WORDSWORTH.

A BIOGRAPHIC

ESTHETIC

STUDY.

BY

GEORGE H. CALVERT.

BOSTON:
LEE AND SHEPARD, PUBLISHERS.
NEW YORK:
CHARLES T. DILLINGHAM.
1878.

C O P Y R I G H T , 1878,

BY GEORGE H. CALVERT.

RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE :
STEREOTYPED

AND

PRINTED

H . O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY.

BY

WORDSWORTH.

ArTr^f^

\s

TO WORDSWORTH.
AMONG my unabating joys are these,
That under thy calm roof I pressed the hand
Whose life had been obedience to command
Of rarest genius ; that beneath thy trees
I shared with thee thy cordial mountain-breeze,
Answered thy speech, and looked into the bland
Mysterious eyes that had beshone the land —
Those inlets to deep beauty's boundless seas, —
And there, beside thy household lakes, did hear
Thee laugh, and feel thy smile, so kindly blent
With hospitalities, that since that year
Thy face hath been a loved accompaniment
To the grand music, mounting tier on tier,
That to my thought profounder rhythm hath lent.

CONTENTS.
CHAPTER

PAGE

I.

HAWKSHEAD

9

II.

CAMBRIDGE

20

HI.

A N EVENING W A L K

29

IV.

BEAUPUIS

37

V.
VI.
VII.

VIII.
IX.
X.
XI.
XII.

DOROTHY

50

COLERIDGE

62

LYRICAL BALLADS ^ .

.

.

.

.

84

GRASMER$
MARY

91

>

104

JOHN WORDSWORTH

120

POETS

131

XIII.

SONNETS .

XIV.

T H E W H I T E D O E OF RYLSTONE

XV.
XVI.

XVII.
XVIII.

. 7 1

GOSLAR

POLITICS .

.
.

.
.

.'

.

;

.146

.

.

•

T H E CRITIC

T H E EXCURSION
CONCLUSION

162
179
195

.

.

.

.

.

.

207
221

WORDSWORTH.
I.
HAWKSHEAD.
DEDICATING to Wordsworth his Oxford lectures on poetry, Keble used the phrase ad
sanctiora erigeret, — language which Wordsworth might with rightful pride accept as, a
deserved tribute. To lift his reader towards
holier things had ever been his aim. Of
poetry the highest office is to set forth the
best possibilities of human nature, to articulate
what, in the depths of man's being, is pure, is
holy, is truest. To this Wordsworth earnestly
devoted his life and faculties ; and having faculties strong, clear, penetrating, all quickened
and refined by poetic sensibility, the devotion
resulted in a life-work which is a priceless
mental treasure to the scores of millions who
speak to-day the English"tongue, an inexhaustible treasure, to enrich the hundreds of millions of coming generations.

10

WORDSWORTH.

To the heart the poet speaks out of a heart
that is fuller than most men's with the loves of
the heart ; and being blessed with a musical,
throat he is listened to as the privileged
mouth-piece of his fellows. Through an ear of
finer sensitiveness he hears cadences of diviner
movement, and thus becomes a voice for the
sincerest, deepest truth of feeling. To the
heart-throb of the poet we hearken, because it
is an echo, a rhythmic echo, to that within our
own breast. With delicate, palpitating cords,
wrought out of the finest tissue of the brain,
he twines himself around our being ; and we,
with the joy and freedom of the most disinterested gratitude, help him to tighten these^
cords. Not a Scotsman in any part of the
globe but feels that Burns is a dear brother to
whom he owes a debt that he would on no account be rid of. All whose speech is English
are better, manlier men because three hundred
years ago William Shakespeare lived and wrote,
and acted on the stage. On entering the most
hallowed precinct in Europe, the little church
by the Avon at Stratford, we are sanctified
by reverential awe; about us is an atmos^
phere spiritualized by a transcendent presence.
When looking at the cathedral of Florence,
who thinks of the priests who dedicated it?

HA

WKSHEAD.

II

The real consecrator is Dante, whose mighty
spirit haunts " Dante's chair," whence the sublime poet used to gaze up at the edifice as it
was - a-building. The most active and contented of us at times feels " the heavy and the
weary weight of all this unintelligible world,"
and thanks the poet for so aptly wording what
he feels, conscious, too, that the rhythmical expression has given him some relief ; unconscious, in most cases, that the happy phrase
comes from Wordsworth.
Applicable to so many of his lines and
phrases, this rejoicing epithet happy is appropriate to Wordsworth's life. H e was happy in
the time and place of his birth, in the circumstances of his childhood and boyhood; happy
that he was sent to Cambridge, that on leaving
Cambridge he was not obliged to betake him
to unwelcome daily bread-work; happy in the
close alliance between the moderation of his
means and the moderation of his desires ; happy in bequests and emoluments, which, at various stages of his career, came opportunely
to upbear or relieve him ; rarely happy in having such a sister and such a wife, — such
friends as Coleridge, Lamb, Southey; happy
that through unusual length of years he was
enabled so completely to accomplish his great
self-imposed task.

12

WORDSWORTH.

On the 7th of April, 1770, William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth, a small town
on the Derwent, hot far from the sea, in the
west of Cumberland. His father was John
Wordsworth, attorney at law and agent for Sir
James Lowther, afterwards Earl of Lonsdale,
His mother was Anne, only daughter of William Cookson, mercer, of Penrith, and of his
wife Dorothy Crackanthorp, of the ancient
Westmoreland family of that name. The poet's
infancy and early boyhood were passed partly
at Cockermouth, partly with his mother's family at Penrith, on the eastern border of Cumberland. At Penrith his mother died, in 1778,
when William was in his ninth year.
•' Early died
My honored mother, she who was the heart
And hinge of all our learnings and our loves."

She was a woman of fine mental composition
and quality; one to impart a pure, spiritual
nourishment to her son when, a babe, he sank
to sleep,
" Rocked on his mother's breast, and with his soul
Drank in the feelings of his mother's eye,"

and when — as he exquisitely expresses a deep,
tender fact — feeding at her breast,
" He held mute dialogues with his mother's heart."

HA WKSHEAD.

13

Wordsworth relates that she told an intimate friend that the only one of her five children about whose future life she felt anxiety
was William ; and he, she said, would be remarkable for good or evil. " The cause of this
was/' continues Wordsworth, " 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 in Penrith, upon some
indignity having been put upon me, with the
intention of destroying myself with one of the
foils which I knew was kept there. I took the
foil in my hand, but my heart failed. On another occasion, my brother Richard and I were
whipping tops in my grandfather's large drawing-room, on which the carpet was laid down
only on 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."

H

WORDSWORTH.

The father of the poet is said to have been
a man of eloquence and mental vigor. When
William was in his fourteenth year, his father
died, in the prime of life, when rising rapidly
in his profession. A proof of his wisdom it is
that he set William to learn, by heart, portions of the best English poets ; so that at an
early age he could repeat many passages from
Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser.
Soon after his mother's death, William
Wordsworth, then in his ninth year, was sent
to school at Hawkshead.
Hawkshead is a small market-town of Lancashire, near the border of Westmoreland, in
the vale of Esthwaite, and stands near the lake.
The school was founded in 1585, by Edward
Sandys, Archbishop of York. The pupils lived
at the cottages of " dames " in the village and
neighborhood. Wordsworth thus escaped the
pains and miseries of that godless limbo for
boyhood, the mercenary motherless boardingschool. What a boy, and especially a poetboy, primarily needs, woman's care and tenderness, Wordsworth had. Of her with whom he
dwelt for many years of his stay at Hawkshead, Anna Tyson, a maiden, he bore a grateful memory through life :—

HAWKSHEAD.

15

" The thoughts of gratitude shall fall like dew
Upon thy grave, good creature ! While my heart
Can beat never will I forget thy name.
Heaven's blessing be upon thee where thou liest
After thy innocent and busy stir
In narrow cares, thy little daily growth
Of calm enjoyments, after eighty years,
And more than eighty, of untroubled life,
Childless, yet by the strangers to thy blood
Honored with little less than filial love."

More fortunate was Wordsworth than most
poet-boys in finding sympathy and encouragement among his teachers, especially in the Rev.
William Taylor, head-master during four years
of Wordsworth's stay at Hawkshead. By the
poet Mr. Taylor was ever kept in affectionate
remembrance. He thus speaks of him, when
after the lapse of eight years he visited his
tomb: —
" The sound of voice and countenance of the man
Came back upon me, so that some few tears
Fell from me in my own despite.
He loved the Poets, and, if now alive,
Would have loved me, as one not destitute
Of promise, nor belying the kind hope
That he had formed, when I, at his command,
Began to spin, with toil, my earliest songs."

Wordsworth was about fifteen, when, under
Mr. Taylor, he wrote his first verses. Of them
he thus speaks : " These verses were much admired, far more than they deserved, for they

i6

WORDSWORTH.

were but a tame imitation of Pope's versification, and a little in his style. This exercise,
however, put it into my hea'd to compose verses
from the impulse of my own mind, and I wrote,
while yet a school-boy, a long poem running
upon my ajdventures and the scenery of the
country in which I was brought up."
Towards the end of the eighteenth century,
to imitate Pope was, for a beginner, inevitable,
almost a necessity. Pope was in the air ; he
had possession of the literary ear of England.
From the want of rhythmic sweep in his versification, from the monotonous cadence of single
lines and couplets (in that day mistaken for
poetic melody), and from the pith of his
thought being furnished by the understanding,
Pope is easily imitated. In his lines there is
often a metallic ring, which is very significant
of the subordination of feeling to the understanding. No stronger proof can be given of
the then influence of Pope than that Wordsworth, at the outset of his poetic career, should
have taken him for a model, — Wordsworth,
who in his maturity was so unlike Pope, both in
the substance and the form of his poetry.
The impulses and inner wants of his being
at this period Wordsworth thus describes: —

HAWKSHEAD;

U

" Nothing at that time
So welcome, no temptation half so dear,
As that which urged me to a daring feat :
Deep pools, tall trees, black chasms, and dizzy crags,
And tottering towers, — I loved to stand and read
Their looks."

His morning walks were early, and he often
made the five-mile circuit of the lake of Esthwaite before school-hours with a companion,
John Fleming, of Rayrigg, —
" Repeating favorite verses with one voice,
Or conning more, as happy as the birds
That with us chanted."

The fields and hills and glens and streams,—
these were his playground. Fishing and hunting were his games. On holidays he and his
school-fellows sought the neighboring broader
waters of Lake Windermere, —
" To sweep along the plain of Windermere
With rival oars."

In the winter, when their own lake of Esthwaite was tightly frozen, came the rapture of
skating: —
" All shod in steel
They hissed along the polished ice, in games
Confederate."

To Wordsworth school-days were a time of
more freedom than to most boys. In that se2

18

WORDSWORTH.

eluded mountainous corner of England, habits
and ways were more natural, less constrained,
than in populous counties, where stouter
guards are needed against the obtrusion of disturbing influences. Rule, control, indispensable always, is nowhere more needful than for
human beings during the rapid, sapful, physical, and mental growth of boyhood. God's law,
unceasingly active, being everywhere, the problem, in all kinds of control, is to make man's
law square with God's law, our finite methods
smoothly fit into the infinite method. When
they do thus fit, then human law is just and
clean, and its incumbency is not felt as pressure, but as guardianship. Wordsworth, with
all-his occasional headiness and seeming lawlessness in boyhood, was organized for easy
submission to law. Rectitude was a leading
quality of his mind; and thus he would early
feel the need of conformity to honest rule.
Law, a first condition of freedom, to which the
strongest must submit, itself owes allegiance
to justice. Uninspired by this allegiance, it
loses its virtue of law, and turns into despotic
usurpation. On the other hand, usurpation is
encouraged by licentious use of freedom, which
thus by abuse forfeits its privileges. Toward

HA WKSHEAD:

19

such abuse Wordsworth, at school, was not
affected, and in his later maturity became
staunchly conservative, — so conservative as almost to mistake fallible, transitory, human institutions for divine, eternal order.

II.
CAMBRIDGE.

himself daily and nightly, winter
and summer, through storm and sunshine, in
the clean, creative atmosphere of nature, with
her shifting, ever-freshened shows and sounds,
her inexhaustible beauties, Wordsworth spent
happily the springy years of boyhood, learning
in the school-room more than most of his fellows, and in the air more than the best of
them,—
STEEPING

" Holding unconscious intercourse with beauty."

Hear him, in after years, apostrophize the
mountains, lakes, and sounding cataracts, the
mists and winds that dwell among the hills
where he was born ! —
* If in my youth I have been pure in heart;
If, mingling with the world, I am content
With my own modest pleasures, and have lived
With God and Nature communing, removed
From little enmities and low desires,
The gift is yours ; if in these times of fear,
This melancholy waste of hopes o'erthrown ;
If, 'mid indifference and apathy,

CAMBRIDGE.

21

And wicked exultation, when good men
On every side fall off, we know not how,
To selfishness, disguised in gentle names
Of peace and quiet and domestic love,
Yet mingled not unwillingly with sneers
On visionary minds ; if, in this time
Of dereliction and dismay, I yet
Despair not of our nature, but retain
A more than Roman confidence, a faith
That fails not, in all sorrow my support,
The blessing of my life, the gift is yours,
Ye winds and sounding cataracts S 't is yours,
Ye mountains ! thine, O Nature ! Thou hast fed
My lofty speculations; and in thee,
For this uneasy heart of ours, I find
A never-failing principle of joy
And purest passion/'

When he entered Saint John's College, Cambridge, Wordsworth was in his eighteenth year.
From Cumberland to Cambridge was a wide
leap ; it was a leap from boyhood to manhood.
With an anticipatory grasp of the near future,
college youths proudly assume the title of men.
Of his first days at Cambridge Wordsworth
gives this vivid picture: —
" My spirit was up, my thoughts were full of hope ;
Some friends I had, acquaintances who there
Seemed friends, poor, simple school-boys, now hung round
With honor and importance ; in a world
Of welcome faces up and down I roved ;
Questions, directions,, warnings, and advice
Flowed in upon me from all sides ; fresh day
Of pride and pleasure ! to myself I seemed

22

WORDSWORTH.
A man of business and expense, and went
From shop to shop about my own affairs,
To Tutor or to Tailor, as befell,
From street to street with loose and careless mind.
I was the Dreamer, they the Dream ; I roamed
Delighted through the motley spectacle ;
Gowns grave or gaudy, doctors, students, streets,
Courts, cloisters, flocks of churches, gateways, towers :
Migration strange for a stripling of the hills,
A northern villager.
As if the change
Had waited on some fairy wand, at once
Behold me rich in moneys, and attired
In splendid garb, with hose of silk, and hair
Powdered like rimy trees, when frost is keen.
My lordly dressing-gown, I pass it by,
With other signs of manhood that supplied
The lack of beard. The weeks went roundly on,
With invitations, suppers, wine, and fruit,
Smooth housekeeping within, and all without Liberal, and suiting gentleman's array."

Wordsworth was not a zealous learner of
college lessons ; he was not an ambitious student. The poetic mind is aspiring, and aspiration somewhat suppresses ambition, the higher
overruling the lower. To bear the collegian
glibly along the unwatered wastes of tutorial
instruction, with its dry, unsympathetic methods, his movement needs the spur of ambition.
Aspiration, to be sure, was still partially dormant in Wordsworth. Some verse he wrote
while at Cambridge, but he did not yet know

CAMBRIDGE.

23

or even feel himself to be a poet. And neither
in the instruction nor the instructors was there
aught to nurture or to reveal his gift, to draw
him^ upward, to cultivate the innate'faculty of
admiration (the very core of the literary and
poetic power). There was little to spiritualize
the mind. No one at Cambridge thought of
- interpreting to him the full meaning and quality of the choice passages from Shakespeare,
Milton, Spenser, which his father had made
him learn by rote. Such an interpreter to such
a pupil would have been a unique conjunction,
— a teacher who could thus early have revealed
and recognized the future greatest English
poet of an age illustrious by its poets, and who
would then have administered to him appropriate nutriment! This could hardly b e ; great
poets have to unfold themselves solitarily from
within, gathering such food from without as
their selective susceptibilities pick out for
them. To the world they have to present
themselves unannounced, and are greeted there
at first with frowns and sneers.
Even had there happened to be among the
tutors and professors of Cambridge one who
could have appreciated Wordsworth, who could
have divined him, (and what a blessing to be
thus divined !) ttie formality of the relation be-

24

WORDSWORTH.

tween teacher and pupil, the absence of cordiality, — and nothing is so attractive and effective with the young as cordiality, — the unnatural scholastic chasm between preceptor and
learner, — a chasm dug in large measure by
the incapacity and self-indulgence of the preceptor, — all this, together with the unpliable,
superficial methods of teaching, would have
tended to keep him out of the range of such
recognition. Besides, Wordsworth, from the
early death of both his parents, and the primitive, unconstrained habits of secluded Cumberland, had been accustomed to more freedom
than most school-boys, and was by nature impatient of control: — .
" While yet an innocent I breathed
Among wild appetites and blind desires,
Motions of savage instinct my delight
And exultation." *

The poet's illimitable privilege it is to be
drawn to the things of God: to be busied with
the changeful wonders of earth and sky ; with
the yearnings of his own heart, the yearnings
of other hearts ; with mysterious imaginations ;
with the outreaehings of aspiring thought, the"
1
This quotation is not from The Prelude, the poem from
which all those already made were taken, but from the The
Recluse, which is still in manuscript, but accessible to Christopher Wordsworth, the selected writer of the Memoir.

CAMBRIDGE.

25

prophetic heavings of a soul more vital than
other souls ; with glimpses of great truths ; with
the outward and inward exhibitions of manifold life; with the sincerities of being. A t
Cambridge, what was nearest about Wordsworth was man-made; little smack of nature
and cordiality anywhere. Instruction was formal much more than vital; and especially lifeless were the daily religious services. Slack,
too, in attendance on them were the professors and tutors and fellows, — they who were
bound by sacred engagements to observe the
laws of the University, and who should have
done so, both for their own sakes and as leaders of the students. With the hollowness and
hypocrisy of his superiors Wordsworth was
shocked. His nephew and biographer, the
Rev. Christopher Wordsworth, says: " The
youthful undergraduate looked down upon
some of his instructors." Things must be
grossly wrong when the pupil is forced into
that attitude towards his teacher. For the
young are prone to respect their' elders, and
in nineteen cases out of twenty it is the fault
of the elders if they fail in respect and deference. But, for their self-protection, nature provides the young with a keen insight into pretense and make-believe. And they have a quick

26

WORDSWORTH.

sense of injustice, and a quicker for tokens of
love; and unless religion be flanked by these,
by love and justice, its inculcations strike not
in, and will even prepare the mind for after
doubt of, and renouncement of, the authority
of divine law.
A t Cambridge Wordsworth found among his
preceptors no genial adviser, none to let fall
upon him that celestial manna to the thirsting
poetic nature, sympathy. For their unfolding
all men need sympathy, — a great deal of sympathy ; and to the poet in an especial way, so
full of sympathy himself, it is in his opening
manhood a rich encouragement and a support.
A thousand years ago there was less than now;
still, in proportion to the deep resources of the
human soul, the want of active fellow-feeling
to-day is a prominent cause of the all-pervading crudities and discords of human condition.
Sympathy is the chief. of Christian virtues.
This was the heavenly distinction of Jesus;
this makes him the supreme teacher.
A t Cambridge Wordsworth had a glorious
company of poetic predecessors: Chaucer,
Spenser, Ben Jonson, Milton, Cowley, Dryden,
and as immediate successor Coleridge.
To
what extent would they have subscribed the
following lines with which he concludes a description of Cambridge ? —

CAMBRIDGE.

2J

'* Feuds, factions, flatteries, enmities, and guile
Murmuring submission, and bald government
(The idol weak as the idolater),
And Decency and Custom starving Truth,
And blind Authority beating with his staff
The child that might have led him ; Emptiness
Followed as of good omen, and meek Worth
Left to herself, unheard*of and unknown."

In his first summer vacation he went directly back to the vale of ^Esthwaite, to lodge
again with his " old dame," to sleep in the same
bed he slept in for so many school-boy years.
This was a home to him, — his only home.
He retrod his old haunts, shook hands with old
friends and old playmates, and in the animal
glow of .youth and social impulse, joined for a
time in a
" Heartless chase of trivial pleasures,"

becoming one of a light crowd that spent days
and nights in .
" Feast and dance and public revelry,
And sports and games (too grateful in themselves,
Yet in themselves less grateful, I believe,
Than as they were a badge glossy and fresh
Of manliness and freedom), all conspired
To lure my mind from firm, habitual quest
Of feeding pleasures, to depress the zeal
Arid damp those yearnings which, had once been mine,
A wild, unworldly-minded youth, given up
To his own eager thoughts."

28

WORDSWORTH.

But for Wordsworth, with his earnest nature,
his high, urgent faculties, there could not be
many days
" Spent in a round of strenuous idleness; "

and one morning, after having passed
" The night in dancing, gayety, and mirth,
With din of instruments and shuffling feet,
And glancing forms, and tapers glittering,
And unaimed prattle flying up and down;
Spirits upon the stretch, and here and there
Slight shocks of young love-liking interspersed,
Whose transient pleasure mounted to the head,
And tingled through the veins," —

as he walked homeward in the dawn of a summer day, the beauties and grandeurs and glories of the mountainous landscape, " drenched
in empyreal light," so wrought upon him that,
suddenly overcome by one of those
" Trances of thought and mountings of the mind "

to which poetic natures of deep inwardness are
liable, he bursts forth: —
" Ah I 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. On I walked
In thankful blessedness, wnich yet survives."

III.
AN EVENING WALK.

T H E earliest verse of Wordsworth retained
by him in his complete works is the " Conclusion of a Poem composed in Anticipation of
leaving School." Only fourteen lines, of octosyllabic rhyme, are given, dated 1786, when he
was in his seventeenth year. The next in date
is a poem of nearly four hundred lines, called
" An Evening Walk, addressed to a Young
Lady " (his sister). This is in rhymed couplets
of ten syllables, dated 1787,1788, and 1789, and
therefore was written, for the most part, during
his college years. But in it there is no mention
of, or even allusion to, Cambridge, the whole
being descriptive of his native Cumberland region. The form and manner tell that the writer
had been with Pope, and that he had also tarried in delight on the new bridge, built chiefly
by Thomson and Cowper, and by Burns, which
led from the restricted, monotonous level of
the artificial school to the boundless outlook
over the stream-enlivened valleys and wooded

30

WORDSWORTH.

hills of the natural school. The substance, the
feeling and inner thought reveal that the writer
had been still more with nature than with
books, and that he had thus early linked himself to her in close, tender friendship, and that
already in his young heart was kindled the
sympathy for human suffering which was in
after years to beam upon his descriptions of
natural scenery the light of a halo. This
youthful poem is a subdued overture to the
long performance of his life. The congenial
intimacy with nature was calling out his characteristic powers, laying bare his preferences,
and through its congeniality moving the profundities of his large being.
With what fidelity and liveliness he already
seizes the commonest presentations of nature,
this picture of the universal familiar and favorite of man gives evidence (the happy opening
epithets, he tells us in a note, are borrowed
from Tasso's dolcemente feroce): —
" Sweetly ferocious, round his native walks,
Pride of his sister-wives, the monarch stalks ;
Spur-clad his nervous feet, and firm his tread;
A crest of purple tops the warrior's head.
Bright sparks his black and rolling eyeball hurls
Afar ; his tail he closes and unfurls ;
On tiptoe reared, he strains his clarion throat,
Threatened by faintly answering farms remote.

AN EVENING

WALK.

31

Again with his shrill voice the mountain rings,
While, flapped with conscious pride, resound his wings."

But on Wordsworth's page is never far distant the paramount theme of poetry, the choice
creature of creation, the culmination of natural
life and beauty, without whom nature would
miss her ordained admiration; the beaming mirror in whose polish her glories are grouped and
glorified ; the immortal mortal, between whose
virtuous elevations and sinister depths are
countless ranges of being, whose manifold life
shifts from terror to joy, from the sublime to
the little, from innocence to guilt, from earthly
despair to infinite hope; " a budded angel graft
on clay," whose triumphs and dejections are for
the poet his best opportunities. And so Wordsworth, after giving many lines to the swan,
and describing how she teaches her young to
swim, taking them one by one alternately upon
her back when they are tired, opens thus a
new paragraph: —
" Fair Swan I by all a mother's joys caressed,
Haply some wretch has eyed, and called thee blessed,
When with her infants, from some shady seat
By the lake's edge, she rose, to face the noontide heat;
Or taught their limbs along the dusty road
A few short steps to totter with their load."

Fellow-feeling with the very poor and the
humble, an unflinching hand in reproducing

32

WORDSWORTH.

their almost hopeless misery, an unadorned
setting of such pictures in the clean, fresh
frame of natural scenery, — the faithfulness of
the frame to reality bringing forward the severe
truthfulness of the picture, — these character
istics of Wordsworth's work in after years are
stamped upon this youthful venture, giving it
fine quality, notwithstanding its artistic crudeness, Wordsworth was somewhat slow in getting command of his inward resources, and of
the instrument for giving them utterance,—
varied versification. He was not quick in maturing, like Keats and Shelley.- s His mind was
more deliberative than theirs, more meditative,
and he lacked fluency of speech, that verbal
readiness whereby words come nimbly and instantaneously to the call of the other faculties,
— a readiness which in a sound, deep mind is
a virtue and an aid, but in the shallow, though
an aid to themselves, is, to the reader or hearer,
a vice, being the capacious conduit for the
overflow of commonplace.
Wordsworth's mental structure built itself
up more gradually than is mostly the case with
poetic minds. Was this because of the preponderance of the meditative over the passionate, of subjective evolution "over the lively objectivity of sensuous perception, and of sensa-

AN EVENING

WALK.

33

tions caused by ringing percussions from without ? For Wordsworth's delight in nature was
more spiritual than pictorial or material. His
poetic powers were hardly ripened until he
reached or approached his thirtieth year. Yet
his delight in the poetical showed itself almost
in childhood; for he says : —
" Twice five years
Or less I might have seen, when first my mind
With conscious pleasure opened to the charm
Of words in tuneful order, found them sweet
For their own sakes> a passion, and a power ;
And phrases pleased me chosen for delight,
Or pomp, or love."

Although Wordsworth did not in his first
published poem, written for the most part at
college, make even an allusion to Cambridge or
its environs, in the long autobiographical poem,
written between his thirtieth and thirty-fifth
year, called " The Prelude; or, Growth of a
Poet's Mind," he gives to Cambridge many
pages. His stay at Cambridge would have
been a lasting benefaction to himself and his
readers, had he got there nothing but that inspiration from the statue of Newton, embodied
in two lines, — lines so vivid with genius that
of themselves they give an instantaneous insight into the essential quality of poetry, flashing into the mind by a single mighty stroke
3

34

WORDSWORTH.

the expansive, elevating virtue there is in the
creative imagination, which, by virtue of divine
illumination, pierces into the inmost nature of
things. From his room in St. John's, College
Wordsworth could see — on a clear night even
from his pillow — the antechapel wherein was
the statue, —
" The marble index of a mind forever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone."

