sy ee ago Soe ata a Keren Seer mang : fai we ee Og fog 3 SiO es exe, 2 : ¢ - uae << ’ . ‘ 5 en - 5 3 “ é a8 re roa ys a “shot Site's U‘Staes os aire ne Sa OC : oe rae a ee See a Stee Rae, Ton, APE, REO Pee ee UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY R22. Telnaes ~Sce Ja09-20M ba Ri “Return this book on or before the Latest Date stamped below. University of Illinois Library L161—II41 THE WORKS OF Pair Y TAYLOR. VOE. Vv. _ CRITICAL ESSAYS ON POETRY. CRIME CONSIDERED IN A LETTER TO THE RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE. REVIEW OF JOHN STUART MILL’S WORK ON ‘THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN.” CORRESPONDENCE WITH JOHN STUART MILL. THE WORKS OF Sleieer td Es Ni Reve PAY LOR, hil 9 Beate CRITICAL ESSAYS ON POETRY. CRIME CONSIDERED IN A LETTER TO THE RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE. REVIEW OF JOHN STUART MILE’S WORK ON ‘THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN.” CORRESPONDENCE WITH JOHN STUART MILL. LONDON : C. KEGAN PAUL & CO., 1, PATERNOSTER SQUARE. 1878. CRITICAL ESSAYS ON POETRY, EG: BY SIRVHENRY TAYLOR. LONDON : C. KEGAN PAUL & CO., 1, PATERNOSTER SQUARE. 1878, ; ; . \ ‘ Bt) et { Fi ‘. . ‘ a( \,* ‘ ( Pi X ‘ ; , 4 ; 2 y i a { ey d Ae {eae Poi vee % y fi wt f * CPN UE PES PAO HUFL AL VUIRERN TEL ALAET | GON EEN TS: PAGE CRITICAL ESSAYS ON POETRY Essay on the Poetical Works of Mr. Wordsworth |... I Essay on Mr. Wordsworth’s Sonnets... ee 53 Essay on De Vere’s Poems he e ee Aee CRIME CONSIDERED IN A LETTER TO THE RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE _... re a ra 1} REVIEW OF JOHN STUART MILL’s WorRK ON “THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN ” oF: eae me 240 CORRESPONDENCE WITH JOHN STUART MILL ues 305 156234 eats ms eee ees cP oe A. v i Ae “ty oe ’ poh s a ‘ * j \ N ’ + V \ > ‘ ? — ( f be . 1 . ‘ ¢ ' i t . s \ hvc real h i i n nt ’ Pag : ‘ j 5 J ¢ “ { = - CRITICAL ESSAYS ON POETRY. Bebe Derive Cone Of 1849. [The first of these essays was first published in No. 104 of the “‘Quarterly Review” (December, 1834); the second in No. 137 (December, 1841); the third in No. 143 (May, 1843). They were re-published in 1849, with the preface now again prefixed to them: and by a singular coincidence the political crisis in France which, according to the preface, prompted their republication in 1849, is repeating itself now in December, 1877; not, of course, with the elements unchanged, whether or not it may be with the like issues. ] ALTHOUGH I have always intended to reprint those few writings of mine in periodical works, which are not necessarily and by the nature of the subjects ephemeral, I should not have chosen for the republication this time of political excitement, were it not that there is to be found in one of these Essays—the second of the series— an exposition of the views taken by our greatest Poets of the nature of liberty; which exposition, if it justly represent those views, will not be unaptly put forward X11 PREFACE. for present consideration. Our great Poets have been, perhaps, our best political philosophers; and if the reading and study of poetry be put aside by political commotions, it is because men lack time to be studious, or because the temper of their minds is rendered averse from contemplation, not because our poetry is wanting in applicability to such seasons: for unless I err greatly through partiality and partial knowledge, the poetry of this country (a country pre-eminently poetical), is its chief storehouse of civil wisdom; whilst it is in that other country whose poetry has ever been of an inferior order and beyond its own territories in the least estima- tion, that political wisdom has been most at fault; sup- planted from time to time by the crudest theories and the most barbarous practice—in so much that, despite the scientific attaimments, the many dexterities and the colloquial cleverness of that people, any instructed man who should adventure to visit them at this time, might suppose himself, like the suitor in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Play, “ arrived amongst a nation of new-found fools, on a land where no navigator had yet planted wit.” Such would be the appearance; and though in reality there is no such thing as a nation of fools, yet there is, unhappily, a nation in which, at particular conjunctures, and (let us hope) only for a season, the fools are so PREFACE. Xl much the most active and energetic as to be the only parties apparent ; and through defect of sober intrepidity on the part of those who are rational, fool-hardihood is triumphant. ** The Good want power, but to weep barren tears ; The Powerful goodness want, worse need for them ; The Wise want love; and those who love want wisdom ; And all best things are thus confused to ill.” * I do not mean of course to imply that it is for want of written poetry that the French nation cannot see its way ; nor that it is by virtue of written poetry that our way lies more in the light: but out of that imaginative power in our national mind which is wanting in theirs, have proceeded the twin-births of poetry and political wisdom: and as they are born of one stock, so do they dwell together in the land in a faithful and helpful relationship. If the poet who is now one of the foremost members of that body in France which is called its Government, and who is apparently one of the least erring, certainly the most brave and generous of their number,—if that in some respects very admirable person be not politically wise, the inference should be, not that poets make bad politicians, but rather that this politician is but an in- * Shelley. ‘ Prometheus Unbound.’ Xiv PREFACE, different poet. For true greatness in poetry there is none without wisdom,—without that wisdom at least which errs not widely in the philosophy of politics, whether or not it be competent to the conduct of affairs. The great English Poets, though ardent lovers of freedom, have never, as far as I know, lent their countenance in a single line to the confounding of liberty with equality: nor was it possible that they should do so, so long as the poetic faculty was alive in them: for in what is that faculty most essentially exercised but in the inquisition into Nature, and who can look into Nature and fail to see that the system of God’s Providence therein is not a system of equality, but throughout its whole scope and tenour a system of subordination ? ** Not equal all, yet free ; Equally free: for orders and degrees Jar not with liberty, but well consist.” * Such was the judgment of the least conservative of our great Poets as delivered in verse : and the prose develop- ment of his opinions may be found in his second book ‘Of Reformation in England.’ In Spenser’s allegory the champion of equality is represented as a Giant full of violence, pride, and pre- sumption, who proclaimed that all realms and nations * ‘Paradise Lost,’ bk. v. 791. PREFACE. XV were run awry, and undertook to put them right by reducing all things to a level :— ‘** Therefore the Vulgar did about him flock And cluster thick unto his leesings vain, Like foolish flies about an honey-crock, In hope by him great benefit to gain.” He is rebuked by Arthegal as seeking to contravene the order of Nature and Providence, and also for his blind- ness in aiming at equality through mere physical dis- tribution, having, at the same time, no balance in which he can weigh what is moral, spiritual, or intellectual. But he stubbornly maintains his ground :— “¢* Thou foolish Elf,’ said then the Giant wroth, ‘ Seest not how badly all things present be, And each Estate quite out of order go’th ? The Sea itself dost thou not plainly see Encroach upon the Land there under thee ; And th’ Earth itself how daily ’tis increased By all that dying to it turned be? Were it not good that wrong were then surceased, And from the most that some were given to the least ? *«< «Therefore I will throw down these mountains high, And make them level with the lowly plain : ‘ These towering rocks which reach unto the sky I will thrust down into the deepest main, And as they were them equalise again. Tyrants that make men subject to their law, I will suppress, that they no more may reign ; And Lordings curb that Commons overawe, And all the wealth of rich men to the poor will draw.’ Xvl PREFACE. ‘* ¢ Of things unseen how canst thou deem aright,’ Then answered the righteous Arthegal, ‘ Sith thou misdeem’st so much of things in sight ? What though the Sea with waves continual Do eat the Earth, it is no more at all ; Ne is the Earth the less or loseth aught ; For whatsoever from one place doth fall Is with the tide unto another brought : For there is nothing lost but may be found if sought. * * * * * ‘* “For take thy balance (if thou be so wise) And weigh the wind that under Heaven doth blow ; Or weigh the light that in the East doth rise ; Or weigh the thought that from Man’s mind doth flow : But if the weight of these thou canst not show, Weigh but one word that from thy lips doth fall. For how canst thou those greater secrets know That dost not know the least thing of them all. Ill can he rule the Great that cannot reach the Small.’ ” The argument proceeds, not without the help of Talus, the faithful attendant of Arthegal; but the Giant is obstinate in error :— *¢ Whom when so lewdly-minded Talus found, Approaching nigh unto him, cheek by cheek, He shouldered him from off the higher ground, And down the rock him throwing, in the sea him drowned.” That portion of Spenser’s argument which points to the restorative and compensatory character of apparent deprivations in the physical scheme of Nature, in order to be recognised as just in politics, should have been, perhaps, more distinctly connected with that other portion of his argument which insists upon the im- 7s PREFACE. XVil _ portance, in the lot of Man, of those elements which are not told by number, weight, or measure; showing that equality of wealth does not produce equality of weal, and that Justice is concerned, not ‘In making men equal, but in making them as much as may be, equally the arbiters and agents of their own happiness and fortunes. There is but this step wanting, however, to bring the opponents “ cheek by cheek,” and the Giant is fairly shouldered from the higher ground. If Spenser and Milton, each in -his way, the one copiously, the other succinctly, propounded the prin- ciples by which liberty and justice are distinguished from equality, Shakespeare, whose political philosophy was far-sighted in proportion to the light which his imagination cast upon all he saw, might almost be sup- posed, from a speech given to Ulysses in ‘Troilus and Cressida,’ to have descried in prophetic vision those consequences of the doctrines of equality which at the end of the last century were exemplified in France :— ** How could communities, Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities, Peaceful commerce from dividable shores, The primogenitive and due of birth, Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels, But by degree, stand in authentic place ? Take but degree away, untune that string, And hark ! what discord follows! Each thing meets Vv. b XViil - PREFACE, In mere oppugnancy : the bounded waters Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores And make a sop of all this solid globe : Strength should be Lord of imbecility, And the rude son should strike his father dead : Force should be right ; or rather, Right and Wrong, (Between whose endless jar Justice resides, ) Should lose their names, and so should Justice too. Then everything includes itself in power, Power into will, will into appetite ; And appetite a universal wolf, So doubly seconded with will and power, Must make perforce a universal prey, And, last, eat up himself.” * In the progress of such a principle, Ulysses beheld plagues, portents, and mutiny,— ‘* frights, changes, horrors, Divert and crack, rend and deracinate The unity and married calm of States Quite from their fixure.” That Shakespeare, living in a peaceful age, under a ‘monarchy yet unshaken, should have traced with such curious precision the hypothetic results of the false philosophy which was to be long after exemplified in France ; and that France, in little more than sixty years after her first Revolution, should be brought again within the danger of these consequences, may serve to show how much we may learn from the imaginative reason without experience ; and where the reason is not imagi- * ©Troilus and Cressida,’ Act. i., Scene 3. PREFACE. * XIX native, how soon the lessons of experience are forgotten. In this country, where the imaginative character of the national intellect deepens and widens its contemplations and retards its conclusions,—for the imagination is a self-questioning faculty,—I trust it is superfluous to insist upon the truth that liberty has no interest in equality. In France, where, with great activity of the other faculties, the popular imagination is small, weak, and at the same time, highly excitable,—for, in the mind as in the body, inflammatory action proceeds as often from weakness as from fulness,—it is a truth which the very elect of the instructed classes have shown themselves unable to discern. But if the English people be safe from the grosser delusions which are now prevalent in France, they have, nevertheless, much to learn as to the moral and spiritual nature of liberty, and the impossibility of pushing it on by merely political impulses. ‘This they will best learn from those by whom liberty is best loved: and there are no sources from which the love of liberty flows more freely than from the minds of the great Poets of England. Pine et 5: POAT 4 ‘ P fi A CRITICAL ESSAYS ON POETRY. ESSAY ON THE POETICAL WORKS OF MR.