most sweet to his ears.

to escape; but except the loss of his, did conviction does not come all at once, daughter Dora, no sorrow even of the first and neither does it come for nought. magnitude ever came his way. He was a Armed in it, as in triple armour, he mainhappy, prosperous, and successful men, as tained the steady tenor of his way, acceptwell as a great and famous poet. If he ing honour from no man, calmly workdid not win the popular ear at once, he ing out the great work of his life-himhad the never-failing support of applause self. He did this as Goethe did it, but from his immediate friends, the opinion more innocently, more kindly that Goethe, of one of whom, at least - Coleridge - he - with a sense of law and duty in which was well warranted in accepting as worth his great contemporary was altogether dethat of half a hundred ordinary critics. ficient. Goethe secured his training at And thus his life rolled on, full of peace and the cost of a few women's hearts, more or high contemplation, full of love and comfort less, which did not matter. Wordsworth and beauty, and the praise which was bought his more cheaply at nobody's cost, winning it slowly from the slow and noiseWe may say here, and Maga may be less progress of his own thoughts. But forgiven if it is said with a certain com- still, to Wordsworth as to Goethe, the placency, that these were the pages in things that surrounded him were all as inwhich anything like true criticism and ap-struments working out his advancement, preciation of the poetry of Wordsworth whether it were a nation in revolution, or first appeared. The Essays of Professor the clouds upon a northern sky and the Wilson upon the rising light which lesser ripples on a lake. The most wonderful critics had so pertinaciously endeavoured evidence of this self-regard - which is not to extinguish, were the first worthy and conceit, nor vanity, nor any frivolous mopublic tributes to his glory. We will not tive, but a deep and solemn sense that his attempt to calculate how much the gen-self was the most momentous thing within erous warmth of the young critic, himself so full of poetic fire and insight, had to do with the gradual opening of the general mind to a perception of the poet's real greatness; but the splendid critical it seemed only right and seemly to devote powers of Christopher North, and his high instinctive sympathy with everything beautiful and noble, were never exercised more lovingly, nor more warmly expressed.

his ken, the most sovereign and majestic, with a natural claim upon the aid, not to say allegiance, of all things—is to be found in "The Prelude." To Wordsworth

a long, serious, and, as we have already said, almost solemn poem, to the history of the growth of his mind. If it is well for the student to trace the growth of states and their development, how much Wordsworth was thus placed in the very more interesting must it be, how much best circumstances for perfecting himself more important for the world, to trace and his work. Everything served and how the poet's mind "orbed into the perbowed to the necessity of providing for fect star," and developed in all its gifts his tranquillity in a way which must have and powers? This he said to himself, increased his natural high sense of his gravely, unconscious of any lack of graceown worth. And that high sense of merit ful humbleness and that instinctive modwas in itself a support to him which it is esty of nature which is as natural to some difficult to over-estimate. It is not a great minds as self-consciousness is to graceful or love-attracting element in his others. Wordsworth knew, confessed, and character. It deprives him of that sweeter was fully prepared to acknowledge anygrace of humility which endears the poet where, that he himself was great - he had to us, and gives to poetry that air of nat-known it in his earliest years, from the ural spontaneous birth after which the time when he first began to understand grand and sweet unconsciousness of whither his youthful musings tended. He Shakespeare makes the English mind hanker. But Wordsworth was not of the Shakespearian mould, and was in no sense, at no moment of his poetical life, free of self-consciousness. On the contrary, he had nursed himself, trained himself, for the role of great poet. He believed in himself profoundly, believing at the same time that it was easier for the whole world to be in the wrong than for Wordsworth to be in the wrong. Such a splen

knew it fully during all his life. Shakespeare, we may suppose, may have smiled over his fame may have lightly laid it aside, and attributed his success to some knack he had; but Wordsworth knew it was no knack, but genius. Wordsworth was always aware of his full claim upon the admiration of men.

This self-consciousness has its advantages as well as its disadvantages. It deprives its possessor of a certain simple

common maxim, that a man's life, truly told, is the most interesting of all topics to his fellow-creatures -a partial truth, which has been productive of much mischief in the world of letters. The other side of the shield bears the other legend:

sweetness which is the last glory of the great; it takes away from him the dew and the fragrance of that most gracious humility which is as a perennial youth; but at the same time it supports him through his difficulties, and makes his troubles lighter. And it has, besides, this wonder- that every individual sooner or later beful practical effect, that no man can believe in himself persistently and consistently without in the end making other people believe in him. Wordsworth seated himself as on a throne, in the seclusion of his mountains. He said to the world, as Constance said in the royalty of her grief: "Here I and poetry sit; this is my throne -let kings come bow to it." And when the hour arrived the kings did come and bowed; and all the world acknowledged that the man who had been the first to divine his own greatness, had justified his own decision, and proved the value of his judgment.