What a far swing is given to the readers delighted brain ! What a picture of a great
original discoverer, " voyaging through strange
seas of thought, alone " !
The poetical, in its grandest play, unifies,
reveals the unity there is in all being, and one
of its means of doing this is by holding up new
analogies, and by bringing remote and near
things into sudden, harmonious contact. Of
this revealing power here is another fine illustration, from the opening pages of " The Prelude." To give the reader an idea of what
Wallace had done for Scotland, and how he is
there valued, Wordsworth says he
" Left the name
Of Wallace to be found, like a wild flower,
All over his dear country.''

The thought that Wallace lives in the heart of
all his countrymen, of every Scot, rich and

AN EVENING

WALK.

35

poor, high and low, man, woman, child, — how
could it be conveyed so fully, so instantaneously, as by this figure of the wild flower ? On
hill and plain, in valley and dell, near rock and
river, op. every acre of Scottish ground, fertile
or barren, where man has made a' dwelling, wild
flowers are found. By this simple comparison
Wallace is felt to be everywhere. At first the
simplicity veils from us the efficiency, the
beauty, the power of the figure.
Through his long life Wordsworth walked
almost daily about the beautiful mountain-andlake region where he lived. The maid-servant
at Rydal Mount, showing the rooms to a^ stranger, said of the one which he took for the
poet's study, "This is the library; master's
study is out of doors." He made several visits
to Scotland to walk through some of her most
attractive scenery. By means of this intimate
intercourse with nature he absorbed much of
her spirit as well as her features and forms.
In such walks it is the visionary, the poetic
eye, that sees the best that is to be seen, and
out of this best the meditative activity seizes
new likenesses and works into the woof of its
task fresh analogies and subtleties. From this
inward meditative superiority, thus nourished,
it is that comes what Wordsworth calls

36

WORDSWORTH.
" The great nature that exists in works
Of mighty poets."

His mood and condition in these studious
walks he describes in the following lines. At
one period he was always accompanied by a
knowing terrier : —" A hundred times when, roving high and low,
I have been harassed with the toil of verse, Much pains and little progress, and at once
Some lovely image in the song rose up
Full-formed, like Venus rising from the sea;
Then have I darted forwards to let loose
My hand upon his back with stormy joy,
Caressing him again and yet again.
And when at evening on the public way
I sauntered, like a river murmuring
And talking to itself when all things else
Are still, the creature trotted on before;
Such was his custom ; but whene'er he met
A passenger approaching, he would turn
To give me timely notice, and straightway,
Grateful for that admonishment, I hushed
My voice, composed my gait, and, with the air.
And mien of one whose thoughts are free, advanced
To give and take a greeting that might save
My name from piteous rumors, such as wait
On men suspected to be crazed in brain."

IV.
BEAUPUIS.

O F his growing consciousness ot poetic power,
during the latter part of his stay at Cambridge,
Wordsworth gives intimation in the following
significant passage of " The Prelude :" —
" Those were the days
Which also first emboldened me to trust
With firmness, hitherto but lightly touched
By such a daring thought, that I might leave
Some monument behind me which pure hearts
Should reverence. The instinctive humbleness,
Maintained even by the very name and thought
Of printed books and authorship, began
To melt away; and further, the dread awe
Of mighty names was softened down and seemed
Approachable, admitting fellowship
Of modest sympathy."

Accompanied by a friend and fellow-student, Robert Jones, of Wales, Wordsworth
spent his last summer vacation in a pedestrian
tour through France, Savoy, Switzerland, and
the north of Italy. They landed in Calais on
the 13 th of July, 1790, the eve of a national

38

WORDSWORTH.

jubilee, the day when the King of France took
the oath of fidelity to the new constitution, a
day which thrilled Europe with joy : —
" France standing on the top of golden hours,
And human nature seeming born again."

Southward from Calais they held their way,
and saw how bright a face is worn when "joy
of one is joy for tens of thousands." They
passed through hamlets and towns gaudy with
the faded garlands and remains of the great
festival. To shorten the journey they walked
for three days through.sequestered villages : —
" And found benevolence and blessedness
Spread like a fragrance everywhere, when spring
Hath left no corner of the land untouched."

And thus by the vine-clad hills and slopes of
Burgundy they reached the "gentle Saone."
Then the rapid Rhone bore them as with wings
on its current between lofty rocks, — a lonely
pair of strangers floating down the stream,
clustered together with a merry crowd of
travelers returning from the grand national
festival at Paris. With this jocund company
they landed at night, and after a joyous supper,
enlivened by fragrant Burgundy, they all rose
and danced hand in hand round the board, the
two young Englishmen sharing heartily the
triumph and the hope of tfye hour.

BEAUPUIS.

39

Again the two took to their staffs and knapsacks, and, " kept in a perpetual hurry of delight by the almost uninterrupted succession of
sublime and beautiful objects that passed be• fore their eyes," as Wordsworth wrote to his
sister, they wandered through parts of Savoy
and Switzerland and the lake region of Italy,
first crossing the Alps over the Simplon, wondering, as they descended into the southern
gorge, at
" The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
And in the narrow rent at every turn
Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And-giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light, —
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first, and last, and midst, and without end."

Arrived at Basle, the pedestrians bought a
boat, and floated down the Rhine to Cologne,'
returning to England by Calais.
This tour furnished material for another

4°

WORDSWORTH.

poem, "Descriptive Sketches," which, with the
"Evening Walk," was published in quarto, in
1793, by J. Johnson, —the same Johnson who
was Cowper's publisher. The two poems attracted little public attention. But they fell
into the hands of a student who had entered
Cambridge the year that Wordsworth left it.
This was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who, in his
" Biographia Literaria," says, " During the last
year of my residence at Cambridge I became
acquainted with Mr. Wordsworth's ' Descriptive
Sketches/ and seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic genius above the
literary horizon more evidently announced."
In January, 1791, Wordsworth took his degree of B. A. and quitted Cambridge.
A t this time he described himself : —
" By personal ambition unenslaved,
Frugal as there was need, and,' though self-willed,
From dangerous passions free."

In these three lines is worded, with intense
condensation, the moral side of Wordsworth's
being, The bearing upon his life of what these
three statements involve can hardly be overstated. Had Wordsworth been enslaved by
personal ambition, we should not be now seeking to penetrate into the mysteries of his
mind: the great poet, Wordsworth, would not

BEAUPUIS.

41

have been. The poetical bears the mind away
from transitory things, from the worldly eminences coveted by ambition, — bears it away
from surfaces to the imperishable spiritual
truths which vitalize the intuitions of man and
dignify his nature. Wordsworth had a large,
keen understanding, so that, had the determination of his career been left to ambition, he
might have become a competitor of the Pitts
and Foxes of the period, his poetic faculty
giving breadth and brilliancy to parliamentary speeches. Being unambitious, he was not
drawn by outward aims from yielding to the
desires of his emotional being; he was not
tempted to devote his rare gifts to the gratification of worldly passions : he deliberately and
resolutely dedicated himself to the high and
exacting vocation of poet.
In that vocation success was attainable by
Wordsworth only through stringent economy,
and consequent frugality. He was now living,
assisted by his uncles, on the remnant of his
share of patrimonial capital. Temperance in
food and drink, so serviceable to all workers,
is essential to the mental worker. Any excess
beyond the needs of nutrition is a weight
upon the vital spring, lessening its elasticity ;
and especially is this obstructive pressure felt

42

WORDSWORTH.

by those refined, sensitive instrumentalities
through whose movement the soul achieves
its most delicate intellectual and spiritual successes.
The third statement, " and, though selfwilled, from dangerous passions free," is as
big with meaning and importance as the first.
Wordsworth was a man of large self-esteem.
Nature provides most of us with a full proportion of this indispensable quality, the manifestation of which people are quick to observe and
to complain of in others, each one's own projective self-estimation making him as watchful
and sensitive to approaches from without as the
night sentinel of a besieged city. In Wordsworth, coming when he did, his ample share of
this mental activity was almost a virtue. As
an innovator and renovator in the domain of
poetry, and appearing at a time when criticism had not yet her eyes half open, there
was needed, in an original new poet, a clear
self-consciousness and persistent self-reliance
to maintain the bold position he had assumed,
and not be forced from it by the continuous
pressure of general opinion, or shaken in his
purpose by the confident reiteration of clever,
partial, unorganic criticism.
This calm self-confidence protected him most

BEAUPUIS.

43

bravely, too in his opening manhood. Here it
proved itself a meritorious agency in enabling
him to withstand the requirements of guardians and friends, who, in urging him to enter
one of the. higher professional careers, were
simply doing what with their lights was their
duty. But the path of a poet, with his interior scintillations, such outside lights are apt
to confuse rather than illuminate. And so
Wordsworth, on quitting Cambridge, instead
of apprenticing himself to a lawyer or doctor,
or preparing to take orders, or putting on an
ensign's uniform, idled away (as they deemed
it) four months in seeing London ; and how
thoroughly he saw and enjoyed the "crowded
solitude " of the huge metropolis a whole book
of " The Prelude " bears witness. In this London experience he was befriended by the second clause of the third statement, being " from
dangerous passions free."
He quitted London towards the end of May.
After spending the summer with his friend
Jones, walking with him through the northern
part of Wales, he returned for a while to Cambridge, and in November set out alone for Orleans, " on the stately Loire," lured back to
France by the appeals which to every generous
soul were made by the resounding shouts and

44

WORDSWORTH.

shrieks of the French people in their agonizing struggle for emancipation. , On the way he
tarried a few days in Paris, ran from spot to
spot, " of old or recent fame," and in both the
clamorous halls of the National Assembly and
the Jacobins —
" I saw the Revolutionary Power
Toss like a ship at anchor, rocked by storms."

At that period, Wordsworth hoped and expected that a new era of liberty and happiness
was about to dawn upon the world. The French
Revolution was such a dawn ; but in the slow
unfolding of a national history, for the dawn to
mount into noon-day blaze not merely decades
are needed, but centuries. People who are at
first too hopeful, or want deep faith, or are natturally short-sighted or easily discouraged, cry
out in despair, because at the end of a few
years 'the human passions, let loose by the advent of a national dawn, have so overclouded
it that it seems utterly effaced; and thus
many, who basked rejoicing in its fresh beams,
now look upon it as a deceptive will-o'-thewisp, and not as a genuine lustrous promise,
deriving its light and its power from the glowing eternal sun of truth.
But passions are the promoters, the very
constituents, of man's progressive attainment;

BEAUPUIS.

45

they are the ladders by which he mounts to
higher planes of exertion. The deep, restless
ocean, which swathes all our continents in its
purifying immensities, which, as the path of
universal intercommunication among races, is
the chief outward civilizer of humanity,—
would you look despondently and angrily at the
sublime ocean because of the destruction by
its temporary storms ? When some one, in the
presence of Canova, a propos of a recent assassination, disparaged the Italians on account of
their passionateness, the eminent sculptor affirmed that it was to the fire of their passions
that the Italians owed their great achievements
in life and history.
And this deep, fiery, restless element, this
electric source of all human movement, must
not be too much compressed. If it be, there
will come a terrific bursting of boilers. In
•France the royal and sacertodal engineers, who
for centuries had control of the official locomotive, had become so stupefied by selfishness,
through long exercise of irresponsible power,
so paralyzed by self-indulgence, that they had
no feeling for the needs, no perception of the
forces, of the mass they undertook to guide.
Hence the twofold tyranny growing more and
more tyrannical, oppression more oppressive,

46

WORDSWORTH.

a great and patient people's heart at last so
heaved under the galling infliction that it
rent the rotted bonds that bound it. In the
frenzy of liberation were committed passionate excesses, surface bubbles, thrown up from
the black abysses of unspeakable wrong, accumulated by many cruel generations. When
Wordsworth passed through Paris on his way
to Orleans, out of the rayless slimy caves of
ignorance and fear — which were the mental
homes of the masses brutified by bad government— had not yet crept the hideous monsters, begotten on darkness by despotism, who
a little later crawled forth to thaw their benumbed ferocity at the fires kindled by terror
and revenge, and quickened by sprinklings of
blood. Robespierre and his like were not yet
conspicuous.
At Orleans Wordsworth became acquainted
with a band of officers of rank, Frenchmen, so
disgusted with the Revolution that they stood
ready, at the first provocation or opportunity,
to join, on the Rhine, the emigrants in arms
against their country. One of these, Beaupuis,
a man of high title, distinguished in person,
manners, and mind, was a patriot, and therefore spurned, as the great Mirabeau was, by his
titled associates. From the picture Words-

BEAUPUIS.

47

worth draws of Beaupuis in " The Prelude," he
seems to have been one of those clear, cordial
men, whose' moral sensibilities guide them to
the right road. Others of the French nobles
of that momentous period, too expansive and
generous to intrench themselves in the citadels of privilege, gave their hearts and lives to
the cause of the oppressed millions. To Beaupuis Wordsworth pays this beautiful tribute : —
" A meeker man
Than this lived never, nor a more benign,
Meek though enthusiastic. Injuries
Made him more gracious, and his nature then
Did breathe its sweetness out most sensibly,
As aromatic flowers on Alpine turf
When foot hath crushed them.
Man he loved
As man; and to the mean and the obscure,
And all-the homely in their homely works,
Transferred a courtesy which had no air
Of condescension ; But did rather seem
A passion and a gallantry, like that
Whic'h he, a soldier, in his idler day
Had paid to woman."

They became close friends, had long, intimate talks together, walking in the venerable
forests near Orleans, or along the Loire, a mutual comfort and support. One day, meeting a
poor girl, thin and pale from want of food,
languidly leading a heifer to crop grass by the

48

WORDSWORTH.

roadside, Beaupuis exclaimed, with agitation,
" ' T i s against that we are fighting." Soon
called to lead an army against the Vendeans, —
" He perished fighting, in supreme command,
Upon the borders of the unhappy Loire."

In the autumn of 1792, Wordsworth went
back to Paris. The king had been dethroned
and imprisoned, the Republic declared; the
Girondists were sinking, Robespierre was rising ; the German army, on the borders of
France, was hastening the reign of terror. A
fortnight before he 'arrived, had occurred the
massacres of September. The great city heaved
like a volcano in travail. Wordsworth was
awed. ' What his feelings were the first night
in his high, lonely chamber, he records in the
following grand passage : —
" With unextinguished taper I kept watch,
Reading at intervals ; the fear gone byPressed on me almost like a fear to come.
I thought of those September massacres,
Divided from me by one little month,
Saw them and touched : the rest was conjured up
From tragic fiction or true history,
Remembrances and dim admonishments.
The horse is taught his manage, and no star
Of wildest course but treads back his own steps ;
For the spent hurricane the air provides
As fierce a successor; the tide retreats
But to return out of its hiding-place
In the great deep; all things have second birth;

BEAUPUIS.

49

The earthquake is not satisfied at once;
And in this way I wrought upon myself,
Until I seemed to hear a voice that cried
To the whole city, * Sleep no more.' " .

And yet, through his sympathy with the
deep, regenerative movement, such was the
fascination of- the terrible city, that, had he not
been called suddenly to England by pressing
demands there, he would have remained in
Paris, and have "seen it out," to perish probably with his Girondist friends.
4

V.
DOROTHY.
YOUNG WORDSWORTH was a republican ; not
from having witnessed in France the uprising
of a whole people against the degrading, crushing burden of monarchic and oligarchic despotism, his mind kindled by the new flame
that blazed upon the brow of a great nation as
it rose upon that mighty leap from darkness
into light. His sympathy with the French
movement sprang, in large measure, from
healthy, manly feelings, which had been fostered by the republican influences around his
youth. Describing, in " The Prelude," his first
talks with the band of royal officers at Orleans,
and how he had no prepossessions in favor of
monarchy, he writes this remarkable passage :
" Yet in the regal sceptre, and the pomp
Of orders and degrees, I nothing found
Then, 01 had ever, even in crudest youth,
That dazzled me, but rather what I mourned
And ill could brook, beholding that the best
Ruled not, and feeling that they ought to rule.

DOROTHY.

51

For, born in a poor district, and which yet
Retaineth more of ancient homeliness
Than any other hook of English ground,
It was my fortune scarcely to have seen,
Through the whole- tenor of my school-day time,
The face of one who, whether boy or man,
Was vested with attention or respect
Through claims of wealth or blood; nor was it least
Of many benefits, in later years
Derived from academic*institutes
And rules, that they held something up to view
Of a Republic, where all.stood thus far
On equal ground ; that we were brothers all
In honor, as in one community,
Scholars and gentlemen ; where, furthermore,
Distinction open lay to all that came,
And wealth and titles were in less esteem
Than talents, worth, and prosperous industry."

• Add to this the ideal tendency of the poetic
mind, which seeks to beget proportion and
higher harmpnies, and one can understand
why Wordsworth, on his return to England in
the beginning of the-year 1793, published a
pamphlet, in form of a letter - to the Bishop
of Llandaf, in which he declared himself -an
enemy to monarchy and hereditary peerage ;
and why he wrote to his friend Mathews:
" Hereditary distinctions and privileged orders
of every species, I think, must necessarily
counteract the progress of human improvement."

52

WORDSWORTH.

Wordsworth was restless. Now in his twenty-fourth year, no step had yet been taken towards meeting and solving the problem that
confronts every young man : what is to be his
life-work ? What is he going to' do to earn
his daily bread ? A career must be decided on,
and that quickly. On'the other hand, a mysterious inward whisper held him back ; not the
seductive whisper of idleness, not the flattering whisper of ambition,'but a serene intimation, at times impressively distinct, from the
deeps of his soul, so cordial, so earnest, it was
a spell upon him. In the depths of him was
a motive force, derived from innate spiritual
predominances, that was guiding him to the
food appropriate to his nature, as the roving
bee is led by a mysterious instinct when he
wanders from flower to shrub, from meadow to
mountain.
In this state he took to roving again. H e
first visited, a friend in the Isle of Wight.
Here his ears were vexed by sound of cannon
at Portsmouth, prophetic of carnage. After
the execution of Louis XVI., January 21,
1793, England would keep no terms with the
regicide Republic. To Wordsworth this was
a shock. In the summer he left the Isle of
Wight, and wandered for two days over the

DOROTHY.

53

weary waste of Salisbury Plain. Therice he
passed through Bristol to North Wales. In
the beginning of 1794 he writes from Halifax
to Mathews: " M y sister is under the same
roof with me ; indeed, it was to see her that I
came into this country. I have been doing
nothing, and still continue to do nothing.
What is to become of me'I know not."
This reunion with his sister was a blessing
to Wordsworth, — a long blessing. To such a
poet such a sister was what, just at that time,
he needed. In his mental make-up Wordsworth had not so much of the feminine element as it is good for a poet to have, such as
many poets and high artists have, — an element
which gives richness and tenderness where
such qualities ought to be prominent. His
sister Dorothy, two years younger than himself, in some measure supplied this deficiency
by her influence, — an influence which grew
and strengthened itself through a twofold sympathy, a fraternal and a poetic ; and through
her discernment of his latent powers and her
eager desire to encourage them ; but more than
all through her disinterested devotion to her
brother, her zealous self-dedication to the task
of aiding him to unfold himself into the poet
she felt confident he was : —

54

WORDSWORTH.
" She, in the midst of all, preserved me still
A Poet, made me seek beneath that name,
And that alone, my office upon earth."

In the spring of 1794 they set out together
from Halifax for Westmoreland.
Dorothy
writes : " I walked with my brother at my side
from Kendal to Grasmere, eighteen miles, and
afterwards from Grasmere to Keswick, fifteen
more, through the most delightful country that
was ever seen."
In May, from Whitehaven, where he was on
a visit to his uncle Richard, Wordsworth writes
to Mathews, in London, proposing to him that
they should set on foot a monthly political and
literary miscellany, to which, he says, " I would
communicate critical remarks on poetry, the
arts of painting, gardening, etc., besides essays
on morals and politics."
This scheme for a magazine (which was to
have been republican and called " The Philanthropist ") came to naught. The debt due his
father's estate by the Earl of Lonsdale had not
been recovered. The prospect for Wordsworth
was dreary. Relations and friends were disappointed, displeased. To them his rambles on
the Continent and in England were a culpable
waste of time. Writing from Keswick, in November, 1794, to Mathews, who was employed

DOROTHY.

55

in London on a newspaper, he says : " You say
a newspaper would be glad of me. Do you
think you could insure me employment in that
way on terms similar to your own ? I mean,
also in an opposition paper, for I cannot abet,
in the smallest degree, the measures pursued
by the present ministry."
The autumn and winter, he- was engaged
nursing a young friend, Raisley Calvert, who
was in the last stage of consumption. Early in
the year 1795 young Calvert died. On opening
his will it was found that he had bequeathed
to Wordsworth nine hundred pounds. Of this
bequest Christopher Wordsworth, the biographer of his uncle, says : " Raisley Calvert, son
of R. Calvert, Esq., steward to the Duke of Norfolk, was no poet himself, but he was endued
with the wisdom of the heart, and with a certain discernment and prescience, which seem to
be not unfrequently granted to unworldly men
when about to leave the world; in bequeathing this »legacy he had a strong belief that he
was not only promoting the happiness of his
friend, but consulting the interests of society."
This, which may be termed a profound act of
friendship, saved Wordsworth. When we think
of his state of mind, feeling, as he did painfully,
the duty, the necessity, of doing something for

56

WORDSWORTH.

a livelihood; feeling, at the same time, that any
work which would give him a livelihood would
be hateful, because it would arrest, perhaps
smother and suppress, his poetic aspirations
and hopes, we can perceive what a rescue this
thoughtful bequest was. His gratitude he uttered several years afterwards in the following
cordial sonnet to his young benefactor : —
" Calvert! it must not be unheard by them
Who may respect my name, that I to thee
Owe many years of early liberty.
This care was thine, wrien sickness did condemn
Thy youth to hopeless wasting root and stem,
That I, if frugal and severe, might stray
Where'er I liked, and finally array
My temples with the Muses' diadem.
Hence, if in freedom I have loved the truth,
If there be aught of pure or good or great
In my past verse, or shall be in the lays
Of highest mood which now I meditate,
It gladdens me, O worthy short-liyed youth, •
To think how much of this will be thy praise/'

Never was bequest more prolific in fruit.
Never did a Shylock make gold breed more
bountifully than did this short-lived .youth
when he bequeathed nine hundred pounds to
his devoted companion, who would not desert
him in his mortal sickness. To. Mathews, who
was negotiating in London to get him employment, Wordsworth wrote on the 7th of No-

DOROTHY.

57

vember, 1794, three months before the death of
his young friend : " My friend has. every symptom of a confirmed consumption, and I cannot
think of quitting him in his present debilitated
state!" And early in the following January he
writes from Penrith : " "I have been here for
some time. I am still much engaged with my
sick friend, and sorry am. I to add that he
worsens* daily ; he is barely alive."
It were not easy to imagine the exultation of
young Wordsworth at this unlooked-for good
fortune. Suddenly was dispelled the black
cloud that .for several years had hung over
him, threatening his high literary hopes. He
was free, — free to yield himself fully, unreservedly, to the deep, delightful solicitations of
a creative soul, that longed to individualize its
warm, vague yearnings and aspirations in concrete, definite forms of luminous verse ; and he
was free from the growing anxieties that had
dogged his youthful life.
And this great joy-was to be heightened. His
sister was by his side; she who was so richly
and exquisitely organized that she could be the
encourager, the comforter, the tutelary genius
of William Wordswprth; she who could help
his heart to feel, and even his poetic eye to see,
so tender was her sensibility, so fine her per-

SB

WORDSWORTH.

ception of the beautiful, so clear and delicate
her intellect and her tact.
That solitary ramble over the desolate plain
of Salisbury had begotten on Wordsworth a
tale of " Guilt and Sorrow," told in seventy-four
Spenserian stanzas, a tale of almost too much
sorrow; for within it is inclosed another story
of utter deprivation and destitution, without a
ray to streak the monotonous gloom, unless it
be that in the inner tale guilt is not the cause
of the lonely desolation. Into this poem is
wrought Wordsworth's loving vision for nature,
and his genuine fellow-feeling for the condition,
the suffering, of the hopeless poor; the more
effective because it exhibits a knowledge of
their secret sentiment, — a knowledge so sure
that it could only have been learnt, even by a
poet, through sympathetic experience'.
The
very earnestness of his feeling shuts off that
imaginative play which might have woven into
the stanzas some relieving colors. All is cheerless, like the wide expanse of Salisbury plain,
which suggested the poem ; but on the plain
there must be at times a momentary radiance
from rising or setting sun. The complicated
Spenserian stanza, invented for the fanciful
" Fairy Queen," is too highly wrought to be the
medium of such a story, the narrative of which

DOROTHY.

59

runs at times near the level of prose. The
poem is, nevertheless, an advance upon " Descriptive Sketches," and has upon it, not only
the flush of poetic promise, but the ineffaceable stamp of high performance. The date
affixed is 1793-4.
In the autumn of 1795 Wordsworth and his
sister set up housekeeping near the sea-coast,
in Dorsetshire. The country, Dorothy writes,
" is delightful; we have charming walks, a
good garden, a pleasant house." Here they
walked and worked in the garden, and read
and wrote. The place was secluded, with little
society, and a post only once a week.
In the winter of 1795-6 Wordsworth, in conjunction with a literary friend (Wrangham), set
himself to writing poetic imitations of Juvenal,
to be published in a volume. But the volume
was laid aside unfinished. Ten years later,
when applied to to have his imitations of Juvenal published, he refused, and wrote : " I have
long since come to a fixed resolution to steer
clear of personal satire ; in fact, I never will
have anything to do with it, as far as concerns
the private vices of individuals, on any account." The volume which he thus refused to
let see the light was full of sharp satire upon
the abuses of the time, upon the vices of those

6o

WORDSWORTH.

high in place, and the corruptions of fashionable aristocratic society.
Wordsworth, free, rejoicing in his freedom,
like fresh-fledged songsters of the woods, was
still trying his wing, discovering by experiment
to what kind of flight his pinion was best
adapted. Juvenalian satire was not his forte.
His next attempt was at a higher — the very
highest — poetic flight, tragedy. To poets the
drama is fascinating through its innate attractions of life-like impersonation; through its
union of realism and idealism ; through its interplay of active passions, and its concentration of human life at fullest tension; and
through the supremacy which, by virtue of
these qualities and requirements, it holds over
all forms of poetic embodiment. Now Wordsworth's deficiencies, great poet as he is, were
such as to place dramatic success out of his
reach. He lacked the power of throwing himself out of himself into another individuality,
— a power which, although not at all implying
deep, large mental resources, is of primary
need to the writer as well- as to the actor of
dramas. Wordsworth was eminently meditative, with the resources of sensibility and of
intellect which make meditation productive;
but for fusing the results of' meditation with

DOROTHY.