* WORDSWORTH. (first published in 1834.) Mr. WoRDSWORTH’s prefatory theories have been for many years sufficiently vexed and controverted ; and the time seems to have come when, if we are to pause at all upon this threshold of his works, it should be with a view rather to a statement of the results than to a continuance of the disputation. In point of opinion the result has been, as to the matter of poetic diction, a very general admission that no real elevation can be given to poetry by the use of phrases which are no otherwise poetical than as not being met with in prose. In point of practice, the result might have been equally decided, if certain results of a different character had not been thrown up at the same time from other sources. * In the year 1834 Wordsworth was naturally so designated. In this year of 1878 to write of Mr. Wordsworth would be as absurd as to write of 1/7. Milton. Ve B 2 WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. Some reforms have been effected, however. The poetical vocabulary in use precedently to Mr. Wordsworth’s prefaces has been expurgated ; Poetry is, in some par- ticulars, more plain-spoken than she was then used to be; and some things are now called by their right names which were then considered to be more favourably presented to the reader under any other denominations than those which belong to them in the language of real life. ‘Thus the bird commonly known by the name of the nightingale is now’'so called in poetry; whereas before Mr. Wordsworth’s time no poet could be content to give it an appellation less poetical than “ Philomel,” r “tuneful bird of night ;” and the luminary which was formerly graced with some such titular distinction as “Bright Phoebus,” or “ Apollo’s golden fire,” is now to be met with in a volume of poetry under the same name as that which is given to it in the almanac. fi So far the prefaces did their work; but hates it accomplished, when there sprang up a new growth of abuses; and whilst some of these bore a very close resemblance to their predecessors, others, though having their root in the same soil, tended more dangerously to the corruption of style, inasmuch as they were of a more covert and surreptitious nature. A bald misnomer like that of “ Philomel” or “ Bulbul,” * “ Albion” or “ Erin,” * It has been said, by some one—I forget by whom—that he had learnt, for the first time, from Lord Byron poetry, that two bulls make a nightingale. WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. 3 is sure to be shortly weeded out of the language to which it does not belong; but there are ways at the present time of falsifying genuine English words for purposes supposed to be poetical, which are more insidious, inasmuch as they carry with them not merely a confusion of tongues, but a confusion of ideas ; and often also, by really conveying a sentiment, give some colour to their pretext of conveying a sense. If we look through some volume of current poetry for one of those words which seem to be considered eminently poetical at the present day—the adjective “wild” for example—and consider it closely in the many situations in which it will be found to recur, we shall in general find it to be used, not for the sake of any meaning, definite or indefinite, which it can be supposed legitimately to bear, but—in a manner which Mr. Words- worth’s prefaces will be found to explain—for the sake of conjuring up certain associations somewhat casually connected with it. It has been originally, perhaps, employed with propriety and with distinguished success, in some passages conceived in the same mood of mind and pointed to the same effects which are aimed at by its subsequent employers; the word takes, as it were, the colour of these original passages ; becomes a stock- word with those who have more of the feeling of poetry than of discrimination in the use of language, and is employed thenceforward with a progressively diminishing concern for its intrinsic significancy, or for the propriety 4 WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. of the applications which are made of it. The adjec- tives bright, dark, lonely, the nouns “ight, dream, halo, and divers other words, might be instanced, which are scattered almost at random through our fugitive poetry, with a sort of feeling senselessness, and convey to the congenial reader the sentiment of which they are under- stood to be the symbols, without either suggesting to him any meaning or awakening him to the want of it. In some instances it does not seem to be necessary that the word should be otherwise than misplaced, even in the passage which may have first given the impulse which led to the indiscriminate use of it. “The mind, the music Jreathing from her face,” is suggestive of as much false metaphor as could well be concentrated in a single line; but it conveyed some vague impres- sions of beauty and fervour and was associated with the feelings with which Lord Byron’s writings were usually read; and “to breathe” became thenceforth, amongst the followers of Lord Byron, a verb poetical which meant anything but respiration. Indeed the abuse seems to have spread to a circle which might be sup- posed to be remote from Lord Byron’s influence: for — a book was published two or three years ago with the title of ‘Holy Breathings.’ * * (1877). One of the phenomena which criticism strives in vain to account for, is the universal currency obtained for a time by some such line or phrase in poetry as the author himself, perhaps, on a revision of what he had written, would most desire to efface. In the poetry of Keats, with all its grace of diction and fervour WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. 5 These errors, when they shall have become old and tiresome, will probably give way, like those which preceded them, on the one hand to more fresh and fashionable faults, and on the other to a renewed appli- cation of Mr. Wordsworth’s principles of poetic diction. Natural good sense and good taste will always conquer at last, though they will never be in want of new worlds of error to oppugn; and upon the sense and taste of the natural human understanding Mr. Wordsworth’s principles will be found to rest, if they be accepted with the modifications which may be considered to have fairly resulted from the discussion that they have undergone. So accepted, they would teach the poet, not to draw his language exclusively from that of common life, nor indeed to reject, from some kinds of poetry, language of a highly scholastic and composite structure ; nor, if a dramatist, need he fear to put diction more or less archaic into the mouths of medieval dramatis persone ; Shakespeare has made the language of his own time the native tongue of the drama; but in general to use the same language which is employed in the writings and conversations of other men when they write and discourse their best—to avoid any words which are not of imagination, there was one unlucky phrase to be found in which was neither grace nor grammar: ‘‘4 thing of beauty is a joy for ever.” It was put up over the entrance of an exhibition of works of art in one of our largest commercial towns, and has been passing from mouth to mouth ever since. 6 WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. admissible in good prose or unaffected conversation, whether erudite or ordinary—and especially to avoid the employment of any words in a sense which is not their legitimate prosaic sense. The more these rules are observed, the more benefit will accrue to the writers and readers of poems: at least to those writers who can afford to deal in clear ideas, and to those readers who have so far exercised their faculties as to be desirous to understand a meaning in poetry. If the influence of Mr. Wordsworth’s works has added largely to the number of those who cultivate poetry with this aim, it is saying nothing in derogation of what he has done for his art—more than must be said of the greatest artists that ever existed—to acknowledge that the generation of false tastes and foolish phrase- ologies proceeds farz passu with their destruction, and that Mr. Wordsworth has not, any more than any poet ever did before, cut off the succession of readers who are capable of receiving, through catch-words appealing to their poetical susceptibilities, a pleasure which would be dissipated if any demand were made upon their understandings. ‘* Ut sylve foliis pronos mutantur in annos ”— If the true tastes of mankind are permanent and the false deciduous, there are nevertheless those elements of faise taste permanently inherent in human nature, which will perpetuate the kind and quality of bad poetry, WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. 7 however speedy may be the oblivion of the successive products. Let Mr. Wordsworth, or ‘*Let Hercules himself do what he may,” poetry always will have, no doubt, as it always has had, its meretricious professors, its vicious admirers, and its bastard language. Perhaps, however, the progress of Mr. Wordsworth’s principles has been more aided by his poems than by his prefaces—by his practice than by his theory ; for whilst the consideration of the latter is still we believe confined to disciples and students, the poems have made a rapid advance to popularity, more especially in the last ten years.* A marked change may be observed in the tone taken upon the subject by those who float upon the current of society and make themselves the mouthpiece of its opinions. The time is not long past when the mention of Mr. Wordsworth’s name would have been met by any one of these gentlemen with some excellent joke about Peter Bell or the Idiot Boy: but of these pleasantries mankind has by degrees grown weary; and there are few societies in which they would not now be received as denoting that the party from whom they proceeded was somewhat behind the world in these matters. * 1824-34.—The advance was more rapid in the years that followed 1834. The publisher of Mr. Wordsworth’s works told me that the sale of them had doubled immediately after the appear- ance of this article. 8 WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. It may be, however, that it is in a great measure Mr. Wordsworth’s own fault that he has been thus late in winning the ear of the people at large. He know- ingly and wantonly laid himself open to ridicule at a period when criticism was infected by a spirit of sarcasm which, ignorant and shallow as it was, was not ill cal- culated to please the popular appetite, was attended therefore with eminent success, and brought a blight as of a poisonous insect upon the growth of everything that was great and noble. Criticism and poetry, which ought to flourish together as members of the same family of art, were then hardly ever in friendly relations with each other: the former, on the contrary, growing beside the latter like a’ mildéwed ear, ‘blasting its wholesome brother.” At this period, Mr. Wordsworth, challenging and defying, as it were, the evil spirit which was abroad, persisted in throwing out, from time to time, effusions which he must have known to be the very matter which that spirit would most delight to fasten upon and could turn to the best account. He seemed to brave the contempt of the children of this world, and to take a pleasure in provoking the scoffs of their blind guides, as one who was resolved that his followers should be a peculiar people. It is not easy to say why this should have been done, or what was the compensation which it brought for the disadvantage, which it must unquestionably be esteemed by any poet, to have his influence—in this instance, it WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. 9 may be said, his purifying, fertilizing, and exalting in- fluence—so long checked and retarded ; thereby render- ing him, though not ultimately less illustrious, yet certainly less useful in his day and generation. If it be necessary to specify in what instances Mr. Wordsworth did wantonly expose himself to injury from the buffoons of criticism, take the commonly quoted instance of the ‘Idiot Boy;’ its announcement of a serious moral purpose, namely, that of “tracing the maternal passion through many of its more subtle wind- ings,” and the choice of the incidents through which this purpose was to be accomplished, namely, the illness of Susan Gale—Betty Foy’s difficulty in finding any one to go for the doctor—her determination to send her son the idiot upon a pony—his losing himself on the way— Betty’s distressful search for him and ultimate success. This end could not be announced and these means employed, without producing such a sense of contrast as must of necessity suggest ludicrous ideas and favour the attempt to direct upon the author the sentiment of ridicule so provoked. Human ingenuity cannot invent that amalgam of the trivial and the grave, of the imagi- native and the familiar, which should succeed in giving congruity of effect to such a narrative, seriously related and set forth with the details which Mr. Wordsworth has not omitted to delineate. Will it be said, then, that the relation is meant to be comic >—a comic narrative, merely adumbrating such matter of serious thought as all truth is se) WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. pregnant with, when regarded with a philosophic mind ? But if the poem is to be so considered, then the comic effect, resulting as it does chiefly from the narration in verse of matters of fact which .when there introduced appear ridiculously insignificant, must be said to be want- ing in vivacity, unity, and predominance. Passages of poetic beauty occur,* and appear to demand of the reader that he should regard the whole as a serious performance, and there is no such decided and unmixed drollery as might dissipate his perplexity and assure him that it was the poet’s intention to excite his merriment. The faults of which the ‘Idiot Boy’ is an example, are attributable also, in a more or less degree, to several others of Mr. Wordsworth’s earlier minor poems, and to portions of ‘ Peter Bell.’ As experiments, or as intellec- tual freaks or vagaries, there was no reason why he should not have written these poems, except that they afforded to the clowns and harlequins of criticism an opportunity of ‘setting on a certain quantity of barren spectators to laugh.” But, bearing in mind that this was sure to be the result, and that this result was calculated to repress the admiration which must otherwise have been rendered * Take, for instance, the following :— ‘* By this the stars were almost gone, The moon was setting on the hill, So pale you scarcely looked at her : The little birds began to stir, Though yet their tongues were still.” Poets have always delighted in describing times by their incidents ; WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. It to his works at large, there can be no doubt that he would have done well to temper with more of worldly discretion, in these intrinsically unimportant particulars, the independent exercise of his genius. There are some other particulars in which the cen- sures which have been passed upon several of Mr. Wordsworth’s earlier poems may be admitted to be just. His theory of poetic diction was perhaps urged further in practice than it would have been, had it not been a sort of theory militant—-a theory which had to prevail against popular error in the opposite extreme and to establish itself in spite of the hostility of critics. He was perhaps more afraid than was needful of indulging in the weak- ness of concession. “Tam sensible,” he says in the preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads ..... that my language may frequently have suffered from those arbitrary con- nexions of feelings and ideas with particular words and phrases, from which no man can altogether protect him- Boise. i sy Such faulty expressions, were I convinced they were faulty at present and that they must necessarily continue to be so, I would willingly take all reasonable pains to correct. But it is dangerous to make these alterations on the simple authority of a few individuals, and ‘ The Hours’ have each received, from poet or painter, or both in one, their characteristic garb and emblem: but it would be diffi- cult to find any passage in which the poetical faculty is made thus delicately, and as it were with a minute-pointer, to indicate the time of day. 12 WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. or even of certain classes of men; for where the under- standing of an author is not convinced, or his feelings altered, this cannot be done without great injury to himself: for his own feelings are his stay and support ; and if he sets them aside in one instance, he may be induced to repeat this act till his mind loses all confidence in itself, and becomes utterly debilitated.” Can it be supposed that Mr. Wordsworth’s mind, deeply founded as it was by nature, could have run any risk of this kind from a more ready compliance with public tastes, on points which were material no otherwise than in the unfortunate particular of leading to conflicts ? The answer can hardly be doubtful; but whether from the impulse of this unyielding antagonism, or from giving too much way to thought and theory in the choice of his phraseology and thus losing the guidance of natural impressions, he was frequently betrayed into the use, in serious poetry, of language not only plain but colloquial ; of phrases not only divested of adventitious associations of the poetical kind, but charged with opposite associa- tions; and his style, in certain portions of his earlier writings, lay open to the objection, that whereas the end | it had in view was a perfect simplicity of effect, it did not in point of fact accomplish that object, nor appear to the majority of readers to be the style which it was natural for an educated writer to use whose chief care was to convey his meaning distinctly. It is always to be borne in mind, that simplicity in poetry is the result of art, and WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. 13 that the ars celare artem is peculiarly requisite to this grace of style. In some of Mr. Wordsworth’s earlier poems the art employed to this end was consummate ; in others it was more or less apparent. ‘* Beneath the clear blue sky, he saw A little field of meadow ground ; But field or meadow name it not; Call it of earth a small green plot, With rocks encompassed round. “‘ The Swale flowed under the grey rocks, But he flowed quiet and unseen ;— You need a strong and stormy gale To bring the noises of the Swale To that green spot, so calm and green 1» In these stanzas he betrays the devices by which the effect of simplicity was sought to be obtained. But take next an example in the other kind; one in which art,— occult art,—is exercised with admirable success in simpli- fying the language of poetry. An old man, of a mirthful temperament, is lying with the poet, on a summer’s day, by the side of a fountain, and replies to a request that he would sing one of his lively songs, in a strain of transi- tory sadness, such as is often evoked by a summons to be ay ** Down to the vale this water steers— How merrily it goes! *Twill murmur on a thousand years, And flow as now it flows. “* And here, on this delightful day, I cannot chuse but think How oft, a vigorous man, I luy Beside this fountain’s brink. 14 WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. ‘« My eyes are dim with childish tears, My heart is idly stirred, For the same sound is in my ears Which in those days I heard. ‘“¢ Thus fares it still in our decay, And yet the wiser mind Mourns less for what age takes away Than what it leaves behind. ‘¢ The blackbird in the summer trees, The lark above the hill, Let loose their carols when they please, Are quiet when they will. ‘* With nature never do ¢hey wage A foolish strife; they see A happy youth, and their old age Is beautiful and free : ‘¢ But we are pressed by heavy laws ; And often, glad no more, We wear a face of joy because We have been glad of yore. ‘‘ If there be one who need bemoan His kindred laid in earth, The household hearts that were his own, It is the man of mirth.” To language so exquisitely simple as this, so graceful, so thoughtful, it may be doubted if the corrupted taste of any age, however dazzled with false adornments, could refuse admiration ; and if the simplicity of all Mr. Words- worth’s earlier poems had been neither more nor less than this, his works would probably have been as popular WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. 15 from the first as they have lately begun to be. Yet how few, comparatively, of his now voluminous works are those from which many thoughtless persons have been used to infer the character of the whole; and how genuine is the simplicity of style in nine-tenths of his writings, in all that he has written subsequently to the period of his earlier and more theoretic taste! In truth, those who refer to the ‘Idiot Boy,’ as a characteristic specimen of Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry, after having really read his works, might be equally expected, after reading those of Lord Bacon, to quote, as characteristic of that great man’s philosophy, the portion of his medical writings in which he recommends, as good for the diges- tion, “‘whelps and healthy young boys applied to the stomach.” Few or none are the minds of great activity which are not subject to these occasional aberrations and lapses. Idle misapprehensions of this kind are not the only ones which have retarded Mr. Wordsworth’s popularity. Readers of a very different class from those who fell into these errors—able men and laborious students—have been accustomed to deliver it as their opinion, that Mr. Wordsworth is more eminently a great ¢Ainker than a great poet; and the belief has been disseminated that it is necessary to climb to the heights of a new system of philosophy in order to reach an appreciation of Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry and find a pleasure init. Perhaps those from whom this opinion has taken its rise, are men 16 WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. who, from the nature of their studies and the bent of their minds, apprehend more readily what is intellectual than what is poetical, and see all that there is of thought in what they read, and not all that there is of poetry. Undoubtedly Mr. Wordsworth is a philosopher; but those who are repelled from his writings by this con- sideration must need to have it explained to them in what sense he is so; and one or two pages may not be misemployed in the endeavour to afford them this explanation. Mr. Wordsworth then, it may be said, is a philo- sophic writer in the sense in which any man must be so who writes from the impulses of a capacious and power- ful mind, habituated to observe, to analyse, and to generalise. So far forth was Shakspeare likewise a philo- sopher. But it does not follow from this that he should be supposed to have invented any peculiar ethical or metaphysical system, or to have discovered any new principles upon which such a system could be built. What is new and peculiar in him asa philosophic thinker is, not his view of the primary principles of psychological philosophy, nor the trains of ratiocination by which he descends to those which are secondary and derivative : it consists not so much in reasoning as in judgment; not so much in the exposition of abstract truths as in his manner of regarding the particulars of life as they arise and of generalising them into one truth or another according as the one or the other harmonises with his WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. 1%, moral temperament and habitual and cherished states of feeling. If a poet have any peculiar philosophy of his own, it must be mainly through this modification of the judgment, by individual temperament; the affinities of such tem- perament drawing round him and giving predominant influence to some truths, whilst others are merely not rejected in deference to the reason. Nor is it to be supposed that a judgment so modified, and a philosophy into which sensibility thus enters, are therefore fallacious. Such a supposition may be entertained, no doubt, by those who have imagined to themselves such a mere fiction as the contemporaneous discernment of all moral truth. The real state of the case being, however, that truth can only be shown piecemeal in its component parts, and that poetry, at all events, can do no more than cast partial lights upon it, it is saying nothing in dero- gation of any man’s philosophy, still less of his poetical philosophy, to affirm that in so far as it is peculiar to himself it is so by dealing with that portion of truth of which his temperament gives him the most lively con- sciousness. By his individual temperament it is that Mr, Wordsworth’s philosophic perceptions of truth, various and composite as they are, come to have a certain unity of drift, which has given to his writings the character of embodying a peculiar system of philosophy. But to some readers poetry comes rather as veiling philosophy than as a light upon it, and it may be well to explain Ve Cc 18 WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. some of the features of Mr. Wordsworth’s philosophy by a commentary upon some of the passages in which it is to be found. The lines left upon a yew-tree seat, after describing the life of mortification led by a neglected man of genius— ‘¢ Who with the food of pride sustained his soul In solitude ”— conclude with the following moral :— “Tf thou be one whose heart the holy forms Of young imagination have kept pure, Stranger! henceforth be warned ; and know that pride, Howe’er disguised in its own majesty, Js littleness ; that he who feels contempt For any living thing, hath faculties Which he has never used ; that thought with him Is in its infancy. The man whose eye Is ever on himself, doth look on one, The least of Nature’s works, one who might move The wise man to that scorn which wisdom holds Unlawful ever. Oh’be wiser, thou Instructed that true knowledge leads to love, True dignity abides with him alone Who, in the silent hour of inward thought ‘Can still suspect, and still revere himself, In lowliness of heart.” Let the stranger who is addressed in this passage be supposed to be another Wordsworth, another philosophic poet, or rather a pupil apt for becoming such, and then the injunctions which it contains are admirably calculated WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. Ig to train him in the way that 4e should go, although it may be possible to represent them as requiring to be received with some qualification by others. ‘The nature of these qualifications will present a key to some of the peculiarities of Mr. Wordsworth’s moral views. We are told that ‘* He who feels contempt For any living thing, hath faculties That he has never used ; that thought with him Is in its infancy.” Were we to understand the doctrine as delivered for acceptation by mankind at large, we should take some exceptions. ‘The moral government of the world appears to us to require that in the every-day intercourse of ordi- nary man with man, room should be given to the opera- tion of the harsher sentiments of our nature—anger, resentment, contempt. They were planted in us for a purpose, and are not essentially and necessarily wrong in themselves, although they may easily be wrong in their direction or in their degree. What we have to do is not to eradicate and abolish such feelings; and we are to subdue, tame, and control them, not with a view to their suppression, but only with a view to their just application. Let the sentiment of justice be paramount, and it will lead to such serious consideration of the grounds of our hostile feelings as will, in itself and of necessity, temper them ; but neither need nor ought to extinguish them, nor even to abate their vivacity further than is necessary to admit of 20 WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. clear perceptions and a just judgment of their objects. Anger, resentment, and contempt, are instruments of the penal law of nature and private society, which, as long as evil exists, must require to be administered; and the best interests of mankind demand that they should be tempered with justice much more than with mercy. The public laws of a community, and the penalties they denounce, have their chief importance by giving counte- nance and operation to the private penalties of society, searching and pervasive, inflicted by the neighbour who looks us in the face or the dealer who traffics with us ; for it is by these alone that evil inchoate can be con- tended with and destroyed. ‘That Man, so far as he is liable to evil inclinations, should fear his neighbour, is as requisite for the good of society as that he should love his neighbour; and that which he will commonly stand most in fear of is his neighbour’s just contempt. Are we then, in so far as the doctrine in question is concerned, to attribute to Mr. Wordsworth a /adse philo- sophy? Not if we understand what he writes with the reservations and developments with which the language of poetry, like the language of proverbs, should be accepted. In the first place, we conceive that Mr. Wordsworth adverted more especially to that species of contempt which is immediately connected with the pride denounced previously in the same passage and the selflove denounced subsequently—the undue contempt which a man conjures up in himself through the workings WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. 