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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Wordsworth, by F. W. H. Myers
+
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+Title: Wordsworth
+
+Author: F. W. H. Myers
+
+Release Date: August, 2005 [EBook #8747]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on August 9, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WORDSWORTH ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+WORDSWORTH
+
+BY F. W. H. MYERS
+
+
+  "From worlds not quickened by the sun
+  A portion of the gift is won;
+  An intermingling of Heaven's pomp is spread
+  On ground which British shepherds tread."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+CHAPTER I.
+  BIRTH AND EDUCATION--CAMBRIDGE
+
+CHAPTER II.
+  RESIDENCE IN LONDON AND IN FRANCE
+
+CHAPTER III.
+  MISS WORDSWORTH--"LYRICAL BALLADS"--SETTLEMENT AT
+  GRASMERE
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+  THE ENGLISH LAKES
+
+CHAPTER V.
+  MARRIAGE--SOCIETY--HIGHLAND TOUR
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+  SIR GEORGE BEAUMONT--DEATH OF JOHN WORDSWORTH
+
+CHAPTER VII
+  "HAPPY WARRIOR" AND PATRIOTIC POEMS
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+  CHILDREN--LIFE AT RYDAL MOUNT--"THE EXCURSION"
+
+CHAPTER IX
+  POETIC DICTION--"LAODAMIA"--"EVENING ODE"
+
+CHAPTER X
+  NATURAL RELIGION
+
+CHAPTER XI
+  ITALIAN TOUR--"ECCLESIASTICAL SONNETS"--POETICAL VIEWS--
+       LAUREATESHIP
+
+CHAPTER XII
+  LETTERS ON THE KENDAL AND WINDERMERE RAILWAY--CONCLUSION
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+BIRTH AND EDUCATION--CAMBRIDGE.
+
+I cannot, perhaps, more fitly begin this short biography than with
+some words in which its subject has expressed his own feelings as to
+the spirit in which such a task should be approached. "Silence,"
+says Wordsworth, "is a privilege of the grave, a right of the
+departed: let him, therefore, who infringes that right by speaking
+publicly of, for, or against, those who cannot speak for themselves,
+take heed that he opens not his mouth without a sufficient sanction.
+Only to philosophy enlightened by the affections does it belong
+justly to estimate the claims of the deceased on the one hand, and
+of the present age and future generations on the other, and to
+strike a balance between them. Such philosophy runs a risk of
+becoming extinct among us, if the coarse intrusions into the recesses,
+the gross breaches upon the sanctities, of domestic life, to which we
+have lately been more and more accustomed, are to be regarded as
+indications of a vigorous state of public feeling. The wise and good
+respect, as one of the noblest characteristics of Englishmen, that
+jealousy of familiar approach which, while it contributes to the
+maintenance of private dignity, is one of the most efficacious
+guardians of rational public freedom."
+
+In accordance with these views the poet entrusted to his nephew, the
+late Bishop of Lincoln, the task of composing memoirs of his life,
+in the just confidence that nothing would by such hands be given to
+the world which was inconsistent with the dignity either of the
+living or of the dead. From those memoirs the facts contained in the
+present work have been for the most part drawn. It has, however,
+been my fortune, through hereditary friendships, to have access to
+many manuscript letters and much oral tradition bearing upon the
+poet's private life;[1] and some details and some passages of
+letters hitherto unpublished, will appear in these pages. It would
+seem, however, that there is but little of public interest, in
+Wordsworth's life which has not already been given to the world, and
+I have shrunk from narrating such minor personal incidents as he
+would himself have thought it needless to dwell upon. I have
+endeavoured, in short, to write as though the Subject of this
+biography were himself its Auditor, listening, indeed, from some
+region where all of truth is discerned, and nothing but truth desired,
+but checking by his venerable presence, any such revelation as
+public advantage does not call for, and private delicacy would
+condemn.
+
+As regards the critical remarks which these pages contain. I have
+only to say that I have carefully consulted such notices of the poet
+as his personal friends have left us[1], and also, I believe,
+nearly every criticism of importance which has appeared on his works.
+I find with pleasure that a considerable agreement of opinion exists,--
+though less among professed poets or critics, than among men of
+eminence in other departments of thought or action whose attention
+has been directed to Wordsworth's poems. And although I have felt it
+right to express in each case my own views with exactness, I have
+been able to feel that I am not obtruding on the reader any merely
+fanciful estimate in which better accredited judges would refuse to
+concur.
+
+[Footnote 1: I take this opportunity of thanking Mr. William
+Wordsworth, the son (now deceased), and Mr. William Wordsworth, the
+grandson, of the poet, for help most valuable in enabling me to give
+a true impression of the poet's personality.]
+
+Without further preface I now begin my story of Wordsworth's life,
+in words which he himself dictated to his intended biographer.
+"I was born," he said, "at Cockermouth, in Cumberland, on April 7th,
+1770, the second son of John Wordsworth, attorney-at-law--as
+lawyers of this class were then called--and law-agent to Sir James
+Lowther, afterwards Earl of Lonsdale. My mother was Anne, only
+daughter of William Cookson, mercer, of Penrith, and of Dorothy,
+born Crackanthorp, of the ancient family of that name, who from the
+times of Edward the Third had lived in Newbiggen Hall, Westmoreland.
+My grandfather was the first of the name of Wordsworth who came into
+Westmoreland, where he purchased the small estate of Sockbridge. He
+was descended from a family who had been settled at Peniston, in
+Yorkshire, near the sources of the Don, probably before the Norman
+Conquest. Their names appear on different occasions in all the
+transactions, personal and public, connected with that parish; and I
+possess, through the kindness of Colonel Beaumont, an almery, made in
+1525, at the expense of a William Wordsworth, as is expressed in a
+Latin inscription carved upon it, which carries the pedigree of the
+family back four generations from himself. The time of my infancy
+and early boyhood was passed, partly at Cockermouth, and partly with
+my mother's parents at Penrith, where my mother, in the year 1778,
+died of a decline, brought on by a cold, in consequence of being put,
+at a friend's house in London, in what used to be called 'a best
+bedroom.' My father never recovered his usual cheerfulness of mind
+after this loss, and died when I was in my fourteenth year, a
+schoolboy, just returned from Hawkshead, whither I had been sent with
+my elder brother Richard, in my ninth year."
+
+"I remember my mother only in some few situations, one of which was
+her pinning a nosegay to my breast, when I was going to say the
+catechism in the church, as was customary before Easter. An intimate
+friend of hers told me that she once said to her, that the only one
+of her five children about whose future life she was anxious was
+William; and he, she said, would be remarkable, either for good or
+for evil. The cause of this was, that I was of a stiff, moody, and
+violent temper; so much so that I remember going once into the
+attics of my grandfather's house at Penrith, upon some indignity
+having been put upon me, with an intention of destroying myself with
+one of the foils, which I knew was kept there. I took the foil in
+hand, but my heart failed. Upon another occasion, while I was at my
+grandfather's house at Penrith, along with my eldest brother, Richard,
+we were whipping tops together in the large drawing-room, on which
+the carpet was only laid down upon particular occasions. The walls
+were hung round with family pictures, and I said to my brother,
+'Dare you strike your whip through that old lady's petticoat?' He
+replied, 'No, I won't.' 'Then', said I, 'here goes!' and I struck my
+lash through her hooped petticoat; for which, no doubt, though I have
+forgotten it, I was properly punished. But, possibly from some want
+of judgment in punishments inflicted, I had become perverse and
+obstinate in defying chastisement, and rather proud of it than
+otherwise."
+
+"Of my earliest days at school I have little to say, but that they
+were very happy ones, chiefly because I was left at liberty then,
+and in the vacations, to read whatever books I liked. For example, I
+read all Fielding's works, _Don Quixote, Gil Bias_, and any part of
+Swift that I liked--_Gulliver's Travels_, and the _Tale of the Tub_,
+being both much to my taste. It may be, perhaps, as well to mention,
+that the first verses which I wrote were a task imposed by my master;
+the subject, _The Summer Vacation_; and of my own accord I added
+others upon _Return to School_. There was nothing remarkable in
+either poem; but I was called upon, among other scholars, to write
+verses upon the completion of the second centenary from the
+foundation of the school in 1585 by Archbishop Sandys. These verses
+were much admired--far more than they deserved, for they were but a
+tame imitation of Pope's versification, and a little in his style."
+
+But it was not from exercises of this kind that Wordsworth's
+school-days drew their inspiration. No years of his life, perhaps,
+were richer in strong impressions; but they were impressions derived
+neither from books nor from companions, but from the majesty and
+loveliness of the scenes around him;--from Nature, his life-long
+mistress, loved with the first heats of youth. To her influence we
+shall again recur; it will be most convenient first to trace
+Wordsworth's progress through the curriculum of ordinary education.
+
+It was due to the liberality of Wordsworth's two uncles, Richard
+Wordsworth and Christopher Crackanthorp (under whose care he and his
+brothers were placed at there father's death, in 1783), that his
+education was prolonged beyond his school-days. For Sir James
+Lowther, afterwards Lord Lonsdale,--whose agent Wordsworth's father,
+Mr. John Wordsworth, was--becoming aware that his agent had about
+5000£ at the bank, and wishing, partly on political grounds, to
+make his power over him absolute, had forcibly borrowed this sum of
+him, and then refused to repay it. After Mr. John Wordsworth's death
+much of the remaining fortune which he left behind him was wasted in
+efforts to compel Lord Lonsdale to refund this sum; out it was never
+recovered till his death in 1801, when his successor repaid 8500£
+to the Wordsworths, being a full acquittal, with interest, of
+the original debt. The fortunes of the Wordsworth family were,
+therefore, at a low ebb in 1787, and much credit is due to the
+uncles who discerned the talents of William and Christopher, and
+bestowed a Cambridge education on the future Poet Laureate, and the
+future Master of Trinity.
+
+In October, 1787, then, Wordsworth went up as an undergraduate to St.
+John's College, Cambridge. The first court of this College, in the
+south-western corner of which were Wordsworth's rooms, is divided
+only by a narrow lane from the Chapel of Trinity College, and his
+first memories are of the Trinity clock, telling the hours "twice
+over, with a male and female voice", of the pealing organ, and of
+the prospect when
+
+  From my pillow looking forth, by light
+  Of moon or favouring stars I could behold
+  The antechapel, where the statue stood
+  Of Newton with his prism and silent face.
+  The marble index of a mind for ever
+  Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.
+
+For the most part the recollections which Wordsworth brought away
+from Cambridge are such as had already found expression more than
+once in English literature; for it has been the fortune of that
+ancient University to receive in her bosom most of that long line of
+poets who form the peculiar glory of our English speech. Spenser,
+Ben Jonson, and Marlowe; Dryden, Cowley, and Waller; Milton, George
+Herbert, and Gray--to mention only the most familiar names--had owed
+allegiance to that mother who received Wordsworth now, and Coleridge
+and Byron immediately after him. "Not obvious, not obtrusive, she;"
+but yet her sober dignity has often seemed no unworthy setting for
+minds, like Wordsworth's, meditative without languor, and energies
+advancing without shock or storm. Never, perhaps, has the spirit of
+Cambridge been more truly caught than in Milton's _Penseroso_; for
+this poem obviously reflects the seat of learning which the poet had
+lately left, just as the _Allegro_ depicts the cheerful rusticity of
+the Buckinghamshire village which was his now home. And thus the
+_Penseroso_ was understood by Gray, who, in his _Installation Ode_,
+introduces Milton among the bards and sages who lean from heaven,
+
+  To bless the place where, on their opening soul,
+  First the genuine ardour stole.
+
+"'Twas Milton struck the deep-toned shell," and invoked with the old
+affection the scenes which witnessed his best and early years:
+
+  Ye brown o'er-arching groves,
+  That contemplation loves,
+  Where willowy Camus lingers with delight!
+  Oft at the blush of dawn
+
+  I trod your level lawn.
+  Oft wooed the gleam of Cynthia silver-bright
+  In cloisters dim, far from the haunts of Folly,
+  With Freedom by my side, and soft-eyed Melancholy.
+
+And Wordsworth also "on the dry smooth-shaven green" paced on
+solitary evenings "to the far-off curfew's sound," beneath those
+groves of forest-trees among which "Philomel still deigns a song"
+and the spirit of contemplation lingers still; whether the silent
+avenues stand in the summer twilight filled with fragrance of the
+lime, or the long rows of chestnut engirdle the autumn river-lawns
+with walls of golden glow, or the tall elms cluster in garden or
+_Wilderness_ into towering citadels of green. Beneath one
+exquisite ash-tree, wreathed with ivy, and hung in autumn with
+yellow tassels from every spray, Wordsworth used to linger long
+"Scarcely Spenser's self," he tells us,
+
+  Could have more tranquil visions in his youth,
+  Or could more bright appearances create
+  Of human forms with superhuman powers,
+  Than I beheld loitering on calm clear nights
+  Alone, beneath this fairy work of earth.
+
+And there was another element in Wordsworth's life at Cambridge more
+peculiarly his own--that exultation which a boy born among the
+mountains may feel when he perceives that the delight in the
+external world which the mountains have taught him has not perished
+by uprooting, nor waned for want of nourishment in field or fen; that
+even here, where nature is unadorned, and scenery, as it were,
+reduced to its elements,--where the prospect is but the plain
+surface of the earth, stretched wide beneath an open heaven,--even
+here he can still feel the early glow, can take delight in that
+broad and tranquil greenness, and in the august procession of the day.
+
+  As if awakened, summoned, roused, constrained,
+  I looked for universal things; perused
+  The common countenance of earth and sky--
+  Earth, nowhere unembellished by some trace
+  Of that first Paradise whence man was driven;
+  And sky, whose beauty and bounty are expressed
+  By the proud name she bears--the name of Heaven.
+
+Nor is it only in these open-air scenes that Wordsworth has added to
+the long tradition a memory of his own. The "storied windows richly
+dight," which have passed into a proverb in Milton's song, cast in
+King's College Chapel the same "soft chequerings" upon their
+framework of stone while Wordsworth watched through the pauses of
+the anthem the winter afternoon's departing glow:
+
+  Martyr, or King, or sainted Eremite,
+  Whoe'er ye be that thus, yourselves unseen,
+  Imbue your prison-bars with solemn sheen,
+  Shine on, until ye fade with coming Night.
+
+From those shadowy seats whence Milton had heard "the pealing organ
+blow to the full-voiced choir below," Wordsworth too gazed upon--
+
+  That branching roof
+  Self-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells
+  Where light and shade repose, where music dwells
+  Lingering, and wandering on as both to die--
+  Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof
+  That they were born for immortality.
+
+Thus much, and more, there was of ennobling and unchangeable in the
+very aspect and structure of that ancient University, by which
+Wordsworth's mind was bent towards a kindred greatness. But of
+active moral and intellectual life there was at that time little to
+be found within her walls. The floodtide of her new life had not yet
+set in: she was still slumbering, as she had slumbered long, content
+to add to her majesty by the mere lapse of generations, and
+increment of her ancestral calm. Even had the intellectual life of
+the place been more stirring, it is doubtful how far Wordsworth
+would have been welcomed, or deserved, to be welcomed, by
+authorities or students. He began residence at seventeen, and his
+northern nature was late to flower. There seems, in fact, to have
+been even less of visible promise about him than we should have
+expected; but rather something untamed and insubordinate, something
+heady and self-confident; an independence that seemed only rusticity,
+and an indolent ignorance which assumed too readily the tones of
+scorn. He was as yet a creature of the lakes and mountains, and love
+for Nature was only slowly leading him to love and reverence for man.
+Nay, such attraction as he had hitherto felt for the human race had
+been interwoven with her influence in a way so strange that to many
+minds it will seem a childish fancy not worth recounting. The
+objects of his boyish idealization had been Cumbrian shepherds--a
+race whose personality seems to melt into Nature's--who are united
+as intimately with moor and mountain as the petrel with the sea.
+
+  A rambling schoolboy, thus
+  I felt his presence in his own domain
+  As of a lord and master--or a power,
+  Or genius, under Nature, under God;
+  Presiding; and severest solitude
+  Had more commanding looks when he was there.
+  When up the lonely brooks on rainy days
+  Angling I went, or trod the trackless hills
+  By mists bewildered, suddenly mine eyes
+  Have glanced upon him distant a few steps,
+  In size a giant, stalking through thick fog,
+  His sheep like Greenland bears; or, as he stepped
+  Beyond the boundary line of some hill-shadow,
+  His form hath flashed upon me, glorified
+  By the deep radiance of the setting sun;
+  Or him have I descried in distant sky,
+  A solitary object and sublime,
+  Above all height! Like an aërial cross
+  Stationed alone upon a spiry rock
+  Of the Chartreuse, for worship. Thus was man
+  Ennobled outwardly before my sight;
+  And thus my heart was early introduced
+  To an unconscious love and reverence
+  Of human nature; hence the human form
+  To me became an index of delight,
+  Of grace and honour, power and worthiness.
+
+"This sanctity of Nature given to man,"--this interfusion of human
+interest with the sublimity of moor and hill,--formed a typical
+introduction to the manner in which Wordsworth regarded mankind to
+the end,--depicting him as set, as it were, amid impersonal
+influences, which make his passion and struggle but a little thing;
+as when painters give but a strip of their canvas to the fields and
+cities of men, and overhang the narrowed landscape with the space
+and serenity of heaven.
+
+To this distant perception of man--of man "purified, removed, and to
+a distance that was fit"--was added, in his first summer vacation, a
+somewhat closer interest in the small joys and sorrows of the
+villagers of Hawkshead,--a new sympathy for the old Dame in whose
+house the poet still lodged, for "the quiet woodman in the woods,"
+and even for the "frank-hearted maids of rocky Cumberland," with
+whom he now delighted to spend an occasional evening in dancing and
+country mirth. And since the events in this poet's life are for the
+most part inward and unseen, and depend upon some stock and
+coincidence between the operations of his spirit and the cosmorama
+of the external world, he has recorded with especial emphasis a
+certain sunrise which met him as he walked homewards from one of
+these scenes of rustic gaiety,--a sunrise which may be said to have
+begun that poetic career which a sunset was to close:
+
+  Ah! Need I say, dear Friend! That to the brim
+  My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
+  Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
+  Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly,
+  A dedicated Spirit.
+
+His second long vacation brought him a further gain in human
+affections. His sister, of whom he had seen little for some years,
+was with him once more at Penrith, and with her another maiden,
+
+  By her exulting outside look of youth
+  And placid under-countenance, first endeared;
+
+whose presence now laid the foundation of a love which was to be
+renewed and perfected when his need for it was full, and was to be
+his support and solace to his life's end. His third long vacation he
+spent in a walking tour in Switzerland. Of this, now the commonest
+relaxation of studious youth, he speaks as of an "unprecedented
+course," indicating "a hardy slight of college studies and their set
+rewards." And it seems, indeed, probable that Wordsworth and his
+friend Jones were actually the first undergraduates who ever spent
+their summer in this way. The pages of the _Prelude_ which narrate
+this excursion, and especially the description of the crossing of
+the Simplon,--
+
+  The immeasurable height
+  Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,--
+
+form one of the most impressive parts of that singular
+autobiographical poem, which, at first sight so tedious and insipid,
+seems to gather force and meaning with each fresh perusal. These
+pages, which carry up to the verge of manhood the story of
+Wordsworth's career, contain, perhaps, as strong and simple a
+picture as we shall anywhere find of hardy English youth,--its proud
+self-sufficingness and careless independence of all human things.
+Excitement, and thought, and joy, seem to come at once at its bidding;
+and the chequered and struggling existence of adult men seems
+something which it need never enter, and hardly deigns to comprehend.
+
+Wordsworth and his friend encountered on this tour many a stirring
+symbol of the expectancy that was running through the nations of
+Europe. They landed at Calais "on the very eve of that great federal
+day" when the Trees of Liberty were planted all over France. They
+met on their return
+
+  The Brabant armies on the fret
+  For battle in the cause of liberty.
+
+But the exulting pulse that ran through the poet's veins could
+hardly yet pause to sympathize deeply even with what in the world's
+life appealed most directly to ardent youth.
+
+  A stripling, scarcely of the household then
+  Of social life, I looked upon these things
+  As from a distance; heard, and saw, and felt--
+  Was touched, but with no intimate concern.
+  I seemed to move along them as a bird
+  Moves through the air--or as a fish pursues
+  Its sport, or feeds in its proper element.
+  I wanted not that joy, I did not need
+  Such help. The ever-living universe,
+  Turn where I might, was opening out its glories;
+  And the independent spirit of pure youth
+  Called forth at every season new delights,
+  Spread round my steps like sunshine o'er green fields.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+RESIDENCE IN LONDON AND IN FRANCE.
+
+Wordsworth took his B.A. degree in January, 1791, and quitted
+Cambridge with no fixed intentions as to his future career.
+"He did not feel himself," he said long afterwards, "good enough for
+the Church; he felt that his mind was not properly disciplined for
+that holy office, and that the struggle between his conscience and
+his impulses would have made life a torture. He also shrank from the
+law. He had studied military history with great interest, and the
+strategy of war; and he always fancied that he had talents for
+command; and he at one time thought of a military life; but then he
+was without connexions, and he felt if he were ordered to the West
+Indies his talents would not save him from the yellow fever, and he
+gave that up." He therefore repaired to London, and lived there for
+a time on a small allowance and with no definite aim. His relations
+with the great city were of a very slight and external kind. He had
+few acquaintances, and spent his time mainly in rambling about the
+streets. His descriptions of this phase of his life have little
+interest. There is some flatness in an enumeration of the
+nationalities observable in a London crowd, concluding thus:--
+
+  Malays, Lascars, the Tartar, the Chinese,
+  And Negro Ladies in white muslin gowns.
+
+But Wordsworth's limitations were inseparably connected with his
+strength. And just as the flat scenery of Cambridgeshire had only
+served to intensify his love for such elements of beauty and
+grandeur as still were present in sky and fen, even so the
+bewilderment of London taught him to recognize with an intenser joy
+such fragments of things rustic, such aspects of things eternal, as
+were to be found amidst that rush and roar. To the frailer spirit of
+Hartley Coleridge the weight of London might seem a load impossible
+to shake off. "And what hath Nature," he plaintively asked,--
+
+  And what hath Nature but the blank void sky
+  And the thronged river toiling to the main?
+
+But Wordsworth saw more than this. He became, as one may say, the
+poet not of London considered as London, but of London considered as
+a part of the country. Like his own _Farmer of Tilsbury Vale_--
+
+  In the throng of the Town like a Stranger is he,
+  Like one whose own Country's far over the sea;
+  And Nature, while through the great city be hies,
+  Full ten times a day takes his heart by surprise.
+
+Among the poems describing these sudden shocks of vision and memory
+none is more exquisite than the _Reverie of Poor Susan_:
+
+  At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears,
+  Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years;
+  Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard
+  In the silence of morning the song of the Bird.
+
+  'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees
+  A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;
+  Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,
+  And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.
+
+The picture is one of those which come home to many a country heart
+with one of those sudden "revulsions into the natural" which
+philosophers assert to be the essence of human joy. But noblest and
+hest known of all these poems is the _Sonnet on Westminster Bridge_,
+"Earth hath not anything to show more fair;" in which nature has
+reasserted her dominion over the works of all the multitude of men;
+and in the early clearness the poet beholds the great City--as
+Sterling imagined it on his dying-bed--"not as full of noise and
+dust and confusion, but as something silent, grand and everlasting."
+And even in later life, when Wordsworth was often in London, and was
+welcome in any society, he never lost this external manner of
+regarding it. He was always of the same mind as the group of
+listeners in his _Power of Music_:
+
+  Now, Coaches and Chariots! Roar on like a stream!
+  Here are twenty Souls happy as souls in a dream:
+  They are deaf to your murmurs, they care not for you,
+  Nor what ye are flying, nor what ye pursue!
+
+He never made the attempt,--vulgarized by so many a "fashionable
+novelist," and in which no poet has succeeded yet,--to disentangle
+from that turmoil its elements of romance and of greatness; to enter
+that realm of emotion where Nature's aspects become the scarcely
+noted accessory of vicissitudes that transcend her own; to trace the
+passion or the anguish which whirl along some lurid vista toward a
+sun that sets in storm, or gaze across silent squares by summer
+moonlight amid a smell of dust and flowers.
+
+But although Wordsworth passed thus through London unmodified and
+indifferent, the current of things was sweeping him on to mingle in
+a fiercer tumult,--to be caught in the tides of a more violent and
+feverish life. In November 1791 he landed in France, meaning to pass
+the winter at Orleans and learn French. Up to this date the French
+Revolution had impressed him in a rather unusual manner,--namely, as
+being a matter of course. The explanation of this view is a somewhat
+singular one. Wordsworth's was an old family, and his connexions
+were some of them wealthy and well placed in the world; but the
+chances of his education had been such, that he could scarcely
+realize to himself any other than a democratic type of society.
+Scarcely once, he tells us, in his school days had he seen boy or
+man who claimed respect on the score of wealth and blood; and the
+manly atmosphere of Cambridge preserved even in her lowest days a
+society
+
+            Where all stood thus far
+  Upon equal ground; that we were brothers all
+  In honour, as in one community,
+  Scholars and gentlemen;
+
+while the teachings of nature and the dignity of Cumbrian peasant
+life had confirmed his high opinion of the essential worth of man.
+The upheaval of the French people, therefore, and the downfall of
+privilege, seemed to him no portent for good or evil, but rather the
+tardy return of a society to its stable equilibrium. He passed
+through revolutionized Paris with satisfaction and sympathy, but
+with little active emotion, and proceeded first to Orleans, and then
+to Blois, between which places he spent nearly a year. At Orleans he
+became intimately acquainted with the nobly-born but republican
+general Beaupuis, an inspiring example of all in the Revolution that
+was self-devoted and chivalrous and had compassion on the wretched
+poor. In conversation with him Wordsworth learnt with what new force
+the well-worn adages of the moralist fall from the lips of one who
+is called upon to put them at once in action, and to stake life
+itself on the verity of his maxims of honour. The poet's heart
+burned within him as he listened. He could not indeed help mourning
+sometimes at the sight of a dismantled chapel, or peopling in
+imagination the forest-glades in which they sat with the chivalry of
+a bygone day. But he became increasingly absorbed in his friend's
+ardour, and the Revolution--_mulier formosa superne_--seemed to him
+big with all the hopes of man.
+
+He returned to Paris in October 1792,--a month after the massacres
+of September; and he has described his agitation and dismay at
+the sight of such world-wide destinies swayed by the hands of
+such men. In a passage which curiously illustrates that reasoned
+self-confidence and deliberate boldness which for the most part he
+showed only in the peaceful incidents of a literary career, he has
+told us how he was on the point of putting himself forward as a
+leader of the Girondist party, in the conviction that his
+singleheartedness of aim would make him, in spite of foreign birth
+and imperfect speech, a point round which the confused instincts of
+the multitude might not impossibly rally.
+
+Such a course of action,--which, whatever its other results, would
+undoubtedly have conducted him to the guillotine with his political
+friends in May 1793,--was rendered impossible by a somewhat
+undignified hindrance. Wordsworth, while in his own eyes "a patriot
+of the world," was in the eyes of others a young man of twenty-two,
+travelling on a small allowance, and running his head into
+unnecessary dangers. His funds were stopped, and he reluctantly
+returned to England at the close of 1792.
+
+And now to Wordsworth, as to many other English patriots, there came,
+on a great scale, that form of sorrow which in private life is one
+of the most agonizing of all--when two beloved beings, each of them
+erring greatly, become involved in bitter hate. The new-born Republic
+flung down to Europe as her battle-gage the head of a king. England,
+in an hour of horror that was almost panic, accepted the defiance,
+and war was declared between the two countries early in 1793.
+"No shock," says Wordsworth,
+
+  Given to my moral nature had I known
+  Down to that very moment; neither lapse
+  Nor turn of sentiment that might be named
+  A revolution, save at this one time;
+
+and the sound of the evening gun-fire at Portsmouth seemed at once
+the embodiment and the premonition of England's guilt and woe.
+
+Yet his distracted spirit could find no comfort in the thought of
+France. For in France the worst came to the worst; and everything
+vanished of liberty except the crimes committed in her name.
+
+  Most melancholy at that time, O Friend!
+  Were my day-thoughts, my nights were miserable.
+  Through months, through years, long after the last beat
+  Of those atrocities, the hour of sleep
+  To me came rarely charged with natural gifts--
+  Such ghastly visions had I of despair,
+  And tyranny, and implements of death;...
+  And levity in dungeons, where the dust
+  Was laid with tears. Then suddenly the scene
+  Changed, and the unbroken dream entangled me
+  In long orations, which I strove to plead
+  Before unjust tribunals,--with a voice
+  Labouring, a brain confounded, and a sense,
+  Death-like, of treacherous desertion, felt
+  In the last place of refuge--my own soul.
+
+These years of perplexity and disappointment, following on a season
+of overstrained and violent hopes, were the sharpest trial through
+which Wordsworth ever passed. The course of affairs in France, indeed,
+was such as seemed by an irony of fate to drive the noblest and
+firmest hearts into the worst aberrations. For first of all in that
+Revolution, Reason had appeared as it were in visible shape, and
+hand in hand with Pity and Virtue; then, as the welfare of the
+oppressed peasantry began to be lost sight of amid the brawls of the
+factions of Paris, all that was attractive and enthusiastic in the
+great movement seemed to disappear, but yet Reason might still be
+thought to find a closer realization here than among scenes more
+serene and fair; and, lastly, Reason set in blood and tyranny and
+there was no more hope from France. But those who, like Wordsworth,
+had been taught by that great convulsion to disdain the fetters of
+sentiment and tradition and to look on Reason as supreme were not
+willing to relinquish their belief because violence had conquered
+her in one more battle. Rather they clung with the greater tenacity,--
+"adhered," in Wordsworth's words,
+
+  More firmly to old tenets, and to prove
+  Their temper, strained them more;
+
+cast off more decisively than ever the influences of tradition, and
+in their Utopian visions even wished to see the perfected race
+severed in its perfection from the memories of humanity, and from
+kinship with the struggling past.
+
+Through a mood of this kind Wordsworth had to travel now. And his
+nature, formed for pervading attachments and steady memories,
+suffered grievously from the privation of much which even the
+coldest and calmest temper cannot forego without detriment and pain.
+For it is not with impunity that men commit themselves to the sole
+guidance of either of the two great elements of their being. The
+penalties of trusting to the emotions alone are notorious; and every
+day affords some instance of a character that has degenerated into a
+bundle of impulses, of a will that has become caprice. But the
+consequences of making Reason our tyrant instead of our king are
+almost equally disastrous.  There is so little which Reason,
+divested of all emotional or instinctive supports, is able to prove
+to our satisfaction that a sceptical aridity is likely to take
+possession of the soul. It was thus with Wordsworth; he was driven
+to a perpetual questioning of all beliefs and analysis of all motives,--
+
+    Till, demanding formal proof,
+  And seeking it in everything, I lost
+  All feeling of conviction; and, in fine,
+  Sick, wearied out with contrarieties,
+  Yielded up moral questions in despair.
+
+In this mood all those great generalized conceptions which are the
+food of our love, our reverence, our religion, dissolve away; and
+Wordsworth tells us that at this time
+
+           Even the visible universe
+  Fell under the dominion of a taste
+  Less spiritual, with microscopic view
+  Was scanned, as I had scanned the moral world.
+
+He looked on the operations of nature "in disconnection dull and
+spiritless;" he could no longer apprehend her unity nor feel her
+charm. He retained indeed his craving for natural beauty, but in an
+uneasy and fastidious mood,--
+
+                       Giving way
+  To a comparison of scene with scene,
+  Bent overmuch on superficial things,
+  Pampering myself with meagre novelties
+  Of colour and proportion; to the moods
+  Of time and season, to the moral power,
+  The affections, and the spirit of the place,
+  Insensible.
+
+Such cold fits are common to all religions: they haunt the artist,
+the philanthropist, the philosopher, the saint. Often they are due
+to some strain of egoism or ambition which has intermixed itself
+with the impersonal desire; sometimes, as in Wordsworth's case, to
+the persistent tension of a mind which has been bent too ardently
+towards an ideal scarce possible to man. And in this case, when the
+objects of a man's habitual admiration are true and noble, they will
+ever be found to suggest some antidote to the fatigues of their
+pursuit. We shall see as we proceed how a deepening insight into the
+lives of the peasantry around him,--the happiness and virtue of
+simple Cumbrian homes,--restored to the poet a serener confidence in
+human nature, amid all the shame and downfall of such hopes in France.
+And that still profounder loss of delight in Nature herself,--that
+viewing of all things "in disconnection dull and spiritless," which,
+as it has been well said, is the truest definition of Atheism,
+inasmuch as a unity in the universe is the first element in our
+conception of God,--this dark pathway also was not without its
+outlet into the day. For the God in Nature is not only a God of
+Beauty, but a God of Law; his unity can be apprehended in power as
+well as in glory; and Wordsworth's mind, "sinking inward upon itself
+from thought to thought," found rest for the time in that austere
+religion,--Hebrew at once and scientific, common to a Newton and a
+Job,--which is fostered by the prolonged contemplation of the mere
+Order of the sum of things.
+
+                       Not in vain
+  I had been taught to reverence a Power
+  That is the visible quality and shape
+  And image of right reason.
