followed up by the poems sent forth in 1807 which established the new departure of the Muse of England into the regions where nature and man lived a quiet life in a sweet accord. To this retired home the young man came, charged with the lightning of a fresh life, radiant with joy and energy, hearing in his heart the music of a world to come; and the fountain of poetry which broke out of the grass of the little garden, at first an unnoticed and despised stream, has now brought its mountain refreshment to the larger world of mankind. Many writers have told, and told excellently, how Wordsworth has spoken to humanity and for humanity, and I need not dwell in this slight introduction upon his work and influence on human life. Elsewhere I have said my say. But I may dwell on a few sideissues of thought which arise when we consider his life at Grasmere. The great work he did was done in the midst of the quietest, simplest, and humblest things, in a few small rooms, not more spacious than those of a shepherd's home, far from the noises of the active world, in a little garden, not larger than the churchyard of a Cornish church, the stones of which were laid, the walls of which were built, and the flowers of which were planted by his own hands. He and his sister, with perhaps a single servant, did in the first years all the work of the house. Manual labour for the needs of life was not disdained while he wrote enduring song. For some time they lived on eighty pounds a year, and lived in sweet content and joy. Freedom to work for man was his aim, and for freedom's sake retirement was chosen, and poverty welcomed. It is said that genius is cramped by poverty. Absolute poverty, passing into starvation, does check genius, because it injures health. But ordinary poverty, content with just enough to live on, is no real barrier to the development of genius, or to work for mankind, if we love our work and aims. It is riches which stand in the way of genius. They replace ideal desires by the desire for more riches, and that desire starves the imagination, and enslaves the passion of creation. All the millionaires of the world have never done so much for mankind as a single week of Wordsworth's life in this poor cottage. In its poverty his genius awoke each morning with a keener insight, with a greater power of creation. All the ways of that life were plain, and its interests concentrated round a few persons who became beloved friends, round a few books which were almost as beloved as the friends. And these were chosen well and clung to steadily. His friends were grappled to his soul with hoops of steel. Nay, they entered into the very texture of his heart, and became powers, like those of nature, in his work. The soul of his sister, his greatest friend; the might of Coleridge's spirit, without his weakness; the gentleness of Lamb, breathe and glow in the labour of his singing. All those also whom he loved and honoured he assimilated in the slow and peaceful years, and housed their impulses in his character. It was the same with the few books, all of the best, and chosen to excite, strengthen, and ennoble the work to which he was dedicated. There is no praise in literature more noble, even so noble, as that which, in many lovely passages of verse, he has given to his sister and his wife, to Coleridge and his other friends, and to the books whose inspiration he made his own. Then, again, and growing out of this retired life, the daily, simple loves of life, its natural, homelike passions, were enough for him; he pierced into their infinite, pursued with unceasing joy their primal powers, saw and grasped their universal elements. Out of them arose, he thought, the most enduring beauty, the greatest joy, the most alluring splendours of imagination, the highest and keenest impulses to work for the welfare of mankind. He found in them the purest source of art. He found in them the power and life of God issuing out of an Eternal Love. In infinite Love was the hiding-place of their power and their beauty. No poet has recorded them with greater and simpler charm, with more of sane and exalted passion, with so much healthy rapture. Rapture is scarcely too strong a word. He felt it for nature, he felt it for human nature. Joy, the nectar of life, was his; no common, no fleeting joy. It was a steady, growing delight, an inward brightness and exultation, born from the past, alive in the present, and radiant for the future. This spirit of fire and dew fills the Recluse, the little book he wrote on coming to Grasmere. There is nothing in the English language so full of youthful hope and ravishment, of sweet content, of glad emotion and deep gratitude, of faith, of spiritual delight in material beauty, of awful pleasure in overflowing love, of youth idealising all things, of imagination in him hungering and thirsting to shape the matter of God and man and nature into new creations. He lost himself in love of that which was not himself, and to lose himself thus is the artist's immortal joy. Such love and the joy which flows from it cannot remain inoperative. They demand form, and the form must be of such a kind as will be charged with love, with a passion to console and exalt mankind. Wordsworth has said again and again that this was the driving power of his poetry. He lived and wrote to uplift and heal the heart of man, to reveal to it the beauty of nature and human nature and of the Father and Maker of both. In pursuing that aim, he not only told the noble story of humanity as he read it in the retired vales of the Lake Country; he was also borne by his love beyond the mountains and their shepherds into the wide interests of the great world. His body stayed at Grasmere, his soul lived with the human race, with its hopes and faiths, its great causes of liberty and truth, its struggle to find and know itself, its source, its goal. In those youthful days he followed with his poetry the fateful strife of Europe. Wherever freedom strove, his imagination strove with it, and enshrined the strife in verse. The loves and sorrows of his own valley urged him into a deeper sympathy with the loves and sorrows of mankind. It may be that he was often troubled by the woe and terror of those days when the vast shadow of Napoleon darkened over Europe. Indeed he has recorded this trouble; the little cottage felt the pain of the great world. And when the trouble was deep, it disturbed his creative power. But then, he had his remedy. He fell back for comfort on the heart of Nature, with whom he lived in reverence and delight. He had no land, save one little garden, to call his own; but the whole country round was his, and has been made ours, by his enjoyment of it. He had no money, but the riches of the golden woods were his and the crystal of the streams; and the orient thrones had no more glorious gems and tapestries than belonged to him when he loved the flower-embroidered meadows, and the jewelled skies. The whole world is in his possession who loves its beauty, whose soul lives in its soul. This quiet man inherited the earth, and he made use of his inheritance to make its loveliness the possession of the landless poor and the weary dwellers in weary cities. Along with this love and joy, he had the creative power of genius-that great, ineffable thing which turns the quietest and plainest life into a palace of beauty and delight-the making with our own heart and hand, out of our own being, of something which is not ourselves, which has not been before us in the world. This made his life, even when the animation of youth was over, a life of steadfast happiness. His poetic power grew less as he grew older, but this is not the place to dwell on the reasons for this. He still wrote many lovely things, even to the very last years. In some of them we seem to breathe the air of 1807. Though the power grew less, the spirit with which he looked on nature and on humanity was always sympathetic at root; though his opinions changed, the secret of the man did not change. The noble passions of his earlier enthusiasms passed into their sober and habitual use in manhood, into their contemplation in a serene old age, but they never lost their power to fill his heart with their own uplifting joy. The stanza of the 'Ode' on the Intimations of Immortality' in Childhood which he wrote in 1803-6 was prophetic. It describes what, in the voiceless depth of an old man's heart, he felt after forty years had gone by, and when he came to die. And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves, |