2I of self-love, for the ends of self-aggrandisement, or perhaps more frequently to stave off a feeling of humilia- tion and self-reproach. But without insisting upon this qualification there is to be found in the proposition, taken even in all the absoluteness of its terms, no error, but rather a peculiarity of sentiment proceeding from a rare constitution of mind, adapted to that constitution, and when enjoined upon men whose minds are similarly constituted, not enjoined amiss. The same sentiments are not to be cultivated by all sorts of minds... The standard of right and wrong is not so ill adapted to human nature as to take no account of its idiosyncracies and to make all dispositions equally right or wrong in every frame and fabric of mind in which they are to be found throughout the infinite varieties of moral structure. There are men who are made to do more good by their just antipathies than by their sympa- thies, as there are others whose just sympathies are more available than their antipathies. There are also men whose admirable gifts of contemplation, whose clear intellectual insights, whose singular powers of communi- cating charitable thoughts, would be in part obscured and defeated by the admission of feelings alien to their natures, however necessary and wholesome as ordinary elements in the great compound of human society. These men are chosen instruments, and it is for them so to order their being as shall best conduce to the development and unimpeded operation of their excellent 2/2 WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. gifts. They should therefore take into their hands the lyre alone, leaving in the hands of others, with due ac- knowledgment, nevertheless, of their use and necessity, the sword, the axe, and the halter. Accordingly, to whom is it that Mr. Wordsworth addresses his admoni- tion P— ‘*Tr thou be one whose heart the holy forms — Of young imagination have kept pure— ” It is one thus eminently endowed—one whose gift of “imagination has filled his mind with pure and holy forms —that Mr. Wordsworth adjures to profit by this gift to its fullest extent, to cultivate the knowledge which leads to love, and not to desecrate “zs heart by the admission of a contemptuous feeling, even in respect of objects which may be not unworthily visited with contempt by others. He, searching for the explication of all that happens, and understanding through what impulses of nature or temptations of circumstance one man or another comes to be weak and vile; regarding all human acts or characters as natural phenomena, the materials of induc- tion, and giving his mind duly in his vocation to the search for final causes and the working out of abstract results—he, the sage thus commissioned, must, for the purposes of this his comprehensive survey, look down upon human nature from an eminence and strive to raise himself above the influence of all vehement and dis- turbing passions. Even such of them as may work for good with men not absolved by the exercise of higher WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. 23 functions from taking a part in the practical contests of life, must be regarded as of too temporal and secular a character to be entertained by him. So much for the philosopher. As for the man who is no better than the vulgus hominum,—not only is he to be indulged in a pronounced indignation for what he know$ to deserve it,—it may be well also that he should not be blamed for a moderate measure of silent dislike where no just ground can be recognized. For were he not, the result would probably be that he would apply himself to make out a case for dislike, which would be worse for both parties than a dislike which, though cause- less, is quiescent. If ‘** Love converted from the thing it was Shall reasons find of settled gravity,” * so will causeless aversion if anticipating reproach. What is required for its absolution is that it ould be wholly and scrupulously passive. Closely connected with his repudiation of the harsher and more violent feelings of humankind, is Mr. Words- worth’s devotion to the beauty of the forms of external nature. This devotion affords to men of great excita- bility and a passionate sense of the beautiful, an escape from many dangers and disturbances. ‘The appetite for the beautiful in such men must be fed, and human beauty is a diet which leads to excessive stimulation, frequent * Shakespeare’s Sonnets. 24 WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. vicissitudes of feeling at all events, and in every pro- bability to the excitement of bitter and turbulent passions. The love and admiration of nature leads from all these ; being in truth the safe outlet for every excess of sensi- bility. ‘The pleasure so derived appears to be, of all human pleasures, the most exempt from correlative pain. It has no connexion of its own creating with any intem- perance, sensual, sentimental, or intellectual. Moreover, he who has given away his heart to the beauty of nature rests in the quiet consciousness that his admiration is fixed upon a perdurable object ; and redeemed from that sense of the transitory which so often mixes perturbation with pleasure, there is perhaps no feeling of the human heart which, being so intense, is at the same time so composed as that to which admiration of the external forms of nature gives birth. It is for this reason, amongst others, that it is peculiarly favourable to the contempla- tions of a poetical philosopher, and eminently so to one like Mr. Wordsworth, in whose scheme of thought there is no feature more prominent than the doctrine that the intellect should be nourished by the feelings, and that the state of mind which bestows a “gift of genuine in- sight” is one of profound emotion as well as profound composure— ‘* Deep self-possession, an intense repose.” * The power which lies in the beauty of nature to induce this union of the tranquil and the vivid is de- * Coleridge. WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. 25 scribed, and to every disciple of Mr. Wordsworth has been as much as is possible imparted, by the celebrated ‘Lines written in 1798, a few miles above Tintern Abbey,’ in ‘which the poet, having attributed to his intermediate recollections of the landscape then revisited a benign influence over many acts of daily life, describes thus the other particulars in which he is indebted to them :— ** Nor less I trust To them I may have owed another gift Of aspect more sublime ; that blessed mood In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened :—that serene and blessed mood In which the affections gently lead us on Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul : While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.” This impassioned love of nature is interfused through the whole of Mr. Wordsworth’s system of thought, filling up all interstices, penetrating all recesses, colouring all media, supporting, associating, and giving coherency and mutual relevancy to it in all its parts. Though man is his subject, yet is man never presented to us divested of his relations with external nature. Man is the text, but there is always a running commentary of natural pheno- mena. In his great work, ‘‘the miid of man” is, as he announces, “ the haunt and the main region of his song ;” 26 WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. but the mind of man, as exhibited by Mr. Wordsworth, whatever else it may be, hardly ever fails to be the mirror of natural objects, and more or less the creature of their power. The vivacity with which he is accustomed to appre- hend this power of inanimate nature over the human mind has perhaps led him into a somewhat excessive use of the poetic license by which sensation is attributed to inanimate objects—the particular feeling which they excite in the spectator being ascribed to themselves as if they were sentient beings. ‘Take for examples,—in the ‘Intimations of Immortality ’— ‘‘The moon doth with delight Look round her when the heavens are bare ”— And in the same ode— ‘*Ve fountains, meadows, hills, and groves, Think not of any severing of our loves— ” In * The:Excursion’— ““Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth, And ocean’s liquid mass, beneath him lay In gladness and deep joy.” There is Scriptural authority for such language: “The little hills shall rejoice on every side... . the valleys also shall stand so thick with corn that they shall laugh and sing.” * And when it is only an appeal to the imagination, analysis may very well be dispensed with. * Psalm lIxv. WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. 27 But there are passages in Mr. Wordsworth’s works which might lead to the supposition that this mode of expres- sion was in some degree connected with his philosophic creed :— ‘* And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, 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 only sense in which this and some similar pas- sages can be reconciled with reason is, as representing inanimate objects to be the symbols or types of feelings the sentient seat of which is in their Creator. The evidences and results of a feeling may thus be said to pervade inanimate creation, and natural objects may be described as both the effect of a feeling in Him who created them and the cause of a feeling in those who behold them. The license by which they are represented as the seat of a feeling may kindle through the imagina- tion a fervent and approximating sense of communion between the sentient source and the sentient vessel ; but the kindling must be by surprise, and the effect is lost by repetition. If, however, there may be met with in Mr. Wordsworth’s writings, passages which his love of nature has impressed 28 WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. with some traces of inordinate desires, instigating the imagination to fictions of impossible fulfilments—desires for community of feeling and reciprocity of spiritual communication with things inanimate ;—if in these some tokens may be detected of the ‘dizzy raptures” of which he speaks as having characterised his passion for nature in its earlier stages—let not this reduce the reader to the level of those critics who “take upon them to report of the course which #e holds whom they are utterly unable to accompany,—confounded if he turn quick upon the wing, dismayed if he soar steadily ‘into the region.’” Let him not the less aspire to appreciate the aid afforded to Mr. Wordsworth’s philosophical medita- tions by that more sedate but not less deeply-seated love of nature,—that wedded love by which his works are more generally characterised,—to perceive in what manner the intellectual vision, cleared, by virtue of this love, from the obstructions of petty cares as well as turbid excite- ments, and yet stimulated to activity by the impulse of pleasurable emotion, is— **Made quick to recognize The moral properties and scope of things.” Let him learn to perceive how the habit of contempla- ting natural objects in their causative character may not only make all nature seem to live in the eyes of the poet, but also qualify the philosopher to penetrate farther into the passive properties of living beings—their properties not only as agents but as objects. WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. #9 As an example of this perspicacity, let him take note of the ‘Old Cumberland Beggar.’ ‘* The aged man Had placed his staff across the broad smooth stone That overlays the pile, and from a bag All white with flour, the dole of village dames, He drew his scraps and fragments, one by one, And scanned them with a fixed and serious look Of idle computation. Him from my childhood fave I out and then He was so old, he seems not older now. He travels on, a solitary man ; So helpless in appearance, that for him The sauntering horseman throws not with a slack And careless hand his alms upon the ground, But stops, that he may safely lodge the coin Within the old man’s hat. : He travels on a solitary man ; His age has no companion. On the ground His eyes are turned, and as he moves along They move along the ground ; and evermore, Instead of common and habitual sight Of fields with rural works, of hill and dale, And the blue sky, one little span of earth « Is all his prospect. Thus, from day to day, Bow-bent, his eyes for ever on the ground, He plies his weary journey, seeing still, And seldom knowing that he sees—some straw, Some scattered leaf, or marks which, in one track, ° The nails of cart or chariot wheel have left Impressed on the white road, in the same line, At distance still the same. Poor traveller ! His staff trails with him—scarcely do his feet Disturb the summer dust ; he is so still In look and motion, that the cottage curs, Ere he have passed the door, will turn away, 30 WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. Weary of barking at him. Boys and girls, © The vacant and the busy, maids and youths, And urchins newly breeched—all pass him by : Him even the slow-paced waggon leaves behind.” It would be difficult to present to the imagination, with more curious distinctness, the picture of a human being whose uses upon earth were over. Such certainly would be the conclusion of an ordinary observer. A form of humanity it would be said—a shell or husk of a human being—than which nothing could be conceived more neutral, more nugatory. But the poet, if at a loss to assign any active uses to such an existence, can discover in it a rich endowment of passive attributes. **Deem him not A burthen of the earth! ’Tis Nature’s law That none, the meanest of created things, Of forms created the most vile and brute, The dullest or most noxious, should exist Divorced from good—a spirit and pulse of good, A life and soul, to every mode of being » Inseparably linked. smth While thus he creeps From door to door, the villagers in him Behold a record which together binds Past deeds and offices of charity, Else unremembered ; and so keeps alive - The kindly mood in hearts which lapse of years, And that half-wisdom half-experience gives, Make slow to feel, and by sure steps resign To selfishness and cold oblivious cares. Among the farms and solitary huts, Hamlets and thinly scattered villages, Where’er the aged beggar takes his rounds, WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. 