+
+Not, indeed, in vain! For he felt now that there is no side of truth,
+however remote from human interests, no aspect of the universe,
+however awful and impersonal, which may not have power at some
+season to guide and support the spirit of man. When Goodness is
+obscured, when Beauty wearies, there are some souls which still can
+cling and grapple to the conception of eternal Law.
+
+Of such stem consolations the poet speaks as having restored him in
+his hour of need. But he gratefully acknowledges also another solace
+of a gentler kind. It was about this time (1795) that Wordsworth was
+blessed with the permanent companionship of his sister, to whom he
+was tenderly attached, but whom, since childhood, he had seen only
+at long intervals. Miss Wordsworth, after her father's death, had
+lived mainly with her maternal grandfather, Mr. Cookson, at Penrith,
+occasionally at Halifax with other relations, or at Forncott with
+her uncle Dr.  Cookson, Canon of Windsor. She was now able to join
+her favourite brother: and in this gifted woman Wordsworth found a
+gentler and sunnier likeness of himself; he found a love which never
+wearied, and a sympathy fervid without blindness, whose suggestions
+lay so directly in his mind's natural course that they seemed to
+spring from the same individuality, and to form at once a portion of
+his inmost being. The opening of this new era of domestic happiness
+demands a separate chapter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+MISS WORDSWORTH--LYRICAL BALLADS--SETTLEMENT AT GRASMERE.
+
+From among many letters of Miss Wordsworth's to a beloved friend,
+(Miss Jane Pollard, afterwards Mrs.  Marshall, of Hallsteads), which
+have been kindly placed at my disposal, I may without impropriety
+quote a few passages which illustrate the character and the
+affection of brother and sister alike. And first, in a letter
+(Forncett, February 1792), comparing her brothers Christopher and
+William, she says: "Christopher is steady and sincere in his
+attachments. William has both these virtues in an eminent degree,
+and a sort of violence of affection, if I may so term it, which
+demonstrates itself every moment of the day, when the objects of his
+affection are present with him, in a thousand almost imperceptible
+attentions to their wishes, in a sort of restless watchfulness which
+I know not how to describe, a tenderness that never sleeps, and at
+the same time such a delicacy of manner as I have observed in few men."
+And again (Forncett, June 1793), she writes to the same friend:
+"I have strolled into a neighbouring meadow, where I am enjoying the
+melody of birds, and the busy sounds of a fine summer's evening. But
+oh! How imperfect is my pleasure whilst I am alone! Why are you not
+seated with me? And my dear William, why is he not here also? I
+could almost fancy that I see you both near me. I hear _you_ point
+out a spot, where if we could erect a little cottage and call it our
+own we should be the happiest of human beings. I see my brother
+fired with the idea of leading his sister to such a retreat. Our
+parlour is in a moment furnished, our garden is adorned by magic;
+the roses and honeysuckles spring at our command; the wood behind
+the house lifts its head, and furnishes us with a winter's shelter
+and a summer's noonday shade. My dear friend, I trust that ere long
+you will be without the aid of imagination, the companion of my walks,
+and my dear William may be of our party.... He is now going upon a
+tour in the west of England, with a gentleman who was formerly a
+schoolfellow,--a man of fortune, who is to bear all the expenses of
+the journey, and only requests the favour of William's company. He
+is perfectly at liberty to quit this companion as soon as anything
+more advantageous offers. But it is enough to say that I am likely
+to have the happiness of introducing you to my beloved brother. You
+must forgive me for talking so much of him; my affection hurries me
+on, and makes me forget that you cannot be so much interested in the
+subject as I am. You do not know him; you do not know how amiable he
+is. Perhaps you reply, 'But I know how blinded you are.' Well, my
+dearest. I plead guilty at once; I _must_ be blind; he cannot be so
+pleasing as my fondness makes him. I am willing to allow that half
+the virtues with which I fancy him endowed are the creation of my
+love; but surely I may be excused! He was never tired of comforting
+his sister; he never left her in anger; he always met her with joy;
+he preferred her society to every other pleasure;--or rather, when
+we were so happy as to be within each other's reach, he had no
+pleasure when we were compelled to be divided. Do not then expect
+too much from this brother of whom I have delighted so to talk to you.
+In the first place, you must be with him more than once before he
+will be perfectly easy in conversation. In the second place, his
+person is not in his favour--at least I should think not; but I soon
+ceased to discover this--nay, I almost thought that the opinion
+which I had formed was erroneous. He is, however, certainly rather
+plain; though otherwise has an extremely thoughtful countenance, but
+when he speaks it is often lighted up by a smile which I think very
+pleasing. But enough, he is my brother; why should I describe him? I
+shall be launching again into panegyric."
+
+The brother's language to his sister is equally affectionate.
+"How much do I wish," he writes in 1793, "that each emotion of
+pleasure or pain that visits your heart should excite a similar
+pleasure or a similar pain within me, by that sympathy which will
+almost identify us when we have stolen to our little cottage.... I
+will write to my uncle, and tell him that I cannot think of going
+anywhere before I have been with you. Whatever answer he gives me, I
+certainly will make a point of once more mingling my transports with
+yours. Alas! My dear sister, how soon must this happiness expire;
+yet there are moments worth ages."
+
+And again: in the same year he writes, "Oh, my dear, dear sister!
+With what transport shall I again meet you! With what rapture shall
+I again wear out the day in your sight!... I see you in a moment
+running, or rather flying, to my arms."
+
+Wordsworth was in all things fortunate, but in nothing more
+fortunate than in this, that so unique a companion should have been
+ready to devote herself to him with an affection wholly free from
+egotism or jealousy, an affection that yearned only to satisfy his
+subtlest needs, and to transfuse all that was best in herself into
+his larger being. And indeed that fortunate admixture or influence,
+whencesoever derived, which raised the race of Wordsworth to poetic
+fame, was almost more dominant and conspicuous in Dorothy Wordsworth
+than in the poet himself. "The shooting lights of her wild eyes"
+reflected to the full the strain of imaginative emotion which was
+mingled in the poet's nature with that spirit of steadfast and
+conservative virtue which has already given to the family a Master of
+Trinity, two Bishops, and other divines and scholars of weight and
+consideration. In the poet himself the conservative and
+ecclesiastical tendencies of his character became more and more
+apparent as advancing years stiffened the movements of the mind. In
+his sister the ardent element was less restrained; it showed itself
+in a most innocent direction, but it brought with it a heavy
+punishment. Her passion for nature and her affection for her brother
+led her into mountain rambles which were beyond her strength, and
+her last years were spent in a condition of physical and mental decay.
+
+But at the time of which we are now speaking there was, perhaps, no
+one in the world who could have been to the poet such a companion as
+his sister became. She had not, of course, his grasp of mind or his
+poetic power; but her sensitiveness to nature was quite as keen as
+his, and her disposition resembled his "with sunshine added to
+daylight."
+
+  Birds in the bower, and lambs in the green field,
+  Could they have known her, would have loved; methought
+  Her very presence such a sweetness breathed,
+  That flowers, and trees, and even the silent hills,
+  And everything she looked on, should have had
+  An intimation how she bore herself
+  Towards them, and to all creatures.
+
+Her journal of a tour in Scotland, and her description of a week on
+Ullswater, affixed to Wordsworth's _Guide to the Lakes_,--diaries
+not written for publication but merely to communicate her own
+delight to intimate friends at a distance,--are surely indescribably
+attractive in their naive and tender feeling, combined with a
+delicacy of insight into natural beauty which was almost a new thing
+in the history of the world. If we compare, for instance, any of her
+descriptions of the Lakes with Southey's, we see the difference
+between mere literary skill, which can now be rivalled in many
+quarters, and that sympathetic intuition which comes of love alone.
+Even if we compare her with Gray, whose short notice of Cumberland
+bears on every page the stamp of a true poet, we are struck by the
+way in which Miss Wordsworth's tenderness for all living things
+gives character and pathos to her landscapes, and evokes from the
+wildest solitude some note that thrills the heart.
+
+  She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,
+  And humble cares, and delicate fears;
+  A heart the fountain of sweet tears;
+  And love, and thought, and joy.
+
+The cottage life in her brother's company which we have seen Miss
+Wordsworth picturing to herself with girlish ardour, was destined to
+be realized no long time afterwards, thanks to the unlooked-for
+outcome of another friendship. If the poet's sister was his first
+admirer, Kaisley Calvert may fairly claim the second place. Calvert
+was the son of the steward of the Duke of Norfolk, who possessed
+large estates in Cumberland. He attached himself to Wordsworth, and
+in 1793 and 1794 the friends were much together. Calvert was then
+attacked by consumption, and Wordsworth, nursed him with patient care.
+It was found at his death that he had left his friend a legacy of 900£.
+"The act," says Wordsworth, "was done entirely from a confidence on
+his part that I had powers and attainments--which might be of use to
+mankind. Upon the interest of the 900£--400£ being laid out in
+annuity--with 200£ deducted from the principal, and 100£ a
+legacy to my sister, and 100£ more which the _Lyrical Ballads_ have
+brought me, my sister and I contrived to live seven years, nearly
+eight."
+
+Trusting in this small capital, and with nothing to look to in the
+future except the uncertain prospect of the payment of Lord
+Lonsdale's debt to the family, Wordsworth settled with his sister at
+Racedown, near Crewkerne, in Dorsetshire, in the autumn of 1795, the
+choice of this locality being apparently determined by the offer of a
+cottage on easy terms. Here, in the first home which he had possessed,
+Wordsworth's steady devotion to poetry began. He had already,
+in 1792 [2], published two little poems, the _Evening Walk_: and
+_Descriptive Sketches_, which Miss Wordsworth, (to whom the _Evening
+Walk_ was addressed) criticises with candour--in a letter to the same
+friend (Forncett, February 1792):--
+
+[Footnote 2: The _Memoirs_ say in 1793, but the following
+MS. letter of 1792 speaks of them as already published.]
+
+"The scenes which he describes have been viewed with a poet's eye,
+and are portrayed with a poet's pencil; and the poems contain, many
+passages exquisitely beautiful; but they also contain many faults,
+the chief of which are obscurity and a too frequent use of some
+particular expressions and uncommon words; for instance, _moveless_,
+which he applies in a sense, if not new, at least different from, its
+ordinary one. By 'moveless,' when applied to the swan, he means that
+sort of motion which is smooth without agitation; it is a very
+beautiful epithet, but ought to have been cautiously used. The word
+_viewless_ also is introduced far too often. I regret exceedingly
+that he did not submit the works to the inspection of some friend
+before their publication, and he also joins with me in this regret."
+
+These poems show a careful and minute observation of nature, but
+their versification--still reminding us of the imitators of Pope--
+has little originality or charm. They attracted the admiration of
+Coleridge, but had no further success.
+
+At Racedown Wordsworth finished _Guilt and Sorrow_, a poem gloomy in
+tone and written mainly in his period of depression and unrest,--and
+wrote a tragedy called _The Borderers_, of which only a few lines
+show any promise of future excellence. He then wrote _The Ruined
+Cottage_, now incorporated in the Fist Book of the _Excursion_. This
+poem, on a subject thoroughly suited to his powers, was his first
+work of merit; and Coleridge, who visited the quiet household in June
+1797, pronounces this poem "superior, I hesitate not to aver, to
+anything in our language which in any way resembles it." In July
+1797 the Wordsworths removed to Alfoxden, a large house in
+Somersetshire, near Netherstowey, where Coleridge was at that time
+living. Here Wordsworth added to his income by taking as pupil a
+young boy, the hero of the trifling poem _Anecdote for Fathers_, a
+son of Mr. Basil Montagu; and here he composed many of his smaller
+pieces. He has described the origin of the _Ancient Mariner_ and the
+_Lyrical Ballads_ in a well-known passage, part of which I must
+here repeat:--
+
+"In the autumn of 1797, Mr. Coleridge, my sister, and myself started
+from Alfoxden pretty late in the afternoon, with a view to visit
+Linton, and the Valley of Stones near to it; and as our united funds
+were very small, we agreed to defray the expense of the tour by
+writing a poem, to be sent to the _New Monthly Magazine_. In the
+course of this walk was planned the poem of the _Ancient Mariner_,
+founded on a dream, as Mr.  Coleridge said, of his friend Mr.
+Cruikshank. Much the greatest part of the story was Mr. Coleridge's
+invention; but certain parts I suggested; for example, some crime
+was to be committed which was to bring upon the Old Navigator, as
+Coleridge afterwards delighted to call him, the spectral persecution,
+as a consequence of that crime and his own wanderings. I had been
+reading in Shelvocke's _Voyages_, a day or two before, that, while
+doubling Cape Horn they frequently saw albatrosses in that latitude,
+the largest sort of sea-fowl, some extending their wings twelve or
+thirteen feet, 'Suppose,' said I, 'you represent him as having
+killed one of these birds on entering the South Sea, and that the
+tutelary spirits of these regions take upon them to avenge the crime.
+The incident was thought fit for the purpose, and adopted accordingly.
+I also suggested the navigation of the ship by the dead man, but do
+not recollect that I had anything more to do with the scheme of the
+poem. We began the composition together, on that to me memorable
+evening, I furnished two or three lines at the beginning of the poem,
+in particular--"
+
+  And listened like a three years' child;
+  The Mariner had his will.
+
+"As we endeavoured to proceed conjointly our respective manners
+proved so widely different, that it would have been quite
+presumptuous in me to do anything but separate from an undertaking
+upon which I could only have been a clog. The _Ancient Mariner_ grew
+and grew, till it became too important for our first object, which
+was limited to our expectation of five pounds; and we began to think
+of a volume, which was to consist, as Mr. Coleridge has told the
+world, of poems chiefly on supernatural subjects, taken from common
+life, but looked at, as much as might be, through an imaginative
+medium."
+
+The volume of _Lyrical Ballads_, whose first beginnings have here
+been traced, was published in the autumn of 1798, by Mr. Cottle, at
+Bristol. This volume contained several poems--which have been justly
+blamed for triviality,--as _The Thorn, Goody Blake, The Idiot Boy_;
+several in which, as in _Simon Lee_, triviality is mingled with much
+real pathos; and some, as _Expostulation and Reply_ and _The Tables
+Turned_, which are of the very essence of Wordsworth's nature. It is
+hardly too much to say, that if these two last-named poems--to the
+careless eye so slight and trifling--were all that had remained from
+Wordsworth's hand, they would have "spoken to the comprehending" of
+a new individuality, as distinct and unmistakeable in its way as
+that which Sappho has left engraven on the world for ever in words
+even fewer than these. And the volume ended with a poem, which
+Wordsworth composed in 1798, in one day, during a tour with his
+sister to Tintern and Chepstow. The _Lines written above Tintern
+Abbey_ have become, as it were, the _locus classicus_ or consecrated
+formulary of the Wordsworthian faith. They say in brief what it is
+the work of the poet's biographer to say in detail.
+
+As soon as this volume was published Wordsworth and his sister
+sailed for Hamburg, in the hope that their imperfect acquaintance
+with the German language might be improved by the heroic remedy of a
+winter at Goslar. But at Goslar they do not seem to have made any
+acquaintances, and their self-improvement consisted mainly in
+reading German books to themselves. The four months spent at Goslar,
+however, were the very bloom of Wordsworth's poetic career. Through
+none of his poems has the peculiar loveliness of English scenery and
+English girlhood shone more delicately than through those which came
+to him as he paced the frozen gardens of that desolate city. Here it
+was that he wrote _Lucy Gray_, and _Ruth_, and _Nutting_, and the
+_Poet's Epitaph_, and other poems known now to most men as
+possessing in its full fragrance his especial charm. And here it was
+that the memory of some emotion prompted the lines on _Lucy_. Of the
+history of that emotion he has told us nothing; I forbear, therefore,
+to inquire concerning it, or even to speculate. That it was to the
+poet's honour I do not doubt; but who ever learned such secrets
+rightly? Or who should wish to learn? It is best to leave the
+sanctuary of all hearts inviolate, and to respect the reserve not
+only of the living but of the dead. Of these poems, almost alone,
+Wordsworth in his autobiographical notes has said nothing whatever.
+One of them he suppressed for years, and printed only in a later
+volume. One can, indeed, well imagine that there may be poems which
+a man may be willing to give to the world only in the hope that their
+pathos will be, as it were, protected by its own intensity, and that
+those who are worthiest to comprehend will he least disposed to
+discuss them.
+
+The autobiographical notes on his own works above alluded to were
+dictated by the poet to his friend Miss  Isabella Fenwick, at her
+urgent request, in 1843, and preserve many interesting particulars
+as to the circumstances under which each poem was composed. They are
+to be found printed entire among Wordsworth's prose works, and I
+shall therefore cite them only occasionally. Of _Lucy Gray_, for
+instance, he says,--"It was founded on a circumstance told me by my
+sister, of a little girl who, not far from Halifax, in Yorkshire,
+was bewildered in a snowstorm. Her footsteps were tracked by her
+parents to the middle of the lock of a canal, and no other vestige
+of her, backward or forward, could be traced. The body, however, was
+found in the canal. The way in which the incident was treated, and
+the spiritualizing of the character, might furnish hints for
+contrasting the imaginative influences which I have endeavoured to
+throw over common life, with Crabbe's matter-of-fact style of
+handling subjects of the same kind."
+
+And of the _Lines written in Germany_, 1798-9,--
+
+"A bitter winter it was when these verses were composed by the side
+of my sister, in our lodgings, at a draper's house, in the romantic
+imperial town of Goslar, on the edge of the Hartz forest. So severe
+was the cold of this winter, that when we passed out of the parlour
+warmed by the stove our cheeks were struck by the air as by cold iron.
+I slept in a room over a passage that was not ceiled. The people of
+the house used to say, rather unfeelingly, that they expected I
+should be frozen to death some night; but with the protection of a
+pelisse lined with fur, and a dog's-skin bonnet, such as was worn by
+the peasants, I walked daily on the ramparts or on a sort of public
+ground or garden, in which was a pond. Here I had no companion but a
+kingfisher, a beautiful creature that used to glance by me. I
+consequently became much attached to it. During these walks I
+composed _The Poet's Epitaph_."
+
+Seldom has there been a more impressive instance of the contrast,
+familiar to biographers, between the apparent insignificance and the
+real importance of their hero in undistinguished youth. To any one
+considering Wordsworth as he then was,--a rough and somewhat
+stubborn young man, who, in nearly thirty years of life, had seemed
+alternately to idle without grace and to study without advantage,--
+it might well have seemed incredible that he could have anything new
+or valuable to communicate to mankind. Where had been his experience?
+Or where was the indication of that wealth of sensuous emotion which
+in such a nature as Keats' seems almost to dispense with experience
+and to give novelty by giving vividness to such passions as are
+known to all? If Wordsworth were to impress mankind it must be, one
+might have thought, by travelling out of himself altogether--by
+revealing some such energy of imagination as can create a world of
+romance and adventure in the shyest heart. But this was not so to be.
+Already Wordsworth's minor poems had dealt almost entirely with his
+own feelings, and with the objects actually before his eyes; and it
+was at Goslar that he planned, and on the day of his quitting Goslar
+that he began, a much longer poem, whose subject was to be still
+more intimately personal, being the development of his own mind. This
+poem, dedicated to Coleridge, and written in the form of a
+confidence bestowed on an intimate friend, was finished in 1805, but
+was not published till after the poet's death. Mrs. Wordsworth then
+named it _The Prelude_, indicating thus the relation which it bears
+to the _Excursion_--or rather, to the projected poem of the _Recluse_,
+of which the _Excursion_ was to form only the Second out of three
+Divisions. One Book of the First Division of the _Recluse_ was
+written, but is yet unpublished; the Third Division was never even
+begun, and "the materials," we are told, "of which it would have
+been formed have been incorporated, for the most part, in the
+author's other publications." Nor need this change of plan be
+regretted: didactic poems admit easily of mutilation; and all that
+can be called plot in this series of works is contained in the
+_Prelude_, in which we see Wordsworth arriving at those convictions
+which in the _Excursion_ he pauses to expound.
+
+It would be too much to say that Wordsworth has been wholly
+successful in the attempt--for such the _Prelude_ virtually is--to
+write an epic poem on his own education. Such a poem must almost
+necessarily appear tedious and egoistic, and Wordsworth's manner has
+not tact enough to prevent these defects from being felt to the full.
+On the contrary, in his constant desire frugally to extract, as it
+were, its full teaching from the minutest event which has befallen
+him, he supplements the self-complacency of the autobiographer with
+the conscientious exactness of the moralist, and is apt to insist on
+trifles such as lodge in the corners of every man's memory, as if
+they were unique lessons vouchsafed to himself alone.
+
+Yet it follows from this very temper of mind that there is scarcely
+any autobiography which we can read with such implicit confidence as
+the _Prelude_. In the case of this, as of so many of Wordsworth's
+productions, our first dissatisfaction at the form which the poem
+assumes yields to a recognition of its fitness to express precisely
+what the poet intends. Nor are there many men who, in recounting the
+story of their own lives, could combine a candour so absolute with
+so much of dignity--who could treat their personal history so
+impartially as a means of conveying lessons of general truth--or who,
+while chronicling such small things, could remain so great. The
+_Prelude_ is a book of good augury for human nature. We feel in
+reading it as if the stock of mankind were sound. The soul seems
+going on from strength to strength by the mere development of her
+inborn power. And the scene with which the poem at once opens and
+concludes--the return to the Lake country as to a permanent and
+satisfying home--places the poet at last amid his true surroundings,
+and leaves us to contemplate him as completed by a harmony without
+him, which he of all men most needed to evoke the harmony within.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+THE ENGLISH LAKES.
+
+The lakes and mountains of Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancashire,
+are singularly fitted to supply such elements of moral sustenance as
+Nature's aspects can afford to man. There are, indeed, many mountain
+regions of greater awfulness; but prospects of ice and terror should
+be a rare stimulant rather than an habitual food; and the physical
+difficulties inseparable from immense elevations depress the
+inhabitant and preoccupy the traveller. There are many lakes under a
+more lustrous sky; but the healthy activities of life demand a scene
+brilliant without languor, and a beauty which can refresh and satisfy
+rather than lull or overpower. Without advancing any untenable claim
+to British pre-eminence in the matter of scenery, we may, perhaps,
+follow on both these points the judgment which Wordsworth has
+expressed in his _Guide to the Lakes_, a work which condenses the
+results of many years of intimate observation.
+
+"Our tracts of wood and water," he says, "are almost diminutive in
+comparison (with Switzerland); therefore, as far as sublimity is
+dependent upon absolute bulk and height, and atmospherical
+influences in connexion with these, it is obvious that there can be
+no rivalship. But a short residence among the British mountains will
+furnish abundant proof, that, after a certain point of elevation, viz.,
+that which allows of compact and fleecy clouds settling upon, or
+sweeping over, the summits, the sense of sublimity depends more upon
+form and relation of objects to each other than upon their actual
+magnitude; and that an elevation of 3000 feet is sufficient to call
+forth in a most impressive degree the creative, and magnifying, and
+softening powers of the atmosphere."
+
+And again, as to climate; "The rain," he says, "here comes down
+heartily, and is frequently succeeded by clear bright weather, when
+every brook is vocal, and every torrent sonorous; brooks and
+torrents which are never muddy even in the heaviest floods. Days of
+unsettled weather, with partial showers, are very frequent; but the
+showers, darkening or brightening as they fly from hill to hill, are
+not less grateful to the eye than finely interwoven passages of gay
+and sad music are touching to the ear. Vapours exhaling from the
+lakes and meadows after sunrise in a hot season, or in moist weather
+brooding upon the heights, or descending towards the valleys with
+inaudible motion, give a visionary character to everything around
+them; and are in themselves so beautiful as to dispose us to enter
+into the feelings of those simple nations (such as the Laplanders of
+this day) by whom they are taken for guardian deities of the
+mountains; or to sympathize with others who have fancied these
+delicate apparitions to be the spirits of their departed ancestors.
+Akin to these are fleecy clouds resting upon the hill-tops; they are
+not easily managed in picture, with their accompaniments of blue sky,
+but how glorious are they in nature! How pregnant with imagination
+for the poet! And the height of the Cumbrian mountains is sufficient
+to exhibit daily and hourly instances of those mysterious attachments.
+Such clouds, cleaving to their stations, or lifting up suddenly
+their glittering heads from behind rocky barriers, or hurrying out
+of sight with speed of the sharpest edge, will often tempt an
+inhabitant to congratulate himself on belonging to a country of mists
+and clouds and storms, and make him think of the blank sky of Egypt,
+and of the cerulean vacancy of Italy, as an unanimated and even a
+sad spectacle."
+
+The consciousness of a preceding turmoil brings home to us best the
+sense of perfect peace; and a climate accustomed to storm-cloud and
+tempest can melt sometimes into "a day as still as heaven" with a
+benignant tranquillity which calmer regions can scarcely know. Such
+a day Wordsworth has described in language of such delicate truth
+and beauty as only a long and intimate love can inspire:
+
+"It has been said that in human life there are moments worth ages.
+In a more subdued tone of sympathy may we affirm, that in the
+climate of England there are, for the lover of Nature, days which
+are worth whole months, I might say, even years. One of these
+favoured days sometimes occurs in springtime, when that soft air is
+breathing over the blossoms and new-born verdure which inspired
+Buchanan with his beautiful Ode to the First of May; the air which,
+in the luxuriance of his fancy, he likens to that of the golden age,--
+to that which gives motion to the funereal cypresses on the banks of
+Lethe; to the air which is to salute beatified spirits when
+expiatory fires shall have consumed the earth with all her
+habitations. But it is in autumn that days of such affecting
+influence most frequently intervene. The atmosphere seems refined,
+and the sky rendered more crystalline, as the vivifying heat of the
+year abates; the lights and shadows are more delicate; the colouring
+is richer and more finely harmonized; and, in this season of
+stillness, the ear being unoccupied, or only gently excited, the
+sense of vision becomes more susceptible of its appropriate
+enjoyments. A resident in a country like this which we are treating
+of will agree with me that the presence of a lake is indispensable to
+exhibit in perfection the beauty of one of these days; and he must
+have experienced, while looking on the unruffled waters, that the
+imagination by their aid is carried into recesses of feeling
+otherwise impenetrable. The reason of this is, that the heavens are
+not only brought down into the bosom of the earth, but that the
+earth is mainly looked at, and thought of, through the medium of a
+purer element. The happiest time is when the equinoctial gales are
+departed; but their fury may probably be called to mind by the sight
+of a few shattered boughs, whose leaves do not differ in colour from
+the faded foliage of the stately oaks from which these relics of the
+storm depend: all else speaks of tranquillity; not a breath of air,
+no restlessness of insects, and not a moving object perceptible--
+except the clouds gliding in the depths of the lake, or the
+traveller passing along, an inverted image, whose motion seems
+governed by the quiet of a time to which its archetype, the living
+person, is perhaps insensible; or it may happen that the figure of
+one of the larger birds, a raven or a heron, is crossing silently
+among the reflected clouds, while the voice of the real bird, from
+the element aloft, gently awakens in the spectator the recollection
+of appetites and instincts, pursuits and occupations, that deform
+and agitate the world, yet have no power to prevent nature from
+putting on an aspect capable of satisfying the most intense cravings
+for the tranquil, the lovely, and the perfect, to which man, the
+noblest of her creatures, is subject."
+
+The scene described here is one as exquisite in detail as majestic
+in general effect. And it is characteristic of the region to which
+Wordsworth's love was given that there is no corner of it without a
+meaning and a charm; that the open record of its immemorial past
+tells us at every turn that all agencies have conspired for
+loveliness and ruin itself has been benign. A passage of Wordsworth's
+describing the character of the lake-shores illustrates this fact
+with loving minuteness.
+
+  "Sublimity is the result of nature's first great dealings with
+  the superficies of the Earth; but the general tendency of her
+  subsequent operations is towards the production of beauty, by
+  a multiplicity of symmetrical parts uniting in a consistent
+  whole. This is everywhere exemplified along the margins of
+  these lakes. Masses of rock, that have been precipitated from
+  the heights into the area of waters, lie in some places like
+  stranded ships, or have acquired the compact structure of jutting
+  piers, or project in little peninsulas crested with native wood.
+  The smallest rivulet, one whose silent influx is scarcely
+  noticeable in a season of dry weather, so faint is the dimple made
+  by it on the surface of the smooth lake, will be found to have
+  been not useless in shaping, by its deposits of gravel and soil
+  in time of flood, a curve that would not otherwise have existed.
+  But the more powerful brooks, encroaching upon the level of the
+  lake, have, in course of time, given birth to ample promontories
+  of sweeping outline, that contrast boldly with the longitudinal
+  base of the steeps on the opposite shore; while their flat or
+  gently-sloping surfaces never fail to introduce, into the midst of
+  desolation and barrenness, the elements of fertility, even where
+  the habitations of men may not have been raised."
+
+With this we may contrast, as a companion picture, the poet's
+description of the tarns, or lonely bodies of water, which lie here
+and there among the hills:
+
+  "They are difficult of access and naked; yet some of them
+  are, in their permanent forms, very grand, and there are accidents
+  of things which would make the meanest of them interesting.
+  At all events, one of these pools is an acceptable sight to
+  the mountain wanderer, not merely as an incident that diversifies
+  the prospect, but as forming in his mind a centre or conspicuous
+  point to which objects, otherwise disconnected or insubordinated,
+  may be referred. Some few have a varied outline,
+  with bold heath-clad promontories; and as they mostly lie at the
+  foot of a steep precipice, the water, where the sun is not shining
+  upon it, appears black and sullen, and round the margin huge
+  stones and masses of rock are scattered, some defying conjecture
+  as to the means by which they came thither, and others
+  obviously fallen from on high, the contribution of ages! A not
+  unpleasing sadness is induced by this perplexity, and these
+  images of decay; while the prospect of a body of pure water,
+  unattended with groves and other cheerful rural images by
+  which fresh water is usually accompanied, and unable to give
+  furtherance to the meagre vegetation around it, excites a sense
+  of some repulsive power strongly put forth, and thus deepens
+  the melancholy natural to such scenes."
+
+To those who love to deduce the character of a population from the
+character of their race and surroundings the peasantry of Cumberland
+and Westmoreland form an attractive theme. Drawn in great part from
+the strong Scandinavian stock, they dwell in a land solemn and
+beautiful as Norway itself, but without Norway's rigour and penury,
+and with still lakes and happy rivers instead of Norway's inarming
+melancholy sea. They are a mountain folk; but their mountains are no
+precipices of insuperable snow, such as keep the dwellers in some
+Swiss hamlet shut in ignorance and stagnating into idiocy. These
+barriers divide only to concentrate, and environ only to endear;
+their guardianship is but enough to give an added unity to each
+group of kindred homes. And thus it is that the Cumbrian dalesmen
+have afforded perhaps as near a realization as human fates have yet
+allowed of the rural society which statesmen desire for their
+country's greatness. They have given an example of substantial
+comfort strenuously won; of home affections intensified by
+independent strength; of isolation without ignorance, and of a
+shrewd simplicity; of an hereditary virtue which needs no support
+from fanaticism, and to which honour is more than law.
+
+The school of political economists, moreover, who urge the advantage
+of a peasant proprietary--of small independent holdings,--as at once
+drawing from the land the fullest produce and rearing upon it the
+most vigorous and provident population,--this school, as is well
+known, finds in the _statesmen_ of Cumberland one of its favourite
+examples. In the days of border-wars, when the first object was to
+secure the existence of as many armed men as possible, in readiness
+to repel the Scot, the abbeys and great proprietors in the north
+readily granted small estates on military tenure, which tenure, when
+personal service in the field was no longer needed, became in most
+cases an absolute ownership. The attachment of these _statesmen_ to
+their hereditary estates, the heroic efforts which they would make
+to avoid parting with them, formed an impressive phenomenon in the
+little world--a world at once of equality and of conservatism--which
+was the scene of Wordsworth's childish years, and which remained his
+manhood's ideal.
+
+The growth of large fortunes in England, and the increased
+competition for land, has swallowed up many of these small
+independent holdings in the extensive properties of wealthy men. And
+at the same time the spread of education, and the improved poor-laws
+and other legislation, by raising the condition of other parts of
+England, have tended to obliterate the contrast which was so marked
+in Wordsworth's day. How marked that contrast was, a comparison of
+Crabbe's poems with Wordsworth's will sufficiently indicate. Both
+are true painters; but while in the one we see poverty as something
+gross and degrading, and the _Tales of the Village_ stand out from a
+background of pauperism and crime; in the other picture poverty
+means nothing worse than privation, and the poet in the presence of
+the most tragic outcast of fortune could still
+
+  Have laughed himself to scorn, to find
+  In that decrepit man so firm a mind.[3]
+
+[Footnote 3: The previous page ends midsentence, within an ordinary
+paragraph, sentence finished by this verse (probably an excerpt from
+a poem).]
+
+Nay, even when a state far below the _Leech-Gatherer's_ has been
+reached, and mind and body alike are in their last decay, the life
+of the _Old Cumberland Beggar_, at one remove from nothingness, has
+yet a dignity and a usefulness of its own. His fading days are
+passed in no sad asylum of vicious or gloomy age, but amid
+neighbourly kindnesses, and in the sanity of the open air; and a life
+that is reduced to its barest elements has yet a hold on the
+liberality of nature and the affections of human hearts.
