elements of which I write, they might have become sentimental. That tendency in them was met by the strength of his nature, now purified of its roughness, and by the deep-seated passionateness of his nature, now purified of its excess. Out of the strong came sweetness, yet the strong was not lost; and from the mingling of both, each balancing each, issued the voice of peace and joy which sings in his poetry, and soothes the heart.

These, then, are elements in his poetic life which we may bind up with the natural world in which he chiefly lived.

The other half of his work-that which had to do with man-may be imaginatively associated with his cottage home at Grasmere, with Dove Cottage. He had taken his turn towards the recording of the simple, natural passions and thoughts of common humanity, chiefly as seen among the poor, before he came to Grasmere; but it was there, in a dwellingplace and daily life no richer than those of the honest 'statesmen' of the valley, that he developed it most fully in verse. It was out of the feelings nurtured there that he gave to the human life of the shepherds, farmers, and peasants of the vale, to children and mothers, lovers, wives, and fathers, to their simple sorrows and delights, to the animals and flowers they loved that impassioned humanity which went home to the heart of England, and created for it a new world of poetry. He brought us back to the universal emotions in which we feel our unity, to our common nature, to its quietude, simplicity, to its native goodness, to its eternal powers and majesty—and the story he told of it enabled men and women to heal their hearts, to redeem them from the world, and to set free their life. And the root of this delightful tree of Song, in which the beloved and well-known birds of human nature sang by night and day, was set in his humble cottage, in its nook of mountain ground, the very flowers of which were sacred to the poor. Its living-rooms were few, two below and four above, low-roofed and with latticed windows. Over its white walls outside grew jasmine and clustering roses and climbing plants; and from its windows the meadows were seen, the lake with its long island, and the fern-clad slopes of Loughrigg and Silver How. It was a home as modest as any small farmer's cottage in the valley, yet from it poured

like a living stream the second volume of the Lyrical Ballads and the poems of 1807; water of song which will enchant and make fruitful for ever the heart of man.

The ground rises in a slope behind the cottage, and the slope is of mossy grass. Out of the grass the underlying rock juts forth here and there among ferns and flowers. Half-way up, under a spreading tree, a little thread of pure hill-water falls into a rocky hollow, and the pleasant tinkle fills the garden with its silver cheer. Above this, and below the bounding wall, on a ledge of the hill to which steps of rude stone, laid in their places by Wordsworth and Coleridge, lead upwards, there is a terrace a few yards broad, with a path and soft grass on either side of it, and in the grass some ancient apple-trees where the birds sing and play all day. This is the orchard of which he wrote so much, and in an arbour, near its end, a hundred joyous, tender, sorrowful, and stately poems were written'Michael,' 'The Green Linnet,' the 'Ode' on 'Intimations of Immortality,' 'The Leech-Gatherer,' 'A Farewell,'-a multitude of noble things. The flowers of spring flourish in the grass; the plenteous rain keeps the trees in summer always green; the sweet spirit of human charity keeps them greener still, for the daily love that sacred household gave the garden is always with it now.

The birthplace of a great poet is interesting to the imagination, but the house where all his best work was done, where in eager thought and love his youthful and impassioned manhood wove together Nature and Humanity, is a meeting-place for a multitude of imaginations. It is true the first volume of the Lyrical Ballads was composed elsewhere, but the completed book was issued from this cottage, and it was