3y The mild necessity of use compels To acts of love; and habit does the work Of reason; yet prepares that after joy Which reason cherishes. And thus the soul By that sweet taste of pleasure unpursued Doth find herself insensibly disposed To virtue and true goodness * * * * * **’'Then let him pass, a blessing on his head ! And—while in that vast solitude to which The tide of things has borne him, he appears To breathe and live but for himself alone— Unblamed, uninjured, let him bear about The good which the benignant law of Heaven Has hung around him ; and, while life is his, Still let him prompt the unlettered villagers To tender offices and pensive thoughts. Then let him pass—a blessing on his head!” It is such poems as these that forcibly recommend to us the tenet, that ‘* He who feels contempt For any living thing, has faculties Which He has never used.” And it is by them that we are impressed with a sense of the dignity of that order of mind in which the contem- plative faculty may be so justly called to an undivided predominance. Never, indeed, was the mind of man imbued with a deeper sense of the dignity of his calling than that which pervades the writings of Mr. Wordsworth; and 32 WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. many are they who, though conscious that no such calling is theirs, that no such spirit has descended upon _ them, have nevertheless been filled by those writings with aspirations which lifted them as high as it was in their nature to rise above the level of ephemeral pursuits and unworthy ambition. The sanative influence of Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry is felt—where such influence is most wanted—in natures of peculiar sensibility ; and it applies itself to that which in those natures is commonly the peccant part. Gross corruption or demoralization is not ordinarily to be apprehended for such minds; but they are subject to be weakened, wasted, and degraded by the vanities and petty distractions of social life or by accesses of casual and futile amatory sentiment. The love of Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry takes possession of such a mind like a virtuous passion, fortifying it against many selfish and many sentimental weaknesses, precluding trivial excitement, and coupling the indulgence (necessary in one way or another) of passionate feeling, with serious study, and as much of intellectual exercise as the under- standing may happen to have strength to bear. ‘To such a mind, conceiving greater things than it can take firm hold of, marking out for itself a loftier course of life than it has steadiness to pursue, and feeling itself dwarfed by the height of its own moral standard,—how often and with what an invigorating impulse will those passages recur, in which Mr. Wordsworth has invoked, with all plainness and gravity of style, but with an earnestness WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. a4 not on that account the less impressive, the aid which is requisite to make the weak stand fast :— “*Tf such theme May sort with highest objects, then, dread Power, Whose gracious favour is the primal source Of all illumination, may my life Express the image of a better time, More wise desires, and simpler manners ; nurse My heart in genuine freedom: all pure thoughts Be with me,—so shall thy unfailing love Guide, and support, and cheer me to the end!” Who that, with the consciousness of a better birthright, has felt himself from time to time subjugated by the petty tyranny of circumstance, by idle sympathies and ignoble inducements, and suffered from the shame of it,—could not repeat those few words— 6é nurse My heart in genuine freedom ae with the frequency of a daily prayer, and with such a hope to be heard as might well be inspired by finding himself, for the moment at least, a sharer in the fervency of the invocation? ‘To these lights in the poetical hemi- sphere such an aspirant might look up, in seasons of pressure, as Wallenstein did to the star, the sight of which had so often “shot strength into his heart.” Of the nature of this genuine freedom, or freedom of the heart, in its several kinds, we have some further intimations in the ‘Ode to Duty.’ That poem points v. D 34 WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. first to the freedom of native innocence; a state in which, through some rare happiness of nature and friendliness of fortune, a human being may now and then be found, whose impulses scarcely need either direction or control, and to whom it is given to be thoughtlessly good: ‘¢ There are who ask not if thine eye Be on them ; who, in love and truth, Where no misgiving is, rely Upon the genial sense of youth : Glad hearts ! without reproach or blot ; Who do thy work and know it not.” It is seldom, indeed, that the duties of life can be gone through with so loose a rein; and when an instance does occur in which what is spontaneous is all-sufficient and continues so after early youth, it will almost always be found to be in the case of one whose scope of being is not naturally large. Wherever there is an abundance of human nature with its passions and powers, not only does self-government become necessary to check their exorbitancies, but thoughtfulness becomes a condition of a dutiful life, inasmuch as the qualities of such a being necessarily draw him into more complicated and pregnant relations with his fellow-creatures. Wherein, then, is to consist the freedom of Azs heart? ‘The answer is, in self- government upon a large scale,—in so ordering the circumstances of his life and determining the general direction in which his powers and feelings shall be cultivated, as may clear him from petty wrestlings with WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. 35 his inclinations and from multiplied efforts and restraints, —in so dealing, that is, with his years and months, as shall impart a certain orderly liberty to his days and hours. It is thus that the virtue of the man may be assimilated to the free innocence of the child, and be invested with some of its charms ; and the man who has thus looked to the regulation of his mind in the main, may go on his way doing what he likes, inasmuch as he has first taken a security for liking what is good. Occa- sions will arise, no doubt, not unfrequently, in the mani- fold contingencies which life, howsoever ordered, must present, on which specific and extemporaneous self- government will be called for; but no man will make the most of his better-nature who does not so place himself in life, and so manage his mind, as to give free play to all his natural dispositions which are not evil, and to make his acts of. virtue, where it is possible, enjoyments and not restraints. It is this genza/ virtue, falling back, when need is, upon severe virtue for support, that Mr. Wordsworth describes in the beautiful stanza following that which we last quoted from the ‘Ode to Duty :’— ** Serene will be our days and bright, And happy will our nature be, When love is an unerring light, And joy its own security. And they a blissful course may hold Even now, who, not unwisely bold, Live in the spirit of this creed, Yet find that other strength, according to their need.” 36 WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. So much for Mr. Wordsworth’s philosophy. In his narrative poems (with the exception of the ‘White Doe of Rylstone’), his peculiarities in respect to subject, treat- ment and ‘style, are perhaps even more strongly marked than in those parts of his works which are more directly philosophical. The story of ‘ Margaret,’ in the first book of the ‘Excursion,’ and the series of stories in the sixth and seventh books, are prominent examples, and more conspicuous even than these, are the pastoral poem, entitled ‘Michael,’ and the story of the ‘ Female Vagrant.’ The incidents related, if not actually matters of fact (which probably most of them were), are such as might have occurred just as easily and naturally as any of the real events of life which are heard of almost every day, in the sphere of life to which they belong. There is nothing romantic in them. The poet writes in the confidence of his power to impart interest to the realities of life, deriving both the confidence and the power from the deep interest which he feels in them. It is an attribute of unusual susceptibility of imagination to need no extraordinary provocatives; and when this is com- bined with intensity of observation and peculiar force of language, it is the high privilege of the poet so endowed to rest upon the common realities of life and to dispense with its anomalies,—leaving to less gifted writers the representation of strange fatalities and of “ nature erring from itself.” Michael had received from his forefathers the in- WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. Ey heritance of a piece of land near Grasmere in Cumber- land, and his calling was to tend his flocks upon the mountains. The land had been burthened when it came to him, and it was not till he was forty years of age that, by continual vigilance and toil, he had cleared it of debt. His wife was twenty years younger than himself. They passed through middle age a solitary couple— ‘* Neither gay perhaps Nor cheerful ; yet with objects and with hopes, Living a life of eager industry, — ” and Michael was beginning to think himself an old man when a child was born to him. This only child became the object of his most devoted attachment and was brought up to his father’s occupation till his eighteenth year, when Michael lost half what he was worth by the failure of a nephew for whom he was surety. He then made up his mind to send his son to a relation who was a tradesman in London, in order that there might be a prospect of retrieving through him the fortunes of the family ; the son went in great hope and with good dispositions; but after he had been some time in London, he took to evil courses, and absconding from their consequences, sought an asylum beyond seas. In a few years the old man died; his wife did not long survive him ; and their land passed into the hands of a stranger. Such is the story of Michael; and probably no poet 38 WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. ever contented himself with what would be thought a tamer theme. It is worth while to inquire, therefore, by what. singular power it is that Mr. Wordsworth has been enabled to carry this theme to the hearts of many thousands of readers. Simplicity of narration would clearly be insufficient of itself to produce such an effect. The facts are not enough. The human heart is not so tender or so easily touched as to respond feelingly to a simple communication of what happened to Michael. ~ Any want of simplicity would at once destroy the effect ; but simplicity the most Scriptural would not of itself suffice to produce it. May it not be that the effect is in the first place to be ascribed to the reader’s recognition of Jower in the mind of the writer. Facts which would not interest him otherwise are made to do so by the consciousness that they have interested a powerful mind. He is interested in perceiving the effect of them upon that mind, and his sympathies with the powerful are brought in aid of his sympathies with the pathetic. The /anguage of the poet, therefore, as the symbol of his power, contributes mainly to the effect. There are many readers who would in vain search the language of Mr. Wordsworth for tokens of this power—many to whom, in such narratives ‘as ‘ Michael,’ his language would be a dead letter as well as his theme. There are many also to whom the language of David in his lamentation over the death of Absalom would be a WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. 39 dead letter, were it not in the Bible that they read it. To such readers violence is power ; abrupt and startling ejaculations, or extravagant figures of speech, constitute the language of passion. Mr. Wordsworth’s language addresses itself to other ears—to the ears of those who feel that truthfulness of language gives force, and that habits of just and exact thinking give truthfulness; to the ears of those who understand the strength which lies in moderation, where thought is to be conveyed—or where feelings are the subject, the enthusiasm which lies in the language of reserve. Next to the sense of power, as betokened by language, which Mr. Wordsworth’s narratives convey, may be adduced as principally contributing to their influence over the imagination, the minute familiarity which they evince with the modes of life represented in them and with the feelings belonging to those modes of life. It is only through sympathy that such familiarity can be acquired ; and that which is begotten by sympathy begets it. Mr. Wordsworth’s mind, being not only poetical and philosophical but, in its observant faculties, practical, becomes readily conversant with the affairs and pursuits of men in every sphere and sees into their daily life. In treating of the lower classes, where the range of objects is necessarily narrow, whilst this very limitation tends to direct the feelings upon them with a concentrated force, he not only deals with the natural affections of the shepherd or the ploughman, but also concerns himself 40 WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. with their application of such intellectual gifts as they possess to such ends as lie within their reach; he under- stands the pleasure and pride attaching to skill in their craft ; he enters into the spirit of their ordinary occupa- tions, of their dealings for the lucre of gain,—into the cares of their poverty and the interests of their thrift. Mr. Wordsworth is, in truth, one of those rare individuals who, being best placed where he is in life, would not however have been misplaced in any situation whatever. For whilst he is endowed with the highest intellectual powers in the largest measure, he is not wanting in the inferior faculties; and thus, let his fancy transport him amongst what order of mankind she may, he can make himself at home amongst them, understand their pre- dicament, partake their life: and let his fancy recommend to him for particular representation whatever individuals may please her best, he can bid the guests welcome, and afford them cordial entertainment, until they become, as it were, domesticated in his mind. To return to ‘ Michael,’ the interests and pursuits of the Shepherd are described in that poem, as well as the affections of the Father :— '** His mind was keen, Intense, and frugal, apt for all affairs, And in his shepherd’s calling he was prompt And watchful more than ordinary men. Hence had he learned the meaning of all winds, Of blasts of every tone; and oftentimes, When others heeded not, he heard the south WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. 41 Make subterraneous music, like the noise Of bagpipers on distant Highland hills. The shepherd, at such warning, of his flock Bethought him, and to himself would say, ‘The winds are now devising work for me.’ And, truly, at all times, the storm that drives The traveller to a shelter, summoned him Up to the mountains: he had been alone Amid the heart of many thousand mists That came to him and left him on the heights. So lived he till his eightieth year was passed.” Such was the Shepherd: let us now pass to the portraiture of the Father :— ** Thus living on through such a length of years, The shepherd, if he loved himself, must needs Have loved his helpmate. “But to Michael’s heart This son of his old age was yet more dear ; Less from instinctive tenderness, the same Blind spirit which is in the blood of all, Than that a child, more than all other gifts, Brings hope with it and forward-looking thoughts, And stirrings of inquietude, when they By tendency of nature needs must fail. Exceeding was the love he bare to him, His heart and his heart’s joy !” Then comes the account of the disaster which befel Michael in the loss of half his substance, which reduced him to the alternative of sending his son to London or of parting with the land which had descended to him from his ancestors. ‘Those who are acquainted with the yeomanry of the North of England know how peculiarly powerful are their feelings of local attachment and their love of their small landed inheritances. In that singular 42 WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. production called ‘The Doctor, etc.’* (a book which, with all its wanton absurdities, is rich beyond almost any other of the time in the best knowledge and the most beautiful literature), it is well observed, that “to have held these small patrimonies unimpaired, as well as unenlarged, through so many generations, implies more contentment, more happiness, and a more uniform course of steadiness and good conduct, than could be found in the proudest genealogies.” Under the influence of these local and proprietary feelings (which, on this side the Border, have now lost their hold on all but the secluded mountaineers of Cumberland and Westmoreland), the shepherd-yeoman resolved upon the alternative of sending his son forth to seek his fortune. Near a brook, in the depth of the valley, Michael had gathered together a heap of loose stones, with the intention of building a sheepfold there. Thither he took his son on the eve of his departure, and desired him to lay the first stone of the sheepfold, that it might be a covenant between them :— ‘This was a work for us; and now, my son, It isa work forme. But lay one stone— Here, lay it for me, Luke, with thine own hands. Nay, boy, be of good hope; we both may live To see a better day. At eighty-four I still am strong and hale; do thou thy part ; I will do mine. I will begin again * Anonymous in 1834, but since known to have been written by Southey. | WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. 43 With many tasks that were resigned to thee: Up to the heights and in among the storms Will I without thee go again, and do All works which I was wont to do alone, Before I knew thy face.” Accordingly, when his son was gone, the old shepherd resumed his duties manfully, and from time to time worked at the building of the sheepfold ; and he was cheered for some time by loving letters from the boy and by satisfactory tidings of his conduct. But at length came accounts of an opposite tenor—that he had given himself up to dissolute courses, that ignominy and shame had fallen upon him, and, finally, that he had been driven to seek a hiding-place beyond the seas :— ‘¢ There is a comfort in the strength of love ; ’T will make a thing endurable, which else Would overset the brain or break the heart. I have conversed with more than one who well Remember the old man, and what he was Years after he had heard this heavy news. His bodily frame had been from youth to age Of an unusual strength. Among the rocks He went, and still looked up to sun and cloud, And listened to the wind ; and, as before, Performed all kinds of labour for his sheep, And for the land his small inheritances And to that hollow dell from time to time Did he repair, to build the fold of which His flock had need. ’Tis not forgotten yet The pity which was then in every heart For the old man; and ’tis believed by all That many and many a day he thither went, And never lifted up a single stone.” 44 WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. It is in old age and in childhood that our rustic fellow- creatures are brought before us in the forms in which they are most likely to meet with sympathy. At other ages their coarseness of aspect, except in occasional in- stances where an inherent refinement or an inborn beauty has triumphed over circumstances, has an effect which is far more unfavourable than it ought to be to the interest we take in them. But in old age what may have been re- pulsive has been worn away; and as to childhood, it has its attractions in every sphere. It may not have been there- fore without due consideration that Michael is presented to us as an aged man; and in the other poem of rustic life which has met with most admiration,—‘ The Female Vagrant,’ we first became acquainted with the subject of itasachild. This poem, being in rhymed stanzas, did not admit of as much narrative detail as ‘ Michael,’ but the art with which it is constructed is equally consum- mate; and whilst we are borne along by the “liquid lapse” of the verse, sliding on with a smooth and solid melody like a swollen river, care is taken that there shall be no points, no prominences, nothing which shall arrest attention and exact admiration for parts to the injury of the rest,—of the whole ; no fractional effects. It is time to conclude, and ‘ The Excursion’ has not been approached. ‘This poem does indeed, though first in importance, come last in order in the study of Mr. Wordsworth’s works ; for it will not be fully appreciated unless the reader be first imbued with the spirit in which WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. 45 all that he writes is written. Those who are accustomed to look for a mantling and sparkling of poetic efferves- cence in every page and line of every poem they read, will find that in ‘The Excursion’ they have many dis- appointments to get over. Such persons would point, perhaps, to particular passages and ask—Where is the poetry in this or that? The answer should be, that this or that neither is, is meant to be, nor in any reasonable apprehension ought to be, poetical. In a poem upon so large a scale every genuine poet is aware that some parts should be bordering upon prose, if not prosaic. Were it to be all the essence of poetry, let it be in other respects what it might, who could read ten pages of it together? Rise and fall, ebb and flow, light and shade, —moor-land and meadow and garden ground,—will be measured out in due proportions by any one who shall attain the breadth of conception necessary to the com- position of a great poem ;—the green leaf, the red berry, and the bare bough, each in its season. Such an artist will also know that it behoves him to apply himself from time to time to manage his transitions, and transact the business of his poem; whereas, one who should aim at being always poetical would fall into the same error which beset the clowns rebuked by Hamlet, who insisted upon being always witty; ‘though in the meantime some necessary question of the play were then to be considered.” Mr. Wordsworth, in his great work, copiously poetical as he is, uses his stores with a 46 WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. measured plenty, after the manner of a sea-captain bound upon a long voyage, who, if he has no fears for the exhaustion of his resources, must yet look to the proper feeding of his crew, well knowing that their health and alacrity depends upon it, and that it were better their diet should be occasionally as dry as “the remainder biscuit,’ than that they should be heated and gorged. In the versification, too, there is nothing to satiate: there is a free and copious variety, but only occasionally a marked melody. For an ear which knows of no other rhythmical music than the unqualified up and down movement of trochees and iambs, or the canter of ana- peests, the “numerous verse” of the ‘ Excursion’ will have been modulated in vain. The uncultivated ear is always best pleased with that which to the ear of the adept is too palpable to be pleasing except when sparingly mixed with other effects and much modified by them. It once happened that a Sandwich Island prince who was in this country, was present at a Royal entertainment at which the band from one of the regiments of Guards performed some very scientific and composite pieces of music; the Sandwich Islander was observed to listen intently, and being asked by one of the company whether he- was pleased with the music, he answered that he had been greatly delighted with the drum. In like manner, to the ear of youth or of age uninstructed, a pleasure will be conveyed by “the very WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. 47 false gallop of verses,” merely because it is the only effect of versification which they can understand ; whilst such a variegated intermixture as ‘The Excursion’ presents would be wholly lost upon them. Lost, indeed, to a degree which will be long remark- able in the history of English literature, was that whole poem—both matter and music—for scarcely less than a quarter of a century! and lost upon critical ears (so called for courtesy) as well as upon those of “the reading public,”—which, indeed, did no other upon the occasion than, more suo, believe as it was taught. The Touch- stones of the day were of opinion that ‘though there was no great matter in the ditty, yet the note was very untuneable ;” and such, therefore, was the opinion of the tractable multitude. The manner in which such judg- ments have gradually given way and finally disappeared, it is anything but uninstructive to observe. It is, indeed, not only instructive, but edifying, to observe the manner in which the great poet has risen into fame, whilst the small critics have dwindled. into insignificance ;—the manner in which the witty worldlings of twenty or thirty years ago,—those who made mouths at him in the days of his unpopularity, dealing about their petty acutenesses and exulting in the power to sting,—would now be glad to have it supposed that they knew all the while that they were assailing a great man, but that ridicule, forsooth, being their high vocation, they made it a point to laugh at everything, where they could get the world to laugh 48 WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. with them. These matters, we say, are not unworthy of regard, as exemplifying the different forms which ambition assumes in different orders of mankind. Mr. Landor, who in his ‘Imaginary Conversations ’ has addressed some forcible admonitions to hasty as- pirants in literature,—those who are ambitious of an early fame,—has described, in characteristic language, the progress of literary reputation :— “Thus it is with writers who are to have a currency through ages. In the beginning they are confounded with most others; soon they fall into some secondary class ; next into one rather less obscure and humble; by degrees they are liberated from the dross and lumber that hamper them ; and being once above the heads of contemporaries, rise slowly and waveringly, then regularly and erectly, then rapidly and majestically, till the vision strains and aches as it pursues them in their ethereal elevation.” * Mr. Wordsworth, whether or not he was ambitious of an early fame, has lived and written with an unalterable devotedness to the interests of that fame in the account of which the mere contemporary beginnings,—the ques- tion of half a century sooner or later,—are as nothing. He has so lived and written, all manner of sarcasm and mockery notwithstanding. It is not easy to conceive a strength of mind more exemplary than that which could enable him, not only to fortify himself against these * Second Series, vol. ii. p. 7: WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. 49 assaults, but to withstand the temptation of seeking that popularity which doubtless lay at his immediate com- mand, could he have been seduced into the misapplica- tion of his powers to that end. The manner in which a spirit of religious self-sacrifice—in this life as it were— was inspired by what may be called his worship of his art, may be more or less collected from the sonnet addressed to Mr. Haydon, the painter :— ** High is our calling, Friend !—Creative art (Whether the instrument of words she use, Or pencil pregnant with ethereal hues) Demands the service of a mind and heart, Though sensitive, yet in their weakest part Heroically fashioned—to infuse Faith in the whispers of the lonely muse, While the whole world seems adverse to desert, And oh! when Nature sinks, as oft she may, Through long-lived pressure of obscure distress, Still to be strenuous for the bright reward, And in the soul admit of no decay, Brook no continuance of weak-mindedness— Great is the glory, for the strife is hard !” We have spoken of his worship of his art as inspiring this fortitude; but it is also to be attributed to his worship of Nature; and here again we may quote his own authority :— **?Tis 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, ‘hat nether evil tongues, Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, 5° WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. 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.” The passages in Mr. Wordsworth’s works (few and far between) wherein, as in these, he has alluded to the difficulties which he has had to encounter, will be read in after-times with the same sort of interest which attaches to those portions of the writings of the great poets before him which cast a light upon the story of their lives and betoken the feelings with which they have read that story to themselves. Perhaps none of these have had cause for so much satisfaction with the tenor of their lives, so far as it was in their own choice and direction, as Mr. Wordsworth has a right to feel: for which of them has so steadfastly kept faith with the mistress whom he served? Milton, when he complained—or rather let us say, stated without condescending to the language of complaint—that he had fallen upon evil days and evil tongues, could not speak it with the consciousness that he had himself sought peace and ensued it—that his own tongue had been at all times innocuously employed—or that he had not, for too considerable a portion of his life, repudiated his better mind, and yielded himself to the angry impulses of political controversy. Shakspeare, in one of those sonnets which have so perplexed his biographers, reproaches Fortune and himself in a strain which shows how painfully conscious he was that he had WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. 