+
+So long as the inhabitants of a region thus solitary and beautiful
+have neither many arts nor many wishes, save such as the Nature
+which they know has suggested, and their own handiwork can satisfy,
+so long are their presence and habitations likely to be in harmony
+with the scenes around them. Nay, man's presence is almost always
+needed to draw out the full meaning of Nature, to illustrate her
+bounty by his glad well-being and to hint by his contrivances of
+precaution at her might and terror. Wordsworth's description of the
+cottages of Cumberland depicts this unconscious adaptation of man's
+abode to his surroundings, with an eye which may be called at
+pleasure that of painter or of poet.
+
+  "The dwelling-houses, and contiguous outhouses, are in many
+  instances of the colour of the native rock out of which they have
+  been built; but frequently the dwelling--or Fire-house, as it is
+  ordinarily called--has been distinguished from the barn or byre
+  by roughcast and whitewash, which, as the inhabitants are not
+  hasty in renewing it, in a few years acquires by the influence of
+  weather a tint at once sober and variegated. As these houses
+  have been, from father to son, inhabited by persons engaged in
+  the same occupations, yet necessarily with changes in their
+  circumstances, they have received without incongruity additions
+  and accommodations adapted to the needs of each successive
+  occupant, who, being for the most part proprietor,
+  was at liberty to follow his own fancy, so that these humble
+  dwellings remind the contemplative spectator of a production of
+  Nature, and may (using a strong expression) rather be said to
+  have grown than to have been erected--to have risen, by an
+  instinct of their own, out of the native rock--so little is there
+  in them of formality, such is their wildness and beauty."
+
+  "These dwellings, mostly built, as has been said, of rough unhewn
+  stone, are roofed with slates, which were rudely taken
+  from the quarry before the present art of splitting them was
+  understood, and are therefore rough and uneven in their surface,
+  so that both the coverings and sides of the houses have furnished
+  places of rest for the seeds of lichens, mosses, ferns and flowers.
+  Hence buildings, which in their very form call to mind the
+  processes of Nature, do thus, clothed in part with a vegetable garb,
+  appear to be received into the bosom of the living principle of
+  things, as it acts and exists among the woods and fields, and
+  by their colour and their shape affectingly direct the thoughts
+  to that tranquil course of nature and simplicity along which the
+  humble-minded inhabitants have through so many generations
+  been led. Add the little garden with its shed for bee-hives, its
+  small bed of potherbs, and its borders and patches of flowers for
+  Sunday posies, with sometimes a choice few too much prized to
+  be plucked; an orchard of proportioned size; a cheesepress, often
+  supported by some tree near the door; a cluster of embowering
+  sycamores for summer shade, with a tall fir through which the
+  winds sing when other trees are leafless; the little rill or
+  household spout murmuring in all seasons,--combine these
+  incidents and images together, and you have the representative
+  idea of a mountain cottage in this country--so beautifully
+  formed in itself, and so richly adorned by the hand of Nature."
+
+These brief descriptions may suffice to indicate the general
+character of a district which in Wordsworth's early days had a
+distinctive unity which he was the first fully to appreciate, which
+was at its best during his long lifetime, and which has already
+begun to disappear. The mountains had waited long for a full
+adoration, an intelligent worship. At last "they were enough beloved."
+And if now the changes wrought around them recall too often the
+poet's warning, how
+
+         All that now delights thee, from the day
+  On which it should be touched, shall melt, and melt away,--
+
+yet they have gained something which cannot be taken from them. Not
+mines, nor railways, nor monster excursions, nor reservoirs, nor
+Manchester herself, "toute entière à sa proie attachée," can deprive
+lake and hill of Wordsworth's memory, and the love which once they
+knew.
+
+Wordsworth's life was from the very first so ordered as to give him
+the most complete and intimate knowledge both of district and people.
+There was scarcely a mile of ground in the Lake country over which
+he had not wandered; scarcely a prospect which was not linked with
+his life by some tie of memory. Born at Cockermouth, on the
+outskirts of the district, his mind was gradually led on to its
+beauty; and his first recollections were of Derwent's grassy holms
+and rocky falls, with Skiddaw, "bronzed with deepest radiance,"
+towering in the eastern sky. Sent to school at Hawkshead at eight
+years old, Wordsworth's scene was transferred to the other extremity
+of the lake district. It was in this quaint old town, on the banks
+of Esthwaite Water, that the "fair seed-time of his soul" was passed;
+it was here that his boyish delight in exercise and adventure grew,
+and melted in its turn into a more impersonal yearning, a deeper
+absorption into the beauty and the wonder of the world. And even the
+records of his boyish amusements come to us each on a background of
+Nature's majesty and calm. Setting springs for woodcock on the
+grassy moors at night, at nine years old, he feels himself "a
+trouble to the peace" that dwells among the moon and stars overhead;
+and when he has appropriated a woodcock caught by somebody else,
+"sounds of undistinguishable motion" embody the viewless pursuit of
+Nemesis among the solitary hills. In the perilous search for the
+raven's nest, as he hangs on the face of the naked crags of Yewdale,
+he feels for the first time that sense of detachment from external
+things which a position of strange unreality will often force on the
+mind.
+
+                            Oh, at that time
+  When on the perilous ridge I hung alone,
+  With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind
+  Blow through my ear! The sky seemed not a sky
+  Of earth--and with what motion moved the clouds!
+
+The innocent rapine of _nutting_ taught him to feel that there is a
+spirit in the woods--a presence which too rude a touch of ours will
+desecrate and destroy.
+
+The neighbouring lakes of Coniston, Esthwaite, Windermere, have left
+similar traces of the gradual upbuilding of his spirit. It was on a
+promontory on Coniston that the sun's last rays, gilding the eastern
+hills above which he had first appeared, suggested the boy's first
+impulse of spontaneous poetry, in the resolve that, wherever life
+should lead him, his last thoughts should fall on the scenes where
+his childhood was passing now. It was on Esthwaite that the
+"huge peak" of Wetherlam, following him (as it seemed) as he rowed
+across the starlit water, suggested the dim conception of "unknown
+modes of being," and a life that is not ours. It was round Esthwaite
+that the boy used to wander with a friend at early dawn, rejoicing
+in the charm of words in tuneful order, and repeating together their
+favourite verses, till "sounds of exultation echoed through the
+groves." It was on Esthwaite that the band of skaters "hissed along
+the polished ice in games confederate," from which Wordsworth would
+sometimes withdraw himself and pause suddenly in full career, to
+feel in that dizzy silence the mystery of a rolling world.
+
+A passage, less frequently quoted, in describing a boating excursion
+on Windermere illustrates the effect of some small point of human
+interest in concentrating and realising the diffused emotion which
+radiates from a scene of beauty:
+
+                    But, ere nightfall,
+  When in our pinnace we returned at leisure
+  Over the shadowy lake, and to the beach
+  Of some small island steered our course with one,
+  The minstrel of the troop, and left him there,
+  And rowed off gently, while he blew his flute
+  Alone upon the rock--oh, then the calm
+  And dead still water lay upon my mind
+  Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky,
+  Never before so beautiful, sank down
+  Into my heart, and held me like a dream!
+
+The passage which describes the schoolboy's call to the owls--the
+lines of which Coleridge said that he should have exclaimed
+"Wordsworth!" if he had met them running wild in the deserts of
+Arabia,--paint a somewhat similar rush of feeling with a still
+deeper charm. The "gentle shock of mild surprise" which in the
+pauses of the birds' jocund din _carries far into his heart the
+sound of mountain torrents_--the very mingling of the grotesque and
+the majestic--brings home the contrast between our transitory
+energies and the mystery around us which returns ever the same to
+the moments when we pause and are at peace.
+
+It is round the two small lakes of Grasmere and Rydal that the
+memories of Wordsworth are most thickly clustered. On one or other
+of these lakes he lived for fifty years,--the first half of the
+present century; and there is not in all that region a hillside walk
+or winding valley which has not heard him murmuring out his verses
+as they slowly rose from his heart. The cottage at Townend, Grasmere,
+where he first settled, is now surrounded by the out-buildings of a
+busy hotel; and the noisy stream of traffic, and the sight of the
+many villas which spot the valley, give a new pathos to the sonnet
+in which Wordsworth deplores the alteration which even his own
+residence might make in the simplicity of the lonely scene.
+
+  Well may'st thou halt, and gaze with brightening eye!
+  The lovely Cottage in the guardian nook
+  Hath stirred thee deeply; with its own dear brook,
+  Its own small pasture, almost its own sky!
+  But covet not the Abode: forbear to sigh,
+  As many do, repining while they look;
+  Intruders--who would tear from Nature's book
+  This precious leaf with harsh impiety.
+  Think what the home must be if it were thine,
+  Even thine, though few thy wants! Roof, window, door,
+  The very flowers are sacred to the Poor,
+  The roses to the porch which they entwine:
+  Yea, all that now enchants thee, from the day
+  On which it should be touched, would melt, and melt away.
+
+The _Poems on the Naming of Places_ belong for the most part to this
+neighbourhood. _Emma's Dell_ on Easdale Beck, _Point Rash-Judgment_
+on the eastern shore of Grasmere, _Mary's Pool_ in Rydal Park,
+_William's Peak_ on Stone Arthur, _Joanna's Rock_ on the banks of
+Rotha, and _John's Grove_ near White Moss Common, have been
+identified by the loving search of those to whom every memorial of
+that simple-hearted family group has still a charm.
+
+It is on Greenhead Ghyll--"upon the forest-side in Grasmere Vale"--
+that the poet has laid the scene of _Michael_, the poem which paints
+with such detailed fidelity both the inner and the outward life of a
+typical Westmoreland "statesman." And the upper road from Grasmere
+to Rydal, superseded now by the road along the lake side, and left
+as a winding footpath among rock and fern, was one of his most
+habitual haunts. Of another such haunt his friend Lady Richardson
+says, "The _Prelude_ was chiefly composed in a green mountain terrace,
+on the Easdale side of Helm Crag, known by the name of Under Lancrigg,
+a place which he used to say he knew by heart. The ladies sat at
+their work on the hill-side, while he walked to and fro on the
+smooth green mountain turf, humming out his verses to himself, and
+then repeating them to his sympathising and ready scribes, to be
+noted down on the spot, and transcribed at home."
+
+The neighbourhood of the poet's later home at Rydal Mount is equally
+full of associations. Two of the _Evening Voluntaries_ were composed
+by the side of Rydal Mere. The _Wild Duck's Nest_ was on one of the
+Rydal islands. It was on the fells of Loughrigg that the poet's
+fancy loved to plant an imperial castle. And _Wansfell's_ green
+slope still answers with many a change of glow and shadow to the
+radiance of the sinking sun.
+
+Hawkshead and Rydal, then, may be considered as the poet's principal
+centres, and the scenery in their neighbourhood has received his
+most frequent attention. The Duddon, a seldom-visited stream on the
+south-west border of the Lake-district, has been traced by him from
+source to outfall in a series of sonnets. Langdale, and Little
+Langdale with Blea Tarn lying in it, form the principal scene of the
+discourses in the _Excursion_. The more distant lakes and mountains
+were often visited and are often alluded to. The scene of _The
+Brothers_, for example, is laid in Ennerdale; and the index of the
+minor poems will supply other instances. But it is chiefly round two
+lines of road leading from Grasmere that Wordsworth's associations
+cluster,--the route over Dunmailraise, which led him to Keswick, to
+Coleridge and Southey at Greta Hall, and to other friends in that
+neighbourhood; and the route over Kirkstone, which led him to
+Ullswater, and the friendly houses of Patterdale, Hallsteads, and
+Lowther Castle. The first of these two routes was that over which
+the _Waggoner_ plied; it skirts the lovely shore of Thirlmere,--a
+lonely sheet of water, of exquisite irregularity of outline, and
+fringed with delicate verdure, which the Corporation of Manchester
+has lately bought to embank it into a reservoir. _Dedecorum pretiosus
+emptor_! This lake was a favourite haunt of Wordsworth's; and upon a
+rock on its margin, where he and Coleridge, coming from Keswick and
+Grasmere, would often meet, the two poets, with the other members of
+Wordsworth's loving household group, inscribed the initial letters
+of their names. To the "monumental power" of this Rock of Names
+Wordsworth appeals, in lines written when the happy company who
+engraved them had already been severed by distance and death;
+
+                   O thought of pain,
+  That would impair it or profane!
+  And fail not Thou, loved Rock, to keep
+  Thy charge when we are laid asleep.
+
+The rock may still be seen, but is to be submerged in the new
+reservoir. In the vale of Keswick itself, Applethwaite, Skiddaw, St.
+Herbert's Island, Lodore, are commemorated in sonnets or inscriptions.
+And the Borrowdale yew-trees have inspired some of the poet's
+noblest lines,--lines breathing all the strange forlornness of
+Glaramara's solitude, and the withering vault of shade.
+
+The route from Rydal to Ullswater is still more thickly studded with
+poetic allusions. The _Pass of Kirkstone_ is the theme of a
+characteristic ode; Grisdale Tarn and Helvellyn recur again and again;
+and Aira Force was one of the spots which the poet best loved to
+describe, as well as to visit. It was on the shores of Further
+Gowbarrow that the _Daffodils_ danced beneath the trees. These
+references might be much further multiplied; and the loving
+diligence of disciples has set before us "the Lake-district as
+interpreted by Wordsworth" through a multitude of details. But
+enough has been said to show how completely the poet had absorbed the
+influences of his dwelling-place; how unique a representative he had
+become of the lovely district of his birth; how he had made it
+subject to him by comprehending it, and his own by love.
+
+He visited other countries and described other scenes. Scotland,
+Wales, Switzerland, France, Germany, Italy, have all a place in his
+works. His familiarity with other scenery helped him, doubtless, to
+a better appreciation of the lake country than he could have gained
+had he never left it. And, on the other hand, like Caesar in Gaul, or
+Wellington in the Peninsula, it was because he had so complete a
+grasp of this chosen base of operations that he was able to come, to
+see, and to make his own, so swiftly and unfailingly elsewhere.
+Happy are those whose deep-rooted memories cling like his about some
+stable home! Whose notion of the world around them has expanded from
+some prospect of happy tranquillity, instead of being drawn at
+random from the confusing city's roar! Happier still if that early
+picture be of one of those rare scenes which have inspired poets and
+prophets with the retrospective day-dream of a patriarchal, or a
+golden, age; of some plot of ground like the Ithaca of Odysseus,
+[Greek: traechsi all agathae koyrotrophos], "rough, but a nurse of
+_men_;" of some life like that which a poet of kindred spirit to
+Wordsworth's saw half in vision, half in reality, among the
+husbandmen of the Italian hills:--
+
+  Peace, peace is theirs, and life no fraud that knows,
+  Wealth as they will, and when they will, repose;
+  On many a hill the happy homesteads stand,
+  The living lakes through many a vale expand:
+  Cool glens are there, and shadowy caves divine,
+  Deep sleep, and far-off voices of the kine;--
+  From moor to moor the exulting wild deer stray;--
+  The strenuous youth are strong and sound as they;
+  One reverence still the untainted race inspires,
+  God their first thought, and after God their sires;--
+  These last discerned Astraea's flying hem,
+  And Virtue's latest footsteps walked with them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+MARRIAGE--SOCIETY--HIGHLAND TOUR.
+
+With Wordsworth's settlement at Townend, Grasmere, in the closing
+days of the last century, the external events of his life may be
+said to come to an end. Even his marriage to Miss Mary Hutchinson,
+of Penrith, on October 4, 1802, was not so much an importation into
+his existence of new emotion, as a development and intensification of
+feelings which had long been there. This marriage was the crowning
+stroke of Wordsworth's felicity--the poetic recompense for his
+steady advocacy of all simple and noble things. When he wished to
+illustrate the true dignity and delicacy of rustic lives he was
+always accustomed to refer to the Cumbrian folk. And now it seemed
+that Cumberland requited him for his praises with her choicest boon;
+found for him in the country town of Penrith, and from the small and
+obscure circle of his connexions and acquaintance,--nay, from the
+same dame's school in which he was taught to read,--a wife such as
+neither rank nor young beauty nor glowing genius enabled his brother
+bards to win.
+
+Mrs. Wordsworth's poetic appreciativeness, manifest to all who knew
+her, is attested by the poet's assertion that two of the best lines
+in the poem of _The Daffodils_--
+
+  They flash, upon that inward eye
+  Which is the bliss of solitude,--
+
+were of her composition. And in all other matters, from the highest
+to the lowest, she was to him a true helpmate, a companion "dearer
+far than life and light are dear," and able "in his steep march to
+uphold him to the end." Devoted to her husband, she nevertheless
+welcomed not only without jealousy but with delight the household
+companionship through life of the sister who formed so large an
+element in his being. Admiring the poet's genius to the full, and
+following the workings of his mind with a sympathy that never tired,
+she nevertheless was able to discern, and with unobtrusive care to
+hide or avert, those errors of manner into which retirement and
+sell-absorption will betray even the gentlest spirit. It speaks,
+perhaps, equally well for Wordsworth's character that this tendency
+to a lengthy insistence, in general conversation, on his own
+feelings and ideas is the worst charge that can he brought against
+him; and for Mrs. Wordsworth's, that her simple and rustic
+upbringing had gifted her with a manner so gracious and a tact so
+ready that in her presence all things could not but go well.
+
+The life which the young couple led was one of primitive simplicity.
+In some respects it was even less luxurious than that of the
+peasants around them. They drank water, and ate the simplest fare.
+Miss Wordsworth had long rendered existence possible for her brother
+on the narrowest of means by her unselfish energy and skill in
+household management; and "plain living and high thinking" were
+equally congenial to the new inmate of the frugal home. Wordsworth
+gardened; and all together, or oftenest the poet and his sister,
+wandered almost daily over the neighbouring hills. If arrow means
+did not prevent them from offering a generous welcome to their few
+friends, especially Coleridge and his family, who repeatedly stayed
+for months under Wordsworth's roof. Miss Wordsworth's unpublished
+letters breathe the very spirit of hospitality in their naive
+details of the little sacrifices gladly made for the sake of the
+presence of these honoured guests. But for the most part their life
+was solitary and uneventful. Books they had few; neighbours almost
+none; and Miss Wordsworth's diary of these early years describes a
+life seldom paralleled in its intimate dependence on external nature.
+I take, almost at random, her account of a single day. "November 24,
+1801. Read Chaucer. We walked by Gell's cottage. As we were going
+along we were stopped at once, at the distance, perhaps, of fifty
+yards from our favourite birch-tree; it was yielding to the gust of
+wind, with all its tender twigs; the sun shone upon it, and it
+glanced in the wind like a flying sunshiny shower. It was a tree in
+shape, with stem and branches; but it was like a spirit of water.
+After our return William read Spenser to us, and then walked to
+John's Grove. Went to meet W." And from an unpublished letter of
+Miss Wordsworth's, of about the same period (September 10, 1800), I
+extract her description of the new home. "We are daily more delighted
+with Grasmere and its neighbourhood. Our walks are perpetually varied,
+and we are more fond of the mountains as our acquaintance with them
+increases. We have a boat upon the lake, and a small orchard and
+smaller garden, which, as it is the work of our own hands, we regard
+with pride and partiality. Our cottage is quite large enough for us,
+though very small; and we have made it neat and comfortable within
+doors; and it looks very nice on the outside; for though the roses
+and honeysuckles which we have planted against it are only of this
+year's growth, yet it is covered all over with green leaves and
+scarlet flowers; for we have trained scarlet beans upon threads,
+which are not only exceedingly beautiful but very useful, as their
+produce is immense. We have made a lodging-room of the parlour below
+stairs, which has a stone floor, therefore we have covered it all
+over with matting. We sit in a room above stairs, and we have one
+lodging-room with two single beds, a sort of lumber-room, and a
+small low unceiled room, which I have papered with newspapers, and
+in which we have put a small bed. Our servant is an old woman of
+sixty years of age, whom we took partly out of charity. She was very
+ignorant, very foolish, and very difficult to teach. But the
+goodness of her disposition, and the great convenience we should
+find if my perseverance was successful, induced me to go on."
+
+The sonnets entitled _Personal Talk_ give a vivid picture of the
+blessings of such seclusion. There are many minds which will echo
+the exclamation with which the poet dismisses his visitors and their
+gossip:
+
+  Better than such discourse doth silence long,
+  Long barren silence, square with my desire;
+  To sit without emotion, hope, or aim,
+  In the loved presence of my cottage fire,
+  And listen to the flapping of the flame,
+  Or kettle whispering its faint undersong.
+
+Many will look with envy on a life which has thus decisively cut
+itself loose from the world; which is secure from the influx of
+those preoccupations, at once distracting and nugatory, which deaden
+the mind to all other stimulus, and split the river of life into
+channels so minute that it loses itself in the sand.
+
+  Hence have I genial seasons; hence have I
+  Smooth passions, smooth discourse, and joyous thought.
+
+Left to herself, the mind can expatiate in those kingdoms of the
+spirit bequeathed to us by past generations and distant men, which
+to the idle are but a garden of idleness, but to those who choose it
+become a true possession and an ever widening home. Among those
+"nobler loves and nobler cares" there is excitement without reaction,
+there is an unwearied and impersonal joy--a joy which can only be
+held cheap because it is so abundant, and can only disappoint us
+through our own incapacity to contain it. These delights of study
+and of solitude Wordsworth enjoyed to the full. In no other poet,
+perhaps, have the poet's heightened sensibilities been productive of
+a pleasure so unmixed with pain. The wind of his emotions blew right
+abaft; he "swam smoothly in the stream of his nature, and lived but
+one man."
+
+The blessing of meditative and lonely hours must of course be
+purchased by corresponding limitations. Wordsworth's conception of
+human character retained to the end an extreme simplicity. Many of
+life's most impressive phenomena were hid from his eyes. He never
+encountered any of those rare figures whose aspect seems to justify
+all traditions of pomp and pre-eminence when they appear amid
+stately scenes as with a natural sovereignty. He neither achieved
+nor underwent any of those experiences which can make all high
+romance seem a part of memory, and bestow as it were a password and
+introduction into the very innermost of human fates. On the other
+hand, he almost wholly escaped those sufferings which exceptional
+natures must needs derive from too close a contact with this
+commonplace world. It was not his lot--as it has been the lot of so
+many poets--to move amongst mankind at once as an intimate and a
+stranger; to travel from disillusionment to disillusionment and from
+regret to regret; to construct around him a world of ideal beings,
+who crumble into dust at his touch; to hope from them, what they can
+neither understand nor accomplish, to lavish on them what they can
+never repay. Such pain, indeed, may become a discipline; and the
+close contact with many lives may teach to the poetic nature lessons
+of courage, of self-suppression, of resolute goodwill, and may
+transform into an added dignity the tumult of emotions which might
+else have run riot in his heart. Yet it is less often from moods of
+self-control than from moods of self-abandonment that the fount of
+poetry springs; and herein it was that Wordsworth's especial
+felicity lay--that there was no one feeling in him which the world
+had either repressed or tainted; that he had no joy which might not
+be the harmless joy of all; and that therefore it was when he was
+most unreservedly himself that he was most profoundly human. All
+that was needful for him was to strike down into the deep of his
+heart. Or, using his own words, we may compare his tranquil
+existence to
+
+      A crystal river,
+  Diaphanous because it travels slowly,
+
+and in which poetic thoughts rose unimpeded to the surface, like
+bubbles through the pellucid stream.
+
+The first hint of many of his briefer poems is to be found in his
+sister's diary:
+
+  "April 15. 1802. When we were in the woods below Gowbarrow
+  Park we saw a few _daffodils_ close to the water side.
+  As we went along there were more, and yet more; and at last,
+  under the boughs of the trees, we saw there was a long belt of
+  them along the shore. I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They
+  grew among the mossy stones about them; some rested their
+  heads on the stones as on a pillow; the rest tossed, and reeled,
+  and danced, and seemed as if they verily danced with the wind,
+  they looked so gay and glancing."
+
+  "July 30, 1802. Left London between five and six o'clock
+  of the morning, outside the Dover coach. A beautiful morning.
+  The city, St. Paul's, with the river, a multitude of little boats,
+  made a beautiful sight as we crossed Westminster Bridge;
+  the houses not overhung by their clouds of smoke, were spread
+  out endlessly; yet the sun shone so brightly, with such a
+  pure light, that there was something like the purity of one
+  of Nature's own grand spectacles. Arrived at Calais at four
+  in the morning of July 31st. Delightful walks in the evenings,
+  seeing far off in the west the coast of England like a
+  cloud, crested with Dover Castle, the evening star, and the
+  glory of the sky. The reflections in the water were more
+  beautiful than the sky itself; purple waves brighter than
+  precious stones for ever melting away upon the sands."
+
+
+How simple are the elements of these delights! There is nothing here,
+except fraternal affection, a sunrise, a sunset, a flock of bright
+wild flowers; and yet the sonnets on _Westminster Bridge_ and
+_Calais Sands_, and the stanzas on the _Daffodils_, have taken
+their place among the permanent records of the profoundest human joy.
+
+Another tour,--this time through Scotland,--undertaken in August 1803,
+inspired Wordsworth with several of his best pieces. Miss
+Wordsworth's diary of this tour has been lately published, and
+should be familiar to all lovers of Nature. The sister's journal is
+indeed the best introduction to the brother's poems. It has not--it
+cannot have--their dignity and beauty; but it exemplifies the same
+method of regarding Nature, the same self-identification with her
+subtler aspects and entrance into her profounder charm. It is
+interesting to notice how the same impression strikes both minds at
+once. From the sister's it is quickly reflected in words of
+exquisite delicacy and simplicity; in the brother's it germinates,
+and reappears, it may be months or years afterwards, as the nucleus
+of a mass of thought and feeling which has grown round it in his
+musing soul. The travellers' encounter with two Highland girls on
+the shore of Loch Lomond is a good instance of this, "One of the
+girls," writes Miss Wordsworth, "was exceedingly beautiful; and the
+figures of both of them, in grey plaids falling to their feet, their
+faces only being uncovered, excited our attention before we spoke to
+them; but they answered us so sweetly that we were quite delighted,
+at the same time that they stared at us with an innocent look of
+wonder. I think I never heard the English language sound more
+sweetly than from the mouth of the elder of these girls, while she
+stood at the gate answering our inquiries, her face flushed with the
+rain; her pronunciation was clear and distinct, without difficulty,
+yet slow, as if like a foreign speech."
+
+  A face with gladness overspread!
+  Soft smiles, by human kindness bred!
+  And seemliness complete, that sways
+  Thy courtesies, about thee plays;
+  With no restraint, but such as springs
+  From quick and eager visitings
+  Of thoughts that lie beyond the reach
+  Of thy few words of English speech:
+  A bondage sweetly brooked, a strife
+  That gives thy gestures grace and life!
+  So have I, not unmoved in mind,
+  Seen birds of tempest-loving kind
+  Thus beating up against the wind.
+
+The travellers saw more of this girl, and Miss Wordsworth's opinion
+was confirmed. But to Wordsworth his glimpse of her became a
+veritable romance. He commemorated it in his poem of _The Highland
+Girl_, soon after his return from Scotland; he narrated it once more
+in his poem of _The Three Cottage Girls_, written nearly twenty
+years afterwards; and "the sort of prophecy," he says in 1843,
+"with which the verses conclude, has, through God's goodness, been
+realized; and now, approaching the close of my seventy-third year, I
+have a most vivid remembrance of her, and the beautiful objects with
+which she was surrounded." Nay, more; he has elsewhere informed us,
+with some naïveté, that the first few lines of his exquisite poem to
+his wife, _She was a phantom of delight_, were originally composed
+as a description of this Highland maid, who would seem almost to
+have formed for him ever afterwards a kind of type and image of
+loveliness.
+
+That such a meeting as this should have formed so long-remembered an
+incident in the poet's life will appear, perhaps, equally ridiculous
+to the philosopher and to the man of the world. The one would have
+given less, the other would have demanded more. And yet the quest of
+beauty, like the quest of truth, reaps its surest reward when it is
+disinterested as well as keen; and the true lover of human-kind will
+often draw his most exquisite moments from what to most men seems
+but the shadow of a joy. Especially, as in this case, his heart will
+be prodigal of the impulses of that protecting tenderness which it
+is the blessing of early girlhood to draw forth unwittingly, and to
+enjoy unknown,--affections which lead to no declaration, and desire
+no return; which are the spontaneous effluence of the very Spirit of
+Love in man; and which play and hover around winning innocence like
+the coruscations round the head of the unconscious Iulus, a soft and
+unconsuming flame.
+
+It was well, perhaps, that Wordsworth's romance should come to him
+in this remote and fleeting fashion. For to the Priest of Nature it
+was fitting that all things else should be harmonious, indeed, but
+accessory; that joy should not be so keen, nor sorrow no desolating,
+nor love itself so wildly strong, as to prevent him from going out
+upon the mountains with a heart at peace, and receiving "in a wise
+passiveness" the voices of earth and heaven.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+SIR GEORGE BEAUMONT--DEATH OF JOHN WORDSWORTH.
+
+The year 1803 saw the beginning of a friendship which formed a
+valuable element in Wordsworth's life. Sir George Beaumont, of
+Coleorton Hall, Leicestershire, a descendant of the dramatist, and
+representative of a family long distinguished for talent and culture,
+was staying with Coleridge at Greta Hall, Keswick, when, hearing of
+Coleridge's affection for Wordsworth, he was struck with the wish to
+bring Wordsworth also to Keswick, and bought and presented to him a
+beautiful piece of land at Applethwaite, under Skiddaw, in the hope
+that he might be induced to settle there. Coleridge was soon
+afterwards obliged to leave England in search of health, and the plan
+fell through. A characteristic letter of Wordsworth's records his
+feelings on the occasion. "Dear Sir George," he writes, "if any
+person were to be informed of the particulars of your kindness to me,
+if it were described to him in all its delicacy and nobleness, and
+he should afterwards be told that I suffered eight weeks to elapse
+without writing to you one word of thanks or acknowledgment, he
+would deem it a thing absolutely _impossible_. It is nevertheless
+true."
+
+"Owing to a set of painful and uneasy sensations which I have, more
+or less, at all times about my chest. I deferred writing to you,
+being at first made still more uncomfortable by travelling, and
+loathing to do violence to myself in what ought to be an act of pure
+pleasure and enjoyment, viz., the expression of my deep sense of your
+goodness. This feeling was indeed so strong in me, as to make me
+look upon the act of writing to you as a thing not to be done but in
+my best, my purest, and my happiest moments. Many of these I had,
+but then I had not my pen, ink, and paper before me, my conveniences,
+'my appliances and means to boot;' all which, the moment that I
+thought of them, seemed to disturb and impair the sanctity of my
+pleasure, I contented myself with thinking over my complacent
+feelings, and breathing forth solitary gratulations and thanksgivings,
+which I did in many a sweet and many a wild place, during my late
+tour."
+
+The friendship of which this act of delicate generosity was the
+beginning was maintained till Sir George Beaumont's death in 1827,
+and formed for many years Wordsworth's closest link with the world
+of art and culture. Sir George was himself a painter as well as a
+connoisseur, and his landscapes are not without indications of the
+strong feeling for nature which he undoubtedly possessed. Wordsworth,
+who had seen very few pictures, but was a penetrating critic of
+those which he knew, discerned this vein of true feeling in his
+friend's work, and has idealized a small landscape which Sir George
+had given him, in a sonnet which reproduces the sense of happy pause
+and voluntary fixation with which the mind throws itself into some
+scene where Art has given
+
+  To one brief moment caught from fleeting time
+  The appropriate calm of blest eternity.
+
+There was another pursuit in which Sir George Beaumont was much
+interested, and in which painter and poet were well fitted to unite.
+The landscape-gardener, as Wordsworth says, should "work in the
+spirit of Nature, with an invisible hand of art." And he shows how
+any real success can only be achieved when the designer is willing
+to incorporate himself with the scenery around him; to postpone to
+its indications the promptings of his own pride or caprice; to
+interpret Nature to herself by completing touches; to correct her
+with deference, and as it were to caress her without importunity.
+And rising to that aspect of the question which connects it with
+human society, he is strenuous in condemnation of that taste, not so
+much for solitude as for isolation, which can tolerate no
+neighbourhood, and finds its only enjoyment in the sense of monopoly.
+
+  "Laying out grounds, as it is called, may be considered as a
+  liberal art, in some sort like poetry and painting; its object
+  ought to be to move the affections under the control of good
+  sense; and surely the affections of those who have the deepest
+  perception of the beauty of Nature,--who have the most valuable
+  feelings, that is the most permanent, the most independent, the
+  most ennobling, connected with Nature and human life. No
+  liberal art aims merely at the gratification of an individual or a
+  class; the painter or poet is degraded in proportion as he does
+  so. The true servants of the arts pay homage to the human
+  kind as impersonated in unwarped and enlightened minds.
+  If this be so when we are merely putting together words or
+  colours, how much more ought the feeling to prevail when
+  we are in the midst of the realities of things; of the beauty
+  and harmony, of the joy and happiness, of loving creatures;
+  of men and children, of birds and beasts, of hills and streams,
+  and trees and flowers; with the changes of night and day, evening
+  and morning, summer and winter; and all their unwearied
+  actions and energies, as benign in the spirit that animates them
+  as they are beautiful and grand in that form of clothing which
+  is given to them for the delight of our senses! What then
+  shall we say of many great mansions, with their unqualified
+  expulsion of human creatures from their neighbourhood,
+  happy or not; houses which do what is fabled of the upas
+  tree--breathe out death and desolation! For my part, strip
+  my neighbourhood of human beings, and I should think it
+  one of the greatest privations I could undergo. You have
+  all the poverty of solitude, nothing of its elevation."