6l

nimble action he had not the indispensable
animal vivacity. Chiefly from this cause, too,
he was diffuse, and dramatic effectiveness depends much on compression. If Wordsworth's
tragedy " The Borderers" had been the first
work of his that Coleridge saw, I cannot think
he would have said of it, as he said of " Descriptive Sketches/' that it announced the coming of an " original poetic genius." The effect
of these secondary qualifications on dramatic
spirit and construction is so decisive, that the
want of them seems to have slackened the flow
of Wordsworth's deeper, poetic currents, for
" The Borderers " is, in poetry and in pictures,
inferior to its predecessor, the narrative poem,
" Guilt and Sorrow." The form of poetic embodiment must be adapted not only to the subject treated, but to the combination of gifts in
the poet.

VI.
COLERIDGE.

IN August, 1797, Wordsworth and his sister
moved from Racedown, near the sea, in Dorsetshire, to Alfoxden, near the sea, in Somersetshire. This change was made that they might
be in the neighborhood of Coleridge. In the
early summer Coleridge (then in his twentysixth year, and two years younger than Wordsworth) had paid them a visit, and they, in return, spent a fortnight with him at Nether
Stowey, where Coleridge, recently married, had
taken a house. To the two poets a rare good
fortune it was, and a high happiness, to meet
and dwell near each other, — so seldom does
a young poet find congenial companionship.
And here it was more than congenial companionship ; each was so high in power and aspiration that each could aid and elevate the
other, the difference in their gifts being, in
their intercourse, a lively stimulus to their
splendid faculties. To enjoy more steadily the
society of Coleridge, Wordsworth and his sis-

COLERIDGE.

63

ter changed their abode. But even to be
within walking distance of Coleridge, they
might not have made the change had they
found him in a region devoid, of hills and
streams. But at Alfoxden they even bettered
their position as regards nature, being surrounded by wooded heights and glens and water-falls, with a park peopled by seventy head
of deer; two miles from Bristol Channel, and
three from Nether Stowey. Here is a portrait
of Dorothy at this time, by Coleridge : " Wordsworth and his exquisite sister are with me.
She is a woman indeed, — in mind I mean, and
in heart; for her persori is such that if you expected to see a pretty woman, you would think
her ordinary; if you expected to see an ordinary woman, you would think her pretty ; but
her manners are simple, ardent, impressive.
In every motion her innocent soul outbeams
so brightly that who saw her would say ' Guilt
was a thing impossible with her/ Her information various ;, her eye watchful in minutest
observation of nature ; and her taste a perfect
electrometer."
The three made foot-excursions in company.
To defray the expenses of one longer than
usual, Wordsworth and Coleridge agreed to
write together and send to the " New Monthly

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WORDSWORTH.

Magazine " a poem, for which they expected to
get five pounds. This was the origin of the
" Lyrical Ballads." They began upon a subject
offered by Coleridge. Wordsworth says : " As
we endeavored to .proceed conjointly, our respective manners proved so widely different
that it would have been quite presumptuous
irj. me to do anything but separate from an undertaking upon which I could have only been
a clog."
A partnership in poetry may be practicable
and profitable to poets of the second or third
rank, — to poets in whom the art is primary
and the inspiration secondary ; but to poets of
the first order, like Wordsworth and Coleridge,
with whom art' is but the form to inspiration,
the futility of an attempt to work together on
one and the same poem cannot fail to show
itself at the start. A poet belonging to the
first class is a new interpreter and reporter of
man and nature, and as such he is necessarily
unique, his individual originality, his self-substantiality, being that which lifts him to this
elevation. At that height he could not be new
without being different from any other poet,
past, present, or future. The points of similarity among great poets come from their common humanity ; but as creators, as discoverers

COLERIDGE.

65

of new beauty and new truth, they must be
solitary. When, through splendor of soul, they
gain new glimpses into the divine depths, fresh
glances into the beautiful mysteries of life,
they are as much alone as was Galileo in his
joy when that first look into his telescope laid
bare to him new wonders in the heavens. In
his inspired moments the poet's vision is telescopic, and inspiration is severely individual.
Of his inspiration, the flow is fed from such
large fountains of spiritual power, that, down to
the finer streams, the very capillaries, of execution, all beats with the full pulse of ever-freshened life. Hence those inextinguishable sparkles of genius, where poetry glows and glories
in its sunny summits, — sparkles which imply
such concentration of gonial soul that in their
warmest brilliancy they are rare even in the
greatest. If, in a poet of second or third order,
you meet with one of these sparkles, you may
be pretty sure that it is borrowed. He had the
judgment to value and the art to appropriate
it. Read in Pickering's edition of Gray the
notes on the famous " Elegy," where you will
find, in every stanza, laid bare close resemblances between lines and phrases of Gray and
passages in a host of poets of the7 past, from
Dante to Pope. And in poets of the calibre of
5

66

WORDSWORTH.

Gray, or even of higher name, who have much
talent and art and comparatively little inspiration, can be detected, in their brightest passages, similar appropriations.
Wordsworth and Coleridge, being both of
them poets of vast original resources, did not
need this pumping into their veins from foreign streams to strengthen their poetic vitality ; their own arteries supplied their embodiments with abundant vivacious blood. And
thus, one experiment was enough to prove how
fruitless it were to * combine their rhythmic
movements for the production of one work.
The poem they made the attempt upon was the
" Ancient Mariner/' founded on a dream of a
friend of Coleridge. Several suggestions were
offered by Wordsworth, who, referring in " The
Prelude" to the time when they roved
" Unchecked upon smooth Qautock's airy ridge,"

thus addresses his companion : —
" Thou in bewitching words, with happy heart,
Didst chaunt the vision of that Ancient Man,
The bright-eyed Mariner, and rueful woes
Didst utter of the lady Christabel."

On April 12, 1798, Wordsworth writes from
Alfoxden to his friend Cottle, the bookseller of
Bristol: " You will be pleased to hear that I
have gone on very rapidly adding to my stock

COLERIDGE.

67

of poetry. Do come and let me read it to
you under the old trees in the park. We have
little more than two months to stay in this
place."
That freedom he had longed for, and so
suddenly obtained, Wordsworth had not forfeited. Its basis he strengthened by extreme
frugality. All indulgences were made subsidiary to the one indulgence, — delight in producing poetry. This was his master passion,
which all other passions must serve.
His
breakfasts and his dinners, his walks and his
talks, his reading and his meditation, all were
directly or indirectly tributary to that which
he had set before him as the purpose and aim,
the happiness, of his life. And what a happiness ! What a life ! This inward lambent light
of poetry, throwing its beams outward to lure
forth the beautiful from its hiding-places, seeking the best and aiming to glorify it, — this interior sunshine is a perpetual exhilaration to its
possessor, awakening joy which empowers him
to triumph over sorrows, and even to turn their
sting into a taper. The beautiful, being the
best there is in all creation, in all the inward
as in all the outward, in conduct as in aspect,
is more alive with the infinite creative soul.
And thus the beautiful calms while it moves us,

68

WORDSWORTH.

always exalts, and therefore to saddest conjunctions it brings a sanative refreshment, it becomes a consolation. In the beautiful there is
always hope ; for the beautiful is fullest of the
divine spirit, and the divine spirit is, to the
healthy human mind, overflowing with encouragement, with promise. The poet living in
and by the beautiful, to him all outward creation is illuminated with a Saturnian light, 2nd
the inward spiritualized by faith and hope.
And thence the poet's high instruction, by
turning this divine light of the beautiful upon
the education of man, may be most efficacious,
revealing to him more clearly his resources.
One of the poet's privileges it is that, subject, through excess of sensibility, to keener
pain as well as to livelier joy, —
(Quanto la cosa e piu perfetta,
Piu senta il bene, e cosi la dolghenza), i —

he eases the pain and heightens the joy by
transfiguring them into poetry. Inasmuch as
to the poet all life may glisten with poetry,
his being, while it is exalted, is enlarged in
proportion to the range of his other faculties;
so that his individuality may, like Shakespeare's or Goethe's, become almost representative of the universe.
1

Dante, Inf., c. vi.

COLERIDGE,

69

To the enjoyment, to the very continuance,
of this Elysian freedom, Dorothy was more
than auxiliary. By her sympathy — a sympathy
so genuine that it was actively cooperative —
she not only sweetened its possession, she
helped it to be. With a poet's eye and feeling
herself, but without vanity, without pretension,
she threw all her stock into the venture of her
brother : she lived for him and in him ; while
by her sparkling intelligence and cheerful companionship she breathed upon the strenuous
poet's every day and hour the breath of a renovating spring.
Could poet, with the deep inwardness of
Wordsworth, be more favored outwardly ? Picturesque, rural nature, its charms redoubled by
the impress of man's judicious hand; man himself in his less sophisticated condition of country seclusion, with a background in the poet's
memory of congregated humanity in huge cities. And then, when he and Dorothy, who
never tired of each other, wished for conversational refreshment from without, by an hour's
walk they found themselves listening to the
rich, fluent speech of him who was already the
most fascinating, the widest and deepest talker
in England, — a clear-sighted, generous appreciator of his brother-poet, and in whom was no

70

WORDSWORTH.

jealousy to restrain the utterance of his admiration, — an admiration which to Wordsworth
was the most inspiriting, fortifying cordial the
world could offer him. Through his whole
after-life, Coleridge never relaxed in this estimate of the poetic genius of his friend, and by
the printed as well as oral expression of it did
much to enlighten the judgment of criticism
in regard to Wordsworth. Coleridge, himself
a great poet, paid him this disinterested, exquisite, but somewhat excessive tribute: " He
strides so far before us that he dwarfs himself
in the distance."

VII,
LYRICAL BALLADS.

W H A T may be called the occasion of beginning the " Lyrical Ballads " was the wish
to earn five pounds, to pay for an excursion ;
their cause lay much deeper, namely, in the
mental conformation of the two poets. In
their conversations on the sources of poetic
interest, they agreed that a series of poems
might be written of two sorts : in the one the
incidents and agents were to be in part supernatural, and were to move and hold the sympathy of the reader through their human feeling and dramatic truth; in the other, subjects
were to be taken from real and ordinary life
in the village and country. Coleridge was to
write poems of the first class, Wordsworth of
the second. In the " Biographia Literaria "
Coleridge thus describes their respective tasks :
" It was agreed that my endeavors should be
directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic ; yet so as to transfer
from our inward nature a human interest and a

72

WORDSWORTH.

semblance of truth sufficient to procure for
these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the
other hand, was to propose to himself, as his object, to give the charm of novelty to the things
of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous
to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's
attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and wonders of the world
before us ; an inexhaustible treasure, but for
which, in consequence of the film of familiarity
and selfish solicitude, we have eyes yet see not,
ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel
nor understand."
In putting the plan into execution, Wordsworth was so much more industrious, and the
number of his pieces so much greater, that
what his associate contributed seemed to be,
says Coleridge, " a n interpolation of heterogeneous matter." The heterogeneous matter
was, however, chiefly the immortal " Ancient
Mariner," which takes up fifty pages, or about
one quarter of the volume.
Under the sway of a large humanity of individual nature, favored by early associations and
impressions in secluded, unaristocratic Cumberland, and nourished by the deeper spirit of

LYRICAL BALLADS.

73

the times (a cardinal characteristic of which
was a more diffused fellow-feeling, an expansion and warming of the human heart towards
man as man), Wordsworth had from the first
been moved to note the condition of the humbler class of his fellow-men, and to hear in their
heart-throb a deep poetic music. In his first
printed poem, " An Evening Walk," we have
seen that the only human being introduced is a
destitute wayfaring mother with her two children, —
" Denied to lay her head,
On cold, blue nights, in hut or straw-built shed.

In the next one, "Descriptive Sketches," we
catch on the southern side of the Alps a
glimpse of a wandering gypsy, — <
" A nursling babe, her only comforter," —

and on the northern side, an enthusiastic description of the Swiss cottager, — a description
so abstract, that it opens with Rousseau's fallacy about the savage state being the freest
and most manly : —
" Once man entirely free, alone and wild,
Was blest as free, for he was nature's child."

Of his third poem, "Guilt and Sorrow," the
chief personages are a wandering widowed soldier's wife and a criminal, repentant sailor.

74

WORDSWORTH.

And now, in a new volume, made up of
twenty pieces, the same spirit prevails, or
rather, the same principle rules. The lowly
and obscure are dragged forth to be suddenly
presented to the world, crowned with the immortal wreath of poetry, — presented to the
astonished protesting world. For are not
knights and ladies, kings and princesses, paladins and crusaders, the legitimate themes, and
palaces and castles the congenial haunts, of
poesy ? And here vagrants and idiots and
washerwomen, instead of being left to starve
in huts, and freeze under hedge-rows, are
thrust upon our notice, and, through the magic
of genius, — which defies the externalities of
circumstance, whether splendent or homely, —
are placed before and beside us in their naked,
irresistible humanity.
One of the longer poems of the volume is
" T h e Thorn." Imagine a reader, in the first
quarter of this century, fresh from the " Giaour,"
and "Lara," and "Lalla Rookh," and " T h e
Lady of the Lake," coming upon " The Thorn "
unexpectedly. The public being unprepared
for such a return to nature, its judgment, too,
misled by the half-criticism of its Jeffreys and
Giffords, in nine readers out of ten the feeling would be distaste, or even disgust, ex-

LYRICAL

BALLADS.

75

pressed by exclamations, " How tame ! How
absurd !" But the tenth reader, a little baffled,
a little disappointed, would read it over a second time, and then the story would haunt him
so, that the next day he would read it a third
time. " The Thorn " is the old story, ever old
and ever new, of betrayal and desertion, set in
a fresh frame, told with a new and terrible pathos, which leaves him, who can read it a third
or fourth time, with his sympathy deepened,
his moral nature strengthened, and in his ear
a music that has the simplicity and the significance of some strains of Beethoven.
One of the shorter poems is called " Goody
Blake and Harry Gill," a name which, in its
low realism, is a prejudgment against the poem
in the readers of Marmions and Don Rodericks and Childe Harolds. This is the story:
A woman, poor and old, lives alone in a hut
on the north side of a bleak hill. She has
not clothes enough to keep her warm in winter
days, nor blankets enough for cold nights in
her hard bed. And so, in the middle of the
night, when winds have blown down the dead
branches, she would go out to the hedge of
Harry Gill to fill her apron with sticks. Now
Harry, a well-to-do lusty drover, had long suspected old Goody of this trespass, and one cold

76

WORDSWORTH.

moonlit midnight he pounced upon her with
her apron full of sticks. " I Ve caught you,
then, at last," he cried, as he seized and held
her fast by the arm and shook her. Goody
let fall the bundle of sticks, and, kneeling upon
it,—
" She prayed, her withered hand uprearing,
While Harry held her by the arm —
God I who art never out of hearing,
O may he never more be warm I
The cold, cold moon above her head,
Thus on her knees did Goody pray ;
Young Harry heard what she had said :
And icy cold he turned away."

And he never was warm again : —
" In March, December, and in July,
'T is all the same with Harry Gill;
The neighbors tell, and tell you truly,
His teeth they chatter, chatter still."

A high achievement it is of the poet when
he can make an incident or a conjunction the
focus of so much light that it sends far and
wide the beams of a momentous, universal
truth. The poet who does this, does it, not by
directly aiming to inculcate a moral lesson, —
a prosaic proceeding, — but by kindling his
thought at the torch of spiritual and moral
beauty. Put now before the mind's eye this
picture, — a poor, lonely, old woman, thinly
clad, kneeling in the cold moonlight on the

LYRICAL BALLADS,

*]>]

bundle of sticks she has dropt, her arm still
clutched by the rich owner of the hedge, she
praying " may he never more be warm," and
he turning away, chilled to the heart, never to
be warm again. What a light is here flashed
upon the vast field of human conduct. All
over the earth the precept, " B e kind to the
poor/' is acknowledged and partially practiced.
But here, through the plastic gift of the poet,
a common occurrence is elevated into a generic act to set forth a cardinal human obligation ; and sets it forth with an efficiency that
carries it with a new emphasis into the soul
Wordsworth calls this poem " A true story,"
whether meaning thereby that the moral shock
to Harry was so penetrating that it wrought
thus powerfully on his physical being, or that
the story poetically depicts the unfailing doom
of the rich who are hard to the poor, thus exciting a feeling, as Coleridge says above, analogous to the supernatural.
Of Wordsworth's " Lyrical Ballads," the longest is " The Idiot Boy," the wonder of which
isf not as has been said by unsusceptive, and
therefore half critics, that a poet should make
an idiot boy the subject of a poem, but that
by his treatment of such a subject he should
have wiped off from it all repulsiveness, and,

78

WORDSWORTH.

by what may be called the magic of poetic tenderness, have built out of three such unpromising figures as two lowly women and the idiot
son of one of them, a story which fascinates
and delights the competent reader. This it
does by letting him into the minute confidence
of the healthy human heart, and especially the
maternal heart.
So warmly intimate is the
poet with this heart, that he is empowered to
make to the reader instructive discoveries,
charming revelations. And all the picture set
in the serenity of a clear moonlit night, with
its shapes and its sounds, —
" She listens, but she cannot hear
The foot of horse, the voice of mun;
The streams with softest sound are flowing,
The grass you almost hear it growing,
You hear it now if e'er you can."

" The Idiot Boy " is an incomparable artistic
feat.
That with such ordinary material the
poet should be able to enlist the reader's full
interest and sympathy proves, how the rich personality of the poet, handled by his genius,
illuminating his intellect, is the all in all in
poetry, in fresh, deep.poetry. The simpler the
material, the greater and more original the
powers needed to mould it into form of permanent poetic worth.

LYRICAL

BALLADS.

79

Wordsworth was a profound naturalist. His
inborn sympathies laid bare to him the human soul in its manifold manifestations, opened
to him the natural beauties of earth and sky,
and gave him mysterious intimations from
the invisible. Ever around him was teeming
changeful nature, lovingly embraced by his
sensuous eye, and ever above him, in his religious consciousness, the supervisive might,
with its infinite spirituality. Wordsworth's
poems were a new world and a strange, and
thence they had, by means of native force and
genius, to create the taste wherewith they
were to be enjoyed and judged. The refined,
cultivated, clear-sighted, true-hearted, highspoken Sara Coleridge, daughter of S. T. C ,
says justly : "That those poems were not generally admired from the first, was, in my opinion, their own fault; that is to say, arose
principally from their being works of great
genius, and, consequently, though old as the
world itself, in one way, yet in another, a new
thing under the sun."
Another poem in the first issue of " Lyrical
Ballads " is " We are Seven ;" and another
proof of how out of the collision between a
susceptible poetic mind, and pure deep nature,
flash forth fresh rhythmic strains perfectly

80

WORDSWORTH.

original, owing nothing to foregone poems or
narrations, but springing and sparkling with
new joy from a heart touched by the simple
play of other human hearts, —
" A simple child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What can it know of death ? "

Many subjects there are, knowledge of which
is acquired by experience, whereof a child can
know nothing ; but, so far as experience can
teach what death is, a child of eight years may
already have had its little heart grieved through
the stiffening before its eyes of the limbs of a
pet bird or kitten, besides being awed by the
passing away of her little brother and sister.
When " t h e little Maid," in the face of the
poet's demonstration to her, that two being
dead, there could now be only five, persisted in
saying, " W e are seven," it may be that she
spoke deeper than the poet wrote. Her spiritual sense, asserting its supremacy, counted by
souls not bodies. The essential human being
is the invisible spirit, not the visible body ; and
the little girl felt by instinct that her brother
and sister, though their bodies lay in the
churchyard, were not dead. Possibly, when
playing round their little graves, she felt their

LYRICAL

BALLADS.

81

presence. Nay, may not her natural eyes hav$
been at times so purged of earthly grossness
as to have been able to see their spiritual
bodies ? There are more things in heaven and
earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy,
or in your theology.
The last poem in the first volume of " Lyrcal Ballads" he was moved to write by revisiting the banks of the Wye, above Tintern
Abbey. The same scenes had been enjoyed
five years before, in his twenty-fourth year, at
which youthful period,—
" The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion : the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood;
Their colors and their forms, were then to me
An appetite ; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye."

That time, he continues, is past, with its
" aching joys," its " dizzy raptures. He has
become more thoughtful: —
" For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth ; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime
6

82

WORDSWORTH.
Of something far more deeply interposed,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."

The whole poem is steeped in beauty, is aglow
with poetic thought, and might be called a
paean to Nature by her chief worshipper. The
latter part is addressed in an impassioned
strain to devoted, beloved Dorothy, his companion. Younger than he, in her voice he
heard the language of his former heart; in the
" shooting lights of her wild eyes " he read his
former pleasures : —
"Oh, yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear sister ! And this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her ; 't is her privilege,
Through all'the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy : for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings."

Wordsworth's healthy practice of making the

LYRICAL BALLADS.

83

sky the roof of his study, working out his
poetry as he walked in the open air, led to the
habit of carrying a poem in his memory uncommitted to paper. "Tintern Abbey" was
composed during a ramble of four or five days
between Tintern and Bristol, — a poem of one
hundred and fifty lines of blank verse. Not
a sentence of it was written down until he
reached Bristol, and in writing it not a line
was altered.
The first edition of " Lyrical Ballads " was
of five hundred copies, but " t h e sale was so
slow," writes the Bristol publisher, Cottle, " and
the severity of most of the reviews so great,
that its progress to oblivion seemed certain. I
parted with the largest portion of the five
hundred at a loss, to Mr. Arch, a London bookseller." Shortly afterwards, Cottle, on retiring frorri business, transferred all his copyrights
to Messrs. Longman. In valuing the several
copyrights, that of the u Lyrical Ballads" was
put down at nil. Mr. Cottle therefore begged
that it might be returned to him ; and he presented it to the authors.
The " Lyrical Ballads " appeared in the beginning of September, 1798, and on the sixteenth of that month Wordsworth, his sister,
and Coleridge, sailed from Yarmouth for Hamburg.

VIII.
GOSLAR.

To the two poets the most important personage in Hamburg was a brother poet; the
most interesting incident of their sojourn there,
an interview with him. The poet was Klopstock, then in his seventy-fourth year, and still
a high reputation at home and abroad. At the
time of Klopstock's rise there was in Germany
no poet of the depth and breadth and rhythm
required to give permanence to poetic work ;
and criticism was hardly fledged ; so that, about
a mechanical poet, with little inspiration and
not much art, such as Klopstock was, there
floated a nimbus of reputation which, on the
arrival of more genuine bards, began at once to
evaporate. The conversations between Klopstock and his two English visitors betray, on
his part, not only shallowness of judgment,
but a total absence of that critical perception
which is a ray cast by creative fire. He preferred Glover to Milton ; thought that Wieland's mastery over his native language was

GOSLAR.

85

far superior to that of Goethe ; did not like the
Fool in Lear; looked upon Wolfe as a sounder
metaphysician than Kant. Speaking of tragedies, he rated high the power of exciting tears ;
to which Wordsworth replied, "that nothing
was easier than to deluge an audience ; that it
was done every day by the meanest writers."
At Hamburg Coleridge parted from the
Wordsworths, going first to Ratzeburg and
afterwards to Goettingen. Wordsworth and
his sister established themselves for the autumn
and winter in Goslar, at the foot of the Hartz
Mountains. In accelerating their acquirement
of German (the purpose of their visit to Germany) through social intercourse, they were
disappointed. Goslar was an old, decayed town,
and such are not noted for hospitality; moreover, Dorothy was an obstacle.
Coleridge
writes to Wordsworth from Ratzeburg : " You
have two things against you : your not loving
smoke, and your sister. If the manners at Goslar resemble those at Ratzeburg, it is necessary
to be able to bear smoke. Here, when my
friends come to see me, the candle nearly goes
out, the air is so thick."
With Dorothy by his side, Wordsworth was
actively productive. In this very cold winter
of 1798-9, the coldest of the century, he wrote

86

WORDSWORTH.

some of his best and most characteristic shorter
poems, among others " Lucy Gray" : —
" No mate, no comrade Lucy knew ;
She dwelt on a wide moor-.
The sweetest thing that ever grew
Beside a human door ! "

The solitude of a strange land and language
were propitious to the meditative poet. As for
his themes, he took none of them from scenes
around him. There is not a stanza or a line
about the Brocken. Poetry the poet makes of
what he has seen and felt and stored away, not
of what he sees. Things wrought into images
in his brain, not images painted on his outward
eye, are his material. So much is this the case,
that if he has to depict a man present before
him, he removes him away from the sensuous
visibility in which he stands there, removes him
into the interior of his cerebral work-shop, to
re-image him there, to subject him to the divulging light of poetic imagination* He takes
the man into the intimacy of his mental forge
and recreates him. He who cannot perform
this visionary feat is no poet. And the same
subtle process is gone through by every poetic
painter of portraits. During the months that
Wordsworth lived at Orleans he wrote no line
about the Loire, but worked at his " Descrip-

GOSLAR.

8?

tive Sketches," at scenes through which he had
passed the year before. The poet's tools are
imaginations, and with these, polished by the
passionate light of the beautiful, he transmutes,
transfigures reality, making it, according to the
degree of his gifts, more transparently, more
delightfully real, piercing to its core, revealing
its affinity with an essential, eternal ideal.
The isolation in a foreign land helped to
kindle memories of home into poetic imaginations : —
" I traveled among unknown men,
In lands beyond the sea ;
Nor, England, did I know till then,
What love I bore to thee."

'

The exquisite poems relating to Lucy were
all written this winter. From the solitude of the
Hartz Mountains the poet's memory flew back
to his opening manhood, and his imagination,
radiant with poetic glow, wrought upon early
tender impressions to mould them into glistening diamonds of verse. A more felicitous, original, sigificant little poem (it is of only fortytwo lines) never was warbled out of the heart,
even of Wordsworth, than the stanzas beginning, " Three years she grew in sun and
shower." Never was the active, purifying influence of nature more lovingly exemplified

88

WORDSWORTH.

than in the growth of this sweet Lucy.
are two of the seven stanzas : —

Here

" The floating clouds their state shall lend
To her ; for her the willow bend;
Nor shall she fail to see,
Even in the motion of the storm,
Grace that shall mould the maiden form
By silent sympathy.
" The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their'wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face."

In Wordsworth the intellectual mental constituent is ever th£re to brace the sentimental,
his art bringing about a close musical marriage
between thought and feeling, — the fruit of
happy meditation coming to the surface buoyed
on the rhythm of healthful sensibility. The
following stanzas are taken from " A Poet's
Epitaph " (written this winter), and, in addition
to their fresh beauty and significance, have an
interest as being a portrait — whether so intended or not— of Wordsworth himself: —
" But who is he with modest looks,
And clad in homely russet brown ?
He murmurs near the running brooks
A music sweeter than their own.

GOSLAR.