51 lived unworthily of his doubly immortal spirit. . Mr. Wordsworth has no such cause as Shakespeare had to “chide with Fortune;” neither has he, like Muilton, “fallen upon evil days,” or at least mixed himself, more than was wise and necessary, with the evil of the days upon which he has fallen. These allusions to the personal history of Mr. Words- worth are not irrelevant, because it is by no means un- important to a poet’s readers to reflect how far he has lived up to the sentiments which he expresses. Moreover the poetry of Mr. Wordsworth, permeating, as it does, the mind, modes of thinking, and character of those who admire it, constitutes something in the nature of a personal tie between him and them, and thereby renders some reference to his life and character not unfittingly introduced into a criticism upon his works. Our relations with the poets whom we most admire are, indeed, of a more intimate character than almost any others which can exist between strangers; and there is assuredly no poet now living whose connexion with his readers bears a stronger analogy to the best and most durable of our personal friendships. Many attachments taken up in early life and which are warm and pleasant while they last, drop off and are left behind us in the necessary course of things; but there are others which not only grow with our growth and strengthen with our strength, but are also bound up with us in our decay. Mr. Words- worth’s poetry is endowed with a beauty which does not, 52 WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. like the toys and gauds of meretricious verse, grow dim to the eyes of age ; but such as it is to us in our youth, it remains whilst life and intelligence remain,—extending its influence in proportion as we advance in years and seek to substitute for naturally declining excitabilities the sense of. dignity and power, of solid intellectual agerandisement and moral purification. ESSAY ON MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. (Lirst published tn 1841.) KO In the previous essay—one of no great length—the subject was Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry at large. It may be pos- sible, within like limits, to do more justice to a part than was then done to the whole. Not that justice can be done to a part of Mr. Wordsworth’s, or of any great writer’s works, without having veference to the whole. ' Every portion of such a writer’s works has a value beyond its intrinsic worth, as being part and lot of a great mind and having correlations with every other part; and whether it be from the unity of spirit which is commonly found to pervade the works of a great writer, whatever may be his variety of manner, or whether it be that there is nothing he has written but must tell us something of his mind (for even his commonplace remarks will tell us that upon occasion he was willing to be commonplace), it is certainly the attribute of such writers to give the 54 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. coherency of one interest to everything that proceeds from them ; and Mr. Wordsworth’s Sonnets should never be otherwise studied than as parcel of that great body of doctrine and moral sentiment which constitutes his mind extant in his works. Of the many styles in which he has written, those of the Sonnets and of ‘ The Excursion,’ may be regarded as. the farthest apart; ‘The Excursion’ being the most. re- markable of his writings for breadth of style, the Sonnets for compactness: In a long philosophical poem which must necessarily tax the powers of attention, a current and almost colloquial manner was best fitted to keep the reader at ease; and a continued terseness of diction and condensation of thought, though apparently abridging his labours, in reality would have cost him more than it saved him. That the whole should be flowingly con- nected, so as to be borne in upon the mind with the weight of one stream, was more for the interests of the subject than that pointed and striking passages should often occur. It was also perhaps expedient that the substance of what was to be said in ‘The Excursion’ should be supported by its own solidity and truth, and that it should be recommended by the natural eloquence of a fervid mind delivering itself of what is strongly felt, rather than by any frequency of fanciful embellishment, or, as regards the rhythm, by any marked and salient melodies. These things were not to be excluded; but they were to come as they might happen to present MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 55 themselves to a mind somewhat pre-occupied—they were to be merely occasional and incidental. The Sonnets, on the contrary, address the reader, each claiming to be considered for itself and by itself ; and though not irres- pectively of its kindred with other works the issue of the same mind, yet distinctively as a substantive poem. And for this kind of poem the style required was the very opposite of that employed in ‘The Excursion.’ The artist was now to lay aside the implements of the architect and assume those of the sculptor. The form was one which fell in less with the natural fluency of the poet. Mr. Wordsworth’s genius inclined naturally to an easy abundance both of thoughts and words; but art was to predominate over this inclination wheresoever it was not fit to be indulged ; and the poetic mind which had been diffused widely with an easy fluctuation through ‘The Excursion,’ though not changing its nature and spirit, was to take a different structure—was to be inspissated as it were, and form itself into crystals in the Sonnets. Yet bright and ornate as many of them are, there is in them, no less than in his other works, an invariable abstinence from antitheses and false effects. There is hardly one of these three or four hundred Sonnets * which ends in a point. Pointed lines will sometimes occur in the course of them, as thought will sometimes naturally take a pointed shape in the mind; but whether it takes that shape or another is obviously treated as a matter of * 7.é., those which had been published before 1841. 56 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. indifference ; nothing is sacrificed to it; and at the close of the sonnet, where the adventitious effect of the point might be apt to outshine the intrinsic value of the subject, it seems to have been studiously avoided. Mr. Words- worth’s sonnet never goes off, as it were, with a clap or repercussion at the close; but is thrown up like a rocket, breaks into light, and falls ina soft shower-of brightness. To none, indeed, of the minor forms of poetry are Mr. Wordsworth’s powers in some respects better adapted ; there is none to which discrimination in thought and aptitude in language are more essential; and there never was a poet who reached so near to perfection in these particulars as he. ‘That sonnet may be instanced which, standing at the head of the second part of the miscel- laneous series, presents to us, as it were a picture-gallery of his predecessors in this walk of the art :— “¢Scorn not the Sonnet ; Critic, you have frowned, Mindless of its just honours ; with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart ; the melody Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch’s wound ; A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound ; 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 Fairy-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 !” When have poetry and criticism mingled more genially MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 57. than in these fourteen lines of rapid retrospect, into which, without any apparent labour of compression, how much is compressed! What ease, gracefulness, and variety attend the procession of the verse; and after rising in animation, with what a gentle fall does it die away upon the ear at the close! This is the “ clau- sula aut cadentia,’—the “ars placidé elabendi,” which was anciently so much esteemed in the science of music. And if in a sonnet in which so much is condensed the condensation occasions no obscurity—historical allusion, sentiment, imagery, exquisite music, distinctive portraiture, all finding a place and nothing crowded—it may be regarded as a fit introduction to the other sonnet upon Sonnets, which deals with some abstruser thoughts ; and those who complain of obscurity in the one may be requested to bear in mind the clearness of language in the other, and to ask themselves whether, if any dif- ficulty occurs, it may not be owing to the subject-matter rather than to the treatment :— ‘** Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room And hermits are contented with their cells ; And students with their pensive citadels : Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom, Sit blithe and happy ; bees that soar for bloom High as the highest peak of Furness-fells Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells : In truth, the prison unto which we doom Ourselves, no prison is: and hence to me, In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound 58 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. Within the sonnet’s scanty plot of ground : Pleased if some souls (for such there needs must be) Who have felt the weight of too much liberty, Should find brief solace there, as I have found.”’ This is one of those doctrinal poems, abounding in Mr. Wordsworth’s works, which some persons complain that they cannot understand, having read them probably as rapidly as they would read any erotic effusion of any glowing gentleman who writes verses. Taking more time than such readers have to spare, and more space than is permitted to a sonnet, it will not be difficult to evolve the doctrine. First it is suggested that no en- largement of a man’s liberty of action can take place without a corresponding aggravation of his moral re- sponsibility, and that there must needs be some souls which ‘feel the weight of too much liberty,”—-such, that is, whose liberty of action is disproportionate to their strength of judgment or of self-control, and must there- fore either oppress their conscience, or vex them with the perplexities of an undetermined choice or the conse- quences of an ungoverned will. Many, indeed, are they who feel in one way or another this “ weight of too much liberty.” The youth who is free to choose a profession has a liberty disproportionate to his knowledge and experience, which is a burthen. The heiress who is free to choose amongst many suitors, finds the difficulty of selection insuperable, and though perhaps any one of them might have been better than no husband, she MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 59 lives and dies unmarried. The child who knows that obedience will not be enforced upon him, is too free for contentment: and the man who is too absolutely his own master, will find that he has got a troublesome servant. “Heaven bless thee from a tutor and dis- cipline come not near thee!” was a deep imprecation, though put into the mouth of the common railer Thersites. For Shakespeare would often speak his deepest truths in his lightest moods. And by another and a graver poetical moralist, Obedience has been personified in the groom of the chambers who puts the Red-Cross Knight to bed when he is tired :-— ‘* Then called she a groom that forth him led Into a goodly lodge, and ’gan despoil Of puissant arms, and laid in easy bed: His name was meek OBEDIENCE rightfully ared.” * Again there is an application of the principle to a wider field by one who was not much of a moralist certainly, but a shrewd politician. Machiavelli, in dealing with questions of Colonization, regards it as doubtful whether the most fruitful regions should be chosen :— “ Perche gli uomini operano o per necessita oO per elettione, e perche si vede quivi essere maggiore virttl dove la elettione ha meno autorita, ¢ da considerare se sarebbe meglio eléggere per la edificatione delle cittadi luoghi sterili accioche gli uomini constretti industriarsi, &c.” Assuming then that only so much liberty as can * ‘Fairy Queen,’ i. x. 17. 60 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. be steadily guided and readily subjected to the law of conscience, will conduce to our ease, the second con- clusion to be drawn from the sonnet is, that in parting with any excess of liberty beyond this quantum, our contentment is best secured when this is done spon- taneously, and we are ourselves the choosers of the yoke to which we will submit :—- ‘* Tn truth, the prison unto which we doom Ourselves, no prison is ”— For to have felt. the weight of too much liberty is one assurance that we shall be contented with restraint, and when the choice of the species and quantum of restraint has been our own, we would be accusing ourselves if we should quarrel with it. This is the case of the nun, the hermit, and the student. But thirdly, there is noticed the case of those who have never felt the weight of too much liberty, and who have been spared the perplexities of choice by a necessity of circumstances born with them and rendering the restraint which it imposes easy because habitual— ‘* Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom.” And this restraint by habit and necessity comes nearest in contentment to—fourthly, restraint by instinct,—that of the bees which ** Murmur by the hour in foxglove bells.’ MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 61 Such, then, are the views of moral restraint indicated in this poem: and the drift of it is to bring this species of restraint into a comparison mutually illustrative with the restraint imposed by the laws of the sonnet upon an exuberant and discursive imagination. As of the moral will, so of the intellect: as in life, so in art. The law to which the sonneteer submits himself, substitutes the restraint of a mechanical limitation for restraint by effort of the judgment ; and the “steed of the pen,” to borrow from a Persian metaphor, is enclosed, and cannot “ get loose upon the plain of prolixity.” The fence is, to a certain extent, a substitute for the bridle. There are some passages in Mr. Wordsworth’s other works, which have a bearing upon the same doctrine. In the ode entitled ‘The Pass of Kirkstone,’ the poet, having by a toilsome ascent and somewhat against his inclination reached that pass, describes the scene which presents itself and addresses the road by which he had gained the summit of the mountain :— ** Aspiring road ! that lov’st to hide Thy daring in a vapoury bourn, Not seldom may the hour return When thou shalt be my guide ; And I (as all men may find cause When life is at a weary pause i And they have panted up the hill Of duty with reluctant will) Be thankful, even tho’ tired and faint, For the rich bounties of constraint ; Whence oft invigorating transports flow That choice lack’d courage to bestow !” 