+
+This passage is from a letter of Wordsworth's to Sir George Beaumont,
+who was engaged at the time in rebuilding and laying out Coleorton.
+The poet himself planned and superintended some of these improvements,
+and wrote for various points of interest in the grounds inscriptions
+which form dignified examples of that kind of composition.
+
+Nor was Sir George Beaumont the only friend whom the poet's
+taste assisted in the choice of a site or the disposition of
+pleasure-grounds. More than one seat in the Lake-country--among them
+one home of preeminent beauty--have owed to Wordsworth no small part
+of their ordered charm. In this way, too, the poet is with us still;
+his presence has a strange reality as we look on some majestic
+prospect of interwinding lake and mountain which his design has made
+more beautifully visible to the children's children of those he loved;
+as we stand, perhaps, in some shadowed garden-ground where his will
+has had its way,--has framed Helvellyn's far-off summit in an arch
+of tossing green, and embayed in towering forest-trees the long
+lawns of a silent Valley,--fit haunt for lofty aspiration and for
+brooding calm.
+
+But of all woodland ways which Wordsworth's skill designed or his
+feet frequented, not one was dearer to him, (if I may pass thus by a
+gentle transition to another of the strong affections of his life),
+than a narrow path through a firwood near his cottage, which
+"was known to the poet's household by the name of John's Grove." For
+in the year 1800 his brother, John Wordsworth, a few years younger
+than himself, and captain of an East Indiaman, had spent eight
+months in the poet's cottage at Grasmere. The two brothers had seen
+little of each other since childhood, and the poet had now the
+delight of discovering in the sailor a character congenial to his own,
+and an appreciation of poetry--and of the _Lyrical Ballads_
+especially--which was intense and delicate in an unusual degree. In
+both brothers, too, there was the same love of nature; and after
+John's departure, the poet pleased himself with imagining the
+visions of Grasmere which beguiled the watches of many a night at sea,
+or with tracing the pathway which the sailor's instinct had planned
+and trodden amid trees so thickly planted as to baffle a less
+practised skill. John Wordsworth, on the other hand, looked forward
+to Grasmere as the final goal of his wanderings, and intended to use
+his own savings to set the poet free from worldly cares.
+
+Two more voyages the sailor made with such hopes as these, and amid
+a frequent interchange of books and letters with his brother at home.
+Then, in February 1805, he set sail from Portsmouth, in command of
+the "Abergavenny" East Indiaman, bound for India and China. Through
+the incompetence of the pilot who was taking her out of the Channel,
+the ship struck on the Shambles off the Bill of Portland, on February
+5, 1805. "She struck," says Wordsworth, "at 5 p.m. Guns were fired
+immediately, and were continued to be fired. She was gotten off the
+rock at half-past seven, but had taken in so much water, in spite of
+constant pumping, as to be water-logged. They had, however, hope
+that she might still be run upon Weymouth sands, and with this view
+continued pumping and baling till eleven, when she went down.... A
+few minutes before the ship went down my brother was seen talking to
+the first mate, with apparent cheerfulness; and he was standing on
+the hen-coop, which is the point from which he could overlook the
+whole ship, the moment she went down--dying, as he had lived, in the
+very place and point where his duty stationed him."
+
+"For myself," he continues elsewhere, "I feel that there is
+something cut out of my life which cannot be restored. I never
+thought of him but with hope and delight. We looked forward to the
+time, not distant, as we thought, when he would settle near us--when
+the task of his life would be over, and he would have nothing to do
+but reap his reward. By that time I hoped also that the chief part
+of my labours would be executed, and that I should be able to show
+him that he had not placed a false confidence in me. I never wrote a
+line without a thought of giving him pleasure; my writings, printed
+and manuscript, were his delight, and one of the chief solaces of
+his long voyages. But let me stop. I will not be cast down: were it
+only for his sake I will not be dejected. I have much yet to do, and
+pray God to give me strength and power: his part of the agreement
+between us is brought to an end, mine continues; and I hope when I
+shall be able to think of him with a calmer mind, that the
+remembrance of him dead will even animate me more than the joy which
+I had in him living."
+
+In these and the following reflections there is nothing of novelty;
+yet there is an interest in the spectacle of this strong and simple
+mind confronted with the universal problems, and taking refuge in
+the thoughts which have satisfied, or scarcely satisfied, so many
+generations of mourning men.
+
+"A thousand times have I asked myself, as your tender sympathy led
+me to do, 'Why was he taken away?' and I have answered the question
+as you have done. In fact there is no other answer which can satisfy,
+and lay the mind at rest. Why have we a choice, and a will, and a
+notion of justice and injustice, enabling us to be moral agents? Why
+have we sympathies that make the best of us so afraid of inflicting
+pain and sorrow, which yet we see dealt about so lavishly by the
+Supreme Governor? Why should our notions of right towards each other,
+and to all sentient beings within our influence, differ so widely
+from what appears to be His notion and rule, _if every thing were to
+end here_? Would it not be blasphemy to say that, upon the
+supposition of the thinking principle being _destroyed by death_,
+however inferior we may be to the great Cause and Ruler of things we
+have _more of love_ in our nature than He has? The thought is
+monstrous; and yet how to get rid of it, except upon the supposition
+of _another_ and a _better world_, I do not see."
+
+From this calamity, as from all the lessons of life, Wordsworth drew
+all the benefit which it was empowered to bring. "A deep distress
+hath humanized my soul,"--what lover of poetry does not know the
+pathetic lines in which he bears witness to the teaching of sorrow?
+Other griefs, too, he had--the loss of two children in 1812; his
+sister's chronic illness, beginning in 1832; his daughter's death in
+1847. All these he felt to the full; and yet, until his daughter's
+death, which was more than his failing energies could bear, these
+bereavements were but the thinly-scattered clouds "in a great sea of
+blue"--seasons of mourning here and there among years which never
+lost their hold on peace; which knew no shame and no remorse, no
+desolation and no fear; whose days were never long with weariness,
+nor their nights broken at the touch of woe. Even when we speak of
+his tribulations, it is his happiness which rises in our minds.
+
+And inasmuch as this felicity is the great fact of Wordsworth's life--
+since his history is for the most part but the history of a halycon
+calm--we find ourselves forced upon the question whether such a life
+is to be held desirable or no. Happiness with honour was the ideal
+of Solon; is it also ours? To the modern spirit,--to the Christian,
+in whose ears counsels of perfection have left "a presence that is
+not to be put by," this question, at which a Greek would have smiled,
+is of no such easy solution.
+
+To us, perhaps, in computing the fortune of any one whom we hold dear,
+it may seem more needful to inquire not whether he has had enough of
+joy, but whether he has had enough of sorrow; whether the blows of
+circumstance have wholly shaped his character from the rock; whether
+his soul has taken lustre and purity in the refiner's fire. Nor is
+it only (as some might say) for violent and faulty natures that
+sorrow is the best. It is true that by sorrow only can the
+headstrong and presumptuous spirit be shamed into gentleness and
+solemnized into humility. But sorrow is used also by the Power above
+as in cases where we men would have shrunk in horror from so rough a
+touch. Natures that were already of a heroic unselfishness, of a
+childlike purity, have been raised ere now by anguish upon anguish,
+woe after woe, to a height of holiness which we may believe that they
+could have reached by no other road. Why should it not be so I since
+there is no limit to the soul's possible elevation, why should her
+purifying trials have any assignable end? She is of a metal which
+can grow for ever brighter in the fiercening flame. And if, then, we
+would still pronounce the true Beatitudes not on the rejoicing, the
+satisfied, the highly-honoured, but after an ancient and sterner
+pattern, what account are we to give of Wordsworth's long years of
+blissful calm?
+
+In the first place, we may say that his happiness was as wholly free
+from vulgar or transitory elements as a man's can be. It lay in a
+life which most men would have found austere and blank indeed; a
+life from which not Croesus only, but Solon would have turned in
+scorn, a life of poverty and retirement, of long apparent failure,
+and honour that came tardily at the close; it was a happiness
+nourished on no sacrifice of other men, on no eager appropriation of
+the goods of earth, but springing from, a single eye and a loving
+spirit, and wrought from those primary emotions which are the
+innocent birthright of all. And if it be answered that however truly
+philosophic, however sacredly pure, his happiness may have been, yet
+its wisdom and its holiness were without an effort, and, that it is
+effort which makes the philosopher and the saint: then we must use
+in answer his own Platonic scheme of things, to express a thought
+which we can but dimly apprehend; and we must say that though
+progress be inevitably linked in our minds with struggle, yet
+neither do we conceive of struggle as without a pause; there must be
+prospect-places in the long ascent of souls; and the whole of this
+earthly life--this one existence, standing we know not where among
+the myriad that have been for us or shall be--may not be too much to
+occupy with one of those outlooks of vision and of prophecy, when
+
+    In a season of calm weather
+  Though inland far we be,
+  Our souls have sight of that immortal sea,
+  Which brought us hither;
+  Can in a moment travel thither.
+  And see the children sport upon the shore.
+  And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+"HAPPY WARRIOR," AND PATRIOTIC POEMS.
+
+The year 1805, which bereft Wordsworth of a beloved brother, brought
+with it also another death, which was felt by the whole English
+nation like a private calamity. The emotion which Wordsworth felt at
+the news of Trafalgar,--the way in which he managed to intertwine
+the memories of Nelson and of his own brother in his heart,--may
+remind us fitly at this point of our story of the distress and
+perplexity of nations which for so many years surrounded the quiet
+Grasmere home, and of the strong responsive emotion with which the
+poet met each shock of European fates.
+
+When England first took up arms against the French revolution,
+Wordsworth's feeling, as we have seen, had been one of unmixed
+sorrow and shame. Bloody and terrible as the revolution had become,
+it was still in some sort representative of human freedom; at any
+rate it might still seem to contain possibilities of progress such
+as the retrograde despotisms with which England allied herself could
+never know. But the conditions of the contest changed before long.
+France had not the wisdom, the courage, the constancy to play to the
+end the part for which she had seemed chosen among the nations. It
+was her conduct towards Switzerland which decisively altered
+Wordsworth's view. He saw her valiant spirit of self-defence
+corrupted into lust of glory; her eagerness for the abolition of
+unjust privilege turned into a contentment with equality of
+degradation under a despot's heel. "One man, of men the meanest
+too,"--for such the First Consul must needs appear to the moralist's
+eye,--was
+
+  Raised up to sway the world--to do, undo;
+  With mighty nations for his underlings.
+
+And history herself seemed vulgarized by the repetition of her
+ancient tales of war and overthrow on a scale of such apparent
+magnitude, but with no glamour of distance to hide the baseness of
+the agencies by which the destinies of Europe were shaped anew. This
+was an occasion that tried the hearts of men; it was not easy to
+remain through all those years at once undazzled and untempted, and
+never in the blackest hour to despair of human virtue.
+
+In his tract on _The Convention of Cintra_, 1808, Wordsworth has
+given the fullest expression to this undaunted temper:--
+
+  "Oppression, its own blind and predestined enemy, has poured
+  this of blessedness upon Spain--that the enormity of the outrages
+  of which she has been the victim has created an object of love
+  and of hatred, of apprehensions and of wishes, adequate (if
+  that be possible) to the utmost demands of the human spirit.
+  The heart that serves in this cause, if it languish, must
+  languish from its own constitutional weakness, and not through
+  want of nourishment from without. But it is a belief propagated
+  in books, and which passes currently among talking
+  men as part of their familiar wisdom, that the hearts of the
+  many _are_ constitutionally weak, that they _do_ languish, and
+  are slow to answer to the requisitions of things. I entreat
+  those who are in this delusion to look behind them and
+  about them for the evidence of experience. Now this, rightly
+  understood, not only gives no support to any such belief,
+  but proves that the truth is in direct opposition to it. The
+  history of all ages--tumults after tumults, wars foreign or
+  civil, with short or with no breathing-places from generation to
+  generation; the senseless weaving and interweaving of factions,
+  vanishing, and reviving, and piercing each other like the
+  Northern Lights; public commotions, and those in the breast
+  of the individual; the long calenture to which the Lover is subject;
+  the blast, like the blast of the desert, which sweeps perennially
+  through a frightful solitude of its own making in the
+  mind of the Gamester; the slowly quickening, but ever quickening,
+  descent of appetite down which the Miser is propelled; the
+  agony and cleaving oppression of grief; the ghost-like hauntings
+  of shame; the incubus of revenge; the life-distemper of ambition ...
+  these demonstrate incontestably that the passions of
+  men, (I mean the soul of sensibility in the heart of man), in all
+  quarrels, in all contests, in all quests, in all delights, in all
+  employments which are either sought by men or thrust upon
+  them, do immeasurably transcend their objects. The true
+  sorrow of humanity consists in this--not that the mind of
+  man fails, but that the cause and demands of action and of
+  life so rarely correspond with the dignity and intensity of
+  human desires; and hence, that which is slow to languish is too
+  easily turned aside and abused. But, with the remembrance of
+  what has been done, and in the face of the interminable evils
+  which are threatened, a Spaniard can never have cause to complain
+  of this while a follower of the tyrant remains in arms
+  upon the Peninsula."
+
+It was passages such as this, perhaps, which led Canning to declare
+that Wordsworth's pamphlet was the finest piece of political
+eloquence which had appeared since Burke. And yet if we compare it
+with Burke, or with the great Greek exemplar of all those who would
+give speech the cogency of act,--we see at once the causes of its
+practical failure. In Demosthenes the thoughts and principles are
+often as lofty as any patriot can express; but their loftiness, in
+his speech, as in the very truth of things, seemed but to add to
+their immediate reality. They were beaten and inwoven into the facts
+of the hour; action seemed to turn, on them as on its only possible
+pivot; it was as though Virtue and Freedom hung armed in heaven
+above the assembly, and in the visible likeness of immortal
+ancestors beckoned upon an urgent way. Wordsworth's mood of mind, on
+the other hand, as he has depicted it in two sonnets written at the
+same time as his tract, explains why it was that that appeal was
+rather a solemn protest than an effective exhortation. In the first
+sonnet he describes the surroundings of his task,--the dark wood and
+rocky cave, "the hollow vale which foaming torrents fill with
+omnipresent murmur:"--
+
+  Here mighty Nature! In this school sublime
+  I weigh the hopes and fears of suffering Spain;
+  For her consult the auguries of time,
+  And through the human heart explore my way,
+  And look and listen, gathering whence I may
+  Triumph, and thoughts no bondage can restrain.
+
+And then he proceeds to conjecture what effect his tract will produce:--
+
+  I dropped my pen, and listened to the wind,
+    That sang of trees uptorn and vessels tost;
+    A midnight harmony, and wholly lost
+  To the general sense of men, by chains confined
+  Of business, care, or pleasure,--or resigned
+    To timely sleep. Thought I, the impassioned strain
+    Which without aid of numbers I sustain
+  Like acceptation from the world will find.
+
+This deliberate and lonely emotion was fitter to inspire grave
+poetry than a pamphlet appealing to an immediate crisis. And the
+sonnets dedicated _To Liberty_ (1802-16) are the outcome of many
+moods like these.
+
+It is little to say of these sonnets that they are the most
+permanent record in our literature of the Napoleonic war. For that
+distinction they have few competitors. Two magnificent songs of
+Campbell's, an ode of Coleridge's, a few spirited stanzas of Byron's--
+strangely enough there is little besides these that lives in the
+national memory, till we come to the ode which summed up the long
+contest a generation later, when its great captain passed away. But
+these _Sonnets to Liberty_ are worthy of comparison with the noblest
+passages of patriotic verse or prose which all our history has
+inspired--the passages where Shakespeare brings his rays to focus on
+"this earth, this realm, this England,"--or where the dread of
+national dishonour has kindled Chatham to an iron glow,--or where
+Milton rises from the polemic into the prophet, and Burke from the
+partisan into the philosopher. The armoury of Wordsworth, indeed,
+was not forged with the same fire as that of these "invincible
+knights of old." He had not swayed senates, nor directed policies,
+nor gathered into one ardent bosom all the spirit of a heroic age.
+But he had deeply felt what it is that makes the greatness of nations;
+in that extremity no man was more staunch than he; no man more
+unwaveringly disdained unrighteous empire, or kept the might of
+moral forces more steadfastly in view. Not Stein could place a
+manlier reliance on "a few strong instincts and a few plain rules;"
+not Fichte could invoke more convincingly the "great allies" which
+work with "Man's unconquerable mind."
+
+Here and there, indeed, throughout these sonnets are scattered
+strokes of high poetic admiration or scorn which could hardly be
+overmatched in AEschylus. Such is the indignant correction--
+
+     Call not the royal Swede unfortunate,
+     Who never did to Fortune bend the knee!
+
+or the stern touch which closes a description of Flamininus'
+proclamation at the Isthmian games, according liberty to Greece,--
+
+     A gift of that which is not to be given
+     By all the blended powers of Earth and Heaven!
+
+Space forbids me to dwell in detail on these noble poems,--on the
+well-known sonnets to Venice, to Milton, &c.; on the generous
+tributes to the heroes of the contest,--Schill, Hoffer, Toussaint,
+Palafox; or on the series which contrast the instinctive greatness
+of the Spanish people at bay, with Napoleon's lying promises and
+inhuman pride. But if Napoleon's career afforded to Wordsworth a
+poetic example, impressive as that of Xerxes to the Greeks, of
+lawless and intoxicated power, there was need of some contrasted
+figure more notable than Hoffer or Palafox from which to draw the
+lessons which great contests can teach of unselfish valour. Was
+there then any man, by land or sea, who might serve as the poet's
+type of the ideal hero? To an Englishman, at least, this question
+carries its own reply. For by a singular destiny England, with a
+thousand years of noble history behind her, has chosen for her
+best-loved, for her national hero, not an Arminius from the age of
+legend, not a Henri Quatro from the age of chivalry, but a man whom
+men still living have seen and known. For indeed England and all the
+world as to this man were of one accord; and when in victory, on his
+ship _Victory_, Nelson passed away, the thrill which shook mankind
+was of a nature such as perhaps was never felt at any other death,--
+so unanimous was the feeling of friends and foes that earth had lost
+her crowning example of impassioned self-devotedness and of heroic
+honour.
+
+And yet it might have seemed that between Nelson's nature and
+Wordsworth's there was little in common. The obvious limitations of
+the great Admiral's culture and character were likely to be strongly
+felt by the philosophic poet. And a serious crime, of which Nelson
+was commonly, though, as now appears, erroneously, [4] supposed to be
+guilty, was sure to be judged by Wordsworth with great severity.
+
+[Footnote 4: The researches of Sir Nicholas Nicolas, (_Letters and
+Despatches of Lord Nelson_, vol. vii. Appendix), have placed Lord
+Nelson's connexion with Lady Hamilton in an unexpected light.]
+
+Wordsworth was, in fact, hampered by some such feelings of
+disapproval. He even tells us, with that naive affectionateness
+which often makes us smile, that he has had recourse to the
+character of his own brother John for the qualities in which the
+great Admiral appeared to him to have been deficient. But on these
+hesitations it would be unjust to dwell. I mention them only to bring
+out the fact that between these two men, so different in outward
+fates,--between "the adored, the incomparable Nelson" and the homely
+poet, "retired as noontide dew,"--there was a moral likeness so
+profound that the ideal of the recluse was realized in the public
+life of the hero, and, on the other hand, the hero himself is only
+seen as completely heroic when his impetuous life stands out for us
+from the solemn background of the poet's calm. And surely these two
+natures taken together make the perfect Englishman. Nor is there any
+portrait fitter than that of _The Happy Warrior_ to go forth to all
+lands as representing the English character at its height--a figure
+not ill-matching with "Plutarch's men."
+
+For indeed this short poem is in itself a manual of greatness; there
+is a Roman majesty in its simple and weighty speech. And what eulogy
+was ever nobler than that passage where, without definite allusion
+or quoted name, the poet depicts, as it were, the very summit of
+glory in the well-remembered aspect of the Admiral in his last and
+greatest hour?
+
+  Whose powers shed round him. In the common strife,
+  Or mild concerns of ordinary life.
+  A constant influence, a peculiar grace:
+  But who, if he be called upon to face
+  Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined
+  Great issues, good or bad for human kind,
+  _Is happy as a Lover, and attired
+  With sudden brightness, like a Man inspired_.
+
+Or again, where the hidden thought of Nelson's womanly tenderness,
+of his constant craving for the green earth and home affections in
+the midst of storm and war, melts the stern verses into a sudden
+change of tone:--
+
+  He who, though thus endued as with a sense
+  And faculty for storm and turbulence.
+  _Is yet a Soul whose master-bias leans
+  To homefelt pleasures and to gentle scenes_;
+  Sweet images! Which, wheresoe'er he be,
+  Are at his heart; and such fidelity
+  It is his darling passion to approve;--
+  More brave for this, that he hath much to love.
+
+Compare with this the end of the _Song at Brougham Castle_, where,
+at the words "alas! The fervent harper did not know--" the strain
+changes from the very spirit of chivalry to the gentleness of
+Nature's calm. Nothing can be more characteristic of Wordsworth than
+contrasts like this. They teach us to remember that his accustomed
+mildness is the fruit of no indolent or sentimental peace; and that,
+on the other hand, when his counsels are sternest, and "his voice is
+still for war," this is no voice of hardness or of vainglory, but
+the reluctant resolution of a heart which fain would yield itself to
+other energies, and have no message but of love.
+
+There is one more point in which the character of Nelson has fallen
+in with one of the lessons which Wordsworth is never tired of
+enforcing, the lesson that virtue grows by the strenuousness of its
+exercise, that it gains strength as it wrestles with pain and
+difficulty, and converts the shocks of circumstance into an energy
+of its proper glow. The Happy Warrior is one,
+
+     Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,
+     And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train!
+     Turns his necessity to glorious gain;
+     In face of these doth exercise a power
+     Which is our human nature's highest dower;
+     Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves
+     Of their bad influence, and their good receives;
+     By objects which might force the soul to abate
+     Her feeling, rendered more compassionate;--
+
+and so further, in words which recall the womanly tenderness, the
+almost exaggerated feeling for others' pain, which showed itself
+memorably in face of the blazing _Orient_, and in the harbour at
+Teneriffe, and in the cockpit at Trafalgar.
+
+In such lessons as these,--such lessons as _The Happy Warrior_ or
+the Patriotic Sonnets teach,--there is, of course, little that is
+absolutely novel. We were already aware that the ideal hero should
+be as gentle as he is brave, that he should act always from the
+highest motives, nor greatly care for any reward save the
+consciousness of having done his duty. We were aware that the true
+strength of a nation is moral and not material; that dominion which
+rests on mere military force is destined quickly to decay, that the
+tyrant, however admired and prosperous, is in reality despicable,
+and miserable, and alone; that the true man should face death itself
+rather than parley with dishonour. These truths are _admitted_ in
+all ages; yet it is scarcely stretching language to say that they
+are _known_ to but few men. Or at least, though in a great nation
+there be many who will act on them instinctively, and approve them
+by a self-surrendering faith, there are few who can so put them
+forth in speech as to bring them home with a fresh conviction and an
+added glow; who can sum up, like AEschylus, the contrast between
+Hellenic freedom and barbarian despotism in "one trump's peal that
+set all Greeks aflame;" can thrill, like Virgil, a world-wide empire
+with the recital of the august simplicities of early Rome.
+
+To those who would know these things with a vital knowledge--a
+conviction which would remain unshaken were the whole world in arms
+for wrong--it is before all things necessary to strengthen the inner
+monitions by the companionship of these noble souls. And If a poet,
+by strong concentration of thought, by striving in all things along
+the upward way, can leave us in a few pages as it were a summary of
+patriotism, a manual of national honour, he surely has his place
+among his country's benefactors not only by that kind of courtesy
+which the nation extends to men of letters of whom her masses take
+little heed, but with a title as assured as any warrior or statesman,
+and with no less direct a claim.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+CHILDREN--LIFE AT RYDAL MOUNT--"THE EXCURSION."
+
+It may be well at this point to return to the quiet chronicle of the
+poet's life at Grasmere; where his cottage was becoming too small
+for an increasing family. His eldest son, John, was born in 1803;
+his eldest daughter, Dorothy or Dora, in 1804. Then came Thomas, born
+1806; and Catherine, born 1808; and the list is ended by William,
+born 1810, and now (1880) the only survivor. In the spring of 1808
+Wordsworth left Townend for Allan Bank,--a more roomy, but an
+uncomfortable house, at the north end of Grasmere. From thence he
+removed for a time, in 1811, to the Parsonage at Grasmere.
+
+Wordsworth was the most affectionate of fathers, and allusions to
+his children occur frequently in his poetry. Dora--who was the
+delight of his later years--has been described at length in _The
+Triad_. Shorter and simpler, but more completely successful, is the
+picture of Catherine in the little poem which begins "Loving she is,
+and tractable, though wild," with its homely simile for childhood--
+its own existence sufficient to fill it with gladness:
+
+      As a faggot sparkles on the hearth
+  Not less if unattended and alone
+  Than when both young and old sit gathered round
+  And take delight in its activity.
+
+The next notice of this beloved child is in the sonnet, "Surprised
+by joy, impatient as the wind," written when she had already been
+removed from his side. She died in 1812, and was closely followed by
+her brother Thomas. Wordsworth's grief for these children was
+profound, violent, and lasting, to an extent which those who imagine
+him as not only calm but passionless might have some difficulty in
+believing. "Referring once," says his friend Mr. Aubrey de Vere,
+"to two young children of his who had died about _forty years_
+previously, he described the details of their illnesses with an
+exactness and an impetuosity of troubled excitement, such as might
+have been expected if the bereavement had taken place but a few
+weeks before. The lapse of time seemed to have left the sorrow
+submerged indeed, but still in all its first freshness. Yet I
+afterwards heard that at the time of the illness, at least in the
+case of one of the two children, it was impossible to rouse his
+attention to the danger. He chanced to be then under the immediate
+spell of one of those fits of poetic inspiration which descended on
+him like a cloud. Till the cloud had drifted, he could see nothing
+beyond."
+
+This anecdote illustrates the fact, which to those who knew
+Wordsworth well was sufficiently obvious, that the characteristic
+calm of his writings was the result of no coldness of temperament
+but of a deliberate philosophy. The pregnant force of his language
+in dealing with those dearest to him--his wife, his sister, his
+brother--is proof enough of this. The frequent allusions in his
+correspondence to the physical exhaustion brought on by the act of
+poetical composition indicate a frame which, though made robust by
+exercise and temperance, was by nature excitable rather than strong.
+And even in the direction in which we should least have expected it,
+there is reason to believe that there were capacities of feeling in
+him which never broke from his control. "Had I been a writer of
+love-poetry," he is reported to have said, "it would have been
+natural to me to write it with a degree of warmth which could hardly
+have been approved by my principles, and which might have been
+undesirable for the reader."
+
+Wordsworth's paternal feelings, at any rate, were, as has been said,
+exceptionally strong; and the impossibility of remaining in a house
+filled with sorrowful memories rendered him doubly anxious to obtain
+a permanent home. "The house which I have for some time occupied," he
+writes to Lord Lonsdale, in January 1813, "is the Parsonage of
+Grasmere. It stands close by the churchyard, and I have found it
+absolutely necessary that we should quit a place which, by recalling
+to our minds at every moment the losses we have sustained in the
+course of the last year, would grievously retard our progress
+towards that tranquillity which it is our duty to aim at." It
+happened that Rydal Mount became vacant at this moment, and in the
+spring of 1813 the Wordsworths migrated to this their favourite and
+last abode.
+
+Rydal Mount has probably been oftener described than any other
+English poet's home since Shakespeare; and few homes, certainly,
+have been moulded into such close accordance with their inmates'
+nature. The house, which has been altered since Wordsworth's day,
+stands looking southward, on the rocky side of Nab Scar, above Rydal
+Lake. The garden was described by Bishop Wordsworth immediately
+after his uncle's death, while every terrace-walk and flowering
+alley spoke of the poet's loving care. He tells of the "tall ash-tree,
+in which a thrush has sung, for hours together, during many years;"
+of the "laburnum in which the osier cage of the doves was hung;" of
+the stone steps "in the interstices of which grow the yellow
+flowering poppy, and the wild geranium or Poor Robin,"--
+
+                                 Gay
+  With his red stalks upon a sunny day.
+
+And then of the terraces--one levelled for Miss Fenwick's use, and
+welcome to himself in aged years; and one ascending, and leading to
+the "far terrace" on the mountain's side, where the poet was wont to
+murmur his verses as they came. Within the house were disposed his
+simple treasures: the ancestral almery, on which the names of unknown
+Wordsworths may be deciphered still; Sir George Beaumont's pictures
+of "The White Doe of Rylstone" and "The Thorn," and the cuckoo clock
+which brought vernal thoughts to cheer the sleepless bed of age, and
+which sounded its noonday summons when his spirit fled.
+
+Wordsworth's worldly fortunes, as if by some benignant guardianship
+of Providence, were at all times proportioned to his successive needs.
+About the date of his removal to Rydal (in March 1813) he was
+appointed, through Lord Lonsdale's interest, to the distributorship
+of stamps for the county of Westmoreland, to which office the same
+post for Cumberland was afterwards added. He held this post till
+August 1842, when he resigned it without a retiring pension, and it
+was conferred on his second son. He was allowed to reside at Rydal,
+which was counted as a suburb of Ambleside: and as the duties of the
+place were light, and mainly performed by a most competent and
+devoted clerk, there was no drawback to the advantage of an increase
+of income which released him from anxiety as to the future. A more
+lucrative office--the collectorship of Whitehaven--was subsequently
+offered to him; but he declined it, "nor would exchange his Sabine
+valley for riches and a load of care."
+
+Though Wordsworth's life at Rydal was a retired one, it was not
+that of a recluse. As years went on he became more and more
+recognized as a centre of spiritual strength and illumination, and
+was sought not only by those who were already his neighbours, but by
+some who became so mainly for his sake. Southey at Keswick was a
+valued friend, though Wordsworth did not greatly esteem him as a poet.
+De Quincey, originally attracted to the district by admiration for
+Wordsworth, remained there for many years, and poured forth a
+criticism strangely compounded of the utterances of the
+hero-worshipper and the _valet-de-chambre_. Professor Wilson, of the
+_Noctes Ambrosianae_, never showed, perhaps, to so much advantage
+as when he walked by the side of the master whose greatness he was
+one of the first to detect. Dr. Arnold of Rugby made the
+neighbouring home at Fox How a focus of warm affections and of
+intellectual life. And Hartley Coleridge, whose fairy childhood had
+inspired one of Wordsworth's happiest pieces, continued to lead
+among the dales of Westmoreland a life which showed how much of
+genius and goodness a single weakness can nullify.
+
+Other friends there were, too, less known to fame, but of
+exceptional powers of appreciation and sympathy. The names of
+Mrs. Fletcher and her daughters, Lady Richardson and Mrs. Davy,
+should not be omitted in any record of the poet's life at Rydal. And
+many humbler neighbours may be recognized in the characters of the
+_Excursion_ and other poems. _The Wanderer_, indeed, is a picture
+of Wordsworth himself--"an idea," as he says, "of what I fancied my
+own character might have become in his circumstances." But the
+_Solitary_ was suggested by a broken man who took refuge in
+Grasmere from the world in which he had found no peace; and the
+characters described as lying in the churchyard among the mountains
+are almost all of them portraits. The clergyman and his family
+described in Book VII were among the poet's principal associates in
+the vale of Grasmere. "There was much talent in the family," says
+Wordsworth in the memoranda dictated to Miss Fenwick; "and the
+eldest son was distinguished for poetical talent, of which a
+specimen is given in my Notes to the _Sonnets on the Duddon_. Once
+when, in our cottage at Townend, I was talking with him about poetry,
+in the course of our conversation I presumed to find fault with the
+versification of Pope, of whom he was an enthusiastic admirer. He
+defended him with a warmth that indicated much irritation;
+nevertheless I could not abandon my point, and said, 'In compass and
+variety of sound your own versification surpasses his.' Never shall
+I forget the change in his countenance and tone of voice. The storm
+was laid in a moment; he no longer disputed my judgment; and I
+passed immediately in his mind, no doubt, for as great a critic as
+ever lived."
+
+It was with personages simple and unromantic as these that
+Wordsworth filled the canvas of his longest poem. Judged by ordinary
+standards the _Excursion_ appears an epic without action, and with
+two heroes, the Pastor and the Wanderer, whose characters are
+identical. Its form is cumbrous in the extreme, and large tracts of
+it have little claim to the name of poetry. Wordsworth compares the
+_Excursion_ to a temple of which his smaller poems form subsidiary
+shrines; but the reader will more often liken the small poems to gems,
+and the _Excursion_ to the rock from which they were extracted. The
+long poem contains, indeed, magnificent passages, but as a whole it
+is a diffused description of scenery which the poet has elsewhere
+caught in brighter glimpses; a diffused statement of hopes and
+beliefs which have crystallized more exquisitely elsewhere round
+moments of inspiring emotion. The _Excursion_, in short, has the
+drawbacks of a didactic poem as compared with lyrical poems; but,
+judged as a didactic poem, it has the advantage of containing
+teaching of true and permanent value.