comes wearisome to his fellows who has not some actual part to play among men, and is not the centre of other lives; and that the more he wraps himself up in his own individuality, the more he palls upon the general taste, and loses the interest which humanity has in all human things. We have no right to apply this criticism to Wordsworth, we repeat, since he himself never proffered this record of himself to the admiration of the world; but it would be well that it should be more fully recognized by all men of genius who are tempted to make themselves their sole subject. For this reason chiefly "The Prelude " is never likely to take that place in the general estimation which in many parts it deserves; but the student who turns to it for help in understanding either the mind of Wordsworth or the state of feeling current among many generous and fine spirits in the end of the last and beginning of the present century, will find that it is a noble and pleasant path by which he has to travel, and will be rewarded in his search for knowledge, by finding many a lovely flower of fairest poesy on the way.

"The Prelude" is full of noble and beautiful passages, and will always be invaluable to the student both of history and of man. We have already quoted from it the powerful historical sketch of the French Revolution - a sketch which we think deserves a high place among the many records of that wonderful event, and gives to the reader of the present generation a new and individuaÎ view from an original standing-ground. There is also much of the charm of autobiography in the poem, and it affords an insight which nothing else can do into the poet's life. "The Excursion" occupies a different There is nothing finer in all his works position. Wordsworth has himself inthan that picture of the vale of Esthwaite, formed us, that it was after the composihis school, his "Dame," and all the influ- tion of "The Prelude" that the idea of ences that formed his boyhood and de- this still greater work occurred to him. lighted his youth. This is brighter and "The result of the investigation which fresher than anything in "The Excursion," | gave rise to it was a determination to and not less lofty in its truth to nature. compose a philosophical poem containing But notwithstanding these great recom- views of men, nature, and society, to be mendations, the poem is founded upon a mistake a mistake which Wordsworth probably was aware of, since he never in his lifetime gave this record of individual progress to the inspection of the world. The self-belief of the poet here overshot its mark; his sense of his own greatness overtopped the slow conviction of his fellow-men. He had not sufficient sympathy with his race, notwithstanding his old and persistent theory that it was his mission to reveal the secrets of humble life to the world-to perceive that the commonest village tale of love and sorrow would have interested that world more deeply than the history of the mental growth of Apollo himself. He had yet to learn, it would appear, the reverse truth of that

called the Recluse." This Recluse was, we presume, the personage introduced in "The Excursion " as the Solitary - -a man driven into the despair of bereavement by the death of his wife and children, roused again into feverish excitement by the beginning of the French Revolution, led to wild excesses during its progress, and finally hunted back by the renewed and deeper despair caused by its bloody and terrible failure into a lonely nook among the mountains, where, a misanthrope and sceptic, disbelieving God and doubting man, he consumed the weary days in absolute loneliness. The subject of "The Excursion" is the contrast between this lonely, imbittered, and miserable man, and the impersonation of Christian philosophy,

tor, the Pastor, upon the different tombs in the graveyard, a certain impression is made upon the mind of the Solitary. No doubt, the poet's purpose was to carry out this beginning in the Recluse, and finally to reconcile his hero to the universe, and bring him back at once to God and man. This, however, he never completed; and the poem which remains to us, is the record of but two summer days among the mountains, filled with snatches of human story, and with what we have ventured to call much eloquent talk talk at once eloquent and lofty. To quote from a poem so well-known and so full of noble passages seems useless. Here, however, is the scene in which the forlorn and weary hermit, fugitive from the disappointments and vanities of the earth, has sought a refuge,

cheerfulness, and wisdom, called the Wan- and the comments of a fourth interlocuderer, his countryman and contemporary. Te famous fact which has called forth so many amusing and witty comments, that this Wanderer is represented to us as occupying no more dignified position in life than that of a pedlar, is in reality quite insignificant, and not worth considering in the poem. It is the last assertion of the old doctrine which Wordsworth proudly gave himself credit for having discovered, and which he clung to with semifictitious heat, whenever his genuine inspiration slackened that a poor man may feel as deeply, and with as much reverence, as a rich man, a doctrine never really questioned by any mind capable of judging. As one last spasmodic and fantastic assertion of this quite unquestioned principle, it pleases the poet, in that mingling of weakness which accompanies all and strength, to make his sage a packman. But it is as puerile on the part of the critic to dwell upon this, as it was on the part of the poet to make it so. The Wanderer wanted no profession, nor rank, nor visible means of subsistence. The laws of natural existence have nothing to do with a being so abstract and typical. He is an impersonation, just as the Solitary is an impersonation. The one is a refined and matured soul, full of gentle wisdom and philosophy, calm as a spectator amid the troubles of the world man detached from all personal burdens, and passionless as was the poet who created him. The other is intended to be an embodiment of humanity outraged and disappointed, and unable to learn the lesson of submission -a fiery, impatient, proud, and passionate spirit; such a one as cannot bend his neck under any spiritual yoke, who demands happiness and delight from earth and heaven, and whose soul chafes and struggles against all the bonds and all the burdens of the flesh.