89

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

In Goslar, going back to his school-days, he
wrote, in his best vein, — the vein of rhythmic,
tender thoughtfulness, — those three poems,
" Mathew," " The two April Mornings," and
" The Fountain." All three have a solid foundation in fact, all relating to one of the headmasters at Hawkshead, and each is a poetic
pathetic tribute to his kindly teacher, Taylor,
to whom, as we have seen, he devoted some
grateful lines in " The Prelude."
Between the parted companions at Ratzeburg and Goslar warm intercourse was kept up
through letters, Wordsworth sending some of
his poems to Coleridge, and receiving, in return, cordial comments. In one of his letters
Coleridge says to Wordsworth : " I am sure I
need not say how you are incorporated into

go

WORDSWORTH

the better part of my being; how, whenever I
spring forward into the future with noble affections, I always alight by your side." In another he discusses hexameters, and sends as a
sample, composed when he was ill and wakeful,
twenty or thirty lines full gi vivacity and fun,
which end, —
" William, my head, and my heart! dear William and dear
Dorothea !
You have all in each other, but I am lonely, and want you."

In February, 1799, Wordsworth and Dorothy quitted Goslar, and after paying a visit to
Coleridge at Goettingen, returned to England
early in the spring.

IX.
GRASMERE.

T H E summer of 1799 Wordsworth and his
sister spent for the most part with their cousins, the Hutchinsons, at Sockburn-on-Tees. In
September Wordsworth, accompanied by Coleridge, went into Westmoreland and Cumberland. Coleridge saw the Lake Country for the
first time. The impression made upon him is
shown in the following sentence of a letter to
Dorothy: " A t Rydal and Grasmere I received,
I think, the deepest delight; yet Hawes-water,
through many a varying view, kept my eyes
dim with tears."
Wordsworth hired a small house in Grasmere ; he and his sister took possession at the
end of December, on S t Thomas's day, after
what he calls "our wild winter journey from
Sockburn,"—
" The naked trees,
The icy brooks, as on we passed, appeared
To question us, ' Whence come ye ? to what end ?' "

On the journey they passed the spring which

92

WORDSWORTH.

gives the name to the poem " Hart-leap Well."
The tale of the poor hunted hart is just one to
set Wordsworth's pen in motion. That tender familiarity with the spirit that breathes
through all creation, that privileged reverential
intimacy with the very soul of being, which
Wordsworth had gained by his religious love
of nature, and his sympathy with all forms of
life, is hardly anywhere more appareat than in
the second part of " Hart-leap Well." Talking
with the " gray-headed shepherd," who related
to him the legend, and telling him of the restorative power of nature, he ends the poem
with this stanza : —
" One lesson, Shepherd, let us two divide,
Taught both by what she shows, and what conceals :
Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels."

The cottage in which, at the end of 1799,
Wordsworth and his sister took up their abode
for eight years, stood (and stands) beside, and
on the right of, the road from Ambleside to
Keswick, at the entrance to the village of
Grasmere. The front looked towards the lake;
in the rear were a small orchard and garden,
with a spring and rocks, from which rises the
wooded mountain.
And now, nothing daunted by tlie seeming

GRASMERE.

93

failure of the first, Wordsworth put forth a
second volume of " Lyrical Ballads," made of
poems written, many of them, in Germany.
The first volume was republished, and, the
other being added, the two were issued by
Longman in 1800.
A copy of the two Wordsworth sent to
Charles James Fox, with a long letter of apology and explanation. The key to the sending and to the letter is found in the subjoined
sentence, which opens its third paragraph,— a
sentence, which is an honorable tribute to Fox,
and records a noble characteristic, which distinguishes him from most public men: as political and social affairs are now organized, they
who get to be leaders among legislators and administrators are, for the most part, the worldly
and the ambitious, and are therefore wanting
in the finer sensibilities : " In common with the
whole of the English people, I have observed
in your public character a constant predominance of sensibility of heart."
Fox answered the letter graciously. His
critical discernment was not equal to giving
him a hint of the high distinction this singling of him out «by a young poet would be to
him with future generations ; but by his insight he vindicated Wordsworth's partiality, —

94

-

WORDSWORTH.

" admiring many poems in the collection," and
specifying as his favorites, " Harry Gill," " We
are Seven," " The Mad Mother," and " The Idiot
Boy." There was in Fox's nature a deep simplicity which, in spite of early influences and
worldly sophistications, kept the bottom of his
heart sound, and put him at once into sympathy with Wordsworth's mind and its unique
poetic product. Had Pitt been thus honored,
probably the most he would have done would
have been to acknowledge courteously the receipt of the volumes before looking into them,
and then to have laid them aside unread. And
it may be doubted whether Burke — to whom,
in " The Prelude," Wordsworth pays so rich a
tribute — would have done much more. Burke
was not primitive enough to have put himself
in affectionate relation with such unacknowledged specimens of humanity as Wordsworth
selects to wear his laurel wreaths; nor, to judge
by his treatise on " The Sublime and Beautiful," was his literary insight very penetrating.
In the little cottage at Grasmere, where
Wordsworth and his sister had planted themselves, there was " plain living and high thinking." In that district of simple habits a more
frugal household could hardly be found than
that of William and Dorothy. It was not in

GRASMERE.

95

Wordsworth's inclinations to be otherwise than
frugal: a man disposed to self-indulgence could
not have written his poems. To be its best,
poetry must be sincere : its liveliest, cleanest
current is a stream from the inmost life of the
poet. . The poem and poet must be at one : a
discord between their two lives taints and
slackens the poetic current. Hence, when the
poet's mind is rich in resources, earnest sincerity brings forth those gems of feeling in whose
sparkle ' is recognized the everlasting glow of
humanity. And so Wordsworth, at first decried, ridiculed by the self-sufficient, incompetent Aristarchs of his day, soon won the favor
of the judicious and the susceptible, — to work
himself gradually, by dint of cordial truthfulness to nature, into the firmest place among
his great contemporaneous brother bards.
The fire that cooked the simple meals of that
cottage sent up its smote to mingle modestly
with the smoke of the other cottages of the
village; but near the hearth whence it ascended was an altar, unrecognized then and there,
whereon was fed, by most religious self-dedicated votaries, a flame which was to be for the
world a holy perennial light.
About the beautiful region they had chosen
for their home the poet and his sister walked

96

WORDSWORTH.

enchanted, seeing new scenes, discovering new
beauties, and producing new poems, — ay, new
poems ; and the number of such, of really new
poems, is at any time very small.
Some entries in Miss Wordsworth's " Diary,"
during these first two years at Grasmere, will
let us into the mode of their daily life.
"Oct. JO, 1801. Coleridge went to Keswick,
n t h . Mr. and Mrs. Sympson came in after tea,
and supped with us.
" Oct. 24. Went to Greenhead Ghyll, and
the sheepfold.
" Nov. 6. Coleridge came.
" Nov. 9. Walked with Coleridge to Keswick.
«<
" Nov. 18. William walked to Rydal. The
lake of Grasmere beautiful.
" Nov. 24. Read Chaucer. We walked by
Gell's cottage. [Sir William Gell.] As we
were going along we were stopped at once, at
the distance perhaps of fifty yards from our
favorite 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.

GRASMERE.

97

"Feb. 5, 1802. William came with two affecting letters from Coleridge, resolved to try
another climate
Translated two or
three of Lessing's Fables. At this time William hard at work on " The Pedlar."
" March, Wednesday. W. reading Ben Jonson.
"Thursday. W. writing the i Singing Bird ;
or, the Sailor's Mother/ Mr. Clarkson came.
"Friday. Read the .remainder of Lessing.
William wrote ' Alice Fell.'"
The humbleness of the subject of this little
poem brought upon Wordsworth the ridicule of
the small critics, so that from policy "Alice
F e l l " was excluded from several editions of
his poems, until restored at the request of
several friends, in particular, his son-in-law,
Edward Quillinan. In thus, for a time, suppressing this poem, the poet did wrong, and I
am surprised that William Wordsworth should
have done it. He did a wrong to himself, to
the public, to Alice. What regard should be
paid to critics who have not that union of sensibility and culture indispensable to genuine
criticism ? Is not a poor, ragged orphan girl
our sister ? Are not her sudden distress, its
cause and its cure, worthy to be taken into the
heart of a great poet, to be there rhythmically
7

93

WORDSWORTH.

arrayed ? And thus arrayed, do they not leave
in the mind of the reader an effective picture
and a tender, purifying emotion ? " Alice Fell "
was suggested by a fact told by a visitor.
Walks, readings, visits, none of them were
barren. In one of these walks the poet represents himself to be in an exhilarated mood,
communing with nature, enjoying the happiness of all living things, on a sunny day after
a heavy night storm : —
" All things that love the sun are out of doors;
The sky rejoices in the morning's birth;
The grass is bright with rain-drops ; on the moors
The hare is running races in her mirth;
And with her feet she from the plashy earth
Raises a mist, that, glittering in the sun,
Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run."

But in the height of his joy there fell upon him,
he knew not whence, a sudden dejection, so
that, from being in a jubilant state of feeling,
he sank into anxious forebodings : —
" But there may come another day to me —
Solitude, pain of heart, distress and poverty."

Then comes in the noted stanza about Chatterton and Burns : —
" I thought of Chatterton, the marvelous boy,
The sleepless soul that perished in his pride;
Of him who walked in glory and in joy
Following his plow, along the mountain-side:
-By our own spirits are we deified :

GRASMERE.

99

We Poets in our youth begin in gladness ;
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness."

None of the poets of his great day for poets
(nor (rf any other day except Shakespeare)
added to daily speech so many phrases and
lines, adopted for their aptness and significancy.
In this single stanza are several such, especially that deep, exalting declaration, —
" By our own spirits are we deified."

From his gloomy despondency how is the poet
rescued ? Suddenly, in a lonely place, —
" Beside a pool bare to the eye of heaven
I saw a man before me unawares :
The oldest man he seemed that ever wore gray hairs."

Then follows that marvelous description, which
draws the reader into the body and very being of the old man. He was a leech-gatherer,
who made a poor living by seeking them from
pool to pool; a lonely man who had lost his
wife and all his ten children, who now, feeble
from old age, leant on the staff with which he
stirred the pools for leeches. And yet, he
smiled as he spoke, and was cheerful and uncomplaining : —
" I could have laughed myself to scorn to find
In that decrepit man so firm a mind.
' God/ said I, * be my help and stay secure ;
I '11 think of the leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!' "

IOO

WORDSWORTH.

In poetry the subject is secondary, the poet
primary. As Joubert says: " You will find
poetry nowhere unless you bring some with
you." And equally true is it, that you will
find it everywhere if you bring much with you;
especially if you are spiritually-minded, that is,
if you habitually look through the body into the
soul of things, for " poetry consists," — again
I quote Joubert, — " above all, in the spirituality of ideas." If Joubert had been studying
Wordsworth, —of whom he probably never
heard,— he could not more clearly have given
the essential quality of his poetry. In a letter
in 1845 to his friend Professor Henry Reed,
of Philadelphia, editor of the American edition
of the " Memoirs," Wordsworth, then in his
seventy-sixth year, mentions an interview he
had recently had with Tennyson, who expressed to him gratitude for his writings. " To
this," continues Wordsworth, " I was far from
indifferent, though persuaded that he is not
much in sympathy with what I should myself
most value in my attempts, namely, the spirituality with which I have endeavored to invest
the material,universe, and the moral relations
under which I have wished to exhibit its most
ordinary appearances." And this is just the
reason why Tennyson, so inferior to Words-

GRASMERE.

101

worth- in mental calibre, poetic sensitiveness,
and in insight, is more popular than Wordsworth : he is more sensuous and superficial;
and most readers, even of the better class who
read poetry, prefer not to be called upon for
new effort either in the direction of intellect or
sentiment.
In the " Memoirs " a striking illustration of
what may be termed the spiritual idealism of
Wordsworth is furnished, taken from his manuscripts. He says that in childhood it was
difficult for him to admit the notion of death as
applicable to himself ; and that he was often
"unable to think of external things as having
external existence, and I communed with all
that I saw, as something not apart from, but
inherent in, my own immaterial nature. Many
times, while going to school, have I grasped at
a wall or tree, to recall myself from this abyss
of idealism to the reality. In later periods of
life I have deplored, as we have all reason to
do, a subjugation of an opposite character."
What a life the two led in that cottage!
Frugality was the basis for a superstructure of .
noble, indefatigable work, mind-work, incited
by poetic inspiration. They read to feed their
thoughts. Thus, one afternoon in 1801 Dorothy was reading to her brother the sonnets of

102

WORDSWORTH.

Milton. He knew them well already, but happening to be in the mood to be " particularly
struck with the dignified simplicity and majestic harmony that runs through most of them,
I took fire, if I may be allowed to say so, and
produced three sonnets the same afternoon, the
first I ever wrote, except one irregular one at
school." Such was Wordsworth's initiation into
a form of verse peculiarly adapted to him, — a
form brief, compact, ever ready to receive and
to tempt the overflowings of his meditative,
generative mind. In the course of his long,
industrious life he wrote over five hundred
sonnets ; that is, five hundred poems of fourteen lines each, differing, of course, in merit,
but hardly one of which does not give out some
of the fragrance of a pure, high humanity. Here
is one of these first three. An admirable sonnet in thought, structure, and rhythm, it shows
clear insight into the character of the First
Consul: —
1801.

" I grieved for Bonaparte, with a vain
And an unthinking grief ! The tenderest mood
Of that Man's mind — what can it be ? What food
Fed his first hopes ? What knowledge could he gain ?
'T is not in battles that from youth we train
The Governor who must be wise and good,
And temper with the sternness of the brain
Thoughts motherly, and meek as womanhood.

GRASMERE.

I03

Wisdom doth live with children round her knees :
Books, leisure, perfect freedom, and the talk
Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk .
Of the mind's business : these are the degrees
By which true Sway doth mount; this is the stalk
True Power doth grow on: and her rights are these."

X.
MARY.

T H E life at the Wordsworth cottage in Grasmere, high as it was, was to be made still
higher, was to be fuller, to be more beautiful,
by having more life added to it. The following entry is taken from Miss Wordsworth's
Diary: "Oct. 4, 1802. William was married
at Brompton Church to Mary Hutchinson
We arrived in Grasmere at six in the evening,
on Oct. 6, 1802."
We have seen how Wordsworth was blessed
in Dorothy, what a delightful stimulus had
been to him the companionship, what a joy the
admiration, of Coleridge. The capital blessing
of his life was his marriage. It was a complete mating, a union of diverse constituents
that made a musical harmony. This union had
been long foreshadowed. Referring, in " T h e
Prelude," to a period four or five years earlier,
when Dorothy had been recently restored to
him, he there speaks of Mary: —

MARY.

105

" Another maid there was, who also shed
A gladness o'er that season, then to me,
By her exulting outside look of youth
And placid under-countenance, first endeared."

Dorothy and Mary were like two attached
sisters. The coming of Mary into the cottage
as. the wife of William, Dorothy did not feel as
a wrong done to her, but as a good ; she did not
look upon it as an encroachment on her rights,
but as an enlargement of them. Mary was
tall and fair, Dorothy of moderate height and
dark; equally unlike mentally, Dorothy having
more vivacity and ardor than Mary, these and
other differences made-no discord between
them, but only gave more liveliness to their
concord. In their sympathy with the poet
they were alike. It has been shown how Dorothy abetted him in his poetic moods and efforts. Among his published poems Wordsworth
has inserted several by her. And although I
believe none of Mary's are given, she furnished
two lines in one of the best of his shorter
poems, and those two the best lines in it.
" The Daffodils " consists of only four stanzas
of six lines each. After describing in three
stanzas the discovery of them and their appearance, stretching along the margin of a bay,
the last stanza is as follows : —•

io6

WORDSWORTH.
" For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude ;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils."

The two central lines, so profound and beautiful, were written by Mrs. Wordsworth : —
" They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude."

De Quincey, who first saw Mrs. Wordsworth
five years-after her marriage, thus concludes
a description of her countenance: " All faults,
had they been ten times more and greater,
would have been swallowed up or neutralized by
that supreme expression of her features, to the
intense unity of which every lineament in the
fixed parts, and every undulation in the moving
parts, or play of her countenance, concurred,
namely, a sunny benignity, — a radiant gracefulness — such as I never saw equaled or approached."
But Mary Wordsworth has the privilege of
being portrayed in one of the most beautiful
poems in literature, and that written by her
husband,— a poem that enriches the paper it
is printed on, brightens the eye that reads it,
refreshes the heart that hears it. It cannot be
too often repeated : —
i

MARY.

107

" She was a Phantom of delight
When first she gleam'd upon my sight;
A lovely Apparition, sent
To be a moment's ornament:
Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair;
Like Twilight's, too, her dusky hair ;
But all things else about her drawn
From May-time and the cheerful Dawn ;
A dancing Shape, an Image gay,
To haunt, to startle, and waylay.
" I saw her upon nearer view,
A Spirit, yet a Woman too !
Her household motions light and free,
And steps of virgin liberty ;
A countenance in which did meet
Sweet records, promises as sweet;
A Creature not too bright or good
For human nature's daily food ;
For transient sorrows, simple wj&es,
Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles.
" And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine ;
A Being breathing thoughtful breath,
A Traveler between life and death ;
The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;
A perfect Woman, nobly plann'd
To warn, to comfort, and command ;
And yet a Spirit still, and bright
With something of angelic light."

[1804.

In the middle of August, 1803, William and
Dorothy, leaving Mary in the cottage, with
" little John " for company and comfort, set out

io8

WORDSWORTH.

for a tour in Scotland, stopping at Keswick to
take up their old traveling companion, Coleridge. They had a car with one horse to carry
their modest luggage and for themselves occasionally to mount, but most of the journey was
on foot. The tour of six weeks was described
in the Diary of Miss Wordsworth, recently
published in one volume, which shows how a
succession of descriptions of scenery can be
made readable by a sprightly poetic mind inspired by delight in nature.
They stood before the grave of Burns, repeating to each other his own touching lines: —
" Is there a man, whose judgment clear,
Can others teach the course to steer,
Yet runs, himself, life's mad career,
Wild as the wave;
Here let him pause, and through a tear,
Survey this grave.
"The poor Inhabitant below
Was quick to learn and wise to know,
And keenly felt the friendly glow,
And softer flame;
But thoughtless follies laid him low,
And stained his name I "

Passing through Glasgow and the Lake District about Loch Lomond they returned by
Edinburgh and the Tweed, meeting for the first
time Walter Sco.tt, who for two or three days

MARY.

IO9

was their companion and guide. The impression then made on Wordsworth by Scott is
thus given in a letter written many years afterwards : " We were received with that frank
cordiality which, under whatever circumstances
I afterwards met him, always marked his manners ; and indeed I found him then in every respect — except, perhaps that his animal spirits
were somewhat higher — precisely the same
man that you knew in later life : the same
lively, entertaining conversation, full of anecdote- and averse from disquisition; the same
unaffected modesty about himself; the same
cheerful and benevolent and hopeful views of
man and the world."
The • travelers (Coleridge had parted from
them near Loch Lomond) reached home, September twenty-fifth, to find " Mary in perfect
health, Joanna Hutchinson with her, and John
asleep in the clothes-basket by the fire." William and Dorothy had been on a foraging
tour and brought back rich booty. At Inversnyde, on Loch Lomond, while waiting in a
ferry-house, Wordsworth was so affected by
the exceeding loveliness of the ferryman's sister, a young girl of fourteen summers, that he
pours upon her torrent upon torrent of admiration, in a succession of melodious stanzas of

no

WORDSWORTH,

unequal lengths, that fix her image upon paper
forever in the shining drapery of genius, and
are a sparkling illustration of the blissful dominion of beauty over the poetic heart: —
" Sweet Highland Girl, a very shower
. Of beauty is thy earthly dower !
Twice seven consenting years have shed
Their utmost bounty on thy head."

He then enumerates the features of the scenes
around her, concluding the first stanza as follows : —
" Yet, dream or vision as thou art,
I bless thee with a human heart:
God shield thee to thy latest years !
I neither know thee nor thy peers ;
And yet my eyes are rilled with tears."

The second opens thus: —
" With earnest feeling I shall pray
For thee when I am far away:
For never saw I mien or face,
In which more plainly I could trace
Benignity and home-bred sense
Ripening in perfect innocence."

The third begins : —
" What hand but would a garland cull
For thee who art so beautiful ?
O happy pleasure ! here to dwell
Beside thee in some heathy dell;
Adopt your homely ways, and dress
A shepherd, thou a shepherdess ! "

In the fourth and last, the enraptured poet

MARY.

Ill

utters his gratitude that he has been blest with
such a sight: —
" Now thanks to Heaven ! that of its grace
Hath led me to this lonely place.
Joy have I had ; and going hence
I bear away my recompense.
For I, methinks, till I grow old,
As fair before me shall behold,
As I do now, the cabin small,
The lake, the bay, the waterfall;
And Thee, the Spirit of them all."

After visiting the grave of Burns, Wordsworth addressed to the sons of Burns some
heartfelt sympathy and admonition in that form
of verse their father so loved. Here are the
first and last stanzas : —
" 'Mid crowded obelisks and urns
I sought the untimely grave of Burns :
Sons of the Bard, my heart still mourns
With sorrow true;
And more would grieve, but that it turns
Trembling to you.
" Let no mean hope your souls enslave;
Be independent, generous, brave •;
Your Father such example gave,
And such revere;
But be admonished by his grave,
And think, and fear ! "

Out of what common incidents the heart of
a poet can draw poetry! He puts new life
into common themes, or rather, through poetic

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WORDSWORTH.

warmth he brings out their beautiful inward
life. As the tourists were going up a hill, in
the valley below them a " Highland lass " was
reaping and singing. Here is the second of
the four stanzas of " The Solitary Reaper : —"
" No Nightingale did ever chant
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travelers in some shady haunt
Among Arabian sands :
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
In the spring time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides."

To exemplify Wordsworth's gifts I have held
up to view a few samples of the copious poetic
harvest reaped in their summer excursion.
In these years was written " The Prelude;
or, Growth of a Poet's Mind," begun in- 1799,
and finished in 1805, — a poem of about eight
thousand lines, in fourteen books. With the
purpose and quality of this autobiographical
poem the reader is acquainted through extracts
from it in the early chapters of our " Study."
Writing about " T h e Prelude," when it was
nearly finished, to a much valued friend, Sir
George Beaumont, to whonvin his letters, he
was cordially confidential, Wordsworth thus
frankly expresses himself in a passage which
has as much biographical value as any page
of the poem itself : —

MARY.

"3

" Two books more will conclude it. It will
be not much less than nine thousand lines, —
not hundred but thousand lines long, — an
alarming length ! and a thing unprecedented in
literary history that a man should talk so much
about himself. It is not self-conceit, as you
wiil know well, that has induced me to do this,
but real humility. I began the work because
I was unprepared to treat any more arduous
subject and diffident of my own powers. Here,
at least, I hoped that, to a certain degree, I
should be sure of succeeding, as I had nothing
to do but describe what I had felt and thought,
and therefore could not easily be bewildered.
This might have been done in narrower compass by a man of more address ; but I have
done my best. If, when the work shall be
finished, it appears to the judicious to have
redundancies, they shall be lopped off, if possible ; but this is very difficult to do, when a
man has written with thought; and this defect,
whenever I have suspected it, or found it to
exist in any writings of mine, I have always
found incurable. The fault lies too deep, and
is in the first conception."
Wordsworth's volume, albeit a poem, has a
realistic advantage over Goethe's celebrated
prose autobiography, "Wahrheit und Dich8

U4

WORDSWORTH.

tung " (Fact and Imagination), in that it is written in the midst of the growth, while the subtle process described was still in its ferment,
the record being thus made by a hand which
was like the index of an active machine, whose
motion registers its rate. Whereas Goethe's
record was set down by effort of memory, instead of in the warm presence of the mental
transformation, more than threescore years
throwing something like a veil of distance over
the facts. The consciousness of this dictated
to Goethe his very appropriate title, literal
truth of fact being at times in his recital encroached upon by involuntary modifications of
the imagination.
Wordsworth touches upon a profound critical principle when, at the end of the above extract, he says that his work being done with
thought, it is difficult to lop off redundancies,
the fault lying in the first conception. In " The
Prelude," as in " The Excursion/' and in some
of the longer of his other poems, there are occasionally what the French call des longueurs •>
passages which may be traced in a measure to
self-complacency in his own work, which, perhaps, a deficiency of humor prevented him from
rectifying ; and in some cases to a lack of
power to condense. His self-estimation, which

MARY,

115

in one so grandly constituted as he was stood at
times almost in the stead of a virtue, may have
led him to mistake that as poetical which was
only egotistical, such devilish tricks will selfesteem play the best of us. Other poets and
men of letters have all Wordsworth's self-sufficiency without his self-sufficingness. He was
self-sufficing from the largeness of his powers,
and especially from the predominance over his
thought and his conduct of the deep saving
qualities of human nature, those qualities which
give to it its essential humanity,—the moral
and spiritual attributes of man, — in Wordsworth ever present and active; so that, when
we come upon exhibitions of too much selfconsciousness, we can smile forgivingly, and
not, as with some other eminent writers, be
withheld from an indignant frown by charity
and sense of humility. Of Wordsworth may
be said what Coleridge said of Milton : " The
egotism of such a man is a revelation of spirit."
" The Prelude" is dedicated to Coleridge,
whom, in the course of the volume, he frequently appeals to, as he does towards the end
in -the following retrospective lines : —
" Thus, O Friend !
Through times of honor and through times of shame
Descending, have I faithfully retraced

u6

WORDSWORTH:
The perturbations of a youthful mind
Under a long-lived storm of great events, —
A story destined for thy ear."

" The Prelude " may be characterized as being at once precise and poetical, exalted and
simple, profound yet obvious, transcendent yet
clear. This remarkable poem might of itself
be profitably the subject of a long essay ; but
I will end what I have room to say of it here,
by citing from its pages a few of those deep
generic passages which embody so much of
truth and humanity in a few lines, — passages
wrought on those luminous mental elevations
to which the poet-thinker rises easily by virtue of the expansive power over thought of
the sensibility to the beautiful. From these
genial heights the vision descends upon a subject m t h psychic insights. A b e t t e r illustration of the mastering ken thus gained could
not be given than this first quotation, defining
man : —
" In the midst stood Man,
Outwardly, inwardly contemplated,
As, of all visible natures, crown, though born
Of dust, and kindred to the worm • a Being,
Both in perception and discernment, first
In every capability of rapture,
Through the divine effect of power and love ;
As, more than anything we know, instinct
With godhead, and, by reason and by will,
Acknowledging dependency sublime."

MARY.

117

In Wordsworth's more rapt moods he is apt,
all through " The Prelude," to appeal to his
friend Coleridge, — to whom the poem is dedicated, — as he does in these lines, where modesty and self-confidence are intermingled : —
" Dearest Friend!
If thou partake the animated faith
That Poets, even as Prophets, each with each
Connected in a mighty scheme of truth,
Have each his own peculiar faculty,
Heaven's gift, a sense that fits him to perceive
Objects unseen before, thou wilt not blame
The humblest of this band who dares to hope
That unto him hath also been vouchsafed
An insight that in some sort he possesses
A privilege whereby a work of his,
Proceeding from a source of untaught things,
Creative and enduring, may become
A power like one of Nature's."