+
+I shall not attempt to deduce a settled scheme of philosophy from
+these discourses among the mountains. I would urge only that as a
+guide to conduct Wordsworth's precepts are not in themselves either
+unintelligible or visionary. For whereas some moralists would have us
+amend nature, and others bid us follow her, there is apt to be
+something impracticable in the first maxim, and something vague in
+the second. Asceticism, quietism, enthusiasm, ecstasy--all systems
+which imply an unnatural repression or an unnatural excitation of
+our faculties--are ill-suited for the mass of mankind. And on the
+other hand, if we are told to follow nature, to develope our
+original character, we are too often in doubt as to which of our
+conflicting instincts to follow, what part of our complex nature to
+accept as our regulating self. But Wordsworth, while impressing on
+us conformity to nature as the rule of life, suggests a test of such
+conformity which can be practically applied. "The child is father of
+the man,"--in the words which stand as introduction to his poetical
+works, and Wordsworth holds that the instincts and pleasures of a
+healthy childhood sufficiently indicate the lines on which our
+maturer character should be formed. The joy which began in the mere
+sense of existence should be maintained by hopeful faith; the
+simplicity which began in inexperience should be recovered by
+meditation; the love which originated in the family circle should
+expand itself over the race of men. And the calming and elevating
+influence of Nature--which to Wordsworth's memory seemed the
+inseparable concomitant of childish years--should be constantly
+invoked throughout life to keep the heart fresh and the eyes open to
+the mysteries discernible through her radiant veil. In a word, the
+family affections, if duly fostered, the influences of Nature, if
+duly sought, with some knowledge of the best books, are material
+enough to "build up our moral being" and to outweigh the less
+deep-seated impulses which prompt to wrong-doing.
+
+If, then, surrounding influences make so decisive a difference in
+man's moral lot, what are we to say of those who never have the
+chance of receiving those influences aright; who are reared, with
+little parental supervision, in smoky cities, and spend their lives
+in confined and monotonous labour? One of the most impressive
+passages in the _Excursion_ is an indignant complaint of the
+injustice thus done to the factory child. Wordsworth was no
+fanatical opponent of manufacturing industry. He had intimate
+friends among manufacturers; and in one of his letters he speaks of
+promising himself much pleasure from witnessing the increased regard
+for the welfare of factory hands of which one of these friends had
+set the example. But he never lost sight of the fact that the life
+of the mill-hand is an anomaly--is a life not in the order of nature,
+and which requires to be justified by manifest necessity and by
+continuous care. The question to what extent we may acquiesce in the
+continuance of a low order of human beings, existing for our
+enjoyment rather than for their own, may be answered with
+plausibility in very different tones; from the Communist who cannot
+rest content in the inferiority of any one man's position to any
+other's, to the philosopher who holds that mankind has made the most
+eminent progress when a few chosen individuals have been supported
+in easy brilliancy by a population of serfs or slaves. Wordsworth's
+answer to this question is at once conservative and philanthropic.
+He holds to the distinction of classes, and thus admits a difference
+in the fulness and value of human lots. But he will not consent to
+any social arrangement which implies a necessary _moral_ inferiority
+in any section of the body politic; and he esteems it the
+statesman's first duty to provide that all citizens shall be placed
+under conditions of life which, however humble, shall not be
+unfavourable to virtue.
+
+His views on national education, which at first sight appear so
+inconsistent, depend on the same conception of national welfare.
+Wordsworth was one of the earliest and most emphatic proclaimers of
+the duty of the State in this respect. The lines in which he insists
+that every child ought to be taught to read are, indeed, often quoted
+as an example of the moralizing baldness of much of his blank verse.
+But, on the other hand, when a great impulse was given to education
+(1820-30) by Bell and Lancaster, by the introduction of what was
+called the "Madras system" of tuition by pupil-teachers, and the
+spread of infant schools, Wordsworth was found unexpectedly in the
+opposite camp. Considering as he did all mental requirements as
+entirely subsidiary to moral progress, and in themselves of very
+little value, he objected to a system which, instead of confining
+itself to reading--that indispensable channel of moral nutriment--
+aimed at communicating knowledge as varied and advanced as time and
+funds would allow. He objected to the dissociation of school and
+home life--to that relegation of domestic interests and duties to
+the background, which large and highly-organized schools, and
+teachers much above the home level, must necessarily involve. And
+yet more strongly, and, as it may still seem to many minds, with
+convincing reason, he objected to an eleemosynary system, which
+"precludes the poor mother from the strongest motive human nature
+can be actuated by for industry, for forethought, and self-denial."
+"The Spartan," he said, "and other ancient communities, might
+disregard domestic ties, because they had the substitution of country,
+which we cannot have. Our course is to supplant domestic attachments,
+without the possibility of substituting others more capacious. What
+can grow out of it but selfishness?" The half-century which has
+elapsed since Wordsworth wrote these words has evidently altered the
+state of the question. It has impressed on us the paramount necessity
+of national education, for reasons political and social too well
+known to repeat. But it may be feared that it has also shifted the
+incidence of Wordsworth's arguments in a more sinister manner, by
+vastly increasing the number of those homes where domestic influence
+of the kind which the poet saw around him at Rydal is altogether
+wanting and school is the best avenue even to moral well-being.
+"Heaven and hell," he writes in 1808, "are scarcely more different
+from each other than Sheffield and Manchester, &c., differ from the
+plains and valleys of Surrey, Essex, Cumberland, or Westmoreland."
+It is to be feared, indeed, that even "the plains and valleys of
+Surrey and Essex" contain many cottages whose spiritual and sanitary
+conditions fall far short of the poet's ideal. But it is of course
+in the great and growing centres of population that the dangers
+which he dreads have come upon us in their most aggravated form. And
+so long as there are in England so many homes to which parental care
+and the influences of Nature are alike unknown, no protest in favour
+of the paramount importance of these primary agencies in the
+formation of character can be regarded as altogether out of date.
+
+With such severe and almost prosaic themes is the greater part of
+the _Excursion_ occupied. Yet the poem is far from being composed
+throughout in a prosaic spirit. "Of its bones is coral made;" its
+arguments and theories have lain long in Wordsworth's mind, and have
+accreted to themselves a rich investiture of observation and feeling.
+Some of its passages rank among the poet's highest flights. Such is
+the passage in Book I describing the boy's rapture at sunrise; and
+the picture of a sunset at the close of the same book. Such is the
+opening of Book IV; and the passage describing the wild joy of
+roaming through a mountain storm; and the metaphor in the same book
+which compares the mind's power of transfiguring the obstacles which
+beset her, with the glory into which the moon incorporates the
+umbrage that would intercept her beams.
+
+It would scarcely be possible at the present day that a work
+containing such striking passages, and so much of substance and
+elevation--however out of keeping it might be with the ruling taste
+of the day--should appear without receiving careful study from many
+quarters and warm appreciation in some recognized organs of opinion.
+Criticism in Wordsworth's day was both less competent and less
+conscientious, and the famous "This will never do" of Jeffrey in the
+_Edinburgh Review_ was by no means an extreme specimen of the
+general tone in which the work was received. The judgment of the
+reviewers influenced popular taste; and the book was as decided a
+pecuniary failure as Wordsworth's previous ventures had been.
+
+And here, perhaps, is a fit occasion to speak of that strangely
+violent detraction and abuse which formed so large an ingredient in
+Wordsworth's life,--or rather, of that which is the only element of
+permanent interest in such a matter,--his manner of receiving and
+replying to it. No writer, probably, who has afterwards achieved a
+reputation at all like Wordsworth's, has been so long represented by
+reviewers as purely ridiculous. And in Wordsworth's manner of
+acceptance of this fact we may discern all the strength, and
+something of the stiffness, of his nature; we may recognize an almost,
+but not quite, ideal attitude under the shafts of unmerited obloquy.
+For he who thus is arrogantly censured should remember both the
+dignity and the frailty of man; he should wholly forgive, and almost
+wholly forget; but, nevertheless, should retain such serviceable
+hints as almost any criticism, however harsh or reckless, can afford,
+and go on his way with no bitter broodings, but yet (to use
+Wordsworth's expression in another context) "with a melancholy in
+the soul, a sinking inward into ourselves from thought to thought, a
+steady remonstrance, and a high resolve."
+
+How far his own self-assertion may becomingly be carried in reply,
+is another and a delicate question. There is almost necessarily
+something distasteful to us not only in self-praise but even in a
+thorough self-appreciation. We desire of the ideal character that
+his faculties of admiration should be, as it were, absorbed in an
+eager perception of the merits of others,--that a kind of shrinking
+delicacy should prevent him from appraising his own achievements
+with a similar care. Often, indeed, there is something most winning
+in a touch of humorous blindness: "Well, Miss Sophia, and how do
+_you_ like the _Lady of the Lake_?"  "Oh, I've not read it; papa
+says there's nothing so bad for young people as reading bad poetry."
+
+But there are circumstances under which this graceful absence of
+self-consciousness can no longer be maintained. When a man believes
+that he has a message to deliver that vitally concerns mankind, and
+when that message is received with contempt and apathy, he is
+necessarily driven back upon himself; he is forced to consider
+whether what he has to say is after all so important, and whether
+his mode of saying it be right and adequate. A necessity of this
+kind was forced upon both Shelley and Wordsworth. Shelley--the very
+type of self-forgetful enthusiasm--was driven at last by the world's
+treatment of him into a series of moods sometimes bitter and
+sometimes self-distrustful--into a sense of aloofness and detachment
+from the mass of men, which the poet who would fain improve and
+exalt them should do his utmost not to feel. On Wordsworth's more
+stubborn nature the effect produced by many years of detraction was
+of a different kind. Naturally introspective, he was driven by abuse
+and ridicule into taking stock of himself more frequently and more
+laboriously than ever. He formed an estimate of himself and his
+writings which was, on the whole, (as will now be generally admitted,)
+a just one; and this view he expressed when occasion offered--in
+sober language, indeed, but with calm conviction, and with precisely
+the same air of speaking from undoubted knowledge as when he
+described the beauty of Cumbrian mountains or the virtue of Cumbrian
+homes.
+
+"It is impossible," he wrote to Lady Beaumont in 1807,
+"that any expectations can be lower than mine concerning the
+immediate effect of this little work upon what is called the public.
+I do not here take into consideration the envy and malevolence, and
+all the bad passions which always stand in the way of a work of any
+merit from a living poet; but merely think of the pure, absolute,
+honest ignorance in which all worldlings, of every rank and situation,
+must be enveloped, with respect to the thoughts, feelings, and
+images on which the life of my poems depends. The things which I
+have taken, whether from within or without, what have they to do
+with routs, dinners, morning calls, hurry from door to door, from
+street to street, on foot or in carriage; with Mr. Pitt or Mr. Fox,
+Mr. Paul or Sir Francis Burdett, the Westminster election or the
+borough of Honiton? In a word--for I cannot stop to make my way
+through the harry of images that present themselves to me--what have
+they to do with endless talking about things that nobody cares
+anything for, except as far as their own vanity is concerned, and
+this with persons they care nothing for, but as their vanity or
+_selfishness_ is concerned? What have they to do (to say all at
+once) with a life without love? In such a life there can be no
+thought; for we have no thought (save thoughts of pain), but as far
+as we have love and admiration.
+
+"It is an awful truth, that there neither is nor can be any genuine
+enjoyment of poetry among nineteen out of twenty of those persons
+who live, or wish to live, in the broad light of the world--among
+those who either are, or are striving to make themselves, people of
+consideration in society. This is a truth, and an awful one; because
+to be incapable of a feeling of poetry, in my sense of the word, is
+to be without love of human nature and reverence for God.
+
+"Upon this I shall insist elsewhere; at present let me confine
+myself to my object, which is to make you, my dear friend, as
+easy-hearted as myself with respect to these poems. Trouble not
+yourself upon their present reception. Of what moment is that
+compared with what I trust is their destiny?--To console the
+afflicted; to add sunshine to daylight, by making the happy happier;
+to teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think,
+and feel, and, therefore, to become more actively and securely
+virtuous; this is their office, which I trust they will faithfully
+perform, long after we (that is, all that is mortal of us,) are
+mouldered in our graves."
+
+Such words as these come with dignity from the mouth of a man like
+Wordsworth when he has been, as it were, driven to bay,--when he is
+consoling an intimate friend, distressed at the torrent of ridicule
+which, as she fears, must sweep his self-confidence and his purposes
+away. He may be permitted to assure her that "my ears are stone-dead
+to this idle buzz, and my flesh as insensible as iron to these petty
+stings," and to accompany his assurance with a reasoned statement of
+the grounds of his unshaken hopes.
+
+We feel, however, that such an expression of self-reliance on the
+part of a great man should be accompanied with some proof that no
+conceit or impatience is mixed with his steadfast calm. If he
+believes the public to be really unable to appreciate himself, he
+must show no surprise when they admire his inferiors; he must
+remember that the case would be far worse if they admired no one at
+all. Nor must he descend from his own unpopular merits on the plea
+that after catching the public attention by what is bad he will
+retain it for what is good. If he is so sure that he is in the right
+he can afford to wait and let the world come round to him.
+Wordsworth's conduct satisfies both these tests. It is, indeed,
+curious to observe how much abuse this inoffensive recluse received,
+and how absolutely he avoided returning it, Byron, for instance,
+must have seemed in his eyes guilty of something far more injurious
+to mankind than "a drowsy frowsy poem, called the _Excursion_,"
+could possibly appear. But, except in one or two private letters,
+Wordsworth has never alluded to Byron at all. Shelley's lampoon--a
+singular instance of the random blows of a noble spirit, striking at
+what, if better understood, it would eagerly have revered--
+Wordsworth seems never to have read. Nor did the violent attacks of
+the _Edinburgh_ and the _Quarterly Reviews_ provoke him to any
+rejoinder. To "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers"--leagued against
+him as their common prey--he opposed a dignified silence; and the
+only moral injury which he derived from their assaults lay in that
+sense of the absence of trustworthy external criticism which led him
+to treat everything which he had once written down as if it were a
+special revelation, and to insist with equal earnestness on his most
+trifling as on his most important pieces--on _Goody Blake_ and
+_The Idiot Boy_ as on _The Cuckoo_ or _The Daffodils_. The sense
+of humour is apt to be the first grace which is lost under
+persecution; and much of Wordsworth's heaviness and stiff exposition
+of commonplaces is to be traced to a feeling, which he could
+scarcely avoid, that "all day long he had lifted up his voice to a
+perverse and gainsaying generation."
+
+To the pecuniary loss inflicted on him by these adverse criticisms
+he was justly sensible. He was far from expecting, or even desiring,
+to be widely popular or to make a rapid fortune; but he felt that
+the labourer was worthy of his hire, and that the devotion of years
+to literature should have been met with some moderate degree of the
+usual form of recognition which the world accords to those who work
+for it. In 1820 he speaks of "the whole of my returns from the
+writing trade not amounting to seven-score pounds," and as late as
+1843, when at the height of his fame, he was not ashamed of
+confessing the importance which he had always attached to this
+particular.
+
+"So sensible am I," he says, "of the deficiencies in all that I write,
+and so far does everything that I attempt fall short of what I wish
+it to be, that even private publication, if such a term may be
+allowed, requires more resolution than I can command. I have written
+to give vent to my own mind, and not without hope that, some time or
+other, kindred minds might benefit by my labours; but I am inclined
+to believe I should never have ventured to send forth any verses of
+mine to the world, if it had not been done on the pressure of
+personal occasions. Had I been a rich man, my productions, like this
+_Epistle_, the _Tragedy of the Borderers_, &c., would most likely
+have been confined to manuscript."
+
+An interesting passage from an unpublished letter of Miss Wordsworth's,
+on the _White Doe of Rylstone_, confirms this statement:--
+
+  "My brother was very much pleased with your frankness in
+  telling us that you did not perfectly like his poem. He wishes
+  to know what your feelings were--whether the tale itself did
+  not interest you--or whether you could not enter into the
+  conception   of Emily's character, or take delight in that visionary
+  communion which is supposed to have existed between her and
+  the Doe. Do not fear to give him pain. He is far too much
+  accustomed to be abused to receive pain from it, (at least as far
+  as he himself is concerned.) My reason for asking you these
+  questions is, that some of our friends, who are equal admirers of
+  the _White Doe_ and of my brother's published poems, think
+  that _this_ poem will sell on account of the story; that is, that
+  the story will bear up those points which are above the level of the
+  public taste; whereas the two last volumes--except by a few
+  solitary individuals, who are passionately devoted to my
+  brother's works--are abused by wholesale."
+
+  "Now as his sole object in publishing this poem at present
+  would be for the sake of the money, he would not publish it if
+  he did not think, from the several judgments of his friends,
+  that it would be likely to have a sale. He has no pleasure in
+  publishing--he even detests it; and if it were not that he is
+  _not_  over wealthy, he would leave all his works to be
+  published after his death. William himself is sure that the
+  _White Doe_ will not sell or be admired, except by a very few,
+  at first; and only yields to Mary's entreaties and mine. We are
+  determined, however, if we are deceived this time, to let him
+  have his own way in future."
+
+These passages must be taken, no doubt, as representing one aspect
+only of the poet's impulses in the matter. With his deep conviction
+of the world's real, though unrecognized, need of a pure vein of
+poetry, we can hardly imagine him as permanently satisfied to defer
+his own contribution till after his death. Yet we may certainly
+believe that the need of money helped him to overcome much
+diffidence as to publication; and we may discern something dignified
+in his frank avowal of this when it is taken in connexion with his
+scrupulous abstinence from any attempt to win the suffrages of the
+multitude by means unworthy of his high vocation. He could never,
+indeed, have written poems which could have vied in immediate
+popularity with those of Byron or Scott. But the criticisms on the
+first edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_ must have shown him that a
+slight alteration of method,--nay even the excision of a few pages
+in each volume, pages certain to be loudly objected to,--would have
+made a marked difference in the sale and its proceeds. From this
+point of view, even poems which we may now feel to have been
+needlessly puerile and grotesque acquire a certain impressiveness,
+when we recognize that the theory which demanded their composition
+was one which their author was willing to uphold at the cost of some
+years of real physical privation, and of the postponement for a
+generation of his legitimate fame.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+POETIC DICTION--"DAODAMIA"--"EVENING ODE."
+
+The _Excursion_ appeared in 1814, and in the course of the next year
+Wordsworth republished his minor poems, so arranged as to indicate
+the faculty of the mind which he considered to have been predominant
+in the composition of each. To most readers this disposition has
+always seemed somewhat arbitrary; and it was once suggested to
+Wordsworth that a chronological arrangement would be better. The
+manner in which Wordsworth met this proposal indicated the limit of
+his absorption in himself--his real desire only to dwell on his own
+feelings in such a way as might make them useful to others. For he
+rejected the plan as too egotistical--as emphasizing the succession
+of moods in the poet's mind, rather than the lessons which those
+moods could teach. His objection points, at any rate, to a real
+danger which any man's simplicity of character incurs by dwelling
+too attentively on the changing phases of his own thought. But after
+the writer's death the historical spirit will demand that poems,
+like other artistic products, should be disposed for the most part
+in the order of time.
+
+In a Preface to this edition of 1815, and a Supplementary Essay, he
+developed the theory on poetry already set forth in a well-known
+preface to the second edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_. Much of the
+matter of these essays, received at the time with contemptuous
+aversion, is now accepted as truth; and few compositions of equal
+length contain so much of vigorous criticism and sound reflection.
+It is only when they generalize too confidently that they are in
+danger of misleading us; for all expositions of the art and practice
+of poetry must necessarily be incomplete. Poetry, like all the arts,
+is essentially a "mystery." Its charm depends upon qualities which
+we can neither define accurately nor reduce to rule nor create again
+at pleasure. Mankind, however, are unwilling to admit this; and they
+endeavour from time to time to persuade themselves that they have
+discovered the rules which will enable them to produce the desired
+effect. And so much of the effect _can_ thus be reproduced, that it
+is often possible to believe for a time that the problem has been
+solved. Pope, to take the instance which was prominent in
+Wordsworth's mind, was, by general admission, a poet. But his
+success seemed to depend on imitable peculiarities; and Pope's
+imitators were so like Pope that it was hard to draw a line and say
+where they ceased to be poets. At last, however, this imitative
+school began to prove too much. If all the insipid verses which they
+wrote were poetry, what was the use of writing poetry at all? A
+reaction succeeded, which asserted that poetry depends on emotion
+and not on polish; that it consists precisely in those things which
+frigid imitators lack. Cowper, Burns, and Crabbe, (especially in his
+_Sir Eustace Grey_), had preceded Wordsworth as leaders of this
+reaction. But they had acted half unconsciously, or had even at
+times themselves attempted to copy the very style which they were
+superseding.
+
+Wordsworth, too, began with a tendency to imitate Pope, but only in
+the school exercises which he wrote as a boy. Poetry soon became to
+him the expression of his own deep and simple feelings; and then he
+rebelled against rhetoric and unreality and found for himself a
+director and truer voice, "I have proposed to myself to imitate and,
+as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men.... I have
+taken as much pains to avoid what is usually called poetic diction as
+others ordinarily take to produce it." And he erected this practice
+into a general principle in the following passage:--
+
+"I do not doubt that it may be safely affirmed that there neither is,
+nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose
+and metrical composition. We are fond of tracing the resemblance
+between poetry and painting, and, accordingly, we call them sisters;
+but where shall we find bonds of connexion sufficiently strict to
+typify the affinity between metrical and prose composition? If it be
+affirmed that rhyme and metrical arrangement of themselves
+constitute a distinction which overturns what I have been saying on
+the strict affinity of metrical language with that of prose, and
+paves the way for other artificial distinctions which the mind
+voluntarily admits, I answer that the language of such poetry as I
+am recommending is, as far as is possible, a selection of the
+language really spoken by men; that this selection, wherever it is
+made with true taste and feeling, will of itself form a distinction
+far greater than would at first be imagined, and will entirely
+separate the composition from the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary
+life; and if metre be superadded thereto, I believe that a
+dissimilitude will be produced altogether sufficient for the
+gratification of a rational mind. What other distinction would we
+hare? Whence is it to come? And where is it to exist?"
+
+There is a definiteness and simplicity about this description
+of poetry which may well make us wonder why this precious thing
+(producible, apparently, as easily as Pope's imitators supposed,
+although by means different from theirs) is not offered to us by
+more persons, and of better quality. And it will not be hard to show
+that a good poetical style must possess certain characteristics,
+which, although something like them must exist in a good prose style,
+are carried in poetry to a pitch so much higher as virtually to need
+a specific faculty for their successful production.
+
+To illustrate the inadequacy of Wordsworth's theory to explain the
+merits of his own poetry, I select a stanza from one of his simplest
+and most characteristic poems--_The Affliction of Margaret_:--
+
+  Perhaps some dungeon hears thee groan,
+  Maimed, mangled by inhuman men,
+  Or thou upon a Desert thrown
+  Inheritest the lion's Den;
+  Or hast been summoned to the Deep,
+  Thou, thou and all thy mates, to keep
+  An incommunicable sleep.
+
+These lines, supposed to be uttered by "a poor widow at Penrith,"
+afford a fair illustration of what Wordsworth calls "the language
+really spoken by men," with "metre superadded." "What other
+distinction from prose," he asks, "would we have?" We may answer
+that we would have what he has actually given us, viz., an
+appropriate and attractive music, lying both in the rhythm and in the
+actual sound of the words used,--a music whose complexity may be
+indicated here by drawing out some of its elements in detail, at the
+risk of appearing pedantic and technical. We observe, then (_a_),
+that the general movement of the lines is unusually slow. They
+contain a very large proportion of strong accents and long vowels,
+to suit the tone of deep and despairing sorrow. In six places only
+out of twenty-eight is the accent weak where it might be expected to
+be strong (in the second syllables, namely, of the Iambic foot), and
+in each of these cases the omission of a possible accent throws
+greater weight on the next succeeding accent--on the accents, that
+is to say, contained in the words inhuman, desert, lion, summoned,
+deep, and sleep, (_b_) The first four lines contain subtle
+alliterations of the letters d, h, m, and th. In this connexion it
+should be remembered that when consonants are thus repeated at the
+beginning of syllables, those syllables need not be at the beginning
+of words; and further, that repetitions scarcely more numerous than
+chance alone would have occasioned, may be so placed by the poet as
+to produce a strongly-felt effect. If any one doubts the
+effectiveness of the unobvious alliterations here insisted on, let
+him read (1) "jungle" for "desert," (2) "maybe" for "perhaps,"
+(3) "tortured" for "mangled," (4) "blown" for "thrown," and he will
+become sensible of the lack of the metrical support which the
+existing consonants give one another. The three last lines contain
+one or two similar alliterations on which I need not dwell,
+(_c_) The words _inheritest_ and _summoned_ are by no means such as
+"a poor widow," even at Penrith, would employ; they are used to
+intensify the imagined relation which connects the missing man with
+(1) the wild beasts who surround him, and (2) the invisible Power
+which leads; so that something mysterious and awful is added to his
+fate. (_d_) This impression is heightened by the use of the
+word _incommunicable_ in an unusual sense, "incapable of being
+communicated _with_," instead of "incapable of being communicated;"
+while (_e_) the expression "to keep an incommunicable sleep" for
+"to lie dead," gives dignity to the occasion by carrying the mind
+back along a train of literary associations of which the well-known
+[Greek: atermona naegreton upnon] of Moschus may be taken as the type.
+
+We must not, of course, suppose that Wordsworth consciously sought
+these alliterations, arranged these accents, resolved to introduce
+an unusual word in the last line, or hunted for a classical allusion.
+But what the poet's brain does not do consciously it does
+unconsciously; a selective action is going on in its recesses
+simultaneously with the overt train of thought, and on the degree of
+this unconscious suggestiveness the richness and melody of the
+poetry will depend.
+
+So rules can secure the attainment of these effects; and the very
+same artifices which are delightful when used by one man seem
+mechanical and offensive when used by another. Nor is it by any
+means always the case that the man who can most delicately
+appreciate the melody of the poetry of others will be able to
+produce similar melody himself. Nay, even if he can produce it one
+year it by no means follows that he will be able to produce it the
+next. Of all qualifications for writing poetry this inventive music
+is the most arbitrarily distributed, and the most evanescent. But it
+is the more important to dwell on its necessity, inasmuch as both
+good and bad poets are tempted to ignore it. The good poet prefers
+to ascribe his success to higher qualities; to his imagination,
+elevation of thought, descriptive faculty. The bad poet can more
+easily urge that his thoughts are too advanced for mankind to
+appreciate than that his melody is too sweet for their ears to catch.
+And when the gift vanishes no poet is willing to confess that it is
+gone; so humiliating is it to lose power over mankind by the loss of
+something which seems quite independent of intellect or character.
+And yet so it is. For some twenty years at most (1798--1818),
+Wordsworth possessed this gift of melody. During those years he
+wrote works which profoundly influenced mankind. The gift then left
+him; he continued as wise and as earnest as ever, but his poems had
+no longer any potency, nor his existence much public importance.
+
+Humiliating as such reflections may seem, they are in accordance
+with actual experience in all branches of art. The fact is that the
+pleasures which art gives us are complex in the extreme. We are
+always disposed to dwell on such of their elements as are explicable
+and can in some way be traced to moral or intellectual sources. But
+they contain also other elements which are inexplicable, non-moral,
+and non-intellectual, and which render most of our attempted
+explanations of artistic merit so incomplete as to be practically
+misleading. Among such incomplete explanations Wordsworth's essays
+must certainly be ranked. It would not be safe for any man to
+believe that he had produced true poetry because he had fulfilled
+the conditions which Wordsworth lays down. But the essays effected
+what is perhaps as much as the writer on art can fairly hope to
+accomplish. They placed in a striking light that side of the subject
+which had been too long ignored; they aided in recalling an art
+which had become conventional and fantastic into the normal current
+of English thought and speech.
+
+It may be added that both in doctrine and practice Wordsworth
+exhibits a progressive reaction from the extreme views with which he
+starts towards the common vein of good sense and sound judgment
+which may be traced back to Horace, Longinus, and Aristotle. His
+first preface is violently polemic. He attacks with reason that
+conception of the sublime and beautiful which is represented by
+Dryden's picture of "Cortes alone in his nightgown," remarking that
+"the mountains seem to nod their drowsy heads." But the only example
+of true poetry which he sees fit to adduce in contrast consists in a
+stanza from the _Babes in the Wood_. In his preface of 1815 he is
+not less severe on false sentiment and false observation. But his
+views of the complexity and dignity of poetry have been much
+developed, and he is willing now to draw his favourable instances
+from Shakespeare, Milton, Virgil, and himself.
+
+His own practice underwent a corresponding change. It is only to
+a few poems of his earlier years that the famous parody of the
+_Rejected Addresses_ fairly applies.
+
+  My father's walls are made of brick,
+  But not so tall and not so thick
+    As these; and goodness me!
+  My father's beams are made of wood,
+  But never, never half so good
+    As those that now I see!
+
+Lines something like these might have occurred in _The Thorn_ or
+_The Idiot Boy_. Nothing could be more different from the style of
+the sonnets, or of the _Ode to Duty_, or of _Laodamia_. And yet both
+the simplicity of the earlier and the pomp of the later poems were
+almost always noble; nor is the transition from the one style to the
+other a perplexing or abnormal thing. For all sincere styles are
+congruous to one another, whether they be adorned or no, as all high
+natures are congruous to one another, whether in the garb of peasant
+or of prince. What is incongruous to both is affectation, vulgarity,
+egoism; and while the noble style can be interchangeably childlike
+or magnificent, as its theme requires, the ignoble can neither
+simplify itself into purity nor deck itself into grandeur.
+
+It need not, therefore, surprise us to find the classical models
+becoming more and more dominant in Wordsworth's mind, till the poet
+of _Poor Susan_ and _The Cuckoo_ spends months over the attempt to
+translate the _Æneid_,--to win the secret of that style which he
+placed at the head of all poetic styles, and of those verses which
+"wind," as he says, "with the majesty of the Conscript Fathers
+entering the Senate-house in solemn procession," and envelope in
+their imperial melancholy all the sorrows and the fates of man.
+
+And, indeed, so tranquil and uniform was the life which we are now
+retracing, and at the same time so receptive of any noble influence
+which opportunity might bring, that a real epoch is marked in
+Wordsworth's poetical career by the mere re-reading of some Latin
+authors in 1814-16 with a view to preparing his eldest son for the
+University. Among the poets whom he thus studied was one in whom he
+might seem to discern his own spirit endowed with grander proportions,
+and meditating on sadder fates. Among the poets of the battlefield,
+of the study, of the boudoir, he encountered the first Priest of
+Nature, the first poet in Europe who had deliberately shunned the
+life of courts and cities for the mere joy in Nature's presence, for
+"sweet Parthenope and the fields beside Vesevus' hill."
+
+There are, indeed, passages in the _Georgics_ so Wordsworthian, as
+we now call it, in tone, that it is hard to realize what centuries
+separated them from the _Sonnet to Lady Beaumont or from Ruth_. Such,
+for instance, is the picture of the Corycian old man, who had made
+himself independent of the seasons by his gardening skill, so that
+"when gloomy winter was still rending the stones with frost, still
+curbing with ice the rivers' onward flow, he even then was plucking
+the soft hyacinth's bloom, and chid the tardy summer and delaying
+airs of spring." Such, again, is the passage where the poet breaks
+from the glories of successful industry into the delight of watching
+the great processes which nature accomplishes untutored and alone,
+"the joy of gazing on Cytorus waving with boxwood, and on forests of
+Narycian pine, on tracts that never felt the harrow, nor knew the
+care of man."
+
+Such thoughts as these the Roman and the English poet had in common;--
+the heritage of untarnished souls.
+
+  I asked; 'twas whispered; The device
+  To each and all might well belong:
+  It is the Spirit of Paradise
+  That prompts such work, a Spirit strong,
+  That gives to all the self-same bent
+  Where life is wise and innocent.
+
+It is not only in tenderness but in dignity that the "wise and
+innocent" are wont to be at one. Strong in tranquillity, they can
+intervene amid great emotions with a master's voice, and project on
+the storm of passion the clear light of their unchanging calm. And
+thus it was that the study of Virgil, and especially of Virgil's
+solemn picture of the Underworld, prompted in Wordsworth's mind the
+most majestic of his poems, his one great utterance on heroic love.
+
+He had as yet written little on any such topic as this. At Goslar he
+had composed the poems on _Lucy_ to which allusion has already been
+made. And after his happy marriage he had painted in one of the best
+known of his poems the sweet transitions of wedded love, as it moves
+on from the first shock and agitation of the encounter of
+predestined souls through all tendernesses of intimate affection
+into a pervading permanency and calm.
+
+Scattered, moreover, throughout his poems are several passages in
+which the passion is treated with similar force and truth. The poem
+which begins "'Tis said that some have died for love" depicts the
+enduring poignancy of bereavement with an "iron pathos" that is
+almost too strong for art. And something of the same power of
+clinging attachment is shown in the sonnet where the poet is stung
+with the thought that "even for the least division of an hour" he
+has taken pleasure in the life around him, without the accustomed
+tacit reference to one who has passed away. There is a brighter
+touch of constancy in that other sonnet where, after letting his
+fancy play over a glad imaginary past, he turns to his wife, ashamed
+that even in so vague a vision he could have shaped for himself a
+solitary joy.