-a

"Wastes the sad remainder of his hours, Steeped in a self-indulging spleen that wants Its own voluptuousness.

not

We scaled, without a track to ease our steps,
A steep ascent; and reached a dreary plain,
With a tumultuous waste of huge hill-tops
Before us; savage region! which I paced
Dispirited: when, all at once, behold!
Beneath our feet, a little lowly vale,
A lowly vale, and yet uplifted high
Among the mountains; even as if the spot
Had been from eldest time by wish of theirs
So placed, to be shut out from all the world!
Urn-like it was in shape, deep as an urn;
With rocks encompassed, save that to the south
Was one small opening, where a heath-clad
ridge
Supplied a boundary less abrupt and close:
A quiet treeless nook, with two green fields,
A liquid pool that glittered in the sun,
And one bare dwelling; one abode, no more!
It seemed the home of poverty and toil,
Though not of want: the little fields made

green

By husbandry of many thrifty years,
Paid cheerful tribute to the moorland house.

- There crows the cock, single in his domain:
The small birds find in spring no thicket there
To shroud them; only from the neighbouring
vales
The cuckoo, straggling up to the hill-tops,
Shouteth faint tidings of some gladder place."

The Wanderer muses tenderly, cheerfully - almost joyfully-about the world, in which he continually sees Good combating with evil while the Solitary shuts himself up in the recesses of the mountains, and broods with bitter grief and indignation over all the miseries he has known. The story, if story it can be called, tells us how the Wanderer, accompanied by Perhaps the most wonderful thing in the visionary figure of the Poet himself "The Excursion," however, is the atmos"I" the looker-on and chorus of the phere whica breathes through every page: long dialogue-goes to visit the lakes; the solemn, serious, yet cheerful air of the how he persuades the other out into the mountains, at once invigorating and world, as represented by the valley with subduing. No passion, no excitement is its cottages and its churchyard below: there. Everything is calm as heaven: an and how, by dint of much eloquent talk, eternity of brooding quiet in which those

66

giant peaks stand up before God. A great tage"-is, we believe, the one which will stillness is over all- a stillness as of dis- longest retain its hold upon the general tance and space, in which it seems natural reader. The humanity in it is stronger that the generations should come and go and fuller, the picture more definite and calmly, as the leaves come and go on the clear, than in the brief sketches of the trees; migrating from the grey cottage to Churchyard among the Mountains ;" the green grave with a peaceable serenity, and sympathy is more readily awakened calm as death is, calm as life was. In for Margaret's long endurance and misery, such scenes the still surroundings of life than for the more artificial wretchedness cease to be secondary, and softly, solemnly of the Solitary in his seclusion. Margaret glide into the first place. It is man who herself, however, though the picture is full is foremost in great towns and cities; it is of power, is defective in the most characman even who takes the leading place in teristic way. She is an impassioned, the wide, rich, patient plains which toil for though deeply serious and dutiful woman, him like their own cattle, but never usurp drawn by a painter who knows passion his sovereignty. But among the moun- only scientifically as a strange power in tains, man in his pettiness is put aside- the world, but who has no personal conthey live and last, while he but comes and ception of its wild force and fervour. goes. Their presence helps the thinker, as With a curious ignorance of the element nothing else can do, to hold the balance in which he is working, he spreads the between peace and strife, and demonstrate broad canvas - which is too broad, too how continuous and universal is the one, expansive, for the rapid and vehement how episodical and momentary the other. and consuming power which he means to It was Wordsworth more than any other portray. Here his very truthfulness of who revealed to the world this quality of mind, and inability to represent that which the mountains. We, so much lower down he does not know, balks the poetic instinct in descent, receive it calmly as an estab- which makes him divine the existence of a lished axiom; but it was he who made kind of emotion which he has never felt. those dwellers in the land known to man. He knows that passion is wild and hasty Among real hills, by real crags, with great and impetuous, but all the powers in his Nature breathing softly through all the own mind are so slow and gradual that he wonderful stillness, the wandering figures cannot permit himself to be carried away move the men muse and reason. If it even by the torrent he has wished to is true that the poet has filled the scene paint. He takes away all the composure with reflections of his own thoughtful and calm of the steadier temperament from mind and lofty ponderings, till mountain his heroine, yet he drags on and prolongs and glen seem but shadows of himself, it her life and sufferings as if it were a is also true that they have become part of slowly-growing and tranquil sorrow, not his nature, and have given him as much as a consum ng passion of grief and suspense, they have received from him. The patient that absorbed her being. The restlessquiet, and long endurance which is the ness of her misery, and her utter abandonvery sentiment of their being, has entered ment to it, are not those of a spirit that into his heart. A certain solemn yet sweet will linger out "nine tedious years; " but conjunction is between the man who ex- he is not aware of this, nor does he see pounds them, and the silent grandeur that no such woman, unless she had been which he reveals. How much it is the carried away by some swift destruction mountains, how much it is Wordsworth, which she could not resist, would have we cannot tell, in the dimness of our per- fallen into the wild recklessness of lonely ceptions; but Wordsworth and his hills wanderings, leaving behind her "a solitary united breathe calm over us as we listen, infant." In short, here is a picture of a and they are as one in our hearts. soul which has lost the helm of her nature, and abandoned herself to the sway of a misery which she cannot control, drawn by one from whose hand no storm could ever have wrested his helm, and who was unaware what passion meant. The inconsistency is curious, but it is inevitable; and notwithstanding this characteristic defect, the picture goes to the reader's heart.