In the following he gives fresh poetic expression to truths known, he says, to Harmodius and Aristogiton and Brutus : —
" That tyrannic power is weak,
Hath neither gratitude, nor faith, nor love,
Nor the support of good or evil men
To trust in ; that the godhead which is ours
Can never utterly be charmed or stilled ;
That nothing has a natural right to last
But equity and reason ; that all else
Meets foes irreconcilable, and at best
Lives only by variety of disease."

Wordsworth and his friend Beaupuis, in their

n8

WORDSWORTH.

talks on the Loire in 1792, had, one can
readily believe, no subject more animating than
the abuses and voluptuous life and immoralities
of regal courts. But is there not an alarming
likeness between the picture drawn in the following passage and the corruptions and perversions and meannesses of our own (not regal)
but republican and democratic politics, and the
men who rule them :—
" More delight
We took, and let this freely be confessed,
In painting to ourselves the miseries
Of royal courts, and that voluptuous life
Unfeeling, where the man who is of soul
The meanest thrives the most; where dignity,
True personal dignity, abideth not;
A light, a cruel, and vain world cut off
From the natural inlets of just sentiment,
From lowly sympathy and chastening truth;
Where good and evil interchange their names,
And thirst for bloody spoils abroad is paired
With vice at home.' ,

Here is a brief but valuable sketch of himself in early manhood : —
" Suffice it here to add, that, somewhat stern
In temperament, withal a happy man,
And therefore bold to look on painful things,
Free likewise of the world, and thence more bold,
I summoned my best skill, and toiled, intent
To anatomize the frame of social life,
Yea, the whole body of society
Searched to its heart."

MARY.

119

One more extract I must make, it is so
musical, so poetical, so thoughtful, so Wordsworthian : —
" Ye motions of delight that haunt the sides
Of the green hills ; ye breezes and soft airs,
Whose subtle intercourse with breathing flowers,
Feelingly watched, might teach man's haughty race
How without injury to take, to give
Without offense; ye who, as if to show
The wondrous influence of power gently used,
Bend the complying heads of lordly pines,
And, with a touch, shift the stupendous clouds
Through the whole compass of the sky ; ye brooks,
Muttering along the stones, a busy noise
By day, a quiet sound in silent night;
Ye waves, that out of the great deep steal forth
In a calm hour to kiss the pebbly shore,
Not mute, and then retire, fearing no storm ;
And you, ye groves, whose ministry it is
To interpose the covert of your shades,
Even as a sleep, between the heart of man
And outward troubles, between man himself,
Not seldom, and his own uneasy heart;
Oh, that I had a music and a voice
Harmonious as your own, that I might tell
What ye have done for me I "

XI.
JOHN WORDSWORTH.
SAINTE-BEUVE, when about to write a biography, would look, as keenly as opportunities
would allow, into the characters and ruling tendencies of those nearest of kin to his subject,
of father and mother, of sister and brother.
Thus he got at the traits characteristic of the
race, and was helped in the interpretation of the
individual he wished to portray, especially in
his obscurer or seemingly anomalous qualities.
Had we no other means of judging of DorothyWordsworth but her Scottish Diary, that by itself would aid us in taking more closely into our
minds the innate love of nature that showed
itself, even in William's early boyhood, His
younger brother John, too,- had marked traits in
common with him, the similarity becoming the
more saliant from John's having had no literary
culture, and being brought up to the sea. He
attained early to the highest rank in the mercantile marine. With the poetic side of his

JOHN

WORDSWORTH.

121

brother so strong was his sympathy, that in
1801, while critics, the willing and sincere
mouthpieces of the shallow insusceptibility of
the day, were sending forth an almost universal
hiss of derision at the " Lyrical Ballads," John
wrote to a friend : " T h e poems will become
popular in time, but by degrees. The fact is,
there are not a great many persons who will be
pleased with them at first, but those that are
pleased with them will be pleased in a high
degree, and they will be people of sense ; and this
will have weight, and then people who neither
understand, nor wish to understand them, will
praise them."
Such was John's congeniality .with William's
high vocation, such his interest in his brother's
labors, heightened by fraternal affection, that,
being a bachelor, he persisted, after two unsuccessful voyages, made for the same purpose, in
making a third, that he might earn the means
of assisting his brother and sister. He sailed
from Portsmouth in February, 1805, as commander of the Abergavenny, East Indiaman.
Through the ignorance of the pilot the ship
struck off Portland, and the captain and most
of the crew and passengers were lost. The sad
tidings Wordsworth announces to his friend Sir
George Beaumont in these affecting words : —

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WORDSWORTH.

"This calamitous news we received at two
o'clock to-day, and I write to you from a house
of mourning. My poor sister, and my wife
who loved him almost as we did (for he was
one of the most amiable of men), are in miserable affliction, which I do all in my power to
alleviate; but Heaven knows I want consolation myself. I can say nothing higher of my
ever dear brother than that he was worthy of
his sister, who is now weeping beside me, and
of the friendship of Coleridge ; meek, affectionate, silently enthusiastic, loving all quiet
things, and a poet in everything but words."
In the same excited, disconsolate tone, he
continues and concludes the letter. He would
not be comforted. Nine days later he resumes
the subject in another long letter to Sir George,
from which I make two short extracts : " Of
all the human beings whom I ever knew, he
was the man of the most rational desires, the
most sedate habits, and the most perfect selfcommand. . . . . I shall never forget him,
never lose sight of him : there is a bond between us yet, the same as if he were living,
nay, far more sacred, calling upon me to do my
utmost, as he to the last did his utmost, to live
in honor and worthiness."
Again, three weeks later, in answer to a let

JOHN WORDSWORTH.

123

ter of heartfelt condolence from Sir George, he
writes to him another long letter, at the conclusion of which he quotes a noble passage
from Aristotle's " Synopsis of the Virtues and
Vices." I will not refrain from giving the first
part of this letter, long as it is, so finely Wordsworthian is it, and a page so profound and spiritual, that to have written it would have been
an honor to Plato : —
" GRASMERE, March 12, 1805.

" As I have said, your last letter affected me
much. 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 everything
were to end here ? Would it not be blasphemy

124

WORDSWORTH.

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. As to my departed
brother, who leads our minds at present to
these reflections, he walked all his life pure
among many impure. Except a little hastiness
of temper, when anything was done in a clumsy
or bungling manner, or when improperly contradicted upon occasions of not much importance, he had not one vice of his profession. I
never heard an oath, or even an indelicate expression or allusion, from him in my life ; his
modesty was equal to that of the purest woman.
In prudence, in meekness, in self-denial, in fortitude, in just desires and elegant and refined
enjoyments, with an entire simplicity of manners, life, and habit, he was all that could be
wished for in man : strong in health, and of a
noble person, with every hope about him that
could render life dear, thinking of, and living
only for, others, — and we see what has been
his end! So good must be better; so high
must be destined to be higher."

JOHN- WORDSWORTH.

125

Southey was a neighbor and friend whom
Wordsworth loved and esteemed, although
he could not greatly admire his poetry. To
Southey he wrote, the day after the arrival of
the sad tidings, in these grief-laden words : " If
you could bear to come to this house of mourning to-morrow, I should be forever thankful.
We weep much to-day, and that relieves us."
He concludes as follows : —
" Oh ! it makes the heart groan, that, with
such a beautiful world as this to live in, and
such a soul as that of man's is by nature and
gift of God, that we should go about on such
errands as we do, destroying and laying waste;
and ninety-nine of us in a hundred never easy
in any road that travels towards peace and
quietness. And yet, what virtue and what
goodness, what heroism and courage, what triumphs of disinterested love everywhere ; and
human life, after all, what it is ! Surety, this
is not to be forever, even on this perishable
planet! Come to us to-morrow, if you can;
your conversation, I know, will do me good."
Who was Sir George Beaumont ? A baronet, a man of fortune, a landscape-painter of
some distinction, a descendant of the celebrated Elizabethan dramatist, Francis Beaumont, a cultivated gentleman, who was among

126

WORDSWORTH.

the first to discover the genius of Wordsworth.
In 1803, while lodging in the same house with
Coleridge at Keswick, he made a present to
Wordsworth of a small tract of land near Keswick, on which was a beautiful site for a house.
This he did in order that Wordsworth might
have the satisfaction of living near Coleridge.
Wordsworth did not accept the gift, but an act
so sympathetic and generous was the beginning of a friendship which near acquaintanceship knit into intimacy.
To Wordsworth the mechanical act of writing was always irksome, and so unwelcome the
necessity of resorting to it, even to commit to
paper the promptings of inspiration, that some
of them were lost and many more would have
been, if, as says his nephew and biographer,
" Providence had not blessed him with a wife,
a sister, a wife's sister, and a daughter, whose
lives were bound up in his life, as his was in
theirs, and who felt — what the world was slow
in admitting — that his poems were destined
for immortality, and that it was no small privilege to be instrumental in conveying them to
posterity, it is probable that many of his verses,
muttered by him on the roads, or on the hills,
or on the terrace-walks of his own garden,
would have been scattered to the winds, like

JOHN WORDSWORTH.

127

the plaintive accents of the deserted Ariadne
on the coast of Naxos, —
" ' Quae cuncta aerii discerpunt irrita venti.'"

From some unaccountable morbid nervousness, at this particular period the holding of a
pen was absolutely painful, so that he put off
from week to week acknowledging the rare and
most gratifying kindness of Sir George, making to him this apology : " 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 one
bundle of uneasiness ; a perspiration starts out
all over me, and my chest is oppressed in a
manner which I cannot describe. This is a
sad weakness; for I am sure, though it is
chiefly owing to the state of my body, that by
exertion of mind I might in part control it.
So, however, it i s ; and I mention it, because I
am sure when you are made acquainted with
the circumstances, though the extent t o which
it exists nobody can well conceive, you will
look leniently upon my silence, and rather pity
than blame me ; though I must still continue
to reproach myself, as I have done bitterly
every day for these last eight weeks."
In a fine sonnet he thus refers to the gift: —•

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WORDSWORTH.
" Beaumont! it was thy wish that I should rear
A seemly cottage in this sunny dell,
On favored ground, thy gift, —where I might dwell
In neighborhood with one to me most dear ;
That, undivided, we, from year to year,
Might work in our high calling."

In the beginning of 1806, after speaking, in
a letter to Sir George, of the death of Nelson,
he devotes a paragraph to Pitt, which seems to
me to give a key to Pitt's whole political life,
and to carry so sound a judgment as to deserve
to be the final judgment of history : —
" Mr. Pitt is also gone ! by tens of thousands
looked upon in like manner as a great loss.
For my own part, as probably you know, I
have never been able to regard his political life
with complacency. I believe him, however, to
have been as disinterested a man,.and as true
a lover of his country, as it was possible for so
ambitious a man to be. His Jirst wish (though
probably unknown to himself) was that his
country should prosper under his administration ; his next, that it should prosper. Could
the order of these wishes have been reversed,
Mr. Pitt would have avoided many of the grievous mistakes into which, I think, he fell. I
know, my dear Sir George, you will give me
credit for speaking without arrogance ; and I
am aware it is not unlikely you may differ

JOHN

WORDSWORTH.

129

greatly from me in these points. But I like, in
some things, to differ with a friend, and that
he should know I differ from him ; it seems to
make a more healthy friendship, to act as a
relief to those notions and feelings which we
have in common, and to give them a grace and
spirit which they could not otherwise possess.,,
In the autumn of this year, having just read
in a newspaper that the death of Fox was
hourly expected, Wordsworth wrote, during an
evening walk after a stormy day, six short stanzas, of which these are the last two : —
" A Power is passing from the earth
To breathless Nature's dark abyss ;
But when the great and good depart,
What is it more than this, —" That Man, who is from God sent forth,
Doth yet again to God return ?
Such ebb and flow must ever be,
Then wherefore should we mourn ? "

Fox, Pitt, and Nelson died within a few
months of each other ; Nelson first, October 21,
1805. He is the basis of reality upon which
Wordsworth built up his grand ideal of " The
Happy Warrior," which might be called an
ethical compendium for the conduct of life. As
a poem it is profound, spiritual, and yet so intelligible and appreciable by all minds that it
9

130

WORDSWORTH.

should be printed in letters of gold as a supplement to the Ten Commandments, flaming
before the reader the deepest law of conduct,
the most solid conditions of human happiness,
in a rhythmical form, so compact with noblest
duty and lofty moral obligation that it might
serve as a pillar of light, marshaling all aspiring
men, as well as novices in life, the way they
should go. As one of the choice products of
human genius, which cannot be too often presented to view, I would strengthen and adorn
my little volume by copying here the whole of
it, were there not nearly one hundred lines. It
would make, too, an appropriate ending to a
chapter named after so noble a character as
Captain John Wordsworth, in whom were found,
says his brother, many elements portrayed in
" The Happy Warrior." I must, however, give
as a short sample, the opening lines : —
" Who is the Happy Warrior ? Who is he
That every man in arms should wish to be ?
— It is the generous spirit, who, when brought
Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought
Upon the plan that pleased his childish thought:
Whose high endeavors are an inward light
That makes the path before him always bright:
Who with a natural instinct to discern
What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn ;
Abides by this resolve, and stops not there,
But makes his moral being his prime care."

XII.
POETS.

IN the Preface to the aecond edition of the
" Lyrical Ballads," — a long preface which, in
aiming to vindicate the poems there printed
against presumptuous, and ignorant judgments,
becomes a comprehensive and acute disquisition on poetry, — in this preface Wordsworth
says, that what distinguishes these poems from
the popular poems of the day is this : " The
feeling therein developed gives importance to
the action and situation, and not the action
and situation to the feeling."
When the poet of more ambition than inspiration sits down to write, it is to .put into captivating verse a subject' he has chosen, because,
by its historic interest or its present vogue, or
by the social elevation of its chief agents, or
the exciting character of its incidents, it promises to be at once attractive. The poet of more
inspiration than ambition does not choose his
subject: his subject chooses him. His susceptibility being agitated by a warm breath in-

132

WORDSWORTH.

wardly breathed upon itself, or by some outward
occasion, in harmony with its present mood, a
form begins to crystallize, so alive with feeling that it takes tyrannous possession of him,
holding at its beck all his best powers of plastic
thought to round itself into concrete existence
and proportion. Genuine poetry is thus always
a creation; that is, the soul of the poet is generative enough to vitalize into a melodious visibility its own images, or to give new life to
images supplied from without. Hence, in true
poetry, — so true that it is to endure and endure
ever fresh, — the feeling must give all the importance to any subject, whether the subject be
Achilles or a daisy. Which is as much as to
say: the fountain of poetry is the heart of the
individual poet, whose aesthetic motions his art
moulds into shapes, giving a body to what, but
for his art, would be airy nothings. But if his
heart (that is, his sensibility) is not deep and
broad, and pure enough to furnish creative
streams, fresh streams never seen before, and
that, being nevertheless ambitious of poetic
fame, he collects, through his art (that is, his
intellect polished by some sense of the beautiful) and uses as material, not creations of
his own brain, which has not quickening power
to furnish them, but from the large common

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property of accumulated floating poetic capital, or from the treasures stored in other poets,
he draws his ideas as well as his forms, —
in that case he writes from a reservoir, not
from a fountain. And thence, however captivating for a time his art and fancy and
knowledge may make his verse, its gloss soon
wears off, and not having the sparkle imparted
by strong inward soul-power, it loses after a
while its look of life, and shows for what it is,
not original, but derivative, poetry. In one of
his letters, commenting upon the <f White Doe
of Rylstone," Wordsworth writes : " The poetry, if there be any in the work, proceeds, as
it ought to do, from the soul of man, communicating its creative energies to the images of the
external world." Full and pure and urgent must
be the psychic fountain-head, if the streams
thence proceeding are to be lively and lasting.
In another letter he writes: "There is
scarcely one of my poems that does not aim to
direct the attention to some moral sentiment,
or to some general principle, or law of thought,
of of our intellectual constitution." Observe
that this is a totally different thing from writing a poem with the direct purpose of inculcating a moral. Wordsworth was too good an
artist for that. Intimate with nature from hav-

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ing such joy in her, and his mental organization being predominantly spiritual and moral,
and noting the unity there is in all creation, he
delights to fuse the affections of the mind with
natural objects and appearances, and to body
forth the union in poems remarkable for a
grand simplicity of style and truth of sentiment. Wordsworth looked upon the vocation
of the poet to be, to elevate and purify the
mind. To a friend he writes: " You have
given me praise for having reflected faithfully
in my poems the feelings of human nature.
But a great poet ought to do more than this ;
he ought, in a certain degree, to rectify men's
feelings, to give them new compositions of feeling, to render their feelings more sane, pure*
and permanent; in short, more consonant to
nature, that is, to eternal nature, and the great
moving spirit of things. He ought to travel
before men occasionally as well as at their
sides." On another occasion he said : " Every
great poet is a teacher: I wish either to be
considered as a teacher or as nothing." And
through the union in him of intellectual amplitude with depth and breadth and truth of
feeling, and rare poetic gift, he is a teacher, a
gracious, beneficent teacher. He rebathes the
world of the English tongue in his own spirit,

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invigorating it, elevating it, and educating it
with a new lesson. And this is the exalted
function of all great poets. How the glorious
Greeks were freshened and strengthened by the
Homeric songs, — a new thing under the sun !
How the soul of Dante warmed and widened
the soul of Italy! Who can compute the force
that Shakespeare added to England ? Who
can weigh what he gives to all who speak the
English tongue ? Is not Germany another and
a wiser Germany since Goethe ?
So much has been said in these pages in
commendation, just commendation, I trust, of
Wordsworth, that he invites and can bear some
disparagement. The mention of Goethe we
make the occasion to pick a crow with him.
He is unjust to Goethe. It may be doubted
whether, during that very cold winter in Goslar, he mastered German sufficiently to enjoy
Goethe's verse. We have seen that he was
busy there upon reminiscences of " Lucy," and
upon " Poets' Epitaphs," securing with his pen
these and other treasures for posterity. He did
not take to German modes of thought and life.
In the " Memoir " there is a chapter of reminiscences of conversations with Wordsworth,
furnished chiefly by two cultivated neighbors,
— Lady Richardson and Mrs. Davy. In an

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WORDSWORTH.

out-of-door talk /with Lady Richardson, August 26, 1841, he divides all eminent poets into
two classes : those in whose poems the individual writer never appears, who breathe life into
Everything they touch, but never show themselves. These are the universal poets, first
among whom he placed Homer and Shakespeare. In the second class he placed those
whom you can trace individually in all they
write, as in Milton and Spenser. To Goethe
he refused a place in the first-class, and would
not allow him a high place in the second ; " so
that," he concludes, " I consider him to be a
very artificial writer, aiming to be universal,
and yet constantly exposing his individuality,
which his character was not of a kind to dignify. He had not sufficiently clear moral perceptions to make him anything but an artificial
writer."
Is Goethe more transparent through " Faust"
than Shakespeare is through " Hamlet ?" What
can you learn of the man Goethe in " Iphigenia" more than you can of the man Shakespeare in "The Tempest?" In "Hermann and
Dorothea" is there not a Homeric objectivity?
The Englishman of the seventeenth centurv is
visible in "Julius Caesar" and "Othello," as
well as in " Henry V." and " King John ; " and

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*37

in Goethe's poetic embodiments the German
necessarily shines through. " Werther " and
" Faust," and Goethe's ballads and lyrics, so
musical and feeling-full, could not have been
written anywhere but in Germany. Who can
conceive of the " Divina Comedia" being
produced out of Italy ? Goethe an artificial
writer ! Goethe's conceptions — and therefore
his sentences and pages —come from an intellect singularly complete in all compartments,
steeped in rich sensibilities that were nourished by closest familiarity with nature, and
with man as the highest in nature. A wider
naturalist than Wordsworth was Goethe. Besides the poetic love for nature, which the two
had in common, Goethe was a scientific lover
of her charms and wonders. Such is not the
soil that artificiality grows in. His style, in
prose and verse, is noted for its directness and
clearness and inartificiality. In style, Goethe
and Wordsworth are both, simple. In Goethe
it is often a rich simplicity, in Wordsworth
a grand ; Goethe's simplicity is at times grand,
Wordsworth's is never rich. In both the inward moulds the outward, the substance the
form. You are not arrested by the words, by
the dress ; these are transparent, and let you
at once see the fact or feeling.

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WORDSWORTH.

The misjudgment on Goethe by Wordsworth was compounded from several ingredients. Insularity had something to do with i t ;
fifty years ago, England's poets and scholars
were much more insular than they are now.
Some of it was traceable to Wordsworth's personal limitations (the largest and strongest and
best have their limitations, even Shakespeare
and Washington) ; some to the shadow wherewith orthodoxy is apt to darken the perception
of its votaries, — a shadow which is not unfrequently deepened by that puritanic pharisaism chargeable upon Old England as well
as New. It were not at all unlikely that the
judgment conveyed in the last sentence of
Words-worth's quoted opinion had some influence in giving their tone to certain critiques
on " Wilhelm Meister " that appeared in some
of the leading British Reviews. These critics
mistook the absence of a veil of conventionality
for destruction of the guard of morality. Certain things and relations are spoken of more
undisguisedly in this great fiction than is customary in England. Goethe uses this German
freedom to give a fuller, richer picture of human nature and social motives and complications ; but this freedom he does not abuse to
excuse immorality. It is uncharitable as well

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as insular and pharisaical to pass condemnatory sentence upon a neighboring people's customs and modes of feeling and thought, with
which moral views are interwoven. When Murray, the London publisher, asked Lord Byron
to write an account of the family life of the
Italians, Byron refused for good personal reasons, and added: "You would not judge them
rightfully in England; your moral is not their
moral." On certain subjects the light from the
central sun of Duty falls at somewhat different angles in Germany and England ; and it is
more self-righteous than safe for an Englishman to conclude that the beams from the controlling, fertilizing luminary strike with more
vertical life upon him than upon the German.
Wordsworth has written effective poems on
the betrayal of women by lovers, but not one
of his is more effective, or, as poem, more simple than Goethe's " Faithless Boy;" nor is any
one of Wordsworth's so rapid in its movement,
so magnetic in its effect: still less is the moral
in any of them impressed with such overpowering emphasis, with what might be called such
a spiritual thunderclap, as in " T h e Faithless
Boy." The first stanza Wordsworth would not
have written, and would doubtless have condemned when he read it. In Goethe there was

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a warmth of temperament foreign to the nature
of Wordsworth ; and to this warmth we owe
the many charming, healthy, female creations
in Goethe's poems and fictions, and in a measure the animating glow that pervades his pages.
To the same warmth we owe the whole multitude of Shakespeare's lovely women, a resplendent creation, that helps to adorn and enliven
and purify the world. In Wordsworth the
poetic energy was not exerted in this direction, except to give an everlasting "Phantom
of Delight," or other idealizations of reality
like the " Sweet Highland Girl." In the eight
thousand lines of " The Prelude " there is no
woman, except the " Dame" with whom he
lodged in his school-days, and a brief allusion
to his sister, and a briefer to his future wife.
There is no rich female figure held visionarily
before his mind for a full portraiture. Nor is
there any such in the " Excursion," a poem in
which he aimed at giving readers his best, and
which is even longer than " The Prelude." The
female figures in " The Excursion " are fine
sketches, subservient to a purpose. Now this
is a want, aesthetically speaking, — a great want.
Is not some of Wordsworth's unpopularity due
to it ? and possibly some of his lack of manysidedness, and of general glow ? The human

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being loses by any truncation: as the revolving grindstone gives edge and brightness to
the steel implement pressed upon it, the activity of the animal feelings, in their endless
revolutions, give efficacy and lustre to the
higher. Through his many-sidedness, and a
strong interior propulsive power, the author
of " Faust " belongs to Wordsworth's first class,
the universal poets. Yet Wordsworth himself,
it may be, performed the more successfully the
noble task he set himself, through his very
one-sidedness. A temperate man in all his
habits, a man of healthy sensibilities, of clear,
broad, cultivated intelligence, and warmed by
that supreme glow which is ever hatching
poetic imaginations, passes the best of his
time in walking about a region remarkable,
through lake, mountain, and valley, for natural
beauty, murmuring as he goes melodious verse,
which issues from a fountain of purest sympathies, that are fed by the ever-fresh sights
and sounds of inexhaustible nature: such is
Wordsworth, a man whose splendid faculties
delight in the highest mental mood, — that of
productive meditation.
A cultivated poet-thinker, Wordsworth was
of course a superior critic of poetry. To be
sure of this one has only to read his " Preface/*

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and its " Supplement." Scattered through his
letters and the reports of his conversation given
in the " Memoir" are repeated evidences of
his critical competency. On the occasion of
Scott's undertaking, in 1805, an edition of
Dryden, Wordsworth writes him a letter, beginning : " My dear Scott,-—I was much pleased
to hear of your engagement with Dryden ; not
that he is, as a poet, any great favorite of mine.
I admire his talents and genius highly, but his
is not a poetical genius."
The two printed pages which the letter fills
scintillate with the insights of the poet-critic,
who, by the way, affirms that " there is not a
single image from nature in the whole body
of Dryden's works." I cite the letter chiefly
to note what he says of the character of language, reiterating the principle which lies at
the bottom of his remarks on poetic language
in the " Preface." The language of Dryden,
says Wordsworth, " is not language that is, in
the highest sense of the word, poetical, being
neither of the imagination nor of the passions ;
I mean the amiable, the ennobling, or the intense passions." But is language in itself poetical or unpoetical ? Could not two poets use
the same vocabulary, say of a hundred words, to
write each a short poem, the one impassioned

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143

the other unimpassioned, the one poetical the
other tame ? To words, passion and poetry are
imparted solely by their combination. The
true poet combines words creatively, so that the
reader is enlivened, is warmed by them: the artificial poet combines exactly the same words
feebly, frostily. So of the artificial diction,
called poetic diction, the artificiality is in the
poet who misuses phrases and words, not in the
words themselves. The very same words might
be used by a strong, earnest writer to produce
hearty effects. When Wordsworth thought he
was making a revolution in poetic diction, was
he not going deeper and making a revolution
in poetic feeling and taste? With new currents of healthy sensibility he swept away the
versified rubbish collected by unhealthy sensibility, which misused language, thus bringing
words, honest in themselves, into discredit.
When Wordsworth writes the word imagination he means poetic imagination. Imagination, be it said, is not, as he terms it, a faculty,
but the function of a faculty. When I recognize a friend who comes before me, I do so by
virtue of one of the functions inherent in every
intellectual faculty, that is, by memory. If I
recall his image to my mind when he is gone,
I exercise an intellectual function higher than

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memory, and that is imagination. I call up his
image to my mind. By means of imagination
I hold in my mind the materials collected by
memory. Thus, imagination is essential to the
commonest daily processes of business. By
means of it the mind grasps and handles its
materials, just as the hand grasps and handles
physical objects. To imagine is thus a purely
intellectual operation.
But the intellect, immense, wonderful power
as it is, is not, as a mental agency, so immense
and wonderful as the feelings; these are the
pith and marrow of man's life, the motive forces
of conduct, and of these the intellect is but
the instrument, the passive tool, — how effective a tool we learn when we see a man of
strong intellect habitually acted on by strong,
very selfish feelings. Now the feelings, thus
using the intellect, when they are incited by
one of the nobler, more expansive of themselves, the feeling for the beautiful, stimulate
the intellect to a high tension in presenting,
for their satisfaction, all kinds of images, combining and modifying them, at the bidding of
the feelings, for various effects. Thence it has
come that this action of the intellect, under
pressure of the expansive, aspiring feeling for
the beautiful, has got to be called imagination.