+
+  Let _her_ be comprehended in the frame
+  Of these Illusions, or they please no more.
+
+In later years the two sonnets on his wife's picture set on that
+love the consecration of faithful age; and there are those who can
+recall his look as he gazed on the picture and tried to recognize in
+that aged face the Beloved who to him was ever young and fair,--a
+look as of one dwelling in life-long affections with the
+unquestioning single-heartedness of a child.
+
+And here it might have been thought that as his experience ended his
+power of description would have ended too. But it was not so. Under
+the powerful stimulus of the sixth _Æneid_--allusions to which
+pervade _Laodamia_ [5] throughout--with unusual labour, and by a
+strenuous effort of the imagination, Wordsworth was enabled to
+depict his own love _in excelsis_, to imagine what aspect it might
+have worn, if it had been its destiny to deny itself at some heroic
+call, and to confront with nobleness an extreme emergency, and to be
+victor (as Plato has it) in an Olympian contest of the soul. For,
+indeed, the "fervent, not ungovernable, love," which is the ideal
+that Protesilaus is sent to teach, is on a great scale the same
+affection which we have been considering in domesticity and peace;
+it is love considered not as a revolution but as a consummation; as
+a self-abandonment not to a laxer but to a sterner law; no longer as
+an invasive passion, but as the deliberate habit of the soul. It is
+that conception of love which springs into being in the last canto of
+Dante's _Purgatory_,--which finds in English chivalry a noble voice,--
+
+  I could not love thee, dear, so much,
+  Loved I not honour more.
+
+[Footnote 5: _Laodamia_ should be read (as it is given in
+Mr. Matthew Arnold's admirable volume of selections) with the _earlier_
+conclusion: the _second_ form is less satisfactory, and the _third_,
+with its sermonizing tone, "thus all in vain exhorted and reproved,"
+is worst of all.]
+
+For, indeed, (even as Plato says that Beauty is the splendour of
+Truth,) so such a Love as this is the splendour of Virtue; it is the
+unexpected spark that flashes from self-forgetful soul to soul, it
+is man's standing evidence that he "must lose himself to find himself,"
+and that only when the veil of his personality has lifted from around
+him can he recognize that he is already in heaven.
+
+In a second poem inspired by this revived study of classical
+antiquity Wordsworth has traced the career of Dion,--the worthy
+pupil of Plato, the philosophic ruler of Syracuse, who allowed
+himself to shed blood unjustly, though for the public good, and was
+haunted by a spectre symbolical of this fatal error. At last Dion
+was assassinated, and the words in which the poet tells his fate seem
+to me to breathe the very triumph of philosophy, to paint with a
+touch the greatness of a spirit which makes of Death himself a
+deliverer, and has its strength in the unseen.
+
+  So were the hopeless troubles, that involved
+  The soul of Dion, instantly dissolved.
+
+I can only compare these lines to that famous passage of Sophocles
+where the lamentations of the dying Oedipus are interrupted by the
+impatient summons of an unseen accompanying god. In both places the
+effect is the same; to present to us with striking brevity the
+contrast between the visible and the invisible presences that may
+stand about a man's last hour; for he may feel with the desolate
+Oedipus that "all I am has perished"--he may sink like Dion through
+inextricable sadness to a disastrous death, and then in a moment the
+transitory shall disappear and the essential shall be made plain,
+and from Dioa's upright spirit the perplexities shall vanish away,
+and Oedipus, in the welcome of that unknown companionship, shall
+find his expiations over and his reward begun.
+
+It is true, no doubt, that when Wordsworth wrote these poems he had
+lost something of the young inimitable charm which fills such pieces
+as the _Fountain_ or the _Solitary Reaper_. His language is majestic,
+but it is no longer magical. And yet we cannot but feel that he has
+put into these poems something which he could not have put into the
+poems which preceded them; that they bear the impress of a soul
+which has added moral effort to poetic inspiration, and is mistress
+now of the acquired as well as of the innate virtue. For it is words
+like these that are the strength and stay of men; nor can their
+accent of lofty earnestness be simulated by the writer's art.
+Literary skill may deceive the reader who seeks a literary pleasure
+alone; and he to whom these strong consolations are a mere
+imaginative luxury may be uncertain or indifferent out of what heart
+they come. But those who need them know; spirits that hunger after
+righteousness discern their proper food; there is no fear lest they
+confound the sentimental and superficial with those weighty
+utterances of moral truth which are the most precious legacy that a
+man can leave to mankind.
+
+Thus far, then, I must hold that although much of grace had already
+vanished there was on the whole a progress and elevation in the mind
+of him of whom we treat. But the culminating point is here. After
+this--whatever ripening process may have been at work unseen--what
+is chiefly visible is the slow stiffening of the imaginative power,
+the slow withdrawal of the insight into the soul of things, and a
+descent--[Greek: ablaechros mala tsios]--"soft as soft can be,"
+to the euthanasy of a death that was like sleep.
+
+The impression produced by Wordsworth's reperusal of Virgil in
+1814-16 was a deep and lasting one. In 1829-30 he devoted much time
+and labour to a translation of the first three books of the _Æneid_,
+and it is interesting to note the gradual modification of his views
+as to the true method of rendering poetry.
+
+"I have long been persuaded," he writes to Lord Lonsdale in 1829,
+"that Milton formed his blank verse upon the model of the _Georgics_
+and the _Æneid_, and I am so much struck with this resemblance, that
+I should, have attempted Virgil in blank verse, had I not been
+persuaded that no ancient author can with advantage be so rendered.
+Their religion, their warfare, their course of action and feeling,
+are too remote from modern interest to allow it. We require every
+possible help and attraction of sound in our language to smooth the
+way for the admission of things so remote from our present concerns.
+My own notion of translation is, that it cannot be too literal,
+provided these faults be avoided: _baldness_, in which I include all
+that takes from dignity; and strangeness, or uncouthness, including
+harshness; and lastly, attempts to convey meanings which, as they
+cannot be given but by languid circumlocutions, cannot in fact be
+said to be given at all....  I feel it, however, to be too probable
+that my translation is deficient in ornament, because I must
+unavoidably have lost many of Virgil's, and have never without
+reluctance attempted a compensation of my own."
+
+The truth of this last self-criticism is very apparent from
+the fragments of the translation which were published in the
+_Philological Museum_; and Coleridge, to whom the whole manuscript
+was submitted, justly complains of finding "page after page without
+a single brilliant note;" and adds, "Finally, my conviction is that
+you undertake an impossibility, and that there is no medium between a
+pure version and one on the avowed principle of _compensation_ in
+the widest sense, i.e. manner, genius, total effect; I confine
+myself to _Virgil_ when I say this." And it appears that Wordsworth
+himself came round to this view, for in reluctantly sending a
+specimen of his work to the _Philological Museum_ in 1832, he says,--
+
+  "Having been displeased in modern translations with the
+  additions of incongruous matter, I began to translate with a
+  resolve to keep clear of that fault by adding nothing; but I
+  became convinced that a spirited translation can scarcely be
+  accomplished in the English language without admitting a
+  principle of compensation."
+
+There is a curious analogy between the experiences of Cowper and
+Wordsworth in the way of translation. Wordsworth's translation of
+Virgil was prompted by the same kind of reaction against the
+reckless laxity of Dryden as that which inspired Cowper against the
+distorting artificiality of Pope. In each case the new translator
+cared more for his author and took a much higher view of a
+translator's duty than his predecessor had done. But in each case
+the plain and accurate translation was a failure, while the loose
+and ornate one continued to be admired. We need not conclude from
+this that the wilful inaccuracy of Pope or Dryden would be any
+longer excusable in such a work. But on the other hand we may
+certainly feel that nothing is gained by rendering an ancient poet
+into verse at all unless that verse be of a quality to give a
+pleasure independent of the faithfulness of the translation which it
+conveys.
+
+The translations and _Laodamia_ are not the only indications of the
+influence which Virgil exercised over Wordsworth. Whether from mere
+similarity of feeling, or from more or less conscious recollection,
+there are frequent passages in the English which recall the Roman
+poet. Who can hear Wordsworth describe how a poet on the island in
+Grasmere
+
+  At noon
+
+  Spreads out his limbs, while, yet unshorn, the sheep,
+  Panting beneath the burthen of their wool
+  Lie round him, even as if they were a part
+  Of his own household:--
+
+and not think of the stately tenderness of Virgil's
+
+  Stant et oves circum; nostri nee poenitet illas--
+
+and the flocks of Arcady that gather round in sympathy with the
+lovelorn Gallus' woe?
+
+So again the well-known lines--
+
+  Not seldom, clad in radiant vest,
+  Deceitfully goes forth the Morn;
+    Not seldom Evening in the west
+    Sinks smilingly forsworn,--
+
+are almost a translation of Palinurus' remonstrance with "the
+treachery of tranquil heaven." And when the poet wishes for any link
+which could bind him closer to the Highland maiden who has flitted
+across his path as a being of a different world from his own:--
+
+  Thine elder Brother would I be,
+  Thy Father, anything to thee!--
+
+we hear the echo of the sadder plaint--
+
+  Atque utinam e vobis unus--
+
+when the Roman statesman longs to be made one with the simple life
+of shepherd or husbandman, and to know their undistracted joy.
+
+Still more impressive is the shock of surprise with which we read in
+Wordsworth's poem on Ossian the following lines:--
+
+  Musæus, stationed with his lyre
+  Supreme among the Elysian quire,
+  Is, for the dwellers upon earth,
+  Mute as a lark ere morning's birth,
+
+and perceive that he who wrote them has entered--where no
+commentator could conduct him--into the solemn pathos of Virgil's
+_Musaeum ante omnis_--; where the singer whose very existence upon
+earth has become a legend and a mythic name is seen keeping in the
+underworld his old pre-eminence, and towering above the blessed dead.
+
+This is a stage in Wordsworth's career on which his biographer is
+tempted unduly to linger. For we have reached the Indian summer of
+his genius; it can still shine at moments bright as ever, and with
+even a new majesty and calm; but we feel, nevertheless, that the
+melody is dying from his song; that he is hardening into
+self-repetition, into rhetoric, into sermonizing common-place, and
+is rigid where he was once profound. The _Thanksgiving Ode_ (1816)
+strikes death to the heart. The accustomed patriotic sentiments--the
+accustomed virtuous aspirations--these are still there; but the
+accent is like that of a ghost who calls to us in hollow mimicry of a
+voice that once we loved.
+
+And yet Wordsworth's poetic life was not to close without a great
+symbolical spectacle, a solemn farewell. Sunset among the Cumbrian
+hills, often of remarkable beauty, once or twice, perhaps, in a
+score of years, reaches a pitch of illusion and magnificence which
+indeed seems nothing less than the commingling of earth and heaven.
+Such a sight--seen from Rydal Mount in 1818--afforded once more the
+needed stimulus, and evoked that "_Evening Ode, composed on an
+evening of extraordinary splendour and beauty_," which is the last
+considerable production of Wordsworth's genius. In this ode we
+recognize the peculiar gift of reproducing with magical simplicity
+as it were the inmost virtue of natural phenomena.
+
+  No sound is uttered, but a deep
+  And solemn harmony pervades
+  The hollow vale from steep to steep,
+  And penetrates the glades.
+  Far distant images draw nigh,
+  Called forth by wondrous potency
+  Of beamy radiance, that imbues
+  Whate'er it strikes, with gem-like hues!
+  In vision exquisitely clear
+  Herds range along the mountain side;
+  And glistening antlers are descried,
+  And gilded flocks appear.
+
+Once more the poet brings home to us that sense of belonging at once
+to two worlds, which gives to human life so much of mysterious
+solemnity.
+
+  Wings at my shoulder seem to play;
+  But, rooted here, I stand and gaze
+  On those bright steps that heavenward raise
+  Their practicable way.
+
+And the poem ends--with a deep personal pathos--in an allusion,
+repeated from the _Ode on Immortality_, to the light which "lay
+about him in his infancy,"--the light
+
+  Full early lost, and fruitlessly deplored;
+  Which at this moment, on my waking sight
+  Appears to shine, by miracle restored!
+  My soul, though yet confined to earth,
+  Rejoices in a second birth;
+  --'Tis past, the visionary splendour fades;
+  And night approaches with her shades.
+
+For those to whom the mission of Wordsworth appears before all
+things as a religious one there is something solemn in the spectacle
+of the seer standing at the close of his own apocalypse, with the
+consciousness that the stiffening brain would never permit him to
+drink again that overflowing sense of glory and revelation; never,
+till he should drink it new in the kingdom of God. He lived, in fact,
+through another generation of men, but the vision came to him no more.
+
+  Or if some vestige of those gleams
+  Survived, 'twas only in his dreams.
+
+We look on a man's life for the most part as forming in itself a
+completed drama. We love to see the interest maintained to the close,
+the pathos deepened at the departing hour. To die on the same day is
+the prayer of lovers, to vanish at Trafalgar is the ideal of heroic
+souls. And yet--so wide and various are the issues of life--there is
+a solemnity as profound in a quite different lot. For if we are
+moving among eternal emotions we should have time to bear witness
+that they are eternal. Even Love left desolate may feel with a proud
+triumph that it could never have rooted itself so immutably amid the
+joys of a visible return as it can do through the constancies of
+bereavement, and the lifelong memory which is a lifelong hope. And
+Vision, Revelation, Ecstasy,--it is not only while these are
+kindling our way that we should speak of them to men, but rather
+when they have passed from us and left us only their record in our
+souls, whose permanence confirms the fiery finger which wrote it
+long ago. For as the Greeks would end the first drama of a trilogy
+with a hush of concentration, and with declining notes of calm, so
+to us the narrowing receptivity and persistent steadfastness of age
+suggest not only decay but expectancy, and not death so much as sleep;
+or seem, as it were, the beginning of operations which are not
+measured by our hurrying time, nor tested by any achievement to be
+accomplished here.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+NATURAL RELIGION.
+
+It will have been obvious from the preceding pages, as well as from
+the tone of other criticisms on Wordsworth, that his exponents are
+not content to treat his poems on Nature simply as graceful
+descriptive pieces, but speak of him in terms usually reserved for
+the originators of some great religious movement. "The very image of
+Wordsworth," says De Quincey, for instance, "as I prefigured it to
+my own planet-struck eye, crushed my faculties as before Elijah or St.
+Paul." How was it that poems so simple in outward form that the
+reviewers of the day classed them with the _Song of Sixpence_, or at
+best with the _Babes in the Wood_, could affect a critic like De
+Quincey,--I do not say with admiration, but with this exceptional
+sense of revelation and awe?
+
+The explanation of this anomaly lies, as is well known, in something
+new and individual in the way in which Wordsworth regarded Nature;
+something more or less discernible in most of his works, and
+redeeming even some of the slightest of them from insignificance,
+while conferring on the more serious and sustained pieces an
+importance of a different order from that which attaches to even the
+most brilliant productions of his contemporaries. To define with
+exactness, however, what was this new element imported by our poet
+into man's view of Nature is far from easy, and requires some brief
+consideration of the attitude in this respect of his predecessors.
+
+There is so much in the external world which is terrible or
+unfriendly to man, that the first impression made on him by Nature
+as a whole, even in temperate climates, is usually that of awfulness;
+his admiration being reserved for the fragments of her which he has
+utilized for his own purposes, or adorned with his own handiwork.
+When Homer tells us of a place
+
+  Where even a god might gaze, and stand apart,
+  And feel a wondering rapture at the heart,
+
+it is of no prospect of sea or mountain that he is speaking, but of
+a garden where everything is planted in rows, and there is a
+never-ending succession of pears and figs. These gentler aspects of
+Nature will have their minor deities to represent them; but the men,
+of whatever race they be, whose minds are most absorbed in the
+problems of man's position and destiny will tend for the most part
+to some sterner and more overwhelming conception of the sum of things.
+"Lord, what is man that Thou art mindful of him?" is the cry of
+Hebrew piety as well as of modern science; and the "majestas cognita
+rerum,"--the recognized majesty of the universe--teaches Lucretius
+only the indifference of gods and the misery of men.
+
+But in a well-known passage, in which Lucretius is honoured as he
+deserves, we find nevertheless a different view hinted, with an
+impressiveness which it had hardly acquired till then. We find
+Virgil implying that scientific knowledge of Nature may not be the
+only way of arriving at the truth about her; that her loveliness is
+also a revelation, and that the soul which is in unison with her is
+justified by its own peace. This is the very substance of _The
+Poet's Epitaph_ also; of the poem in which Wordsworth at the
+beginning of his career describes himself as he continued till its
+close,--the poet who "murmurs near the running brooks a music
+sweeter than their own,"--who scorns the man of science "who would
+peep and botanize upon his mother's grave."
+
+  The outward shows of sky and earth,
+  Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
+  And impulses of deeper birth
+  Have come to him in solitude.
+
+  In common things that round us lie
+  Some random truths he can impart,--
+  The harvest of a quiet eye
+  That broods and sleeps on his own heart.
+
+  But he is weak, both man and boy,
+  Hath been an idler in the land;
+  Contented if he might enjoy
+  The things which others understand.
+
+Like much else in the literature of imperial Rome, the passage in
+the second _Georgic_ to which I have referred is in its essence more
+modern than the Middle Ages. Mediaeval Christianity involved a
+divorce from the nature around us, as well as from the nature within.
+With the rise of the modern spirit delight in the external world
+returns; and from Chaucer downwards through the whole course of
+English poetry are scattered indications of a mood which draws from
+visible things an intuition of things not seen. When Wither, in
+words which Wordsworth has fondly quoted, says of his muse,--
+
+  By the murmur of a spring,
+  Or the least bough's rustelling;
+  By a daisy whose leaves spread,
+  Shut when Titan goes to bed;
+  Or a shady bush or tree,--
+  She could more infuse in me
+  Than all Nature's beauties can
+  In some other wiser man,--
+
+he felt already, as Wordsworth after him, that Nature is no mere
+collection of phenomena, but infuses into her least approaches some
+sense of her mysterious whole.
+
+Passages like this, however, must not he too closely pressed. The
+mystic element in English literature has run for the most part into
+other channels; and when, after Pope's reign of artificiality and
+convention, attention was redirected to the phenomena of Nature by
+Collins, Beattie, Thomson, Crabbe, Cowper, Burns, and Scott, it was
+in a spirit of admiring observation rather than of an intimate
+worship. Sometimes, as for the most part in Thomson, we have mere
+picturesqueness,--a reproduction of Nature for the mere pleasure of
+reproducing her,--a kind of stock-taking of her habitual effects. Or
+sometimes, as in Burns, we have a glowing spirit which looks on
+Nature with a side glance, and uses her as an accessory to the
+expression of human love and woe. Cowper sometimes contemplated her
+as a whole, but only as affording a proof of the wisdom and goodness
+of a personal Creator.
+
+To express what is characteristic in Wordsworth we must recur to a
+more generalized conception of the relations between the natural and
+the spiritual worlds. We must say with Plato--the lawgiver of all
+subsequent idealists--that the unknown realities around us, which
+the philosopher apprehends by the contemplation of abstract truth,
+become in various ways obscurely perceptible to men under the
+influence of a "divine madness,"--of an enthusiasm which is in fact
+inspiration. And further, giving, as he so often does, a
+half-fanciful expression to a substance of deep meaning,--Plato
+distinguishes four kinds of this enthusiasm. There is the prophet's
+glow of revelation; and the prevailing prayer which averts the wrath
+of heaven; and that philosophy which enters, so to say, unawares
+into the poet through his art, and into the lover through his love.
+Each of these stimuli may so exalt the inward faculties as to make a
+man [Greek: entheos kyi ekphron],--"bereft of reason but filled
+with divinity,"--percipient of an intelligence other and larger than
+his own. To this list Wordsworth has made an important addition. He
+has shown by his example and writings that the contemplation of
+Nature may become a stimulus as inspiring as these; may enable us
+"to see into the life of things"--as far, perhaps, as beatific
+vision or prophetic rapture can attain. Assertions so impalpable as
+these must justify themselves by subjective evidence. He who claims
+to give a message must satisfy us that he has himself received it;
+and, inasmuch as transcendent things are in themselves inexpressible,
+he must convey to us in hints and figures the conviction which we
+need. Prayer may bring the spiritual world near to us; but when the
+eyes of the kneeling Dominic seem to say "To son venuto a questo,"
+their look must persuade us that the life of worship has indeed
+attained the reward of vision. Art, too, may be inspired; but the
+artist, in whatever field he works, must have "such a mastery of his
+mystery" that the fabric of his imagination stands visible in its
+own light before our eyes,--
+
+      Seeing it is built
+  Of music; therefore never built at all,
+  And, therefore, built for ever.
+
+Love may open heaven; but when the lover would invite us "thither,
+where are the eyes of Beatrice," he must make us feel that his
+individual passion is indeed part and parcel of that love "which
+moves the sun and the other stars."
+
+And so also with Wordsworth. Unless the words which describe the
+intense and sympathetic gaze with which he contemplates Nature
+convince us of the reality of "the light which never was on sea or
+land,"--of the "Presence which disturbs him with the joy of elevated
+thoughts,"--of the authentic vision of those hours
+
+                When the light of sense
+  Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed
+  The invisible world;--
+
+unless his tone awakes a responsive conviction in ourselves, there
+is no argument by which he can prove to us that he is offering a new
+insight to mankind. Yet, on the other hand, it need not be
+unreasonable to see in his message something more than a mere
+individual fancy. It seems, at least, to be closely correlated with
+those other messages of which we have spoken,--those other cases
+where some original element of our nature is capable of being
+regarded as an inlet of mystic truth. For in each of these complex
+aspects of religion we see, perhaps, the modification of a primeval
+instinct. There is a point of view from which Revelation seems to be
+but transfigured Sorcery, and Love transfigured Appetite, and
+Philosophy man's ordered Wonder, and Prayer his softening Fear. And
+similarly in the natural religion of Wordsworth we may discern the
+modified outcome of other human impulses hardly less universal--of
+those instincts which led our forefathers to people earth and air
+with deities, or to vivify the whole universe with a single soul. In
+this view the achievement of Wordsworth was of a kind which most of
+the moral leaders of the race have in some way or other performed.
+It was that he turned a theology back again into a religion: that he
+revived in a higher and purer form those primitive elements of
+reverence for Nature's powers which had diffused themselves into
+speculation, or crystallized into mythology; that for a system of
+beliefs about Nature, which paganism had allowed to become grotesque,--
+of rites which had become unmeaning,--he substituted an admiration
+for Nature so constant, an understanding of her so subtle, a
+sympathy so profound, that they became a veritable worship. Such
+worship, I repeat, is not what we commonly imply either by paganism
+or by pantheism. For in pagan countries, though the gods may have
+originally represented natural forces, yet the conception of them
+soon becomes anthropomorphic, and they are reverenced as
+transcendent _men_; and, on the other hand, pantheism is generally
+characterized by an indifference to things in the concrete, to
+Nature in detail; so that the Whole, or Universe, with which the
+Stoics (for instance) sought to be in harmony, was approached not by
+contemplating external objects, but rather by ignoring them.
+
+Yet here I would be understood to speak only in the most general
+manner. So congruous in all ages are the aspirations and the hopes
+of men that it would be rash indeed to attempt to assign the moment
+when any spiritual truth rises for the first time on human
+consciousness. But thus much, I think, may be fairly said, that the
+maxims of Wordsworth's form of natural religion were uttered before
+Wordsworth only in the sense in which the maxims of Christianity
+were uttered before Christ. To compare small things with great--or
+rather, to compare great things with things vastly greater--the
+essential spirit of the _Lines near Tintern Abbey_ was for practical
+purposes as new to mankind as the essential spirit of the _Sermon on
+the Mount_. Not the isolated expression of moral ideas, but their
+fusion into a whole in one memorable personality, is that which
+connects them for ever with a single name. Therefore it is that
+Wordsworth is venerated; because to so many men--indifferent, it may
+be, to literary or poetical effects, as such--he has shown by the
+subtle intensity of his own emotion how the contemplation of Nature
+can be made a revealing agency, like Love or Prayer,--an opening, if
+indeed there be any opening, into the transcendent world.
+
+The prophet with such a message as this will, of course, appeal for
+the most part to the experience of exceptional moments--those
+moments when "we see into the life of things;" when the face of
+Nature sends to us "gleams like the flashing of a shield;"--hours
+such as those of the Solitary, who, gazing on the lovely distant
+scene,
+
+                 Would gaze till it became
+  Far lovelier, and his heart could not sustain
+  The beauty, still more beauteous.
+
+But the idealist, of whatever school, is seldom content to base his
+appeal to us upon these scattered intuitions alone. There is a whole
+epoch of our existence whose memories, differing, indeed, immensely
+in vividness and importance in the minds of different men, are yet
+sufficiently common to all men to form a favourite basis for
+philosophical argument. "The child is father of the man;" and
+through the recollection and observation of early childhood we may
+hope to trace our ancestry--in heaven above or on the earth beneath--
+in its most significant manifestation.
+
+It is to the workings of the mind of the child that the philosopher
+appeals who wishes to prove that knowledge is recollection, and that
+our recognition of geometrical truths--so prompt as to appear
+instinctive--depends on our having been actually familiar with them
+in an earlier world. The Christian mystic invokes with equal
+confidence his own memories of a state which seemed as yet to know
+no sin:--
+
+  Happy those early days, when I
+  Shined in my angel infancy!
+  Before I understood this place
+  Appointed for my second race,
+  Or taught my soul to fancy aught
+  But a white, celestial thought;
+  When yet I had not walked above
+  A mile or two from my first Love,
+  And looking back at that short space
+  Could see a glimpse of His bright face;
+  When on some gilded cloud or flower
+  My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
+  And in those weaker glories spy
+  Some shadows of eternity;
+  Before I taught my tongue to wound
+  My conscience with a sinful sound,
+  Or had the black art to dispense
+  A several sin to every sense,
+  But felt through all this fleshly dress
+  Bright shoots of everlastingness.
+
+And Wordsworth, whose recollections were exceptionally vivid, and
+whose introspection was exceptionally penetrating, has drawn from
+his own childish memories philosophical lessons which are hard to
+disentangle in a logical statement, but which will roughly admit of
+being classed under two heads. For firstly, he has shown an unusual
+delicacy of analysis in eliciting the "firstborn affinities that fit
+our new existence to existing things;"--in tracing the first impact
+of impressions which are destined to give the mind its earliest ply,
+or even, in unreflecting natures, to determine the permanent modes of
+thought. And, secondly, from the halo of pure and vivid emotions
+with which our childish years are surrounded, and the close
+connexion of this emotion with external nature, which it glorifies
+and transforms, he infers that the soul has enjoyed elsewhere an
+existence superior to that of earth, but an existence of which
+external nature retains for a time the power of reminding her.
+
+The first of these lines of thought may be illustrated by a passage
+in the _Prelude_, in which the boy's mind is represented as passing
+through precisely the train of emotion which we may imagine to be at
+the root of the theology of many barbarous peoples. He is rowing at
+night alone on Esthwaite Lake, his eyes fixed upon a ridge of crags,
+above which nothing is visible:--
+
+  I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
+  And as I rose upon the stroke my boat
+  Went heaving through the water like a swan;--
+  When, from behind that craggy steep till then
+  The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
+  As if with voluntary power instinct
+  Upreared its head. I struck and struck again;
+  And, growing still in stature, the grim shape
+  Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
+  For so it seemed, with purpose of its own,
+  And measured motion like a living thing,
+  Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,
+  And through the silent water stole my way
+  Back to the covert of the willow-tree;
+  There in her mooring-place I left my bark,
+  And through the meadows homeward went, in grave
+  And serious mood. But after I had seen
+  That spectacle, for many days, my brain
+  Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
+  Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts
+  There hung a darkness--call it solitude,
+  Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
+  Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
+  Of sea, or sky, no colours of green fields;
+  But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
+  Like living men, moved slowly thro' the mind
+  By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.
+
+In the controversy as to the origin of the worship of inanimate
+objects, or of the powers of Nature, this passage might fairly be
+cited as an example of the manner in which those objects, or those
+powers, can impress the mind with that awe which is the foundation
+of savage creeds, while yet they are not identified with any human
+intelligence, such as the spirits of ancestors or the like, nor even
+supposed to operate according to any human, analogy.
+
+Up to this point Wordsworth's reminiscences may seem simply to
+illustrate the conclusions which science reaches by other roads. But
+he is not content with merely recording and analyzing his childish
+impressions; he implies, or even asserts, that these "fancies from
+afar are brought"--that the child's view of the world reveals to him
+truths which the man with difficulty retains or recovers. This is
+not the usual teaching of science, yet it would be hard to assert
+that it is absolutely impossible. The child's instincts may well be
+supposed to partake in larger measure of the general instincts of
+the race, in smaller measure of the special instincts of his own
+country and century, than is the case with the man. Now the feelings
+and beliefs of each successive century will probably be, on the whole,
+superior to those of any previous century. But this is not
+universally true; the teaching of each generation does not thus sum
+up the results of the whole past. And thus the child, to whom in a
+certain sense the past of humanity is present,--who is living
+through the whole life of the race in little, before he lives the
+life of his century in large,--may possibly dimly apprehend something
+more of truth in certain directions than is visible to the adults
+around him.
+
+But, thus qualified, the intuitions of infancy might seem scarcely
+worth insisting on. And Wordsworth, as is well known, has followed
+Plato in advancing for the child a much bolder claim. The child's
+soul, in this view, has existed before it entered the body--has
+existed in a world superior to ours, but connected, by the immanence
+of the same pervading Spirit, with the material universe before our
+eyes. The child begins by feeling this material world strange to him.
+But he sees in it, as it were, what he has been accustomed to see;
+he discerns in it its kinship with the spiritual world which he
+dimly remembers; it is to him "an unsubstantial fairy place"--a scene
+at once brighter and more unreal than it will appear in his eyes
+when he has become acclimatized to earth. And even when this
+freshness of insight has passed away, it occasionally happens that
+sights or sounds of unusual beauty or carrying deep associations--a
+rainbow, a cuckoo's cry, a sunset of extraordinary splendour--will
+renew for a while this sense of vision and nearness to the spiritual
+world--a sense which never loses its reality, though with advancing
+years its presence grows briefer and more rare.
+
+Such, then, in prosaic statement is the most characteristic message
+of Wordsworth. And it is to be noted that though Wordsworth at times
+presents it as a coherent theory, yet it is not necessarily of the
+nature of a theory, nor need be accepted or rejected as a whole; but
+is rather an inlet of illumining emotion in which different minds
+can share in the measure of their capacities or their need. There
+are some to whom childhood brought no strange vision of brightness,
+but who can feel their communion with the Divinity in Nature growing
+with the growth of their souls. There are others who might be
+unwilling to acknowledge any spiritual or transcendent source for
+the elevating joy which the contemplation of Nature can give, but
+who feel nevertheless that to that joy Wordsworth has been their
+most effective guide. A striking illustration of this fact may be
+drawn, from the passage in which John Stuart Mill, a philosopher of
+a very different school, has recorded the influence exercised over
+him by Wordsworth's poems; read in a season of dejection, when there
+seemed to be no real and substantive joy in life, nothing but the
+excitement of the struggle with the hardships and injustices of
+human fates.
+
+  "What made Wordsworth's poems a medicine for my state of
+  mind," he says in his Autobiography, "was that they expressed,
+  not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought
+  coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They
+  seemed to be the very culture of the feelings which I was in
+  quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward
+  joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be
+  shared in by all human beings, which had no connexion
+  with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by
+  every improvement in the physical or social condition of
+  mankind. From them I seemed to learn what would be the
+  perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of
+  life shall have been removed. And I felt myself at once better
+  and happier as I came under their influence."
+
+Words like these, proceeding from a mind so different from the
+poet's own, form perhaps as satisfactory a testimony to the value of
+his work as any writer can obtain. For they imply that Wordsworth
+has succeeded in giving his own impress to emotions which may become
+common to all; that he has produced a body of thought which is felt
+to be both distinctive and coherent, while yet it enlarges the
+reader's capacities instead of making demands upon his credence.
+Whether there be theories, they shall pass; whether there be systems,
+they shall fail; the true epoch-maker in the history of the human
+soul is the man who educes from this bewildering universe a new and
+elevating joy.
+
+I have alluded above to some of the passages, most of them familiar
+enough, in which Wordsworth's sense of the mystic relation between
+the world without us and the world within--the correspondence
+between the seen and the unseen--is expressed in its most general
+terms. But it is evident that such a conviction as this, if it
+contain any truth, cannot be barren of consequences on any level of
+thought. The communion with Nature which is capable of being at
+times sublimed to an incommunicable ecstasy must be capable also of
+explaining Nature to us so far as she can be explained; there must
+be _axiomata media_ of natural religion; there must be something in
+the nature of poetic truths, standing midway between mystic
+intuition and delicate observation.
+
+How rich Wordsworth is in these poetic truths--how illumining is the
+gaze which he turns on the commonest phenomena--how subtly and
+variously he shows us the soul's innate perceptions or inherited
+memories as it were co-operating with Nature and "half creating" the
+voice with which she speaks--all this can be learnt by attentive
+study alone. Only a few scattered samples can be given here; and I
+will begin with one on whose significance the poet has himself dwelt.