Notwithstanding, we are obliged to confess our conviction that "The Excursion" is very unlikely ever to be widely known, or loved as it deserves out of a very limited circle. It is long and very serious, and broken by few episodes which can relieve the reader's mind from the intense strain of high and continuous thought which fills it. The first book-that which Wordsworth read to Coleridge when they first It is, however, a very serious matter met, under the title of "The Ruined Cot- when a poet's fame depends upon a long

-

But, as it sometimes chanceth, from the
might

Of joy in minds that can no further go,
As high as we have mounted in delight,
In our dejection do we sink as low;
To me that morning did it happen so,
And fears and fancies thick upon me came,
Dim sadness and blind thoughts I knew not,
nor could name.

I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous boy,
The sleepless soul that perished in his pride;
Of him who walked in glory and in joy
Behind his plough along the mountain-side.
By our own spirits are we deified:
We poets in our youth begin in gladness,
But thereof comes in the end despondency
and madness."'

Never was a picture more perfect or more
suggestive.

a

and serious philosophical poem. Had Wordsworth written "The Excursion and "The Prelude " alone, we could have looked for nothing but his final relegation to that honoured and renowned but dusty shelf where "Paradise Lost' holds its place. It is another of the many resemblances which we have not had space to point out between him and Milton, that though the great poems of both are spoken of with bated breath and profound respect, it is to their lesser works the débris of their greatness the baskets of fragments which posterity has gathered up, and cherishes among its dearest possessions that they owe their warm and living place in the heart of England. At the same time it proves the greatness both of the elder and the younger poet, that their minor works include in one case the splendour of Comus," and in the other, such a won- But time presses, and we can only now derful outburst of highest poetry as the ask the reader to recall to his mind Ode on the Intimations of Immortality." lighter task-the wonderful brief lines We have left ourselves no room to com- occurring here and there, some of them ment upon that great and most touching claiming to be no more than what our poem; nor on that other which to our grandfathers called Copies of Verses," own mind embodies, with singular beauty which breathe a thousand suggestions into and force, at once Wordsworth's highest the spirit, and whisper about us like a soft strain of melodious composition and spring breeze, bringing with them all manhis characteristic philosophy-the verses ner of gentle fancies. Let us take as an which the poet (always given to uncouth example the first upon which the book and heavy titles) has called "Resolution opens- the "Lines written in Early and Independence." This sketch of "the Spring" - already mentioned as one of Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor," with Wordsworth's earliest compositions. It is its wonderful representation of the land- the merest trifle. but the man who has scape, and equally wonderful sketch of the scattered such trifles about the world can wayward poetic nature turning in a mo- never lose the human reward of admiring ment from hope to despondency, is one of love and praise: the very finest of his briefer works. The description of the bright morning after a night of rain and storm, the stockdove brooding over his own sweet voice," the birds singing in the woods, the air full of "the pleasant sound of waters," is as perfect as anything in poetry.

-

"I heard a thousand blended notes,

While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grievel my heart to think
What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And 'tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure:
But the least motion which they made,
It seemed a thrill of pleasure."

Or let us take this other :

"He is retired as noontide dew,
Or fountain in a noonday grove,
And you must love him, e'er to you
He will seem worthy of your love.