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145

In this use of the term imagination is involved
a psychological misconception ; for to imagine
is a purely intellectual process. The intellect
being called upon for a vigorous and its most
captivating performance of this process by the
feelings, when themselves are swayed by the
feeling for the beautiful, imagination has come
to be used as synonymous almost with poetry.
When meant to signify this elevated performance of its function, as it always is by Wordsworth, it should be called creative or poetic imagination. 1
1
See the author's volume, Essays JEsthetical: Essay, What
is Poetry ?

10

XIII.
SONNETS.

T H E " Lyrical Ballads" were published in
1800. Since that, Wordsworth's reputation
had been slowly growing. His admirers were
not numerous, but they were a choice class,
led by Coleridge, Sir George Beaumont, De
Quincey, Wilson. Enemies of course he had.
Success is a strong fertilizer, bringing up rapid
crops of the weeds of envy and jealousy, particularly among clever, ambitious men of talent
barren of genius. So that when in 1807 appeared two more volumes of " Poems by William Wordsworth," his former detractors, embittered by the vitality there was in this heterodox poet, indignant that he should presume to
be alive after the stabs they had given him, assailed the new volumes with their old malignity
envenomed by their failure. When we reflect
that the new volumes contained " She was a
Phantom of Delight," " T h e Happy Warrior/'
" The Seven Sisters/' " Resolution and Independence;" some of his best Sonnets, including

SONNETS.

H7

those grand martial ones to Liberty, and other
poems of the same stamp, we can perceive that
in the first decade of the nineteenth century
critics of poetry were not yet out of the slough
of arrogant ignorance, and that their effrontery
was equal to their blindness. And these critical sciolists were for years flattered by an appearance of success in their endeavors to crush
Wordsworth ; for the effect of their strictures
so checked the sale of the volumes, that no
new edition was called for frpm 1807, the year
of their publication, to 1815.
Meanwhile the Poet was as firm and as confident in his belief in their durability as he was
in that of the mountains that daily delighted
his vision, and as calm, amid these blasts of injurious comment as one of his neighbor lakes,
when in a sunny June morning it reflects the
hills and the heavens in the smooth mirror of
its deep waters. Among many letters from
Wordsworth, given in the " Memoir," the most
interesting, and"one of the most valuable, morally and aesthetically, ever written by a great
poet, is a letter to Lady Beaumont, dated May
21, 1807. Lady Beaumont, one of his warmest
friends and admirers, having, among the earliest, already read them, writes to him to express her interest in them, and her solicitude

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WORDSWORTH.

as to their reception by the public. Wordsworth opens his answer with cordial thanks,
begging her not to have any anxiety about the
opposition the poems may excite, and then continues :—
" It is impossible 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 hurry of images that
present themselves to me, — what have they to
do with endless 'talking about things nobody
cares anything for, except as far as their own

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149

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
ampng 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,

i5o

WORDSWORTH.

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 i$ mortal of us) are mouldered
in our graves."
I give the most striking part of this long letter. It presents prominently to view the selfconfidence of Wordsworth, which, in a man of
so much worth, and a poet of so much power,
shines here as a virtue, enabling him to bear
and defy neglect and scoffs, and to walk right
on in the upward path he had deliberately entered.
The Rev. F. W. Robertson, of Brighton, England, that spiritually-gifted preacher and sound
thinker, in an admirable lecture on Wordsworth, in 1853, declares wisely that the first
qualification for appreciating poetry is unworldliness ; and then thus defines worldliness : " By
worldliness I mean entanglement in the temporal and visible. It is the spirit of worldliness which makes a man love show, splendor,
rank, title, and sensual enjoyments; and occupies his attention, chiefly or entirely, with conversation respecting merely passing events, and
passing acquaintances."
The poet being the cordial mouth-piece of
the most momentous, the finest, the truest

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151

truth, truth of feeling, any spuriousness or pretense is like a false note in music, and, while
marring the rhythm of the poem, it jars the
soul of the poet. And therefore to him is especially .offensive and disheartening the artificiality, the hollowness, the shallow pretension,
the hypocrisy, of worldly society, with its deceptive varnish, its materialism, its impossibility of
attaining to any beauty of proportions. To a
poet of the reach and earnestness and spirituality of Wordsworth, this most unpoetic side
of humanity, which is always presented by fashionable circles, would at all times be discouraging enough to untune him for any higher
effort than indignant denunciation; and so, at
the opening of the century, when the political
existence of England was threatened by Bonaparte, and he, Wordsworth, was, out of the
depths of his English heart, pouring forth noble
sonnets to liberty, this worldly side of human
nature, so grossly and unblushingly displayed,
drove him almost to hopelessness. The following lines, which make the larger half of a sonnet addressed to Coleridge in 1802, give rhythmical utterance to this feeling: —
" Oh, friend ! I know not which way I must look
For comfort, being, as I am, opprest
To think that now our life is only drest
For show ; mean handwork of craftsman, cook,

15 Z

WORDS WOR TH.
Or groom ! We must run glittering like a brook
In the open sunshine, or we are unblest;
The wealthiest man among us is the best:
No grandeur now in nature or in book
Delights us/ 7

Wordsworth was an active patriot; and he
was a genuine, not a demagogic patriot: he
was not a flatterer of England, of her government or people. When the news reached England, in 1808, of the Convention of Cintra,
whereby a defeated French army, under Junot,
was allowed to return to France, there arose
among many of the sturdiest Englishmen a
cry of wrath and shame. Wordsworth issued a
pamphlet, which Canning pronounced the most
eloquent political production since Burke ; and
Charles Lamb, in a letter to Coleridge, says of
i t : " Its power over me was like that which
Milton's pamphlets must have had over his contemporaries who were turned to them. What
a piece of prose ! "
To know how warm and sound a patriot
Wordsworth was, one should read the Sonnets
to Liberty. They are in two parts, the first
embracing those written between 1802 and
1806, twenty-six in number. Take this as a
sample of their quality : —
" Milton ! thou should be living at this hour ;
England hath need of thee: she is a fen

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153

Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, th' heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh, raise us up, return to us again !
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea :
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness ; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay."

Between the two parts of the Sonnets comes
an ode, written in 1807, when Napoleon was
at the height of Imperial power. This ode is
a picture, as graphic as eloquent, of the blasting rule of Napoleon on the Continent. The
first strophe ends : —
" Melt, Principalities, before her melt!
Her love ye hailed — her wrath have felt!
But she through many a change of form hath gone,
And stands amidst you now an armed creature,
"Whose panoply is not a thing put on,
But the live scales of a portentous nature ;
That, having wrought its way from birth to birth,
Stalks round — abhorred by Heaven, a terror to the
Earth !»

The second part contains forty sonnets. The
fourth of these, written in 1807, opens with this
prophecy, —
" High deeds, O Germans, are to come from you ! " —

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WORDSWORTH.

a prophecy grandly fulfilled six years later.
Many relate to the conflict in Spain, several
to the Tyrolese and their brave fight. , One
opens with this clear definition of Honor : —
" Say, what is Honor ? 'T is the finest sense
Of justice which the human mind can frame,
Intent on each lurking frailty to disclaim,
And guard the way of life from all offense
Suffered or done."

The number, excellence, and variety of
Wordsworth's Sonnets give him a claim to be
called the chief of sonneteers. For him the
sonnet is not, as it is for almost all English
poets who have written it, a short poem interjected, as it were, among longer poems, in momentary moods, when a single idea or person
or sentiment appeals to the poet for brief concentrated expression. Besides hundreds, originated in this way, he has taken the sonnet as
a form of stanza to embody long poems. Thus,
in a series of one hundred and eighteen, in
three parts, entitled " Ecclesiastical Sonnets,"
he delivers a poet's commentary on the history
and vicissitudes of the Church of England from
the days of the Druids to modern times. Here
is a poem of more than sixteen hundred lines,
on a wide, deep, various, national subject, offering rich opportunities to a poet whose mind,

SONNETS.

iS5

like Wordsworth's, through fineness and fullness of organization, -gets intuitive insights
which make of it a kind of magic mirror
wherein others can behold reflected much of
divine truth and law. Intuitions into the feelings and aspirations of the human heart are a
different domain from that of opinions upon
institutions and humanly established forms. In
the same sonnet sometimes the reader may feel
himself attracted and warmed by the sentiment,
and repelled by the opinion. Many of Wordsworth's admirers will be unwilling to subscribe
to the Sonnet on Laud, but few will refuse to
him full sympathy with the following, which
illustrates the suppression of the Monasteries : —
" The lovely nun (submissive, but more meek
Through saintly habit than from effort due
To unrelenting mandates that pursue
With equal wrath the steps of strong and weak)
Goes forth, — unveiling timidly a cheek
Suffused with blushes of celestial hue,
While through the convent's gate to open view
Softly she glides, another home to seek.
Not Iris,'issuing from her cloudy shrine,
An apparition more divinely bright ! Not more attractive to the dazzled sight
Those watery glories, on the stormy brine
Pour'd forth, while summer suns at distance shine,
And the green vales lie hush'd in sober light!''

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WORDSWORTH.

The latter half of the one-headed " Wiccliffe "
does what deep thinkers, especially great poets,
are apt to do unconsciously: it sets forth
through an individual illustration a generic
principle or universal truth. The lines describe
the spread of truth in all cases where are involved the broad interests of humanity. The
remains of Wickliffe being by the opponents
of his reformatory spirit exhumed and" the
ashes flung into the nearest brook, the " voice
that walks upon the winds, though seldom
heard by busy human kind," thus speaks : —
" As thou these ashes, little brook! wilt bear
Into the Avon, Avon to the tide
Of Severn, Severn to the narrow seas,
Into main Ocean they, this deed accurst
An emblem yields to friends and enemies
How the bold Teacher's doctrine, sanctified
By truth, shall spread, throughout the world dispersed."

With all the proper deference to Wordsworth
and other churchmen, it may be said that a
fallacy runs through the Ecclesiastical Sonnets.
Wordsworth assumes that the Church of England is a heavenly institution, — an institution
especially founded and favored by God. Such
a position is, must be by the constitution of the
human mind, pure assumption, its only basis,
human imagination heated by pride. In church
matters, more than in others, there is, even

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157

among men of culture, a dangerous confounding of conscience and conceit, of piety and
egotism. All institutions on earth are necessarily human. Religious institutions can only
be the outcome of individual inward religious
movement and aspiration, modified by historical, social, personal circumstances. Creeds and
rituals are as much the work of human minds
as cathedrals are of human hands. How much
divinity there is behind, moving the minds or
the hands, will be transparent in the excellence
realized : in the one case realized in the beauty
of goodness, in justice, humility, charity to all
men, not self-assertion ; in the other, in grace
of form and buoyancy of proportion.
When Wordsworth was a republican, and
when, as in the first Scotch tour with his sister, he had no scruples about traveling on
Sunday, he was more spiritual than when he
became a monarchist and a staunch upholder
of the establishment, whether in church or
aristocracy. As he grew old, the material
usurped upon the spiritual, and thence his
mental vision became a little clouded, and
in ecclesiastical matters particularly, his natural arrogance made itself felt. Not to blame
Wordsworth, still less to throw a shadow upon
his sacred memory, are these comments ven-

158

WORDSWORTH.

tured, but purely for the purpose of endeavoring to get a clear view of him as he was. For
myself, I would not have him other than he
was by a tittle. He was a man to admire, to rejoice in, to revere, a good man and a great man,
standing in the splendid hierarchy of English poets next to Milton, possibly by his side.
Using the sonnet as a form of stanza (a most
difficult one), Wordsworth wrote another poem
addressed to the river Duddon, a beautiful river
that takes its rise in the mountains of Cumberland, a stream, every foot of which Wordsworth knew from his boyhood. The poem
consists of thirty-four sonnets, the second of
which begins, " Child of the Clouds ! " Wordsworth's faculty, a poetic faculty, of putting a
scene vividly before you with a pen (so often
attempted, so seldom achieved) is well illustrated in the first eight lines of the fourth : —
".Take, cradled nursling of the mountains, take
This parting glance, no negligent adieu !
A Protean change seems wrought while I pursue
The curves, a loosely-scattered chain doth make ;
Or rather thou appear'st a glistening snake,
Silent, and to the gazer's eye untrue,
Thridding with sinuous lapse the rushes through
Dwarf willows gliding, and by ferny brake."

He wrote another — poem can it be called,
because it has put on the dress of poetry?

SONNETS,

159.

Should that be called a poem which was written in advocacy of the death-penalty, and
presents solemnly and sincerely what a poetthinker can ,say on so dismal a theme, which, if
it lift itself up at all, must rise on the raven's
wing ? What a sustained illusion that could
carry a poet through fourteen sonnet-stanzas
of which the hangman is the hero! That a
kind and thoughtful Englishman should, forty
years ago, be opposed to the abrogation of the
death penalty, one can readily understand. But
that a high, sympathetic poet should, even in
advanced age, on such a theme, attempt to
make a series of sonnets flow musically with
an uplifting movement, proves that Wordsworth's was not of the minds (there are few
such) that grow more sane, more spiritual,
more deeply intuitive, when years begin to lay
weights on the body.
Wordsworth's finest sonnets were written in
earlier years. The self-involved movement, as
in an eddy, of the sonnet suited his meditative
mind. The sonnet grows rapidly from within
to its modest compass ; but, though bounded,
it should be strong with interior motion, and,
like a spring, be clear and deep in proportion
to the smallness of its surface. Wordsworth's
best are dyed in the glow of his deep moral

i6o

WORDSWORTH.

nature. Here is-one of the most thoughtful,
and at the same time most sonorous : -—
" 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 !
This 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 coming from the sea ;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."

Both by their quality and their quantity, his
sonnets form an important part of Wordsworth's poetic work ; they fill between seven
and eight thousand lines of his best verse.
Professor Wilson (Christopher North) said of
them : " Wordsworth's sonnets, were they all in
one book, would be the statesman's, warrior's,
priest's, sage's manual." On this account I
have lingered with them so long, and now conclude with this Sonnet on the Sonnet: —
" Scorn not the Sonnet: Critic, you have frowned,
Mindless of its just honors ; with this key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart; the melody
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound ;
A thousand times this pipe ctid Tasso sound;

SONNETS.

161

With it Camoens soothed an exile's grief;
The sonnet glittered a gay myrtle leaf
Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned
His visionary brow : a glow-worm lamp,
It Cheered mild Spenser, called from Faery-land
To struggle through dark ways ; and when a damp
Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand
The Thing became a trumpet; whence he blew
Soul-animating strains — alas, too few 1"
II

XIV.
THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE.

T H E revolution in poetic subjects and treatment, which Wordsworth undertook to make,
and in essential principles did make, is by
nothing he accomplished more strongly exemplified than by " T h e White Doe of Rylstone." The hint for this tragic tale he took
from the ballad of " The Rising in the North,"
first published in 1765, in "Percy's Reliques,"
a collection which preceded Wordsworth in
the good work of bringing poetry back to nature and simplicity. Wordsworth's own words
shall tell what he aimed to do in this remarkable poem, remarkable for its beauty and power,
and thence for the attainment of his high aesthetic aim: —
" Let me here say a few words of this poem,
by way of criticism. The subject being taken
from feudal times, has led to its being compared to some of Walter Scott's poems that
belong to the same age and state of society.
The comparison is inconsiderate. Sir Walter

THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE.

163

pursued the customary and very natural course
of conducting an action, presenting various
turns of fortune, to some outstanding point on
which the mind might rest as a termination or
catastrophe. The course I attempted to pursue is entirely different. Everything that is
attempted by the principal personages in the
' White D o e ' fails, so far as its object is external and substantial: so far as it is moral and
spiritual, it succeeds. The heroine of the poem
knows that her duty is not to interfere with the
current of events, either to forward or delay
them ; but —
' T o abide
The shock, and finally secure
O'er pain and grief a triumph pure.' "

Not less original than the conception of the
" White Doe of Rylstone"' was the manner and
place of its production. Wordsworth and his
wife were on a visit to her brother, Mr. Hutchinson, at Sockburn-on-Tees, at the close of
1807. These are his words : " T h e country is
flat, and the weather was rough. I was accustomed every day to walk to and fro under the
shelter of a row of stacks in a field at a small
distance from the town, and there poured forth
my verses aloud as freely as they would come."
In the onward, bodeful flow of its narrative;

164

WORDSWORTH.

in the natural ease and beauty of the pictures
revealed by the devious current; in the conflicts of feeling which the progress of the story
evolves, this tale is not surpassed by the narrations of Byron or Scott; while its incidents
move to the beat of a higher music, in which,
if there is less superficial clang than in theirs,
there is a deeper rhythm, which lingers longer
on the chords of the reader's heart. No wonder that when the manuscript was shown to
Southeyhe wrote to Scott: "The story affected
me more deeply than I wish to be affected, and
nothing was ever more ably treated."
In this, as in all other of Wordsworth's
best poems, there are — what are only found
in poets in whom work freely together deep
thoughtfulness and clean truth of feeling, and
what may be called, as himself calls them, recesses— significant side retreats, into which
you pass to get unexpected glimpses and revelations. Nowhere — and indeed nowhere on
any of Wordsworth's pages — is there a line or
sentence written merely for outward effect; no
intellectual, ostentatious gymnastics, no showy
fancy work to intercept, with flickering light
and shade, the direct beams of feeling.
What shall I say of the figure of the " White
Doe," a creature akin to those marvels of po-

THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE.

16$

etic life, " Mignon and Ariel/' — a figure drawn
by a high visionariness out of the deeps which
warmest intimacy with nature empowers the
poet to penetrate. She is a silver link between
earth and heaven, a bond that binds together
the worlds of flesh and spirit. With a benign
influence she chastens the tragic passion of the
poem.
About the years 1814-16 Wordsworth, being
busied preparing his son for Cambridge, was
led into a renewal of acquaintance with the
ancient classics. As fruit of this intimacy was
a translation of several books of the ^Eneid,
speaking of which in a letter to his friend and
neighbor, the Earl of Lonsdale, he says he is
persuaded that Milton formed his blank verse
upon the model of the Georgics and JEne'id of
Virgil. But for us more precious fruit of the
resteeping of his mind in ancient poetry are
" Dion " and " Laodamia," poems which illustrate what may be called a characteristic of
Wordsworth, even among poets, that there always floated above him an insatiable ideal,
ever drawing his thoughts and aims towards
the sublime peaks of perfection. This determination upward springs out of the very being
of poetry. This passion for the better polishes
the poet's thoughts and diction, and, when as-

i66

WORDSWORTH.

sociated, as in Wordsworth, with energy in the
spiritual and moral sensibilities, swings him
up to the high ethic table-land whence flow the
clear, invigorating streams of duty and beneficence. This moral ideal dictates the concluding lines of " Dion " : —
" Him only pleasure leads, and peace attends,
Him, only him, the shield of Jove defends,
Whose means are fair and spotless as his ends."

And this stanza of Laodamia : —
" Learn, by a mortal yearning, to ascend —
Seeking a higher object. Love was given,
Encouraged, sanctioned, chiefly for that end;
For this the passion to excess was driven —
That self might be annulled : her bondage prove
The fetters of a dream, opposed to love."

Thus, dealing with the feelings of man in
their deepest movement and finest play, the
poet becomes, through his ideal tendency, the
educator of humanity. Still, his function on
this high plain is indirect. A ruling principle
it is, that the effect of Art in all its forms is
not to communicate facts, or directly to teach
a moral lesson : it is to elevate, to illuminate
the reader's or spectator's or auditor's mood,
to tune his feelings to a higher key, to exalt
him, not to amuse, or even to instruct him ; it
is to put him into a frame of mind in which he

THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE.

167

shall be more susceptible to good influences,
more capable to do any good work his mind is
upon; in a word, to animate and purify him
through the beautiful. The true artist is always the earnest, happy servant of the beautiful.
Wordsworth enjoyed traveling. So regardful was Sir George Beaumont (whom he lost in
1827) of the poet's known delight in excursions,
that this kind friend left him, by will, an annuity
of one hundred pounds, specifically to give him
the enjoyment of an annual tour. From Homer to Wordsworth, roaming has been a happy
• propensity of poets, whereby they enrich their
susceptive minds with new thoughts and new
images, and freshen and deepen their feelings.
In 1820, in company with Mrs. Wordsworth,
her sister, and two or three friends, he made
a tour that is now annually made, in one third
the time it then took him and his party, by
thousands of English and American travelers,
through Brussels, Namur (my own chief interest in once visiting Namur was to behold the
fortress at whose siege My Uncle Toby got
his wound), down the Meuse, through Liege
and Aix-la-Chapelle, to Cologne ; up the Rhine,
through Mayerice and Frankfort, to Heidelberg;
thence through the Black Forest to Schaff-

i68

WORDSWORTH.

hausen ; thence through some of the choice
regions of Switzerland, where, high up on the
Wengern Alp, they enjoyed the awe of an avalanche. From Geneva they passed over the
Simplon down into the plains of Italy to Milan ; thence by the lakes of Como and Lugano
back' to Geneva; whence, through Dijon and
Fontainebleau, to Paris. Wordsworth had not
been in Paris since 1792. Nothing in Paris
now interested him so much as the Jardin des
Plantes, with its live animals and Museum of
Natural History. " Scarcely could I refrain/'
he writes to the Earl of Lonsdale, "from tears
of admiration at the sight of this apparently
boundless exhibition of wonders of the creation. The statues and pictures of the Louvre
affect me feebly in comparison.,,
In the summer of 1823, accompanied by
Mrs. Wordsworth, he made another shorter
tour through Belgium and Holland. In Antwerp, he wrote: " We feasted our eyes upon
those magnificent pictures of Rubens, in the
Cathedral, over and over again." A pity it is
that he did not extend his journey into Germany as far as Weimar. Goethe was twenty
years older than Wordsworth, and he, too, had
been stiffened by age into Toryism. As artists
and lovers of nature, they would have enjoyed

THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE.

169

each other, and the English poet would have
brought away a more just opinion of the great
German than that given in the last chapter.
So long as his legs would carry him, Wordsworth never tired of rambling ; and to this I
owe the satisfaction of having again shaken
hands with him at Malvern in 1849, when, in
his eightieth year (the year before his death),
he walked over the Malvern hills from the
northern side, where he lodged, into the village of Malvern on the southern side. He was
strolling with one of the physicians of Malvern. I recalled to his mind a visit I paid him
at Rydal in 1840, but I doubt whether he remembered me. We were standing in the center of the village, and I shall never forget his
somewhat drooping figure and look. A butcher's shop was opposite to us, and on the doctor's commenting upon the freshened look of
his premises, Wordsworth remarked, with a
slight tincture of satire in his voice and manner, " The butcher seems to be doing well."
In 1829 he went on an excursion in Ireland
with a gentleman who traveled post with four
horses. As an illustration of the poetic impulse to make things better, Wordsworth, finding the guide-books such " sorry things," would
have liked to get up a good one himself. To a

170

WORDSWORTH,

correspondent he writes : " If I were a younger
man, and could prevail on an able artist to accompany me, there are few things I should like
better than giving a month or six weeks to explore the county of Kerry only." His " Guide
to the Lakes" bears witness to his peculiar
competency to execute such a volume. The
tour in Ireland, like that up the Rhine the year
before, was barren of poetic fruit Only in
Ireland was seen the eagle that soars in that
great poem on the " Power of Sound," a poem
of fourteen stanzas, of sixteen lines each, itself
an immortality. This is its twelfth stanza: —
* By one pervading spirit
Of tones and numbers all things are controlled,
As sages taught, where faith was found to merit
-Initiation to that mystery of old.
The Heavens, whose aspect makes our minds as still
As they themselves appear to be,
Innumerable voices fill
With everlasting harmony ;
The towering headlands, crowned with mist,
Their feet among the billows, know
That Ocean is a mighty harmonist;
Thy pinions, universal Air,
Ever waving to and fro,
Are delegates of harmony, and bear
Strains that support the seasons in their round;
Stern Winter loves a dirge-like sound."

One of the longest chapters in the " Memoirs " is given to Wordsworth's letters to va-

THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE.

ijl

rious correspondents on education, and an address he delivered, by request of the aged
founder of a school at Bowness on lake Windermere. The chapter shows how intimate was
his knowledge of this high subject, and how
eager always his wish to improve whatever he
took an interest in ; and he took an interest in
whatever bore upon the general welfare of his
country or humanity.
Here is a very biographical passage from a
letter dated February. 19, 1819, to one of his
earliest and dearest friends, who was now
Archdeacon Wrangham :—
" You astonish me with the account of your
books ; and I should have been still more astonished if you had told me you had read a
third (shall I say a tenth part ?) of them. My
reading powers were never very good, and now
they are much diminished, especially by candlelight ; and as to buying books, I can affirm that
in new books I have not spent five shillings for
the last five years, i. e. in reviews, magazines,
pamphlets, etc., etc. ; so that there would be
an end of Mr. Longman, and Mr. Cadell,\ etc.,
etc., if nobody had more power or inclination
to buy than myself. And as to old books, my
dealings in that way, for want of means, have
been very trifling. Nevertheless, small and

172

WORDSWORTH.

paltry as my collection is, I have not read a
fifth part of it. I should, however, like to see
your army.
* Such forces met not, nor so wide a camp,
When Agrican, with all his northern powers,
Besieged Albracca, as romances tell.'

Not that I accuse you of romancing ; I verily
believe that you have all the books you speak
of. Dear Wrangham, are you and I ever like
.to meet in this world again ? Yours is a corner
of the earth ; mine is not so. I never heard
of anybody going to Bridlington ; but all the
'world comes to the Lakes. Farewell. Excuse
this wretched scrawl; it is like all that proceeds from my miserable pen."
Mr. Moxori, the publisher, who afterwards
became his publisher, and who had some poetic
talent, sent him, in 1826, a small volume of his
attempts. Wordsworth, in acknowledging the
volume, which, he writes, " I have read with no
inconsiderable pleasure," gives the young aspirant the following good advice : " This little
volume, with what I saw of yourself during a
short interview, interests me in your welfare ;
and the more so, as I always feel some apprehension for the destiny of those who in youth
addict themselves to the composition- of verse.
It is a very seducing employment, and though

THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE.