+This is the poem called _The Leech-Gatherer_, afterwards more
+formally named _Resolution and Independence_.
+
+"I will explain to you," says Wordsworth, "in prose, my feelings in
+writing that poem, I describe myself as having been exalted to the
+highest pitch of delight by the joyousness and beauty of Nature; and
+then as depressed, even in the midst of those beautiful objects, to
+the lowest dejection and despair. A young poet in the midst of the
+happiness of Nature is described as overwhelmed by the thoughts of
+the miserable reverses which have befallen the happiest of all men,
+viz. poets. I think of this till I am so deeply impressed with it,
+that I consider the manner in which I am rescued from my dejection
+and despair almost as an interposition of Providence. A person
+reading the poem with feelings like mine will have been awed and
+controlled, expecting something spiritual or supernatural. What is
+brought forward? A lonely place, 'a pond, by which an old man
+_was_, far from all house or home:' not _stood_, nor _sat_, but
+_was_--the figure presented in the most naked simplicity possible.
+The feeling of spirituality or supernaturalness is again referred to
+as being strong in my mind in this passage. How came he here?
+thought I, or what can he be doing? I then describe him, whether ill
+or well is not for me to judge with perfect confidence; but this I
+_can_ confidently affirm, that though I believe God has given me a
+strong imagination, I cannot conceive a figure more impressive than
+that of an old man like this, the survivor of a wife and ten children,
+travelling alone among the mountains and all lonely places, carrying
+with him his own fortitude, and the necessities which an unjust
+state of society has laid upon him. You speak of his speech as
+tedious. Everything is tedious when one does not read with the
+feelings of the author. _The Thorn_ is tedious to hundreds; and so
+is _The Idiot Boy_ to hundreds. It is in the character of the old
+man to tell his story, which an impatient reader must feel tedious.
+But, good heavens! Such a figure, in such a place; a pious,
+self-respecting, miserably infirm and pleased old man, telling such
+a tale!"
+
+The naive earnestness of this passage suggests to us how constantly
+recurrent in Wordsworth's mind were the two trains of ideas which
+form the substance of the poem; the interaction, namely, (if so it
+may be termed,) of the moods of Nature with the moods of the human
+mind; and the dignity and interest of man as man, depicted with no
+complex background of social or political life, but set amid the
+primary affections and sorrows, and the wild aspects of the external
+world.
+
+Among the pictures which Wordsworth has left us of the influence of
+Nature on human character, _Peter Bell_ may be taken as marking one
+end, and the poems on _Lucy_ the other end of the scale. Peter Bell
+lives in the face of Nature untouched alike by her terror and her
+charm; Lucy's whole being is moulded by Nature's self; she is
+responsive to sun and shadow, to silence and to sound, and melts
+almost into an impersonation of a Cumbrian valley's peace. Between
+these two extremes how many are the possible shades of feeling! In
+_Ruth_, for instance, the point impressed upon us is that Nature's
+influence is only salutary so long as she is herself, so to say, in
+keeping with man; that when her operations reach that degree of
+habitual energy and splendour at which our love for her passes into
+fascination and our admiration into bewilderment, then the fierce
+and irregular stimulus consorts no longer with the growth of a
+temperate virtue.
+
+  The wind, the tempest roaring high,
+  The tumult of a tropic sky,
+  Might well be dangerous food
+  For him, a youth to whom was given
+  So much of earth, so much of heaven,
+  And such impetuous blood.
+
+And a contrasting touch recalls the healing power of those gentle
+and familiar presences which came to Ruth in her stormy madness with
+visitations of momentary calm.
+
+  Yet sometimes milder hours she knew,
+  Nor wanted sun, nor rain, nor dew,
+  Nor pastimes of the May;
+  They all were with her in her cell;
+  And a wild brook with cheerful knell
+  Did o'er the pebbles play.
+
+I will give one other instance of this subtle method of dealing with
+the contrasts in Nature. It is from the poem entitled "_Lines left
+upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree which stands near the Lake of Esthwaite,
+on a desolate part of the Shore, commanding a beautiful Prospect_."
+This seat was once the haunt of a lonely, a disappointed, an
+embittered man.
+
+  Stranger! These gloomy boughs
+  Had charms for him: and here he loved to sit,
+  His only visitants a straggling sheep,
+  The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper;
+  And on these barren rocks, with fern and heath
+  And juniper and thistle sprinkled o'er,
+  Fixing his downcast eye, he many an hour
+  A morbid pleasure nourished, tracing here
+  An emblem of his own unfruitful life:
+  And, lifting up his head, he then would gaze
+  On the more distant scene,--how lovely 'tis
+  Thou seest,--and he would gaze till it became
+  Far lovelier, and his heart could not sustain
+  The beauty, still more beauteous! Nor, that time,
+  When Nature had subdued him to herself,
+  Would he forget those beings, to whose minds,
+  Warm from the labours of benevolence,
+  The world, and human life, appeared a scene
+  Of kindred loveliness; then he would sigh
+  With mournful joy, to think that others felt
+  What he must never feel; and so, lost Man!
+  On visionary views would fancy feed
+  Till his eyes streamed with tears.
+
+This is one of the passages which the lover of Wordsworth, quotes,
+perhaps, with some apprehension; not knowing how far it carries into
+the hearts of others its affecting power; how vividly it calls up
+before them that mood of desolate loneliness when the whole vision
+of human love and joy hangs like a mirage in the air, and only when
+it seems irrecoverably distant seems also intolerably dear. But,
+however this particular passage may impress the reader, it is not
+hard to illustrate by abundant references the potent originality of
+Wordsworth's outlook on the external world.
+
+There was indeed no aspect of Nature, however often depicted, in
+which his seeing eye could not discern some unnoted quality; there
+was no mood to which nature gave birth in the mind of man from which
+his meditation could not disengage some element which threw light on
+our inner being. How often has the approach of evening been described!
+And how mysterious is its solemnizing power! Yet it was reserved for
+Wordsworth in his sonnet "Hail, Twilight, sovereign of one peaceful
+hour," to draw out a characteristic of that grey waning light which
+half explains to us its sombre and pervading charm. "Day's mutable
+distinctions" pass away; all in the landscape that suggests our own
+age or our own handiwork is gone; we look on the sight seen by our
+remote ancestors, and the visible present is generalized into an
+immeasureable past.
+
+The sonnet on the Duddon beginning "What aspect bore the Man who
+roved or fled First of his tribe to this dark dell," carries back
+the mind along the same track, with the added thought of Nature's
+permanent gentleness amid the "hideous usages" of primeval man,--
+through all which the stream's voice was innocent, and its flow
+benign. "A weight of awe not easy to be borne" fell on the poet, also,
+as he looked on the earliest memorials which these remote ancestors
+have left us. The _Sonnet on a Stone Circle_ which opens with these
+words is conceived in a strain of emotion never more needed than now,--
+when Abury itself owes its preservation to the munificence of a
+private individual,--when stone-circle or round-tower, camp or dolmen,
+are destroyed to save a few shillings, and occupation-roads are
+mended with the immemorial altars of an unknown God. "Speak,
+Giant-mother! Tell it to the Morn!"--how strongly does the heart
+re-echo the solemn invocation which calls on those abiding witnesses
+to speak once of what they knew long ago!
+
+The mention of these ancient worships may lead us to ask in what
+manner Wordsworth was affected "by the Nature-deities of Greece and
+Rome"--impersonations which have preserved through so many ages so
+strange a charm. And space must be found here for the characteristic
+sonnet in which the baseness and materialism of modern life drives
+him back on whatsoever of illumination and reality lay in that young
+ideal.
+
+  The world is too much with us; late and soon
+  Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
+  Little we see in Nature that is ours;
+  We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
+  The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
+  The Winds that will be howling at all hours,
+  And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
+  For this, for everything we are out of tune;
+  It moves us not. Great God! I'd rather be
+  A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
+  So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
+  Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
+  Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea:
+  Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
+
+Wordsworth's own imagination idealized Nature in a different way.
+The sonnet "Brook! Whose society the poet seeks" places him among
+the men whose Nature-deities have not yet become anthropomorphic--
+men to whom "unknown modes of being" may seem more lovely as well as
+more awful than the life we know. He would not give to his idealized
+brook "human cheeks, channels for tears,--no Naiad shouldst thou be,"--
+
+  It seems the Eternal Soul is clothed in thee
+  With purer robes than those of flesh and blood,
+  And hath bestowed on thee a better good;
+  Unwearied joy, and life without its cares.
+
+And in the _Sonnet on Calais Beach_ the sea is regarded in the same
+way, with a sympathy (if I may so say) which needs no help from an
+imaginary impersonation, but strikes back to a sense of kinship
+which seems antecedent to the origin of man.
+
+  It is a beauteous Evening, calm and free;
+  The holy time is quiet as a Nun
+  Breathless with adoration; the broad sun
+  Is sinking down in its tranquillity;
+  The gentleness of heaven is on the Sea:
+  Listen! The mighty Being is awake,
+  And doth with his eternal motion make
+  A sound like thunder--everlastingly.
+
+A comparison, made by Wordsworth himself, of his own method of
+observing Nature with Scott's expresses in less mystical language
+something of what I am endeavouring to say.
+
+  "He expatiated much to me one day," says Mr. Aubrey de
+  Vere, "as we walked among the hills above Grasmere, on the
+  mode in which Nature had been described by one of the most
+  justly popular of England's modern poets--one for whom he
+  preserved a high and affectionate respect. 'He took pains,'
+  Wordsworth said; 'he went out with his pencil and note-book,
+  and jotted down whatever struck him most--a river rippling
+  over the sands, a ruined tower on a rock above it, a promontory,
+  and a mountain-ash waving its red berries. He went home and
+  wove the whole together into a poetical description.' After a
+  pause, Wordsworth resumed, with a flashing eye and impassioned
+  voice: 'But Nature does not permit an inventory to be
+  made of her charms! He should have left his pencil and notebook
+  at home, fixed his eye as he walked with a reverent attention
+  on all that surrounded him, and taken all into a heart that
+  could understand and enjoy. Then, after several days had
+  passed by, he should have interrogated his memory as to the
+  scene. He would have discovered that while much of what he
+  had admired was preserved to him, much was also most wisely
+  obliterated; that which remained--the picture surviving in his
+  mind--would have presented the ideal and essential truth of the
+  scene, and done so in a large part by discarding much which,
+  though in itself striking, was not characteristic. In every scene
+  many of the most brilliant details are but accidental; a true eye
+  for Nature does not note them, or at least does not dwell on
+  them.'"
+
+How many a phrase of Wordsworth's rises in the mind in illustration
+of this power! Phrases which embody in a single picture, or a single
+image,--it may be the vivid wildness of the flowery coppice, of--
+
+       Flaunting summer, when he throws
+  His soul into the briar-rose,--
+
+or the melancholy stillness of the declining year,--
+
+  Where floats
+  O'er twilight fields the autumnal gossamer;
+
+or--as in the words which to the sensitive Charles Lamb seemed too
+terrible for art--the irresponsive blankness of the universe--
+
+  The broad open eye of the solitary sky--
+
+beneath which mortal hearts must make what merriment they may.
+
+Or take those typical stanzas in _Peter Bell_, which so long were
+accounted among Wordsworth's leading absurdities.
+
+  In vain through, every changeful year
+  Did Nature lead him as before;
+  A primrose by the river's brim
+  A yellow primrose was to him,
+  And it was nothing more.
+
+  In vain, through water, earth, and air,
+  The soul of happy sound was spread,
+  When Peter, on some April morn,
+  Beneath the broom or budding thorn.
+  Made the warm earth his lazy bed.
+
+  At noon, when by the forest's edge
+  He lay beneath the branches high,
+  The soft blue sky did never melt
+  Into his heart,--he never felt
+  The witchery of the soft blue sky!
+
+  On a fair prospect some have looked
+  And felt, as I have heard them say,
+  As if the moving time had been
+  A thing as steadfast as the scene
+  On which they gazed themselves away.
+
+In all these passages, it will be observed, the emotion is educed
+from Nature rather than added to her; she is treated as a mystic
+text to be deciphered, rather than as a stimulus to roving
+imagination. This latter mood, indeed, Wordsworth feels occasionally,
+as in the sonnet where the woodland sights become to him "like a
+dream of the whole world;" but it is checked by the recurring sense
+that "it is our business to idealize the real, and not to realize
+the ideal." Absorbed in admiration of fantastic clouds of sunset, he
+feels for a moment ashamed to think that they are unrememberable--
+
+  They are of the sky,
+  And from our earthly memory fade away.
+
+But soon he disclaims this regret, and reasserts the paramount
+interest of the things that we can grasp and love.
+
+  Grove, isle, with every shape of sky-built dome,
+  Though clad In colours beautiful and pure,
+  Find in the heart of man no natural home;
+  The immortal Mind craves objects that endure:
+  These cleave to it; from these it cannot roam,
+  Nor they from it: their fellowship is secure.
+
+From this temper of Wordsworth's mind, it follows that there will be
+many moods in which we shall not retain him as our companion. Moods
+which are rebellious, which beat at the bars of fate; moods of
+passion reckless in its vehemence, and assuming the primacy of all
+other emotions through the intensity of its delight or pain; moods
+of mere imaginative phantasy, when we would fain shape from the
+well-worn materials of our thought some fabric at once beautiful and
+new; from all such phases of our inward being Wordsworth stands aloof.
+His poem on the nightingale and the stockdove illustrates with
+half-conscious allegory the contrast between himself and certain
+other poets.
+
+  O Nightingale! Thou surely art
+  A creature of a fiery heart:--
+  These notes of thine--they pierce and pierce;
+  Tumultuous harmony and fierce!
+  Thou sing'st as if the God of wine
+  Had helped thee to a Valentine;
+  A song in mockery and despite
+  Of shades, and dews, and silent Night;
+  And steady bliss, and all the loves
+  Now sleeping in their peaceful groves.
+
+  I heard a Stock-dove sing or say
+  His homely tale, this very day;
+  His voice was buried among trees,
+  Yet to be come at by the breeze:
+  He did not cease; but cooed--and cooed,
+  And somewhat pensively he wooed.
+  He sang of love with quiet blending,
+  Slow to begin, and never ending;
+  Of serious faith and inward glee;
+  That was the Song--the Song for me!
+
+"_His voice was buried among trees_," says Wordsworth; "a metaphor
+expressing the love of _seclusion_ by which this bird is marked; and
+characterizing its note as not partaking of the shrill and the
+piercing, and therefore more easily deadened by the intervening shade;
+yet a note so peculiar, and withal so pleasing, that the breeze,
+gifted with that love of the sound which the poet feels, penetrates
+the shade in which it is entombed, and conveys it to the ear of the
+listener."
+
+Wordsworth's poetry on the emotional side (as distinguished from its
+mystical or its patriotic aspects) could hardly be more exactly
+described than in the above sentence. For while there are few poems
+of his which could be read to a mixed audience with the certainty of
+producing an immediate impression; yet on the other hand all the
+best ones gain in an unusual degree by repeated study; and this Is
+especially the case with those in which, some touch of tenderness is
+enshrined in a scene of beauty, which it seems to interpret while it
+is itself exalted by it. Such a poem is _Stepping Westward_, where
+the sense of sudden fellowship, and the quaint greeting beneath the
+glowing sky, seem to link man's momentary wanderings with the cosmic
+spectacles of heaven. Such are the lines where all the wild romance
+of Highland scenery, the forlornness of the solitary vales, pours
+itself through the lips of the maiden singing at her work, "as if
+her song could have no ending,"--
+
+  Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
+  And sings a melancholy strain;
+  O listen! For the Vale profound
+  Is overflowing with the sound.
+
+Such--and with how subtle a difference!--is the _Fragment_ in which
+a "Spirit of noonday" wears on his face the silent joy of Nature in
+her own recesses, undisturbed by beast, or bird, or man,--
+
+  Nor ever was a cloudless sky
+  So steady or so fair.
+
+And such are the poems--_We are Seven, The Pet Lamb_, [6]
+
+[Footnote 6: The _Pet Lamb_ is probably the only poem of
+Wordsworth's which can be charged with having done moral injury, and
+that to a single individual alone. "Barbara Lewthwaite," says
+Wordsworth, in 1843, "was not, in fact, the child whom I had seen and
+overheard as engaged in the poem. I chose the name for reasons
+implied in the above," (i.e. an account of her remarkable beauty),
+"and will here add a caution against the use of names of living
+persons. Within a few months after the publication of this poem I
+was much, surprised, and more hurt, to find it in a child's
+school-book, which, having been compiled by Lindley Murray, had come
+into use at Grasmere School, where Barbara was a pupil. And, alas, I
+had the mortification of hearing that she was very vain of being
+thus distinguished; and in after-life she used to say that she
+remembered the incident, and what I said to her upon the occasion."]
+
+_Louisa, The Two April Mornings_--in which the beauty of rustic
+children melts, as it were, into Nature herself, and the--
+
+        Blooming girl whose hair was wet
+  With points of morning dew
+
+becomes the impersonation of the season's early joy. We may apply,
+indeed, to all these girls Wordsworth's description of leverets
+playing on a lawn, and call them--
+
+  Separate creatures in their several gifts
+  Abounding, but so fashioned that in all
+  That Nature prompts them to display, their looks,
+  Their starts of motion and their fits of rest,
+  An undistinguishable style appears
+  And character of gladness, as if Spring
+  Lodged in their innocent bosoms, and the spirit
+  Of the rejoicing Morning were their own.
+
+My limits forbid me to dwell longer on these points. The passages
+which I have been citing have been for the most part selected as
+illustrating the novelty and subtlety of Wordsworth's view of Nature.
+But it will now be sufficiently clear how continually a strain of
+human interest is interwoven with the delight derived from impersonal
+things.
+
+  Long have I loved what I behold,
+  The night that calms, the day that cheers:
+  The common growth of mother earth
+  Suffices me--her tears, her mirth,
+  Her humblest mirth and tears.
+
+The poet of the _Waggoner_--who, himself a habitual water-drinker,
+has so glowingly described the glorification which the prospect of
+nature receives in a half-intoxicated brain--may justly claim that
+he can enter into all genuine pleasures, even of an order which he
+declines for himself. With anything that is false or artificial he
+cannot sympathize, nor with such faults as baseness, cruelty, rancour;
+which seem contrary to human nature itself; but in dealing with
+faults of mere _weakness_ he is far less strait-laced than many less
+virtuous men.
+
+He had, in fact, a reverence for human beings as such which enabled
+him to face even their frailties without alienation; and there was
+something in his own happy exemption from such falls which touched
+him into regarding men less fortunate rather with pity than disdain.
+
+  Because the unstained, the clear, the crystalline,
+  Have ever in them something of benign.
+
+His comment on Barns's _Tam o' Shanter_ will perhaps surprise some
+readers who are accustomed to think of him only in his didactic
+attitude.
+
+"It is the privilege of poetic genius, he says, to catch, under
+certain restrictions of which perhaps at the time of its being
+exerted it is but dimly conscious, a spirit of pleasure wherever it
+can be found, in the walks of nature, and in the business of men.
+The poet, trusting to primary instincts, luxuriates among the
+felicities of love and wine, and is enraptured while he describes
+the fairer aspects of war, nor does he shrink from the company of
+the passion of love though immoderate--from convivial pleasures
+though intemperate--nor from the presence of war, though savage, and
+recognized as the handmaid of desolation. Frequently and admirably
+has Burns given way to these impulses of nature, both with
+references to himself and in describing the condition of others. Who,
+but some impenetrable dunce or narrow-minded puritan in works of art,
+ever read without delight the picture which he has drawn of the
+convivial exaltation of the rustic adventurer Tam o' Shanter? The
+poet fears not to tell the reader in the outset that his hero was a
+desperate and sottish drunkard, whose excesses were as frequent as
+his opportunities. This reprobate sits down to his cups while the
+storm is roaring, and heaven and earth are in confusion; the night
+is driven on by song and tumultuous noise, laughter and jest thicken
+as the beverage improves upon the palate--conjugal fidelity archly
+bends to the service of general benevolence--selfishness is not
+absent, but wearing the mask of social cordiality; and while these
+various elements of humanity are blended into one proud and happy
+composition of elated spirits, the anger of the tempest without
+doors only heightens and sets off the enjoyment within. I pity him
+who cannot perceive that in all this, though there was no moral
+purpose, there is a moral effect."
+
+  Kings may be blest, but Tarn was glorious,
+  O'er a' the ills of life victorious.
+
+"What a lesson do these words convey of charitable indulgence for
+the vicious habits of the principal actor in the scene, and of those
+who resemble him! Men who to the rigidly virtuous are objects almost
+of loathing, and whom therefore they cannot serve! The poet,
+penetrating the unsightly and disgusting surfaces of things, has
+unveiled with exquisite skill the finer ties of imagination and
+feeling, that often bind these beings to practices productive of so
+much unhappiness to themselves, and to those whom it is their duty
+to cherish; and, as far as he puts the reader into possession of
+this intelligent sympathy, he qualifies him for exercising a
+salutary influence over the minds of those who are thus deplorably
+enslaved."
+
+The reverence for man as man, the sympathy for him in his primary
+relations and his essential being, of which these comments on
+_Tam o' Shanter_ form so remarkable an example, is a habit of
+thought too ingrained in all Wordsworth's works to call for specific
+illustration. The figures of _Michael_, of _Matthew_, of the
+_Brothers_, of the hero of the _Excursion_, and even of the _Idiot Boy_,
+suggest themselves at once in this connexion. But it should be noted
+in each case how free is the poet's view from any idealization of
+the poorer classes as such, from the ascription of imaginary merits
+to an unknown populace which forms the staple of so much
+revolutionary eloquence. These poems, while they form the most
+convincing rebuke to the exclusive pride of the rich and great, are
+also a stern and strenuous incentive to the obscure and lowly. They
+are pictures of the poor man's life as it is,--pictures as free as
+Crabbe's from the illusion of sentiment,--but in which the delight
+of mere observation (which in Crabbe predominates) is subordinated
+to an intense sympathy with all such capacities of nobleness and
+tenderness as are called out by the stress and pressure of penury or
+woe. They form for the folk of northern England (as the works of
+Burns and Scott for the Scottish folk) a gallery of figures that are
+modelled, as it were, both from without and from within; by one with
+experience so personal as to keep every sentence vividly accurate,
+and yet with an insight which could draw from that simple life
+lessons to itself unknown. We may almost venture to generalize our
+statement further, and to assert that no writer since Shakespeare
+has left us so true a picture of the British nation. In Milton,
+indeed, we have the characteristic English spirit at a whiter glow;
+but it is the spirit of the scholar only, or of the ruler, not of the
+peasant, the woman, or the child, Wordsworth gives us that spirit as
+it is diffused among shepherds and husbandmen,--as it exists in
+obscurity and at peace. And they who know what makes the strength of
+nations need wish nothing better than that the temper which he saw
+and honoured among the Cumbrian dales should be the temper of all
+England, now and for ever.
+
+Our discussion of Wordsworth's form of Natural Religion has led us
+back by no forced transition to the simple life which he described
+and shared. I return to the story of his later years,--if that be
+called a story which derives no interest from incident or passion,
+and dwells only on the slow broodings of a meditative soul.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+ITALIAN TOUR--ECCLESIASTICAL SONNETS--POLITICAL VIEWS--LAUREATESHIP.
+
+Wordsworth was fond of travelling, and indulged this taste whenever
+he could afford it. Comparing himself and Southey, he says in 1843:
+"My lamented friend Southey used to say that had he been a Papist,
+the course of life which in all probability would have been his
+was that of a Benedictine monk, in a convent furnished with
+an inexhaustible library. _Books_ were, in fact, his passion;
+and _wandering_, I can with truth affirm, was mine; but this
+propensity in me was happily counteracted by inability from want of
+fortune to fulfil my wishes." We find him, however, frequently able
+to contrive a change of scene. His Swiss tour in 1790, his residence
+in France in 1791-2, his residence in Germany, 1798-9, have been
+already touched on. Then came a short visit to France in August 1802,
+which produced the sonnets on Westminster Bridge and Calais Beach.
+The tour in Scotland which was so fertile in poetry took place in
+1803. A second tour in Scotland, in 1814, produced the _Brownie's
+Cell_ and a few other pieces. And in July, 1820, he set out with his
+wife and sister and two or three other friends for a tour through
+Switzerland and Italy.
+
+This tour produced a good deal of poetry; and here and there are
+touches which recall the old inspiration. Such is the comparison of
+the clouds about the Engelberg to hovering angels; and such the
+description of the eclipse falling upon the population of statues
+which throng the pinnacles of Milan Cathedral. But for the most part
+the poems relating to this tour have an artificial look; the
+sentiments in the vale of Chamouni seem to have been laboriously
+summoned for the occasion; and the poet's admiration for the Italian
+maid and the Helvetian girl is a mere shadow of the old feeling for
+the Highland girl, to whom, in fact, he seems obliged to recur in
+order to give reality to his new emotion.
+
+To conclude the subject of Wordsworth's travels, I will mention here
+that in 1823 he made a tour in Holland, and in 1824 in North Wales,
+where his sonnet to the torrent at the Devil's Bridge recalls the
+Swiss scenery seen in his youth with vigour and dignity. In 1828 he
+made another excursion in Belgium with Coleridge, and in 1829 he
+visited Ireland with his friend Mr. Marshall. Neither of these tours
+was productive. In 1831 he paid a visit with his daughter to Sir
+Walter Scott at Abbotsford, before his departure to seek health in
+Italy. Scott received them cordially, and had strength to take them
+to the Yarrow. "Of that excursion," says Wordsworth, "the verses
+_Yarrow Revisited_ are a memorial. On our return in the afternoon
+we had to cross the Tweed, directly opposite Abbotsford. 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 (the Tweed), I was
+not a little moved, and expressed some of my feelings in the sonnet
+beginning, _A trouble not of clouds nor weeping rain_. At noon on
+Thursday 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 written 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 sake; they are probably
+the last verses I shall ever write.' They show how much his mind was
+impaired: not by the strain of thought, but by the execution, some
+of the lines being imperfect, and one stanza wanting corresponding
+rhymes. One letter, the initial S., had been omitted in the spelling
+of his own name."
+
+There was another tour in Scotland in 1833, which produced _Memorials_
+of little poetic value. And in 1837 he made a long tour in Italy
+with Mr. Crabb Robinson. But the poems which record this tour
+indicate a mind scarcely any longer susceptible to any vivid stimulus
+except from accustomed objects and ideas. The _Musings near
+Aquapendente_ are musings on Scott and Helvellyn; the _Pine Tree of
+Monte Mario_ is interesting because--Sir George Beaumont has saved
+it from destruction; the _Cuckoo at Laverna_ brings all childhood
+back into his heart. "I remember perfectly well," says Crabb Robinson,
+"that I heard the cuckoo at Laverna twice before he heard it; and
+that it absolutely fretted him that my ear was first favoured; and
+that he exclaimed with delight, 'I hear it! I hear it!'" This was
+his last foreign tour; nor, indeed, are these tours very noticeable
+except as showing that he was not blindly wedded to his own lake
+scenery; that his admiration could face comparisons, and keep the
+same vividness when he was fresh from other orders of beauty.
+
+The productions of these later years took for the most part a
+didactic rather than a descriptive form. In the volume entitled
+_Poems chiefly of Early and Later Years_, published in 1842, were
+many hortatory or ecclesiastical pieces of inferior merit, and among
+them various additions to the _Ecclesiastical Sketches_, a series of
+sonnets begun in 1821, but which he continued to enlarge, spending
+on them much of the energies of his later years. And although it is
+only in a few instances--as in the description of King's College,
+Cambridge--that these sonnets possess force or charm enough to rank
+them high as poetry, yet they assume a certain value when we consider
+not so much their own adequacy as the greater inadequacy of all
+rival attempts in the same direction.
+
+The Episcopalian Churchman, in this country or in the United States,
+will certainly nowhere find presented to him in poetical form so
+dignified and comprehensive a record of the struggles and the glories,
+of the vicissitudes and the edification, of the great body to which
+he belongs. Next to the Anglican liturgy--though next at an immense
+interval--these sonnets may take rank as the authentic exposition of
+her historic being--an exposition delivered with something of her
+own unadorned dignity, and in her moderate and tranquil tone.
+
+I would not, however, seem to claim too much. The religion which
+these later poems of Wordsworth's embody is rather the stately
+tradition of a great Church than the pangs and aspirations of a holy
+soul. There is little in them--whether for good or evil--of the
+stuff of which a Paul, a Francis, a Dominic are made. That fervent
+emotion--akin to the passion of love rather than to intellectual or
+moral conviction--finds voice through singers of a very different
+tone. It is fed by an inward anguish, and felicity which, to those
+who have not felt them, seem as causeless as a lover's moods; by
+wrestlings not with flesh and blood; by nights of despairing
+self-abasement; by ecstasies of an incommunicable peace. How great
+the gulf between Wordsworth and George Herbert!--Herbert "offering
+at heaven, growing and groaning thither,"--and Wordsworth, for whom
+the gentle regret of the lines,--
+
+  Me this unchartered freedom tires,
+  I feel the weight of chance desires,--
+
+forms his most characteristic expression of the self-judgment of the
+solitary soul.
+
+Wordsworth accomplished one reconciliation of great importance to
+mankind. He showed, as plainly in his way as Socrates had shown it
+long ago, with what readiness a profoundly original conception of
+the scheme of things will shape itself into the mould of an
+established and venerable faith. He united the religion of the
+philosopher with the religion of the churchman; one rarer thing he
+could not do; he could not unite the religion of the philosopher
+with the religion of the saint. It is, indeed, evident that the most
+inspiring feeling which breathes through Wordsworth's ecclesiastical
+pieces is not of a doctrinal, not even of a spiritual kind. The
+ecclesiastical as well as the political sentiments of his later
+years are prompted mainly by the admiring love with which he
+regarded the structure of English society--seen as that society was
+by him in its simplest and most poetic aspect. This concrete
+attachment to the scenes about him had always formed an important
+element in his character. Ideal politics, whether in Church or State,
+had never occupied his mind, which sought rather to find its
+informing principles embodied in the England of his own day. The
+sonnet _On a Parsonage in Oxfordshire_ well illustrates the loving
+minuteness with which he draws out the beauty and fitness of the
+established scheme of things,--the power of English country life to
+satisfy so many moods of feeling.
+
+The country-seat of the English squire or nobleman has become--may
+we not say?--one of the world's chosen types of a happy and a
+stately home. And Wordsworth, especially in his poems which deal
+with Coleorton, has shown how deeply he felt the sway of such a
+home's hereditary majesty, its secure and tranquillizing charm. Yet
+there are moods when the heart which deeply feels the inequality of
+human lots turns towards a humbler ideal. There are moments when the
+broad park, the halls and towers, seem no longer the fitting frame
+of human greatness, but rather an isolating solitude, an unfeeling
+triumph over the poor.
+
+In such a mood of mind it will not always satisfy us to dwell, as
+Wordsworth has so often done, on the virtue and happiness that
+gather round a cottage hearth,--which we must, after all, judge by a
+somewhat less exacting standard. We turn rather to the "refined
+rusticity" of an English Parsonage home.
+
+  Where holy ground begins, unhallowed ends,
+  Is marked by no distinguishable line;
+  The turf unites, the pathways intertwine,--
+
+and the clergyman's abode has but so much of dignity as befits the
+minister of the Church which is the hamlet's centre; enough to
+suggest the old Athenian boast of beauty without extravagance, and
+study without effeminacy; enough to show that dwellings where not
+this life but another is the prevailing thought and care, yet need
+not lack the graces of culture, nor the loves of home.
+
+The sonnet on _Seathwaite Chapel_, and the life of Robert Walker,
+the incumbent of Seathwaite, which is given at length in the notes
+to the sonnets on the Duddon, afford a still more characteristic
+instance of the clerical ideal towards which Wordsworth naturally
+turned. In Robert Walker he had a Cumbrian statesman turned into a
+practical saint; and he describes him with a gusto in which his
+laboured sonnets on _Laud_ or on _Dissensions_ are wholly deficient.
+
+It was in social and political matters that the consequences of this
+idealizing view of the facts around him in Cumberland were most
+apparent. Take education, for example. Wordsworth, as has been
+already stated, was one of the earliest and most impressive
+assertors of the national duty of teaching every English child to
+read. He insists on this with a prosaic earnestness which places
+several pages of the _Excursion_ among what may be called the
+standing bugbears which his poems offer to the inexperienced reader.
+And yet as soon as, through the exertions of Bell and Lancaster,
+there seems to be some chance of really educating the poor, Dr. Bell,
+whom Coleridge fondly imagines as surrounded in heaven by multitudes
+of grateful angels, is to Wordsworth a name of horror. The
+mistresses trained on his system are called "Dr. Bell's sour-looking
+teachers in petticoats." And the instruction received in these
+new-fangled schools is compared to "the training that fits a boxer
+for victory in the ring." The reason of this apparent inconsistency
+is not far to seek. Wordsworth's eyes were fixed on the village life
+around him. Observation of that life impressed on him the imperative
+necessity of instruction in reading. But it was from a moral, rather
+than an intellectual point of view that he regarded it as needful,
+and, this opening into the world of ideas once secured, he held that
+the cultivation of the home affections and home duties was all that
+was needed beyond. And thus the Westmoreland dame, "in her summer
+seat in the garden, and in winter by the fireside," was elevated
+into the unexpected position of the ideal instructress of youth.