173

begun in disinterested love of the Muses, is too
apt to connect itself with self-love, and the disquieting passions which follow in the train of
that our natural infirmity. Fix your eye upon
acquiring independence by honorable business,
and let the Muses come after rather than go
before."
From Wordsworth's letters may be picked
gems of criticism. In 1829, he writes to Professor Hamilton, of Dublin, to thank him for
verses from himself and sister : " Your sister's
have abundance of spirit and feeling; all that
they want is what appears in itself of little
moment, and yet is of incalculably great,—
that is, workmanship, — the art by which the
thoughts are made to melt into each other, and
to fall into light and shadow, regulated by distinct preconception of the best general effect
they are capable of producing."
In the same year he was tempted to become
a contributor to one of the " Annuals," the
editor of which, he writes, treated him shamefully, and he then adds : " I am properly served
for having had any connection with such things.
My only excuse is, that they offered me a
very liberal sum, and that I have labored hard
through a long life, without more pecuniary
emolument than a lawyer gets for two special

174

WORDSWORTH.

retainers, or a public performer sometimes for
two or three songs."
To the same friend to whom the above was
sent, Mr. G. Huntly Gordon, he writes in 1830 :
" You ask what are my employments. According to Dr. Johnson they are such as entitle me
to a high commendation, for I am not only
making two blades of grass grow where only
one grew before, but a dozen. * In plain language, I am draining a bit of spongy ground.
In the field where this goes on, I am making a
green terrace that commands a beautiful view
of our two lakes, Rydal and Windermere, and
more than two miles of intervening vale with
the stream visible by glimpses flowing through
it."
My most precious memory of England,
through several visits at different periods, is
walking, on Thursday noon, the 30th of July,
1840, on that terrace beside the builder of it.
It should be added, that even more precious
than the memory of that beautiful landscape,
sanctified by the presence of Wordsworth as
hospitable interpreter, are the memories of his
kindness in-doors on the same morning, and
on the second day, when we took tea with him,
and walked with him before tea, to look at Rydal Fall, and on the fourth day (Sunday), when

THE

WHITE

DOE

OF RYLSTONE.

175

we sat with him in his pew in the little chapel
near his house.1
In the autumn of 1831 Wordsworth and his
daughter set off from Rydal to visit Sir Walter
Scott before his departure for Italy, whither
he was going in the hope of restoring his shattered health. On this occasion Wordsworth
wrote a sonnet, which expresses in his clear,
clinging diction, set to a poetic key, his own
sympathy with Sir Walter, mingled with sounding utterance of public admiration and interest
The sonnet begins : —
" A trouble, not of clouds, or weeping rain,
Nor of the setting sun's pathetic light
Engendered, hangs o'er Eildon's triple height', "

and e n d s : —
"Be true,
Ye winds of ocean, and the midland sea,
Wafting your charge to soft Parthenope ! "

The taking leave of Sir Walter is thus described : " At noon, on Thursday, we left Abbotsford, and on the morning of that day, Sir
Walter and I had a serious conversation, tete-atete, 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
1
See "Scenes and Thoughts in Europe"
Chapter I.

First Series,

176

WORDSWORTH.

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."
The scenery in Scotland was ever an attraction to Wordsworth. In the summer of 1833,
accompanied by his son, the Rev. John Wordsworth, rector of Brigham, near Cockermouth,
and by Henry Crabb Robinson, he made another sally into Scotland, going by the Isle of
Man. Wordsworth, long after reaching manhood, had seen the rise of the steamboat,—
that huge shuttle that now plies backward and
forward all over the earth, where there is deep
water, to weave the woof of civilization, — that
winged giant who carries on his broad back
thousands, where, before his advent, only tens
could go.
Wordsworth has been charged with a conservatism so unreasoning as to be angered by
the approach of the railroad towards his beloved
lakes. A poet may be pardoned some irritability at the imagination of the monstrous scars
cut upon the beautiful face of the rare nature
about him by the engineer's pick. But that

THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE.

177

Wordsworth was neither unreasoning nor obtuse to the vast beneficent conquests made by
the scientific art of man, is proved by a fine
sonnet (part of the fruit of this tour) called
" Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways/' which
ends:—
" In spite of all that beauty may disown
In your harsh features, Nature doth embrace
Her lawful offspring in Man's art; and Time, ,
Pleased with your triumphs o'er his brother Space,
Accepts from your bold hands the proffered crown
Of hope, and smiles on you with cheer sublime."

A remark he makes about children is worth
recording, coming from so sure and subtle an
observer. Some readers will think there is in
the remark more of imagination than of fact.
In the Isle o£ Man he fell in with a party of little children, one of whom, " upon my request,
recited the Lord's Prayer to me, and I helped
her to a clearer understanding of it as well as
I could ; but I was not at all satisfied with my
own part, — hers was much better done; and
I am persuaded that, like other children, she
knew more about it than she was able to express, especially to a stranger."
His admiration of Burns, and his sympathy
with him, find frequent utterance. When Mosgiel was pointed out to him, he expresses surprise that the splendid prospect stretching to12

i78

WORDSWORTH.

wards the sea was never adverted to by Burns,
though daily in his sight; and he adds : " Yet
this is easily explained. In one of his poetical
effusions he speaks of describing 'fair Nature's face/ as a privilege on which he sets a
high value ; nevertheless, natural appearances
rarely take a lead in his poetry. It is as a human being, eminently sensitive and intelligent,
and not as a poet clad in his priestly robes,
and carrying the ensigns of sacerdotal office,
that he interests and affects us.
" Whether he speaks of river, hills, and
woods, it is not so much on account of the
properties with which they are absolutely endowed, as relatively to local patriotic remembrances and associations, or as they are ministerial to personal feelings, especially those of
love, whether happy or otherwise ; yet it is not
always so."

XV.
POLITICS.

never recovered from the deep
disappointment of what seemed to him a gross
and permanent failure in the promises of the
French Revolution, whose first imposing movement was coincident in time with his entrance
into manhood, — he being an eye-witness in
France and Paris to the tremendous upheaval.
Shocked in his feelings and shaken in his hopes
by the Reign of Terror, with its iniquities, he
was confounded by the usurpation of Bonaparte, with its deeper, broader iniquities. Believing, with something like the confidence of
Bossuet, that he could trace the design of God
in history, his vision was not enough clarified
and strengthened by love and hope to compass the wider sweeps of Providential rule, but
found itself balked by apparently destructive
phenomena, not discerning that these were temporary and preparatory. In his faith he was
not passive enough, but too self-asserting, and
thence he misinterpreted Providence, in atWORDSWORTH

i8o

WORDSWORTH.

tempting to weigh the Infinite in finite scales.
Wordsworth did not expand after middle life ;
as he advanced towards age he became more
and more Tory, and thus more alarmed by political change ; for the essence of Toryism is
unpliableness and immobility, whereas the profound characteristic of providential control'is
unceasing flux, perpetual change, uninterrupted
progression.
When the agitation about the Reform Bill
began in England, in 1831, Wordsworth was in
his sixty-second year. For several years after
the bloodless deposition of the elder Bourbons
in 1830, he was kept uncomfortable, fearing
revolutionary, disastrous measures in England.
As he expressed it in verse : —
" Every day brought with it tidings new,
Of rash change, ominous for the public weal."

Remembering his powerful pamphlet on^ the
Convention of Cintra, his Tory friends appealed
to him to champion the good cause with his
prose pen. To one of these friends he writes,
in December, 1831, a letter, from which I extract below two passages biographically valuable. Wordsworth never desisted from endeavoring to improve his verse. As studiously and
patiently as Virgil, did he weigh and reweigh
his words, as well for their prosody as their

POLITICS.

181

meaning, continuing to revise his poems till
his deajth. The letter of his friend had been
delayed. To this the opening words of the
first passage refer: " When it reached me
I was engaged in assisting my wife to decipher some of my mangled and almost illegible
MSS., which inevitably involved me in endeavors to correct and improve them. My eyes are
subject to frequent inflammations, of which I
had an attack (and am still suffering from it)
while that was going on."
The second passage is as follows : " A conviction of my incompetence to do justice to the
momentous subject has kept me, and I fear
will keep me, silent. My sixty-second year
will soon be completed, and though I have been
favored 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 early period of
my life, they would probably have been superior. There is yet another obstacle : I am no
ready master of prose writing, having been
little practiced in the art. This last consideration will not weigh with you ; nor would it
have done with myself a few years ago ; but
the bare mention of it will serve to show that
years have deprived me of courage, in the sense

182

WORDSWORTH.

the word bears when applied by Chaucer to the
animation of birds in spring time."
From a letter to another correspondent I
take this very striking sentence : " The constitution of England, which seems about to be
destroyed, offers to my mind the sublimest contemplation which the history of society and
government have ever presented to i t ; and for
this cause especially, that its principles have
the character of preconceived ideas, archetypes
of the pure intellect, while they are, in fact, the
results of a humble-minded experience. ,,
In 1832 he concludes a long letter to the
Earl of Lonsdale with these words, — words so
fraught with deep practical wisdom that they
deserve to be inscribed in all legislative halls,
national or municipal, of every country in Christendom ; displayed in large golden letters, right
over the presiding officer's chair, where every
mover of a measure could read them : —
" It has ever been the habit of my mind to
trust that expediency will come out of fidelity
to principles, rather than to seek my principles
of action in calculations of expediency."
Readers who have not forgotten the wise,
unselfish, sprightly Dorothy will like to hear of
her once more. For the latter portion of her
long life (she outlived her brother William) she

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was an invalid. In 1832 Wordsworth writes
of her to their brother, the Rev. Dr. Wordsworth : " Our dear sister makes • no progress
towards recovery of strength. She is very feeble, never quits her room, and passes most of
the day in, or upon, the bed. She does not
suffer much pain, and is very cheerful, and
nothing troubles her but public affairs and the
sense of requiring so much attention. Whatever may be the close of this illness, it will be
a profound consolation to you, my dear brother,
and to us all, that it is borne with perfect resignation ; and that her thoughts are such as the
good and pious would wish. She reads much,
both religious and miscellaneous works."
He thus concludes the letter: u John says
you are well ; so am I, and every one here except our sister : but I have witnessed one revolution in a foreign country, and I have not
courage to think of facing another in my own.
Farewell. God bless you again."
At this period the letters of Wordsworth
pulsate more sensitively than usual with the
troubles of his heart. As though his feelings
were suffering from an unnatural reaction
against his early democratic convictions, he
became almost morbidly alarmed at the revolutionary consequences with which, to his mind,

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WORDSWORTH,

was freighted the growth of popular power, his
poetic imagination and sensibilities, which in
his young manhood had colored too highly his
political hopes, now darkening unduly those
which his present Tory convictions had forced
upon him. I do not, therefore, apologize for
quoting from his feeling-full letters two or three
more passages. To Professor Hamilton, of
Dublin, one of his most esteemed correspondents, he writes, in 1832: "Your former letter
reached me in due time ; your second, from
Cambridge, two or three days ago. I ought to
have written to you long since, but really I
have for some time, from private and public
causes of sorrow and apprehension, been in a
great measure deprived of those genial feelings
which, through life, have not been so much
accompaniments of my character, as vital principles of my existence
" It gives me much pleasure that you and
Coleridge have met, and that you were not disappointed in the conversation of a man from
whose writings you had previously drawn so
much delight and instruction. He and my beloved sister are the two beings to whom my
intellect is most indebted."
Mrs. Hemans was much esteemed by Wordsworth, and duly valued as a poetess. To her

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185

he writes in November, 1832, a long letter,
from which I take the following passage:
"Europe is at present a melancholy spectacle,
and these two islands are likely to reap the
fruit of their own folly and madness, in becoming, for the present generation, the two most
unquiet and miserable spots upon the earth.
' May you, my dear friend, find the advantage of
the poetic spirit in raising you, in thought at
least, above the contentious clouds! Never
before did I feel such reason to be grateful for
what little inspiration Heaven has graciously
bestowed upon my humble intellect. What
you kindly wrote upon the interest you took,
during your travels, in my verses, could not
but be grateful to me, because your own show
that in a rare degree you understand and sympathize . with me. We are all well, God be
thanked. I am a wretched correspondent, as
this scrawl abundantly shows."
Whoever wishes to know to the full what
Wordsworth thought and felt about the state
of England in those years should read " T h e
Warning," a poem written in 1833, of about
one hundred of his most polished lines, — lines
more weighted with thought than winged with
aspiration, and in which the healthy spring of
the free poetic mood has been cumbered with

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WORDSWORTH.

the burden of the too anxious Englishman,
the spiritual splendors of his mind overcast by
shadows from the temporalities on which tl^e
understanding feeds. Wordsworth found (as
every man must find) support and security in
political institutions, but in his latter years he
leant upon them too heavily ; nor did he sufficiently recognize that, being made by man, they
now and then need repairing and renewing.
Others of his poems of that period are
saddened by political solicitude; but there is
a class called " Evening Voluntaries," written
when the excitement of his mind was subsiding,
which are marked by more serenity and faith.
A passage from one of these, written in 1834,
has a twofold interest, as exhibiting a more
happy state of feeling, and as having been directed against Lord Byron and his school. In
recollections of these poems, communicated in
his latter years to his nephew, Wordsworth
himself says: u The lines following ' Nor do
words/ etc., were written with Lord Byron's
character as a poet before me, and that of others his contemporaries, who wrote under like
influences." The interest imparted to these
lines by the profound truth embodied in them
is heightened by their singularity, for I do not
know that in all his poetry is there another

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disparaging allusion to contemporary poets.
The following is the passage : —
" Not in the lucid intervals of life
That come but as a curse to party-strife ;
Not in some hour when Pleasure with a sigh
Of languor puts his rosy garland by;
Not in the breathing-times of that poor slave
Who daily piles up wealth in Mammon's cave —
Is Nature felt, or can be ; nor do words,
Which practiced talent readily affords,
Prove that her hand has touched responsive chords;
Nor has her gentle beauty power to move
With genuine rapture and with fervent love
The soul of Genius, if he dare to take
Life's rule from passion craved for passion's sake ;
Untaught that meekness is the cherished bent
Of all the truly great and all the innocent."

In 1833, there being a Scientific Meeting at
Cambridge, to which his friend Hamilton, of
Dublin, intended to go, Wordsworth writes to
him: " Could not you take us in your way,
coming or going to Cambridge ? If Mrs. H.
accompanies you, we should be glad to see her
alsa
" I hope that in the meeting about to take
place in Cambridge there will be less of mutual flattery among the men of science than
appeared in that of the last year at Oxford.
Men of science in England seem, indeed, to
copy their fellows in France, by stepping too
much out of their way for titles and baubles of

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WORDSWORTH.

that kind, and for offices of state and political
struggles, which they would do better to keep
out of."
Charles Lamb and Wordsworth were, as is
well known, on terms of intimate friendship,
appreciating, admiring each the other. The fol_ lowing letter to Lamb (1833) beats with the
warm pulse of Wordsworth's domestic heart:
" MY DEAR LAMB, — I have to thank you and
Moxon for a delightful volume, your last (I hope
not), of ' Elia/ I have read it all except some of
the ' Popular Fallacies/ which I reserve
The book has much pleased the whole of my
family, namely, my wife, daughter, Miss Hutchinson, and my poor, dear sister, on her sickbed ; they all return their best thanks. I am
not sure but I like the i Old China/ and the
' Wedding/ as well as any of the Essays. I
read ' Love me and my D o g ' to my poor sister
this morning. . . . .
" I have been thus particular, knowing how
much you and your dear sister value this excellent person, whose tenderness of .heart I do
not honestly believe was ever exceeded by any
of God's creatures. Her loving kindness has
no bounds. God bless her forever and ever!
Again thanking you for your excellent book,

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189

and wishing to know how you and your dear
sister are, with best love to you both from us
all,
I remain, my dear Lamb,
" Your faithful friend,
" W. WORDSWORTH."

He valued the simple habits of his native
sequestered Cumberland ; but that the absence
of active populous towns, as centres of culture,
kept at a low rustic level the standard of education and intellectual curiosity, evidence is
afforded by this passage in a letter (1833) to
Moxon. The sarcasm conveyed in the latter
of the two words he emphasizes is pardonable
for the truth i t carries : " There does not appear to be much genuine relish for poetical
publications in Cumberland, if I may judge
from the fact of not a copy of my poems having been sold there by one of the leading
booksellers, though Cumberland is my native
county. Byron and Scott are, I am persuaded,
the only popular writers in that line, —perhaps
the word ought rather to be that they arefaskionable writers."
About this time Wordsworth had a lively
correspondence with the Reverend Alexander
Dyce about the book of sonnets which Mr.
Dyce was preparing, in the preface of which

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WORDSWORTH.

he pays a deserved tribute to Wordsworth, to
whom the little collection is dedicated. Dyce
had published a volume of " Specimens of British Poetesses," in which Wordsworth took so
much interest that in one of his letters he
offers his assistance. His familiarity with all
English poetry enabled him to make a statement which will probably be new to most of
my readers, namely, that " the two best ballads,
perhaps, of modern times, ' Auld Robin Gray'
and the ' Lament for the Defeat of the Scots
at Flodden Field/ are both from the pens of
females/'
^
In 1834, Wordsworth, in his sixty-fifth year,
was still active in body and mind. This he
owed, in large measure, to frugality and his
open-air life. Something was due to the freedom of his intellectual work. He was never
forced to write: his moods were his only masters; to obey these was a joy ; and work thus
done is a fosterer of health. Thus he was enabled to compass a full earthly circle, to fulfill
his high self-imposed obligations, to reap from
the rich fields of his mind a complete harvest,
to lie, in his eighty-first year, on his deathbed, with the blissful consciousness that his
lofty task was finished, that all that he by nature was empowered to do was done. In this

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igi

he enjoyed, among renowned contemporaries,
almost a solitary privilege. What Coleridge
accomplished in his sixty-three years, though
full of power and streaked with splendor, was,
owing to infirmities bodily and mental, so fragmentary that while he left us seven or eight
volumes teeming with precious ore, his earthly
being might be called a magnificent torso. Byron lived only thirty-six years, but so fiery was
his temperament that in those thirty-six he consumed more nervous vitality than Wordsworth
in double the number. Shelley died at thirty,
Keats at twenty-five, both wafted early to the
upper realms, as though their organisms were
too finely charged with magnetism for earth's
atmosphere.
1834 was a grievous year to Wordsworth. In
it he lost Coleridge and Lamb, besides other
early friends. But his poetry, that waited so
long to get appreciated, brought to his latter
years many younger friends to make up for eminent contemporaries departed, and to console
him (if he needed consolation), by their admiration, for early neglect.
Among the Epitaphs a long one is devoted
to Lamb, to whom he pays a heartfelt tribute,
in which is this line : —
" Oh, he was good, if e'er a good man lived ! "

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WORDSWORTH,

In stanzas written on the death of Hogg, he
again mentions Lamb along with Coleridge : —
" Nor has the rolling year twice measured,
From sign to sign, its steadfast course,
Since every mortal power of Coleridge
Was frozen at its marvelous source ;
" The rapt one of the godlike forehead,
The heaven-eyed creature, sleeps in earth :
And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle,
Has vanished from his lonely hearth."

To Robert Montgomery, who had sent him
two volumes of poetry, he wrote a letter, a passage of which could have come from no one
but a poet-sage, so saturated is it with wisdom.
Such masterly advice cries for reiterated publication for the benefit of the craft, -— with this
proviso, that he who is to profit fully by the
advice should be an " author of sense and genius:"—
" I cannot conclude without one word of literary advice, which I hope you will deem my
advanced age entitles me to give. Do not, my
dear sir, be anxious about any individual's opinion concerning your writings, however highly
you may think of his genius or rate his judgment. Be a severe critic to yourself; and depend upon it, no person's decision upon the
merit of your works will bear comparison in
point of value with your own. You must be

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193

conscious from what feeling they have flowed,
and how far they may or may not be allowed to
claim, on that account, permanent respect; and
above all, I would remind you, with a view to
tranquillize and steady your mind, that no man
takes the trouble of surveying and pondering
another's writings with a hundredth part of the
care which an author of sense and genius will
have bestowed upon his own. Add to this reflection another, which I press upon you, as it
has supported me through life, namely,, that
Posterity will settle all accounts justly, and that
works which deserve to last will last; and if
undeserving this fate, the sooner they perish
the better."
With his many excursions on the Continent,
Wordsworth, in 1837, had not yet seen Rome.
Once he penetrated down the southern slopes
of the Alps to Milan, but hitherto economical
prudence had deterred him from gratifying a
wish to behold Rome and other celebrated Italian cities. Having secured „one of the most
experienced and travel-taught of companions,
his friend Henry Crabb Robinson, he set out
in March, 1837, from. London, to which they
returned in August, " earlier," says Wordsworth,
" than my companion wished or I should myself have desired had I been a bachelor." The
13

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WORDSWORTH.

poetic fruit of this tour took mostly the form
of sonnets. Among several addressed to Rome,
two or three are prophetic, one ending thus :
" Fallen Power,
Thy fortunes, twice exalted, might provoke
Verse to glad notes prophetic of the hour
When thou, uprisen, shalt break thy double yoke,
And enter, with prompt aid from the most High,
On the third stage of thy great destiny."

«

Another sonnet, written before leaving Italy,
ends, —
" Awake !
Mother of heroes, from thy death-like sleep ! "

These sonnets are not among his best. To
nis companion he repeatedly said, " I t is too
late." Once he said, " I have matter for volumes, had I but youth to work it up." Robinson relates a charming incident, which shows
how much stronger than in Art or History was
Wordsworth's interest in living human nature.
While they were in the famous Roman Amphitheatre at Nismes, Robinson noticed that
Wordsworth's eyes were intently fixed in a direction where there was least to see. Looking
that way he saw two young children at play
with flowers, and overheard Wordsworth say
to himself: " Oh, you darlings, I wish I could
put you in my pocket and carry you to Rydal
Mount."

XVI.
THE CRITIC.

T H E poet is necessarily a critic. The writing of genuine poetry implies the sensibility
which is a primary requisite for critical insight.
A great poet-thinker will be a great critic,
but a great critic is not necessarily a great
poet. Sainte-Beuve is a great critic, so is Carlyle ; neither of them is a great poet; but the
natures of both are enriched and beautified by
sensibility. Of recent great poets, Goethe and
Coleridge seem to me to be the best in criticism. Their mental endowments were remarkably full, with few chasms, their temperaments
sensitive, and they both cultivated the art of
criticism. This Wordsworth did not do, and,
moreover, he had not their completeness of
natural equipment. Nevertheless, he was a
great critic, and some of his judgments, weighty
with intrinsic excellence, are made the more
imposing by the poetic grasp and the upright
personality of the man.
In the two chapters, near the close of the

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WORDSWORTH.

" Memoirs," entitled " Reminiscences," are recorded some of his critical opinions as given
in conversations reported by admiring listeners.
His intimacy for so many years with Coleridge
gives additional value to the following judgment upon him and his poetical powers, delivered at a tea-party in 1844. The description
of the celebrated conversation of Coleridge is
the best I ever read: " He said that the liveliest and truest image he could give of Coleridge's talk was ' that of a majestic river, the
sound or sight of whose course you caught at
intervals, which was sometimes concealed by
forests, sometimes lost in sand, then came
flashing out broad and distinct, then again took
a turn which your eye could not follow; yet
you knew and felt that it was the same river.:
so/ he said, ' there was always a train, a stream,
in Coleridge's discourse, always a connection
between its parts in his own mind, though one
not always perceptible to the minds of others.'
Mr. Wordsworth went on to say that in his
opinion Coleridge had been spoilt as a poet by
going to Germany. T h e . bent of his mind,
which was at all times very much to metaphysical theology, had there been fixed in that direction. * If it had not been so/ said Wordsworth, ' he would have been the greatest, the
most abiding poet of his age,' "

THE CRITIC,

igy

On the same occasion, the discourse having
turned to Scotland, he spoke thus frankly of
Scott: u I don't like," he said, " to say all this,
or to take to pieces some of the best reputed
passages of Scott's verse, especially in presence of my wife, because she thinks me too
fastidious; but as a poet Scott cannot live, for
he has never in verse written anything addressed to the immortal part of man. In making amusing stories in verse he will be superseded by some newer versifier ; what he writes
in the way of natural description is merely
rhyming nonsense."
One evening (1846) at his own house, speaking of emulation as a help to school-progress,
he expressed this decided opinion against it:
" I felt very early the force of the words, ' Be
ye perfect even as your Father in heaven is
perfect,' and as a teacher, or friend, or counselor of youth, I would hold forth no <|ther
motive to exertion than this. There is, I think,
hone other held forth in the gospels. No permission is given to emulation there."
Upon the summing up by Milton of his conception of Eve in this line, —
" He for God only, she for God in him,"

Wordsworth made this protesting comment:

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WORDSWORTH.

" Now, that is a low, a very low, and a very
false estimate of woman's condition."
Wordsworth had made himself well acquainted with the body and soul of the whole
English poetry; but he of course studied only
its best pages, those with most soul gleaming
through the body. He several times speaks of
Spenser with a degree of admiration I should
not have expected from him. From a similar
point of view he somewhat overrated, it seems
to me, Ariosto and Tasso (who belong to
the same order of poets as Spenser), who, he
says, are unduly depreciated in comparison with
Dante. Compared with the earnest, deepsouled, gigantic creator'of the " Inferno," Tasso and Ariosto are perfumed triflers. But
Wordsworth delighted in fine workmanship,
and for this, besides his other merits, Spenser deserved his love. In a long passage of
exceeding interest about his contemporaries,
which will be given presently, he says of Shelley : " Shelley is one of the best artists of us
all ; I mean in workmanship of style." Here
is a passage in which he tells who were his
models at the time when he chose poetry as
his life-work. Before that he had, as we have
seen, studied Pope. He soon rose above Pope.
" I was impressed with a conviction that there

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199

were four English poets whom I must have
continually before me as examples,—-Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton. These I
must study, and equal if I could; and I need
not think of the rest."
Where is the direct evidence that Shakespeare thought lowly of himself ? Is it in the
fifty-fifth sonnet ? which opens, —
" Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time; "

or in the eighty-first ? which ends, —
"•Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read;
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead;
You still shall live — such virtue hath my pen —
Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.,v

One rejoices to read these two powerful sonnets
every now and then through one's whole life,
to renew the assurance that their author, our
incomputable benefactor, knew what he was,
— how great he was. He was the only man
of his day who did thoroughly know what William Shakespeare was. It is difficult to think
that a mind so supreme was not fully conscious
of its own means and reach. Or is the opin-

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WORDSWORTH.

ion in the subjoined item of Wordsworth's table-talk held by him because he regarded as indirect evidence of Shakespeare's low estimate
of himself that he did not collect and himself
edit his mighty works ? Shakespeare died comparatively young, and suddenly. Who can infer what he would have done or not have done,
had he lived ten years longer ? C. Armitage
Brown, one of the shrewdest among his commentators, gives good reasons for believing that'
he was about to edit his works when he died.
" I cannot account for Shakespeare's low estimate of his own writings, except from the
sublimity, the superhumanity, of his genius.
They were infinitely below his conception of
what they might have been, and ought to have
been."
With what close attention Wordsworth studied the tragedies of Shakespeare the following
passage proves : " ' Macbeth' is the best conducted of Shakespeare's plays. * The fault of
' Julius Caesar,' ' Hamlet,' and i Lear' is that
the interest is not, and by the nature of the
case could not be, sustained to their conclusion.
The death of Julius Csesar is too overwhelming an incident for any stage of the drama but
the last. It is an incident to which the mind
clings and' from which it will not be torn away

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201

to share in other sorrows. The same may be
said of the madness of Lear. Again, the opening of 'Hamlet' is full of exhausting interest.
There is more mind in •* Hamlet' than any
other play; more knowledge of human nature.
The first act is incomparable
There is
too much of an every-day sick room in the
deathbed scene of Catherine, in ' Henry the
Eighth' — too much of leeches and apothecaries' vials." . . . .
In the summer of 1827, speaking of some
of his contemporaries, Wordsworth said : " T.
Moore has great natural genius ; but he is too
lavish of brilliant ornament. His poems smell
of the perfumer's and milliner's shops. He is
not content with a ring and a bracelet, but he
must have rings in the ears, rings on the nose,
— rings everywhere.
" Walter Scott is not a careful composer. He
allows himself many liberties, which betray a
want of respect for his reader. For instance,
he is too fond of inversions ; that is, he often
places the verb before the substantive, and the
accusative before the verb. W. Scott quoted,
as from me, —
* The swan on sweet St. Mary's lake
•Floats double, swan and shadow,'

instead of still;

thus obscuring my idea, and

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WORDSWORTH.

betraying his own uncritical principles of composition.
"Byron seems to me deficient in feeling.
Professor Wilson, I think, used to say that
' Beppo' was his best poem ; because all his
faults were there brought to a height. I never
read the ' English Bards' through. His critical prognostications have, for the most part,
proved erroneous."
Wordsworth relates this amusing incident:
"One day I met. Mr. M. T. Sadler at the late
Archbishop's. Sadler did not know me ; and
before dinner he began to launch forth in a
critical dissertation on contemporary English
Poetry. 'Among living poets, your Grace
may know there is one called Wordsworth,
whose writings the world calls childish and
puerile, but I think some of them wonderfully
pathetic/ ' Now, Mr. Sadler/ said the Archbishop, ' what a scrape you are in ! here is Mr.
Wordsworth : but go down with him to dinner
and you will find that, though a great poet, he
does not belong to the genus irritabile? "
Here is a valuable comment on the Ode.
The visionariness and imaginativeness of this
masterpiece must not be mistaken for belief
in metempsychosis: " I n my Ode on the ' I n timations of Immortality in Childhood/ I do

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203

not profess to give a literal representation of
the state of the affections and of the moral
being in childhood. I record my feelings at
that time, — my absolute spirituality, my ' allsoulness/ if I may so speak. At that time I
could not believe that I should lie down quietly
in the grave, and that my body would moulder
into dust/'
Is any admirer of Wordsworth strong enough,
abstract enough, in imagination to figure to
himself the author of " The Excursion " as a
field-marshal, at the head of embattled legions ? From the subjoined passage it will be
learnt that, amid the doubts and anxieties with
which Wordsworth was beset as to the choice
of a profession after he had left Cambridge,
he had some thought of entering the army. In
another conversation he remarked, good-humoredly, that " Nature had qualified him for
success in three callings, those of poet, of landscape-gardener, and of critic of pictures and
works of art." " After tea, in speaking of the
misfortune it was when a young man did not
seem more inclined to one profession than another, Wordsworth said that he had always
some feeling of indulgence for men at that age,
who felt such a difficulty. He had himself
passed through it, and had incurred the strict-

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WORDSWORTH.

ures of his friends and reliations on this subject. He said that after he had finished his
college course he was in great doubt as to
what his future employment should be. He
did not feel himself 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, although Southey
often told him that he was well fitted for the
higher parts of the profession. 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 had at
one time thought of a military life ; but then he
was without connections, 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. At this time he had only a
hundred a year. Upon this he lived, and traveled, and married, for it was not until the late
Lord Lonsdale came into possession that the
money which was due to them was restored.
He mentioned this to show how difficult it
often was to judge of what was passing in a
young man's mind ; but he thought that for the
generality of men it was much better that they

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205

should be early led to the exercise of a profession of their own choice."
This chapter cannot be more fitly concluded
than with a portion of Mrs. Hemans' reminiscence of a visit to Rydal in 1830
" Mr.
Wordsworth's kindness has inspired me with
a feeling of confidence, which it is delightful to
associate with those of admiration and respect,
before excited by his writings, — and he has
treated me with so much consideration, and
gentleness, and care ! — they have been like
balm to my spirit
I wish I had time to
tell you of mornings which he has passed in
reading to me, and of evenings when he has
walked beside me, whilst I rode through the
lovely vales of Grasmere and Rydal; and of
his beautiful, sometimes half-unconscious recitation, in a voice so deep and solemn that it
has often brought tears into my eyes. His
voice has something quite breeze-like in the
soft gradations of its swells and falls
We had been listening, during one of these
evening rides, to various sounds and notes of
birds which broke upon the stillness ; and at
last I said, ' Perhaps there may be still deeper
and richer music pervading all nature than we
are permitted, in this state, to hear/ He answered by reciting those glorious lines of Milton's : —

206
1

WORDSWORTH.

Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth,
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep,' etc.;

and this in tones that seemed rising from such
depths of veneration ! His tones of solemn
earnestness, sinking, almost dying away into a
murmur of veneration, as if the passage were
breathed forth from the heart, I shall never
forget."

XVII.
THE EXCURSION.

Now came the triumph. Forty years before,
Wordsworth had been decried, derided, by the
influential critics of the day, as tame, prosaic,
puerile; and derided so effectually that the
sale of his poems was almost arrested for many
years. But these were critics of the day, and
he whom they denounced was a poet for all
tinie. So, by degrees, the more thoughtful
minds — educated into better judgment by the
derided poems themselves:—counteracted the
shallow opinions circulated by envy and malice
and ignorance, and won, during the poet's life,
so firm a place for him in the heart of the new
generation that in his seventieth year an ovation was given him at Oxford, so impressive, so
sonorous, that it resounded through the world,
— a glorifying proclamation and a prophecy.
When, as the recipient of an honorary degree, the name of Wordsworth was announced
in the Sheldonian Theatre, crowded to excess,
there resounded - thunders of enthusiastic ap-

208

WORDSWORTH.

plause, repeated over and over again, soulsprung shouts, such as had not been heard
since the visit of the Duke of Wellington. Of
his friends and admirers many went up to Oxford on purpose to be present. One of these,
Mr. Peace, librarian of the city library, Bristol,
walked from Bristol to Oxford, a distance of
seventy miles. Dr. Arnold (the distinguished,
honored Dr. Arnold of Rugby) was there, who
had not been to Oxford for twenty years, and
others of note; but they whose eyes would have
most filled with tears of delightful emotion,
Coleridge and Lamb and others of his earliest
appreciators, were not present in the body.
Yes, on that day of July, 1839, t n e great,
venerable poet had the deep joy of feeling that
by his countrymen he was accepted for what
he was, and honored among the highest. And
let due honor be paid to those who, in the
beginning of his career, had the discernment
to discover his superiority, and the independence and generosity to utter their judgment.
Conspicuous among this clear-sighted few was
Southey, who, a quarter of a century before the
Oxford proclamation, wrote to Bernard Barton
thes£ warm, emphatic words : " Wordsworth's
residence and mine are fifteen miles asunder; a
sufficient distance to preclude .any frequent in-

THE EXCURSION.

20g

terchange of visits. I have known him nearly
twenty years, and for about half that time intimately. The strength and the character of
his mind you see in ' The Excursion ; ' and his
Life does not belie his Writings; for, in every
relation of life, and every point of view, he is a
truly exemplary and admirable man. In conversation he is powerful beyond any of his contemporaries ; and as a poet — I speak not from
the partiality of friendship, nor because we have
been so absurdly held up as both writing upon
one concerted system of poetry, but with the
most deliberate exercise of impartial judgment
whereof I am capable, when I declare my full
conviction that Posterity will rank him with
Milton."
Other tokens of the esteem in which he was
held came to him from those in high places,
who in this instance represented the enlightened opinion of the realm. For many years
Wordsworth had enjoyed the income (over
^500) from the post of Stamp Distributor.
This, in 1842, he resigned, but had the influence to get appointed in his stead his son William, who for some years had been his deputy.
In announcing to him this arrangement, the
then Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, adds this
sentence, so* honorable to himself : / ' I t is some
14

210

WORDSWORTH.

compensation for the severe toil and anxiety of
public life to have, occasionally, the opportunity
of serving or gratifying those who are an honor
to their country."
A few weeks later, in a note written in the
same spirit of appreciation of what was due the
illustrious poet, Sir Robert informs him that
the Queen has settled on him for life " an annual provision of three hundred pounds."
And still another honor awaited him. The
following year Southey, the laureate, died. Ten
days after his decease the laureateship was offered to Wordsworth, through a note from the
Lord Chamberlain, Earl De la Warr. This
Wordsworth declined, on account of duties imposed by the office which his advanced age
would not allow him to perform. Hereupon
came another note from the Lord Chamberlain,
pressing his acceptance of the appointment,
backed by one from Sir Robert Peel, who begs
him " not to 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 of you." And so Wordsworth became poet-laureate when just about to
enter his seventy-fourth year.
In one of his searching critical papers on
translating Homer, Mr. Matthew Arnold says :

THE

EXCURSION,

211

" He [Homer] is, indeed, rather to be classed
with Milton than the balladists and Scott;
for what he has in common with Milton —
the noble and profound application of ideas
to life — is the most essential part of poetic
greatness. The most essentially grand and
characteristic things of Homer are such things
as ' And I have endured — the like of which
no soul upon the earth hath yet endured — to
carry to my lips the hand of him who slew my
child ;' .
" Or as ' Nay, and thou, too, old man, in times
past wert, as we hear, happy ;'
" Or as ' For, so have the gods spun our destiny to us wretched mortals, that we should
live in sorrow • but they themselves are without trouble/ "
Tried by this exacting test, Wordsworth
stands abreast with the very foremost poets of
all nations and ages.
At the same time, in order that the application of ideas be the more productive, the ideas
must be embodied in a narrative and characters
that shall give the poem what may be called
superficial attractiveness. Thus, the Iliad is
more attractive than " Paradise Lost," finding,
therefore, many more readers, and thence the
ideas applied to life by Homer are brought

212

WORDSWORTH.

more frequently before the minds of cultivated
humanity than those of Milton. The story of
the Iliad is more apprehensible than that of
"Paradise Lost:" the one is concrete and manifest, the other comparatively abstract, recondite. Homer is superior to Milton in the primary artistic gift of imparting life to his personages and the scenes they move in. However
grandly and melodiously the Muse may sing —
" Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe,"

the theme is*" too theological and factitious to
bring itself warmly home to the reader's bosom.
Nor is there incident enough for twelve books,
and thence, as well as from the nature of Milton's mind, which prompted such a theme, there
is a lack of progression and variety. About the
whole Miltonic narration there is an unreality which fatigues the reader's attention, instead of stimulating it, as every poetic narrative should do.
" The Excursion" makes no pretension to
epic form : for that form Wordsworth lacked
the constructive gift. He could not project
one involved story to be carried forward by
the interaction and counteraction of the agents
all combined and subordinated to one momen-

THE EXCURSION.

213

tous end, towards which everything tends. His
mind was meditative much more than sensuous and plastic; not objective, but subjective.
His personages are put before us not so much
for their own sakes as for the sake of presenting, through them, certain principles and motives of life and conduct. Ideas precede the
personages instead of springing, unconsciously
as it were, out of them. The figures are for
the most part absent, and are presented to us
through the mouths of others instead of by
their own audible speech and visible motion.
Thence they are not carried directly into our
hearts, but indirectly. And this is the advantage of the dramatic form, which demands not
only creative, but histrionic power in the poet.
Thence good drama is seldom achieved, and
thence Wordsworth's signal dramatic failure.
But " The Excursion " is not a failure ; it is
the opposite of a failure; it is a glorious, enduring success, as embodying in the harmonious iambics of a poet who especially valued
the art of poetry the thoughts, sentiments,
convictions of a man of rare mental endowments, a clear, strong understanding being combined with noble aspirations and perpetual
sympathies, all mellowed by wide experience
and culture. If there is not the vivacity of

214

WORDSWORTH,

presentation of Homer, neither is there his repetition ; if there is not his rapidity of movement, there are depths of meditation and sweeps
of thought and problems of life beyond the
reach of the dear, sensuous, gigantic, luminous,
young l pagan. And thence, for the manifestation of " the most essential part of poetic greatness," for "grand and characteristic things,"
such as Mr. Arnold quotes from Homer, for
every one of Such to be found in the Iliad,
half a score could be cited from " The Excursion."
That far-reaching answer to the question,
" W h a t are.things eternal?" near the beginning of the fourth book — a passage so grandly
thoughtful, so majestic and melodious, that it
were a tribute to Milton to call it Miltonic —
is nourished by an atmosphere of spirituality
to the upper stratum of which no Greek ever
rose, —saving, perhaps, in their highest moods,
Socrates or Plato. Take a single fragment of
an appeal to the "Prime self-existing Cause."
This beautiful sentence basks, too, in an Homeric sunshine: —
" Thou, who didst wrap the cloud
Of infancy around us, that thyself,
1
Young, because he lived in the youth of Greece and
civilization.

THE

EXCURSION.

21$

Therein, with *our simplicity a while
Might'st hqld, on earth, communion undisturbed."

What a passage this is to quote, on apt occasion, instead of hackneyed Horatian or Virgilian lines. And here, two pages farther, is another " application of ideas to life :" —
" 'T is by comparison an easy task
Earth to despise ; but to converse with heaven, —
This is not- easy."

Spirituality, a characteristic of Wordsworth
as poet, is the very essence of " T h e Excursion," underlying its reflections and meditations," overhanging its scenes. In the second
of the two following lines, belief in the transcendent, paramount vitality of the spirit is expressed with a boldness which endues Wordsworth with the Prophet's majesty: —
" Rejoicing secretly
In the sublime attractions of the grave."

What significance in the two following lines!
Could we obey their injunction, all the threads
of our tangled life would be disengaged and
straightened, and we should advance nearer to
perfection: —
" Take courage, and withdraw yourself from ways
That run not parallel to nature's course."

Who but a profound poet, after his faculties

2l6

WORDSWORTH.

had been steeped in experience and spiritual
meditation, could utter such wise, cheerful
words as these ? —
" We live by Admiration, Hope, and Love ;
And, even as these are well and wisely fixed,
In dignity of being we ascend."

A description of the effect upon one's whole
being of the sweetening power of love he concludes with these lines, which hold forth an
ideal which it were healthful for us all to aspire
to: —
" And seeks for good ; and finds the good he seeks :
Until abhorrence and contempt are things
He only knows by name ; and, if he hear
From other mouths the language which they speak,
He is compassionate; and has no thought,
No feeling, which can overcome his love."

Some votaries of science think they can see
"all creation" through the telescope and microscope, and that physical laws embrace and
control the whole of being. At such these
lines are aimed : —
•»
" Science then
Shall be a precious visitant; and then,
And only then, be worthy of her nante ;
For then her heart shall kindle ; her dull eye,
Dull and inanimate, no more shall hang
Chained to its object in brute slavery."

He thus describes a rural pastor: —

THE

EXCURSION.

21/

" The calm delights
Of unambitious piety he chose,
And learning's solid dignity."

Many similar gems of wisdom glisten in the
glow of poetic beauty, gems set in paragraphs
and pages - of fresh, instructive exposition of
human doing and suffering, or of vivid landscape reflected from the mirror of a great Artist's eye. Poetic genius lights up what it falls
on. The church-yard among the mountains,
in " The Excursion," instead of being a blank,
silent, melancholy inclosure of buded bodies,
becomes alive with souls. It is far other than
the superficial animation given to it by the
risen sun, drawing its earthly features into
bright visibility: it is not a bit of landscape
suddenly illuminated; it is* a resurrection of
the buried, effected by the poet's magic. The
buried rise out of their graves, and speak
through the tongue of the poet His fellpwmen come back to earthly life at his bidding,
because he is so much a man, so palpitating
with the desires 'and passions and aspirations
of men, such a focus of those rays which, from
the brain of man, play upon things, all these
gifts of sensibility and intellect being in him
tuned, harmonized, exalted by the supreme
poetic gift, which interfuses them all with the
vivifying light of the beautiful.

2l8

WORDSWORTH.

This vivifying light it is which makes " The
Excursion " a volume wherein, amid so much
else, may be studied felicities of speech. The
language of Wordsworth, as the pliable instrument of a poet who is a close, subtle, exacting
thinker, a watchful, sympathetic observer, is
distinguished by appropriateness; and when we
consider the range of his thought, the wealth
of his sensibilities, and hence the immense
multiplication of his utterance, to say that his
language is singularly appropriate is of itself a
high and broad eulogy. Felicities of diction
spring from soundness of feeling and clearness
of perception fused into a brilliant aptness of
words by poetic warmth. Wordsworth's language is not the dress of his thoughts, it is
their incarnation; it fits them as the pliant skin
fits the flesh Qut of which as well as over which
it is woven.. His words never overlay his
thought, so entirely are they the creatures of
his thought. The form is never too brilliant
for the substance. There is not that sheen im^
parted by shining words which makes the matter seem at first richer than it is, and which,
wearing off, takes away with it the freshness
of the page. The mind of Wordsworth being
strong and clear, logical and artistic,- could
obey the principle of Joubert, — "Keep your

THE EXCURSION.

219

mind.above your thoughts, and your thoughts
above your expressions." He is in the best
sense classical, in that his thoughts being
choice and fresh are perfectly matched with
words. Hence his style is firm and_ transparent. If he is less attractive than some of his
contemporaries and successors, it is because
he is less superficial than they, because he
opens to the reader a deeper inner world of
poetry. If he occasionally lacks color, that is
on account of his spirituality. The flames of
some poets are redder and make more crackle,
but such do not hold the lasting warmth of
Wordsworth's. If lie wants the sensuousness
of Shakespeare and Homer, he has their power
of creative description. Nejxt to Shakespeare,
Wordsworth is full of- felicities, significant
phrases, happy turns of thought, single sentences that carry with them service and joy,
such service as only thoughts born of truth can
perform, such joy as only truth and beauty in
unison can enkindle, — sentences which, shining with the mild glow of a chastened poetic
imagination, are embedded forever in the texture of the English language, deepening it,
strengthening it, beautifying it.
Throughout Wordsworth's works there is a
unity of spirit which has led to his being called

220

WORDSWORTH.

one-sided: it were fitter, on account of his
moral intuitions, to call him deep-sided. This
unity makes it appropriate to insert here one
of his sonnets which enumerates some of the
themes he delighted to treat, and which are
treated in many pages of " The Excursion :" —
" Not Love, nor War, nor the tumultuous swell
Of civil conflict, nor the wrecks of change,
Nor Duty struggling with affliction strange —
Not these alone inspire the tuneful shell;
But where untroubled peace and concord dwell,
There also is the Muse not loath to range,
Watching the twilight smoke of cot or grange,
Skyward ascending from a woody dell.
Meek aspirations please her, lone endeavor,
And sage content, and placid melancholy;
She loves to gaze upon a crystal river —
Diaphanous because it travels slowly ;
Soft is the music that would charm forever;
The flower of sweetest smell is shy and lowly." •

XVIII.
CONCLUSION.

T H E deepest sorrow of Wordsworth's life
fell upon him in old age. Many years before,
he had lost children; but, sore as was the affliction to his affectionate fatherly heart, these
died young, and when himself was young
enough to outgrow his grief. For thirty years
Dora was his only daughter, a dutiful, attaching
child, the comfort of her parents, married, since
1841, to Mr. Quillinan, an accomplished man of
letters. When, after having been for forty-four
years entwined round his warmest heart-strings,
doubly endeared to him by filial devotion and
•intellectual sympathy, she was torn away from
him, the wrench was fearful. A month after
Dora's death, August 9, 1847, n e wrote to
Moxon: " We bear up under our affliction as
well as God enables us to do. But oh! my
dear friend, our loss is immeasurable. God
bless you and. yours." The note announcing
Dora's death to his nephew (and biographer)
concludes with a touching phrase: "Your af-

222

WORDSWORTH.

fectionate uncle, and the more so for this affliction." In speaking of Dora many months afterwards, he said, " The loss of her has taken the
sunshine out of my-life."
Wordsworth's work was done. The spring
which, fifty years before, from the high interior
resource of % its granite mountain, had come
forth timidly, amid wild flowers, to flow rejoicing and unknown in the sunshine, and as its
stream grew in strength had* made itself felt
by the purity and productivity of its waters,
had now run its long, deep, untainted course.
Wordsworth had no word more for his fellowmen : he had said his great say. From obscurity and poverty he had risen to competence
and renown. The best and wisest of his countrymen acknowledged their obligations to him;
men from another land and a distant continent,
whose privilege it is to speak the language of
Shakespeare and Milton and Wordsworth, on
landing in dear old England, went out of their
way that they might behold and listen to the
great poet sage to whom their hearts and their
intellects owed so much.
-.Towards the end of March, 1850, Wordsworth fell ill. On Sunday the 7th of April, the
day h'e completed his eightieth year, he was
prayed for in Rydal Chapel. He grew daily

CONCLUSION.

223

worse. On the '20th, it was seen that his
earthly end was nigh. His wife, the same age
with himself, said to him, " William, you afe
going to Dora." Sixteen days after he had
entered his eighty-first year he did go, at midday on the 23d of April, the same .day of the
same month on which Shakespeare was born
and died.
Had the beautiful nature about Rydal been
capable of consciousness, its face on that day
would have been marred by inward disturbance. The lovely lakes, which had looked their
loveliest under his gaze, would have ruffled
themselves, as if suffering under the whips of
conflicting winds. The mountains and valleys,
among which he had been cradled and reared,
and had lived one of the most productive lives
ever lived on earth, the. valleys and mountains,
which he could no more look upon, would have
shrouded themselves in the mourning of their
darkest mists. The streams and waterfalls
would in sadness have hushed their musicwhich their poet could no longer listen to. And
the wild violets, which had been his life-long
companions and comforters, would have closed
their sweet petals at noon, feeling that night
was come, because upon him who had most
loved them was come the night of death, and
he could see them no more.

224

WORDSWORTH.

For the Poet himself, that was his day of exaltation, of translation to regions more beautiful than those his mortal eyes had feasted on,
to visual prospects lighted up by a light even
diviner than that of the sun. For him it was
a new birthday, a day of reunion with Dora
and other long-lost children, of reunion with
his father and mother and a crowd of dear
friends ; the opening day of a grander, more
glorious phase of life, which few who had gone
before him were better fitted to enjoy. For
the community around Rydal it was a day of
deep depression. Aged as was William Wordsworth, his departure from among them was an
immeasurable deprivation. The chief joy and*
glory of the neighborhood was gone. The tall,
gaunt figure of the venerated poet would never
be seen again among them : a big chasm was
made in their daily being. But through the
gloom of the mourners round his grave shimmered sweet memories, memories of his wise
words, his kindly deeds, his venerable aspect,
•his neighborly amenities, his integrity. Standing beside the body's resting-place, through
the minds of his older neighbors passed swiftly
the procession of his long manhood in its
simplicity and beneficence. To them William
Wordsworth was the beloved, respected man;

CONCLUSION.

225

to the younger, his familiar, ever welcome person was clothed with a grandeur thrown round
it by poetic fame.
On the wings of that fame the news was
borne through England and America; and
many hearts were touched by the sad tidings,
for to many he was the great master whose
fellow-feeling and pathos had so moved them
and rejoiced them and lifted them that they
felt the.y had lost an unseen benefactor, a most
dear, revered friend; And through their minds
passed swiftly the glories of his song, as pure,
every one of them, as the forest-thoughts of
Diana, as fresh as the, ever-young Apollo's
beautiful presence. To one. came echoing out
of the past upon his ear some sonorous sonnet,
to another a tender ballad, to a third a longer
narrative, to some the profound meditations of
" The Excursion;" but all were in accord to
hail as bis masterpiece the great Ode. With *
"
this, then, I crown the end of a little volume
which has been written under the impulses of
Love and Admiration, and with the Hope that
it may do something towards making Wordsworth more deeply valued in America.
15

226

WORDSWORTH.
ODE.

INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY FROM RECOLLECTIONS OF
EARLY CHILDHOOD.
T h e Child is Father of the M a n ;
And I coul.d wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
See page 129.
I.

T H E R E was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
T o me did seem
Apparel'd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it has been of yore ; —
Turn whereso'er I may,
By night or day,
T h e things which I have seen I now can see no more.
11.

T h e rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose ;
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare ;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair j
T h e sunshine is a glorious birth ;
But yet I know, where'er I g6,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.
in.
Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound,

CONCLUSION.

22J

To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strpng ;
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong ;
I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng ;
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay ;
Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every beast keep holiday; —
Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy
Shepherd-boy !
IV.

Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make ; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee ;
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath its coronal,
The fullness of your bliss, I feel— I feel it all.
0 evil day ! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,
And the children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers ; while the Sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his mother's arm :
1 hear, I hear, with joy I hear ! —
But there's a Tree, of many, one,

228

WORDSWORTH.

A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone :
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam ?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream ?
v.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar :
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is-our home :
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the East
Must travel, still ^is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended ;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
VI.

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own ;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a Mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim

CONCLUSION.
The homely Nurse doth all she can
To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.
VII.

Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
A six years' Darling of a pigmy size !
See; where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
With light upon him from his father's eyes !
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragmentfrom his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learned art;
A wedding or a festival,
A mourning or a funeral;
• And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his song:
Then will he fit his tongue
To dialogues of business, love, or strife ;
But it will not be long.
Ere this be thrown aside,
And with new joy and pride
The little actor cons another part;
Filling from time to time his " humorous stage
With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,
That Life brings with her in her equipage ;
As if his whole vocation
Were endless imitation.
VIII.

Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy soul's immensity;

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WORDSWORTH.

Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind, ,
That, deaf and silent, read'st th' eternal deep,
Haunted forever by the eternal mind, —
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave ;
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave,
A Presence which is not to be put by ;
Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The years to bring th' inevitable yoke,
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife ?
Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life !

a

IX.

O joy ! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive !
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction : not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest. —
•Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering r his breast: —
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise ;

CONCLUSION.
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things ;
Fallings from us; vanishings ;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realized ;
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised:
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing ;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence : truths that wake,
To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy !
' Hence 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.
x.
Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song !
And let the young Lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound !
We in thought will join your throng,

231

232

WORDSWORTH.

Ye that pipe and ye that play,
Ye that through your hearts to-day
Feel the gladness of the May !
W h a t though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now forever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower ;
' W e will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind ;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be ;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering ;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
XI.

And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves !
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your m i g h t ;
I only have relinquished one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway, ,
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripp'd lightly as they ;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely y e t ;
The Clouds that gather round the setting Sun
Do take a sober coloring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality:
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. [1803-6.