+
+Conservatism of this kind could provoke nothing but a sympathetic
+smile. The case was different when the same conservative--even
+retrograde--tendency showed itself on subjects on which
+party-feeling ran high. A great part of the meditative energy of
+Wordsworth's later years was absorbed by questions towards whose
+solution he contributed no new element, and which filled him with
+disproportionate fears. And some injustice has been done to his
+memory by those who have not fully realized the predisposing causes
+which were at work,--the timidity of age, and the deep-rooted
+attachment to the England which he knew.
+
+I speak of age, perhaps, somewhat prematurely, as the poet's
+gradually growing conservatism culminated in his opposition to the
+Catholic Relief Bill, before he was sixty years old. But there is
+nothing to wonder at in the fact that the mind of a man of brooding
+and solitary habits should show traces of advancing age earlier than
+is the case with statesmen or men of the world, who are obliged to
+keep themselves constantly alive to the ideas of the generation that
+is rising around them. A deadness to new impressions, an
+unwillingness to make intellectual efforts in fresh directions, a
+tendency to travel the same mental pathways over and over again, and
+to wear the ruts of prejudice deeper at every step; such traces of
+age as these undoubtedly manifested themselves in the way in which
+the poet confronted the great series of changes--Catholic
+Emancipation, Reform Bill, New Poor Law, on which England entered
+about the year 1829. "My sixty-second year," Wordsworth writes, in
+1832, "will soon be completed; and though I have been favoured thus
+far in health and strength beyond most men of my age, yet I feel its
+effects upon my spirits; they sink under a pressure of apprehension
+to which, at an earlier period of my life, they would probably have
+been superior." To this it must be added, that the increasing
+weakness of the poet's eyes seriously limited his means of
+information. He had never read much contemporary literature, and he
+read less than ever now. He had no fresh or comprehensive knowledge
+of the general condition of the country, and he really believed in
+the prognostication which was uttered by many also who did _not_
+believe in it, that with the Reform Bill the England which he knew
+and loved would practically disappear. But there was nothing in him
+of the angry polemic, nothing of the calumnious partisan. One of the
+houses where Mr. Wordsworth was most intimate and most welcome was
+that of a reforming member of parliament, who was also a manufacturer,
+thus belonging to the two classes for which the poet had the
+greatest abhorrence. But the intimacy was never for a moment shaken,
+and indeed in that house Mr. Wordsworth expounded the ruinous
+tendency of Reform and manufactures with even unusual copiousness,
+on account of the admiring affection with which he felt himself
+surrounded. The tone in which he spoke was never such as could give
+pain or excite antagonism; and--if I may be pardoned for descending
+to a detail which well illustrates my position--the only rejoinder
+which these diatribes provoked was that the poet on his arrival was
+sometimes decoyed into uttering them to the younger members of the
+family, whose time was of less value, so as to set his mind free to
+return to those topics of more permanent interest where his
+conversation kept to the last all that tenderness, nobility, wisdom,
+which in that family, as in many others familiar with the celebrated
+persons of that day, won for him a regard and a reverence such as
+was accorded to no other man.
+
+To those, indeed, who realized how deeply he felt these changes,--
+how profoundly his notion of national happiness was bound up with a
+lovely and vanishing ideal,--the prominent reflection was that the
+hopes and principles which maintained through all an underlying hope
+and trust in the future must have been potent indeed. It was no easy
+optimism which prompted the lines written in 1837--one of his latest
+utterances--in which he speaks to himself with strong self-judgment
+and resolute hope. On reading them one shrinks from dwelling longer
+upon an old man's weakness and a brave man's fears.
+
+  If this great world of joy and pain
+    Revolve in one sure track;
+  If Freedom, set, revive again,
+    And Virtue, flown, come back,--
+
+  Woe to the purblind crew who fill
+    The heart with each day's care,
+  Nor learn, from past and future, skill
+    To bear and to forbear.
+
+The poet had also during these years more of private sorrow than his
+tranquil life had for a long time experienced. In 1832 his sister
+had a most serious illness, which kept her for many months in a
+state of great prostration, and left her, when the physical symptoms
+abated, with her intellect painfully impaired, and her bright nature
+permanently overclouded. Coleridge, too, was nearing his end.
+"He and my beloved sister," writes Wordsworth, in 1832, "are the two
+beings to whom my intellect is most indebted, and they are now
+proceeding, as it were, _pari passu_, along the path of sickness, I
+will not say towards the grave, but I trust towards a blessed
+immortality."
+
+In July, 1834, "every mortal power of Coleridge was frozen at its
+marvellous source," And although the early intimacy had scarcely
+been maintained,--though the "comfortless and hidden well" had, for
+a time at least, replaced the "living murmuring fount of love" which
+used to spring beside Wordsworth's door,--yet the loss was one which
+the surviving poet deeply felt. Coleridge was the only contemporary
+man of letters with whom Wordsworth's connexion had been really close;
+and when Wordsworth is spoken of as one of a group of poets
+exemplifying in various ways the influence of the Revolution, it is
+not always remembered how very little he had to do with the other
+famous men of his time. Scott and Southey were valued friends, but
+he thought little of Scott's poetry, and less of Southey's. Byron
+and Shelley he seems scarcely to have read; and he failed altogether
+to appreciate Keats. But to Coleridge his mind constantly reverted;
+he called him "the most wonderful man he had ever known," and he
+kept him as the ideal auditor of his own poems, long after Coleridge
+had listened to the _Prelude_,--
+
+  A song divine of high and passionate thoughts
+  To their own music chanted.
+
+In 1836, moreover, died one for whom Coleridge, as well as Wordsworth,
+had felt a very high respect and regard--Sarah Hutchinson, Mrs.
+Wordsworth's sister, and long the inmate of Wordsworth's household.
+This most valued friend had been another instance of the singular
+good fortune which attended Wordsworth in his domestic connexions;
+and when she was laid in Grasmere churchyard, the stone above her
+tomb expressed the wish of the poet and his wife that, even as her
+remains were laid beside their dead children's, so their own bodies
+also might be laid by hers.
+
+And now, while the inner circle of friends and relations began, to
+pass away, the outer circle of admirers was rapidly spreading.
+Between the years 1830 and 1840 Wordsworth passed from the apostle
+of a clique into the most illustrious man of letters in England. The
+rapidity of this change was not due to any remarkable accident, nor
+to the appearance of any new work of genius. It was merely an
+extreme instance of what must always occur where an author, running
+counter to the fashion of his age, has to create his own public in
+defiance of the established critical powers. The disciples whom he
+draws round him are for the most part young; the established
+authorities are for the most part old; so that by the time that the
+original poet is about sixty years old, most of his admirers will be
+about forty, and most of his critics will be dead. His admirers now
+become his accredited critics; his works are widely introduced to the
+public; and if they are really good his reputation is secure. In
+Wordsworth's case the detractors had been unusually persistent, and
+the reaction, when it came, was therefore unusually violent; it was
+even somewhat factitious in its extent; and the poems were forced by
+enthusiasts upon a public which was only half ripe for them. After
+the poet's death a temporary counter-reaction succeeded, and his
+fame is only now finding its permanent level.
+
+Among the indications of growing popularity was the publication of
+an American edition of Wordsworth's poems in 1837, by Professor Reed
+of Philadelphia, with whom the poet interchanged many letters of
+interest. "The acknowledgments," he says in one of these, "which I
+receive from the vast continent of America are among the most
+grateful that reach me. What a vast field is there open to the
+English mind, acting through our noble language! Let us hope that
+our authors of true genius will not be unconscious of that thought,
+or inattentive to the duty which it imposes upon them, of doing their
+utmost to instruct, to purify, and to elevate their readers."
+
+But of all the manifestations of the growing honour in which
+Wordsworth was held, none was more marked or welcome than the
+honorary degree of D.C.L. conferred on him by the University of
+Oxford in the summer of 1839. Keble, as Professor of Poetry,
+introduced him in words of admiring reverence, and the enthusiasm of
+the audience was such as had never been evoked in that place before,
+"except upon the occasions of the visits of the Duke of Wellington."
+The collocation was an interesting one. The special claim advanced
+for Wordsworth by Keble in his Latin oration was "that he had shed a
+celestial light upon the affections, the occupations, the piety of
+the poor." And to many men besides the author of the _Christian Year_
+it seemed that this striking scene was, as it were, another visible
+triumph of the temper of mind which is of the essence of Christianity;
+a recognition that one spirit more had become as a little child, and
+had entered into the kingdom of heaven.
+
+In October, 1842, another token of public respect was bestowed on
+him in the shape of an annuity of 300£ a year from the Civil List
+for distinguished literary merit. "I need scarcely add," says Sir
+Robert Peel, in making the offer, "that the acceptance by you of
+this mark of favour from the Crown, considering the grounds on which
+it is proposed, will impose no restraint upon your perfect
+independence, and involve no obligation of a personal nature." In
+March, 1843, came the death of Southey, and in a few days Wordsworth
+received a letter from Earl De la Warr, the Lord Chamberlain,
+offering him, in the most courteous terms, the office of Poet
+Laureate, which, however, he respectfully declined as imposing duties,
+"which, far advanced in life as I am, I cannot venture to undertake."
+
+This letter brought a reply from the Lord Chamberlain, pressing the
+office on him again, and a letter from Sir Robert Peel which gave
+dignified expression to the national feeling in the matter.
+"The offer," he says, "was made to you by the Lord Chamberlain, with
+my entire concurrence, not for the purpose of imposing on you any
+onerous or disagreeable duties, but in order to pay you that tribute
+of respect which is justly due to the first of living poets. The
+Queen entirely approved of the nomination, and there is one
+unanimous feeling on the part of all who have heard of the proposal
+(and it is pretty generally known) that there could not be a question
+about the selection. Do not be deterred by the fear of any
+obligations which the appointment may be supposed to imply. I will
+undertake that you shall have nothing _required_ from you. But as
+the Queen can select for this honourable appointment no one whose
+claims for respect and honour, on account of eminence as a poet, can
+be placed in competition with, yours, I trust you will not longer
+hesitate to accept it."
+
+This letter overcame the aged poet's scruples; and he filled with
+silent dignity the post of Laureate till after seven years' space a
+worthy successor received
+
+  This laurel greener from the brows
+  Of him that uttered nothing base.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+LETTERS ON THE KENDAL AND WINDERMERE RAILWAY--CONCLUSION.
+
+Wordsworth's appointment to the Laureateship was significant in more
+ways than one. He was so much besides a poet, that his appointment
+implied something of a national recognition, not only of his past
+poetical achievements, but of the substantial truth of that body of
+principles which through many years of neglect and ridicule he had
+consistently supported. There was therefore nothing incongruous in
+the fact that the only composition of any importance which
+Wordsworth produced after he became Laureate was in prose--his two
+letters on the projected Kendal and Windermere railway, 1844. No
+topic, in fact, could have arisen on which the veteran poet could
+more fitly speak with whatever authority his official spokesmanship
+of the nation's higher life could give, for it was a topic with
+every aspect of which he was familiar; and so far as the extension of
+railways through the Lake country was defended on grounds of popular
+benefit, (and not merely of commercial advantage), no one, certainly,
+had shown himself more capable of estimating at their full value
+such benefits as were here proposed.
+
+The results which follow on a large incursion of visitors into the
+Lake country may be considered under two heads, as affecting the
+residents, or as affecting the visitors themselves. And first as to
+the residents. Of the wealthier class of these I say nothing, as it
+will perhaps be thought that their inconvenience is outweighed by
+the possible profits which the railway may bring to speculators or
+contractors. But the effect produced on the poorer residents,--on
+the peasantry,--is a serious matter, and the danger which was
+distantly foreseen by Wordsworth has since his day assumed grave
+proportions. And lest the poet's estimate of the simple virtue which
+is thus jeopardized should be suspected of partiality, it may be
+allowable to corroborate it by the testimony of an eminent man, not
+a native of the district, though a settler therein in later life,
+and whose writings, perhaps, have done more than any man's since
+Wordsworth to increase the sum of human enjoyment derived both from
+Art and from Nature.
+
+"The Border peasantry of Scotland and England," says Mr. Ruskin,[6]
+"painted with absolute fidelity by Scott and Wordsworth,--(for
+leading types out of this exhaustless portraiture, I may name
+Dandie Dinmont, and Michael,) are hitherto a scarcely injured race;
+whose strength and virtue yet survive to represent the body and soul
+of England, before her days of mechanical decrepitude, and
+commercial dishonour. There are men working in my own fields who
+might have fought with Henry the Fifth at Agincourt, without being
+discerned from among his knights; I can take my tradesmen's word for
+a thousand pounds; my garden gate opens on the latch to the public
+road, by day and night, without fear of any foot entering but my own;
+and my girl-guests may wander by road or moorland, or through every
+bosky dell of this wild wood, free as the heather-bees or squirrels.
+What effect on the character of such a population will be produced
+by the influx of that of the suburbs of our manufacturing towns
+there is evidence enough, if the reader cares to ascertain the facts,
+in every newspaper on his morning table."
+
+[Footnote 6: _A Protest against the Extension of Railways in the
+Lake District_,--Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1876.]
+
+There remains the question of how the greatest benefit is to be
+secured to visitors to the country, quite apart from the welfare of
+its more permanent inhabitants. At first sight this question seems
+to present a problem of a well-known order--to find the point of
+maximum pleasure to mankind in a case where the intensity of the
+pleasure varies inversely as its extension--where each fresh person
+who shares it diminishes _pro tanto_ the pleasure of the rest. But,
+as Wordsworth has pointed out, this is not in reality the question
+here. To the great mass of cheap excursionists the characteristic
+scenery of the Lakes is in itself hardly a pleasure at all. The
+pleasure, indeed, which they derive from contact with Nature is
+great and important, but it is one which could be offered to them,
+not only as well but much better, near their own homes.
+
+"It is benignly ordained that green fields, clear blue skies,
+running streams of pure water, rich groves and woods, orchards, and
+all the ordinary varieties of rural nature should find an easy way
+to the affections of all men. But a taste beyond this, however
+desirable it may be that every one should possess it, is not to be
+implanted at once; it must be gradually developed both in nations
+and individuals. Rocks and mountains, torrents and wide-spread waters,
+and all those features of nature which go to the composition of such
+scenes as this part of England is distinguished for, cannot, in
+their finer relations to the human mind, be comprehended, or even
+very imperfectly conceived, without processes of culture or
+opportunities of observation in some degree habitual. In the eye of
+thousands, and tens of thousands, a rich meadow, with fat cattle
+grazing upon it, or the sight of what they would call a heavy crop
+of corn, is worth all that the Alps and Pyrenees in their utmost
+grandeur and beauty could show to them; and it is noticeable what
+trifling conventional prepossessions will, in common minds, not only
+preclude pleasure from the sight of natural beauty, but will even
+turn it into an object of disgust. In the midst of a small
+pleasure-ground immediately below my house, rises a detached rock,
+equally remarkable for the beauty of its form, the ancient oaks that
+grow out of it, and the flowers and shrubs which adorn it. 'What a
+nice place would this be,' said a Manchester tradesman, pointing to
+the rock, 'if that ugly lump were but out of the way.' Men as little
+advanced in the pleasure which such objects give to others, are so
+far from being rare that they may be said fairly to represent a
+large majority of mankind. This is the fact, and none but the
+deceiver and the willingly deceived can be offended by its being
+stated."
+
+And, since this is so, the true means of raising the taste of the
+masses consists, as Wordsworth proceeds to point out, in giving them,--
+not a few hurried glimpses of what is above their comprehension,--
+but permanent opportunities of learning at leisure the first great
+lessons which Nature has to teach. Since he wrote thus our towns have
+spread their blackness wider still, and the provision of parks for
+the recreation of our urban population has become a pressing
+national need. And here again the very word _recreation_ suggests
+another unfitness in the Lake country for these purposes. Solitude
+is as characteristic of that region as beauty, and what the mass of
+mankind need for their refreshment--most naturally and justly--is
+not solitude but society.
+
+  The silence that is in the starry sky,
+  The sleep that is among the lonely hills,
+
+is to them merely a drawback, to be overcome by moving about in
+large masses, and by congregating in chosen resorts with vehement
+hilarity. It would be most unreasonable to wish to curtail to
+curtail the social expansion of men whose lives are for the most
+part passed in a monotonous round of toil. But is it kinder and wiser,--
+from any point of view but the railway shareholder's,--to allure
+them into excursion trains by the prestige of a scenery which is to
+them (as it was to all classes a century or two ago) at best
+indifferent, or to provide them near at hand with their needed space
+for rest and play, not separated from their homes by hours of
+clamour and crowding, nor broken up by barren precipices, nor
+drenched with sweeping storm?
+
+Unquestionably it is the masses whom we have first to consider.
+Sooner than that the great mass of the dwellers in towns should be
+debarred from the influences of Nature--sooner than that they
+should continue for another century to be debarred as now they are--
+it might be better that Cumbrian statesmen and shepherds should be
+turned into innkeepers and touts, and that every poet, artist,
+dreamer, in England should be driven to seek his solitude at the
+North Pole. But it is the mere futility of sentiment to pretend that
+there need be any real collision of interests here. There is space
+enough in England yet for all to enjoy in their several manners, if
+those who have the power would leave some unpolluted rivers, and
+some unblighted fields, for the health and happiness of the
+factory-hand, whose toil is for their fortunes, and whose
+degradation is their shame.
+
+Wordsworth, while indicating, with some such reasoning as this, the
+true method of promoting the education of the mass of men in natural
+joys, was assuredly not likely to forget that in every class, even
+the poorest, are found exceptional spirits which some inbred power
+has attuned already to the stillness and glory of the hills. In what
+way the interests of such men may best be consulted, he has
+discussed in the following passage.
+
+  "O nature a' thy shows an' forms
+  To feeling pensive hearts hae charms!"
+
+"So exclaimed the Ayrshire ploughman, speaking of ordinary rural
+nature under the varying influences of the seasons; and the
+sentiment has found an echo in the bosoms of thousands in as humble
+a condition as he himself was when he gave vent to it. But then they
+_were_ feeling, pensive hearts--men who would be among the first
+to lament the facility with which they had approached this region,
+by a sacrifice of so much of its quiet and beauty as, from the
+intrusion of a railway, would be inseparable. What can, in truth, be
+more absurd than that either rich or poor should be spared the
+trouble of travelling by the high roads over so short a space,
+according to their respective means, if the unavoidable consequence
+must be a great disturbance of the retirement, and, in many places,
+a destruction of the beauty, of the country which the parties are
+come in search of? Would not this be pretty much like the child's
+cutting up his drum to learn where the sound came from?"
+
+The truth of these words has become more conspicuous since
+Wordsworth's day. The Lake country is now both engirdled and
+intersected with railways. The point to which even the poorest of
+genuine lovers of the mountains could desire that his facilities of
+cheap locomotion should be carried has been not only reached but far
+overpassed. If he is not content to dismount from his railway
+carriage at Coniston, or Seascale, or Bowness,--at Penrith, or
+Troutbeek, or Keswick,--and to move at eight miles an hour in a coach,
+or at four miles an hour on foot, while he studies that small
+intervening tract of country, of which every mile is a separate gem,--
+when, we may ask, _is_ he to dismount? What _is_ he to study? Or is
+nothing to be expected from Nature but a series of dissolving views?
+
+It is impossible to feel sanguine as to the future of this
+irreplaceable national possession. A real delight in scenery,--
+apart from the excitements of sport or mountaineering, for which
+Scotland and Switzerland are better suited than Cumberland,--is
+still too rare a thing among the wealthier as among the poorer
+classes to be able to compete with such a power as the Railway
+Interest. And it is little likely now that the Government of England
+should act with regard to this district as the Government of the
+United States has acted with regard to the Yosemite and Yellowstone
+valleys, and guard as a national possession the beauty which will
+become rarer and more precious with every generation of men. But it
+is in any case desirable that Wordsworth's unanswered train of
+reasoning on the subject should be kept in view--that it should be
+clearly understood that the one argument for making more railways
+through the Lakes is that they may possibly pay; while it is certain
+that each railway extension is injurious to the peasantry of the
+district, and to all visitors who really care for its scenery, while
+conferring no benefit on the crowds who are dragged many miles to
+what they do not enjoy, instead of having what they really want
+secured to them, as it ought to be, at their own doors.
+
+It is probable that all this will continue to be said in vain.
+Railways, and mines, and waterworks will have their way, till injury
+has become destruction. The natural sanctuary of England, the nurse
+of simple and noble natures, "the last region which Astræa touches
+with flying feet," will be sacrificed--it is scarcely possible to
+doubt it--to the greed of gain. We must seek our consolation in the
+thought that no outrage on Nature is mortal; that the ever-springing
+affections of men create for themselves continually some fresh abode,
+and inspire some new landscape with a consecrating history, and as
+it were with a silent soul. Yet it will be long ere round some other
+lakes, upon some other hill, shall cluster memories as pure and high
+as those which hover still around Rydal and Grasmere, and on
+Helvellyn's windy summit, "and by Glenridding Screes and low
+Gleneoign."
+
+With, this last word of protest and warning,--uttered, as it may
+seem to the reader, with, unexpected force and conviction from out
+of the tranquillity of a serene old age,--Wordsworth's mission is
+concluded. The prophecy of his boyhood is fulfilled, and the
+"dear native regions" whence his dawning genius rose have been
+gilded by the last ray of its declining fire. There remains but the
+domestic chronicle of a few more years of mingled sadness and peace.
+And I will first cite a characteristic passage from a letter to his
+American correspondent, Mr.  Reed, describing his presentation as
+Laureate to the Queen:--
+
+"The reception given me by the Queen at her ball was most gracious.
+Mrs. Everett, the wife of your Minister, among many others, was a
+witness to it, without knowing who I was. It moved her to the
+shedding of tears. This effect was in part produced, I suppose, by
+American habits of feeling, as pertaining to a republican government.
+To see a grey-haired man of seventy-five years of age, kneeling down
+in a large assembly to kiss the hand of a young woman, is a sight
+for which institutions essentially democratic do not prepare a
+spectator of either sex, and must naturally place the opinions upon
+which a republic is founded, and the sentiments which support it, in
+strong contrast with a government based and upheld as ours is."
+
+In the same letter the poet introduces an ominous allusion to the
+state of his daughter's health. Dora, his only daughter who survived
+childhood, was the darling of Wordsworth's age. In her wayward
+gaiety and bright intelligence there was much to remind him of his
+sister's youth; and his clinging nature wound itself round this new
+Dora as tenderly as it had ever done round her who was now only the
+object of loving compassion and care. In 1841 Dora Wordsworth
+married Mr. Quillinan, an ex-officer of the Guards, and a man of
+great literary taste and some original power. In 1821 he had settled
+for a time in the vale of Rydal, mainly for the sake of Wordsworth's
+society; and ever since then he had been an intimate and valued
+friend. He had been married before, but his wife died in 1822,
+leaving him two daughters, one of whom was named from the murmuring
+Rotha, and was god-child of the poet. Shortly after marriage, Dora
+Quillinan's health began to fail. In 1845 the Quillinans went to
+Oporto in search of health, and returned in 1846, in the trust that
+it was regained. But in July 1847 Dora Quillinan died at Rydal,
+and left her father to mourn for his few remaining years his
+"immeasurable loss."
+
+The depth and duration of Wordsworth's grief in such bereavements as
+fell to his lot, was such as to make his friends thankful that his
+life had on the whole been guided through ways of so profound a peace.
+
+Greatly, indeed, have they erred, who have imagined him as cold, or
+even as by nature tranquil. "What strange workings," writes one from
+Rydal Mount when the poet was in his sixty-ninth year,--"what strange
+workings are there in his great mind! How fearfully strong are all
+his feelings and affections! If his intellect had been less powerful
+they must have destroyed him long ago." Such, in fact, was the
+impression which he gave to those who knew him best throughout life.
+The look of premature age, which De Quincey insists on; the furrowed
+and rugged countenance, the brooding intensity of the eye, the
+bursts of anger at the report of evil doings, the lonely and violent
+roamings over the mountains,--all told of a strong absorption and a
+smothered fire. His own description of himself (for such we must
+probably hold it to be) in his _Imitation of the Castle of Indolence_,
+unexpected as it is by the ordinary reader, carries for those who
+knew him the stamp of truth.
+
+  Full many a time, upon a stormy night,
+  His voice came to us from the neighbouring height:
+  Oft did we see him driving full in view
+  At mid-day when the sun was shining bright;
+  What ill was on him, what he had to do,
+  A mighty wonder bred among our quiet crew.
+
+  Ah! Piteous sight it was to see this Man
+  When he came back to us, a withered flower,--
+  Or like a sinful creature, pale and wan.
+  Down would he sit; and without strength or power
+  Look at the common grass from hour to hour:
+  And oftentimes, how long I fear to say,
+  Where apple-trees in blossom made a bower,
+  Retired in that sunshiny shade he lay;
+  And, like a naked Indian, slept himself away.
+  Great wonder to our gentle tribe it was
+  Whenever from our valley he withdrew;
+  For happier soul no living creature has
+  Than he had, being here the long day through.
+  Some thought he was a lover, and did woo:
+  Some thought far worse of him, and judged him wrong:
+  But Verse was what he had been wedded to;
+  And his own mind did like a tempest strong
+  Come to him thus, and drove the weary wight along.
+
+An excitement which vents itself in bodily exercise carries its own
+sedative with it. And in comparing Wordsworth's nature with that of
+other poets whose career has been less placid, we may say that he was
+perhaps not less excitable than they, but that it was his constant
+endeavour to avoid all excitement, save of the purely poetic kind;
+and that the outward circumstances of his life,--his mediocrity of
+fortune, happy and early marriage, and absence of striking personal
+charm,--made it easy for him to adhere to a method of life which was,
+in the truest sense of the term, _stoic_--stoic alike in its
+practical abstinences and in its calm and grave ideal. Purely poetic
+excitement, however, is hard to maintain at a high point; and the
+description quoted above of the voice which came through the stormy
+night should be followed by another--by the same candid and
+self-picturing hand--which represents the same habits in a quieter
+light.
+
+"Nine-tenths of my verses," says the poet in 1843, "have been
+murmured out in the open air. One day a stranger, having walked
+round the garden and grounds of Rydal Mount, asked of one of the
+female servants, who happened to be at the door, permission to see
+her master's study. 'This,' said she, leading him forward, 'is my
+master's library, where he keeps his books, but his study is out of
+doors.' After a long absence from home, it has more than once
+happened that some one of my cottage neighbours (not of the
+double-coach-house cottages) has said, 'Well, there he is! We are
+glad to hear him _booing_ about again.'"
+
+Wordsworth's health, steady and robust for the most part, indicated
+the same restrained excitability. While he was well able to resist
+fatigue, exposure to weather, &c. there were, in fact, three things
+which his peculiar constitution made it difficult for him to do, and
+unfortunately those three things were reading, writing, and the
+composition of poetry. A frequently recurring inflammation of the
+eyes, caught originally from exposure to a cold wind when overheated
+by exercise, but always much aggravated by mental excitement,
+sometimes prevented his reading for months together. His symptoms
+when he attempted to hold the pen are thus described, in a published
+letter to Sir George Beaumont (1803):--
+
+"I do not know from what cause it is, but during the last three
+years I have never had a pen in my hand for five minutes before my
+whole frame becomes a bundle of uneasiness; a perspiration starts
+out all over me, and my chest is oppressed in a manner which I
+cannot describe." While as to the labour of composition his sister
+says (September 1800): "He writes with so much feeling and agitation
+that it brings on a sense of pain and internal weakness about his
+left side and stomach, which now often makes it impossible for him
+to write when he is, in mind and feelings, in such a state that he
+could do it without difficulty."
+
+But turning to the brighter side of things--to the joys rather than
+the pains of the sensitive body and spirit--we find, in Wordsworth's
+later years much of happiness 011 which to dwell. The memories which
+his name recalls are for the most part of thoughtful kindnesses, of
+simple-hearted joy in feeling himself at last appreciated, of tender
+sympathy with the young. Sometimes it is a recollection of some
+London drawing-room, where youth and beauty surrounded the rugged
+old man with an eager admiration which fell on no unwilling heart.
+Sometimes it is a story of some assemblage of young and old, rich
+and poor, from all the neighbouring houses and cottages, at Rydal
+Mount, to keep the aged poet's birthday with a simple feast and
+rustic play. Sometimes it is a report of some fireside gathering at
+Lancrigg or Foxhow, where the old man grew eloquent as he talked of
+Burns and Coleridge, of Homer and Virgil, of the true aim of poetry
+and the true happiness of man. Or we are told of some last excursion
+to well-loved scenes; of holly-trees planted by the poet's hands to
+simulate nature's decoration on the craggy hill.
+
+Such are the memories of those who best remember him. To those who
+were young children while his last years went by he seemed a kind of
+mystical embodiment of the lakes and mountains round him--a presence
+without which they would not be what they were. And now he is gone,
+and their untouched and early charm is going too.
+
+  Heu, tua nobis
+  Pæne simul tecum solatia rapta, Menalea!
+
+Rydal Mount, of which he had at one time feared to be deprived, was
+his to the end. He still paced the terrace-walks--but now the flat
+terrace oftener than the sloping one--whence the eye travels to lake
+and mountain across a tossing gulf of green. The doves that so long
+had been wont to answer with murmurs of their own to his "half-formed
+melodies" still hung in the trees above his pathway; and many who
+saw him there must have thought of the lines in which, his favourite
+poet congratulates himself that he has not been exiled from his home.
+
+  Calm as thy sacred streams thy years shall flow;
+  Groves which thy youth has known thine age shall know;
+  Here, as of old, Hyblæan bees shall twine
+  Their mazy murmur into dreams of thine,--
+  Still from the hedge's willow-bloom shall come
+  Through summer silences a slumberous hum,--
+  Still from the crag shall lingering winds prolong
+  The half-heard cadence of the woodman's song,--
+  While evermore the doves, thy love and care,
+  Fill the tall elms with sighing in the air.
+
+Yet words like these fail to give the solemnity of his last years,--
+the sense of grave retrospection, of humble self-judgment, of
+hopeful looking to the end. "It is indeed a deep satisfaction," he
+writes near the close of life, "to hope and believe that my poetry
+will be while it lasts, a help to the cause of virtue and truth,
+especially among the young. As for myself, it seems now of little
+moment how long I may be remembered. When a man pushes off in his
+little boat into the great seas of Infinity and Eternity, it surely
+signifies little how long he is kept in sight by watchers from the
+shore."
+
+And again, to an intimate friend, "Worldly-minded I am not; on the
+contrary, my wish to benefit those within my humble sphere
+strengthens seemingly in exact proportion to my inability to realize
+those wishes. What I lament most is that the spirituality of my
+nature does not expand and rise the nearer I approach the grave, as
+yours does, and as it fares with my beloved partner."
+
+The aged poet might feel the loss of some vividness of emotion, but
+his thoughts dwelt more and more constantly on the unseen world. One
+of the images which recurs oftenest to his friends is that of the
+old man as he would stand against the window of the dining-room at
+Rydal Mount and read the Psalms and Lessons for the day; of the tall
+bowed figure and the silvery hair; of the deep voice which always
+faltered when among the prayers he came to the words which give
+thanks for those "who have departed this life in Thy faith and fear."
+
+There is no need to prolong the narration. As healthy infancy is the
+same for all, so the old age of all good men brings philosopher and
+peasant once more together, to meet with the same thoughts the
+inevitable hour. Whatever the well-fought fight may have been, rest
+is the same for all.
+
+  Retirement then might hourly look
+    Upon a soothing scene;
+  Age steal to his allotted nook
+    Contented and serene;
+  With heart as calm as lakes that sleep,
+    In frosty moonlight glistening,
+  Or mountain torrents, where they creep
+  Along a channel smooth and deep,
+    To their own far-off murmurs listening.
+
+What touch has given to these lines their impress of an unfathomable
+peace? For there speaks from them a tranquillity which seems to
+overcome our souls; which makes us feel in the midst of toil and
+passion that we are disquieting ourselves in vain; that we are
+travelling to a region where these things shall not be; that
+"so shall immoderate fear leave us, and inordinate love shall die."
+
+Wordsworth's last days were absolutely tranquil. A cold caught on a
+Sunday afternoon walk brought on a pleurisy. He lay for some weeks
+in a state of passive weakness; and at last Mrs. Wordsworth said to
+him, "William, you are going to Dora." "He made no reply at the time,
+and the words seem to have passed unheeded; indeed, it was not
+certain that they had been even heard. More than twenty-four hours
+afterwards one of his nieces came into his room, and was drawing
+aside the curtain of his chamber, and then, as if awakening from a
+quiet sleep, he said, 'Is that Dora?'"
+
+On Tuesday, April 23, 1850, as his favourite cuckoo-clock struck the
+hour of noon, his spirit passed away. His body was buried, as he had
+wished, in Grasmere churchyard. Around him the dalesmen of Grasmere
+lie beneath the shade of sycamore and yew; and Rotha's murmur mourns
+the pausing of that "music sweeter than her own." And surely of him,
+if of any one, we may think as of a man who was so in accord with
+Nature, so at one with the very soul of things, that there can be no
+Mansion of the Universe which shall not be to him a home, no
+Governor who will not accept him among His servants, and satisfy him
+with love and peace.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Wordsworth, by F. W. H. Myers
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