62 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. In other poems Mr. Wordsworth seems to have’ had in view the difficult question, whether there may not be some individuals to whom, by a rare purity of moral constitution, Nature herself may afford a restraint ade- quate for the government of a life led under the influence of natural objects and a natural piety :— ‘* Three years she grew in sun and shower ; Then Nature said, ‘ A lovelier flower On earth was never sown ; This child I to myself will take ; She shall be mine, and I will make A lady of my own. Myself will to my darling be Both law and impulse: and with me The girl, in rock and plain, In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, Shall feel an overseeing power, To kindle or restrain.’ ” In the ‘Ode to Duty’ again, he speaks in the same sense as in the sonnet— *“ Me this unchartered freedom tires, I feel the weight of chance desires.” But the spirit of a moral liberty as growing out of the spirit of duty or tempered by it, is, in truth, the subject of the whole of this ode, which should always be read in connection with the sonnet. “Is Mr. Wordsworth, then,” it may be asked, ‘so prone to repeat himself?” Undoubtedly he is; and it MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 63 may be added that self-repetition is almost invariably incident to men of genius, and constitutes a great element of their power. The difference between such men and others is, not only in the importance of the truths which occur to them, but in the impression which a truth makes. A great truth, coming into the mind of a great man, lives with him from that time forth, mixes itself with his thoughts in all moods of his mind, repro- duces itself in many combinations, passes from him in sundry shapes ; and according as his own mind is multi- form and cognizant of many varieties of mind and mood in others, this truth, proceeding from it thus repeatedly and variously, finds access to one reader in the shape of a passage in an ethical poem, to another in that of a sonnet—to one in a form in which he can comprehend it in its entire scope and extent; to another, or to the same in another mood, in a form in which he can remember and quote it. The same truth may have entered a thousand minds before; but the ordinary mind grew tired of it and dismissed it, whilst to the other its value as a truth is more than its novelty as a thought, and gives it an eternal freshness. ‘Those who have had the good fortune to have listened to the conversation of most of the great writers of the present age, will have observed that they all repeated themselves more than other men; and that this did in no respect detract from the interest of their discourse, but rather enhanced it ; as what recurred often was what was best worth dwelling 64 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. upon. It is true that an opposite effect may sometimes be produced ; and Mr. Wordsworth, when in conversation he said what he was not sure that those to whom he spoke might not have heard from him before, would often introduce the phrase or sentiment by the words,— and thus, by re- nouncing the claim of novelty, anticipate and disarm “T have been accustomed to say—” the sort of derogatory reception the repetition might have experienced from some persons who might be impatient of hearing twice what they were perhaps not worthy of having heard at all. If, as we have seen, Mr. Wordsworth insists much upon self-government as the condition of moral freedom, not less sedulous is he to inculcate that the control of the passions is indispensable to freedom of the intellect and imagination ; and on that ground he rests the follow- ing exhortation to temperance in grief :— “¢ From the dark chambers of dejection freed, Spurning the unprofitable yoke of care, Rise, GILLIES, rise: the gales of youth shall bear Thy genius forward like a winged steed. Though bold Bellerophon (so Jove decreed In wrath) fell headlong from the fields of air, Yet a rich guerdon waits on minds that dare, If aught be in them of immortal seed And reason govern that audacious flight Which heavenward they direct.—Then droop not thou, Erroneously renewing a sad vow In the low dell ’mid Roslin’s faded grove : A cheerful life is what the Muses love, A soaring spirit is their prime delight.” MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 65 To a mind of high intellectual aspirations, there is perhaps no earthly motive for conquering a sorrow so likely to be effective as that which is here suggested ; for though earthly, it is not worldly; on the contrary, it harmonizes with a state of the feelings in which worldly pursuits are set aside. A belief the opposite of that expressed in the last two lines, was almost universal in the zenith of Lord Byron’s reputation and is still some- what prevalent, that a melancholy temperament is favourable to poetic genius; a belief from which the practical consequence followed that in our time, as in the days of Prince Arthur— ** Young gentlemen would be as sad as night Only for wantonness.” It is not to be denied that a poetical mind will have its melancholy moods and seasons; and it may even be admitted that a pensive melancholy, as an occasional mood, will be more frequent with such a mind than with others. In these very Sonnets of Mr. Wordsworth’s there is a strain of melancholy feeling to be met with in many a page: but Mr. Wordsworth’s melancholy is not that of a languid self-occupied recluse ; it is a melan- choly which alternates with the spirit of enjoyment, and carries with it the spirit of consolation, and is penetrating and rational,—‘‘a melancholy compounded of many simples and the sundry contemplation of his travels.” We speak of Mr. Wordsworth, therefore, as well as with V. F 66 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. him, when we say that a mind which is strong and elastic in its general texture is as propitious to the highest order of poetic genius as to any other agency which is to be powerful over mankind. The reveries of a fantastic sadness or of a gloomy seclusion can yield but a meagre product in poetry, as compared with the meditations of a mind which is not only contemplative but vigorous and buoyant, and above all, active in its social sym- pathies. It is true that nothing can be more unpoetical than a strong and vivacious spirit which is also hard and selfish ; and it may be true that this is a common com- bination : but it is the zxcommon combination of great susceptibility and tenderness with not less of strength and vivacity, which makes the truly poetical temperament. And in regard to sympathy with suffering, though it is often supposed to belong more peculiarly to those who suffer in themselves, yet we are to distinguish between the occasional sufferings of a strong spirit bending but not broken, and the absolute subjection of the mind to suffering as a permanent state. In the former case the recollection of past sufferings is keen enough to quicken the sympathies, whilst there is nothing to abate the courage or the genial freshness of the heart. In the latter, after the suffering has been for a long time unmixed and unintermitting, there will be hardly any-. thing left alive in the heart except the desire to escape from pain; and if the sympathy with pain be not deadened (which it probably will be in the general MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 67 prostration and self-involvement of the feelings), then there will be the desire to escape from that also. And here we may learn from the ‘ Excursion’— ** Unoccupied by sorrow of its own, His heart lay open ; and by Nature tuned And constant disposition of his thoughts To sympathy with man, he was alive To all that was enjoyed where’er he went, And all that was endured ; for in himself Happy, and quiet in his cheerfulness, He had no painful pressure from without That made him turn aside from wretchedness With coward fears. He could afford to suffer With those whom he saw suffer. Hence it came That in our best experience he was rich And in the wisdom of our daily life.” Thus, to resume the sonnet, it is not from grief that the poet’s friend is exhorted to free himself,—not from grief the natural tribute to calamity,—but from dejection and darkness, and, as their necessary consequent, “‘the un- profitable yoke of care.” For let no man suppose that he can surrender himself to an undue and interminable sorrow without becoming the slave of petty, fretful, miserable cares. To put on perpetual mourning is to put on the livery of a very abject servitude. And again, the exhortation is addressed, not to one who was sub- jugated by some constitutional weakness or malady conspiring with circumstances to make sorrow imme- dicable—for to such a man exhortation would be ad- dressed in vain—but to one whose despondency was 68 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. in some measure wilful,—a mistaken man who was voluntarily devoting himself to sorrow and whom to enlighten might be to reanimate; for that such was the case in question is clearly intimated in those two lines (so exquisitely musical) which precede the close of the sonnet— ‘* Droop not thou, Erroneously renewing a sad vow In the low dell ’mid Roslin’s faded grove.” The principal aim of the sonnet having been this exhortation to the exercise of intellectual powers, the rewards and conditions of true genius are noticed inci- dentally. The rewards are promised to “minds that dare:” but the courage is not to be that of temperament —for such courage is rash and presumptuous, and can expect only the rebuke of Bellerophon who fell head- long. It is to be a courage founded in faith and fortified by the judgment—aintellectual, spiritual, reasonable— such as shall be attendant upon endeavours directed towards the highest objects: for when is it that a rich guerdon waits on minds that dare >p—Only ‘“* If aught be in them of immortal seed, And reason govern that audacious flight Which heavenward they direct.” It is to the intrepidity of high and sacred thoughts and a genuine inspiration that rewards are promised, and amongst them that restoration for an afflicted spirit which is not to be found in permanent seclusion, but MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 69 only in the consecrating of active life to nobler purposes. And how much more is to be expected from an appeal like this, than from the exhortations to patience and fortitude which are so often employed with so little effect ! ‘*Consolatories writ With studied argument Extolling patience as the truest fortitude” * do not produce the patience they extol, precisely because they extol it to this false extent. For excellent .and commendable though it be, there are few cases of afflic- tion in which, so soon as the earliest stage is past, some- thing better than patience may not be looked to with better hope, and patience be met with by the way. Active energies, high aspirations must be awakened ; the resiliency of the heart must be called upon rather than its passive strength ;—and oftentimes when the admoni- tion to be patient would do little else than impose silence upon grief, such exhortations as are contained in this sonnet (and at greater length in the Fourth Book of the ‘ Excursion’) may—not in poetry merely, but in practice and in very deed, be found full of consolation—anima- ting, exalting, invigorating, and “*able to drive All sadness but despair.” This sonnet was addressed to a man of poetical talents who had the world before him and the “ gales of * ‘Samson Agonistes.’ 70 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. youth” to bear him forward. Let us turn now to a tribute rendered in the same form to a great man whose career was rapidly drawing to a close. In the autumn of 1831 Mr. Wordsworth paid a visit to Sir Walter Scott, at Abbotsford, a few days before Sir Walter’s departure for Naples; and that departure became the subject of a sonnet, which we are desirous to quote—not for the purposes of criticism, for indeed it needs no comment— but because the grace and melody and tenderness by which it is characterised, will say more to some readers than Mr. Wordsworth’s abstruser inspirations :— ** A trouble not of clouds or weeping rain, Nor of the setting sun’s pathetic light, Engendered, hangs o’er Eildon’s triple height: Spirits of Power, assembled there, complain For kindred Power departing from their sight ; While Tweed, best pleased in chanting a blithe strain, Saddens his voice again, and yet again. Lift up your hearts, ye mourners! for the might Of the whole world’s good wishes with him goes ; Blessings and prayers in nobler retinue Than sceptred king or laurelled conqueror knows, Follow this wondrous potentate. Be true, Ye winds of ocean and the midland sea, Wafting your charge to soft Parthenope !” Let it be written in the literary annals of this age at least, if not of others, that the men who were greatest in intel- lect amongst us were also great in heart and spirit, and lived together delighting in each other’s society and re- joicing in each other’s fame. Nor was it the fellowship MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. re! of a “school” which united them. This has been supposed of Mr. Wordsworth, Mr. Coleridge, and Mr. Southey, though never of Sir Walter Scott; and yet it could scarcely have been more absurd to class him with them as forming a school, than to class them with each other. The truth is, that these four men came together merely because they were the men of the greatest literary genius in their generation, and because, being also men of large natures, any spirit of rivalry or jealousy was utterly foreign to their dispositions. Such men could not but be congenial associates,—not owing to any peculiarity of genius common to them or any of them, but in spite of very great diversity. Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Coleridge are the two in whom most points of resem- blance might be discerned, the genius of both being essentially philosophic; and yet how wide is the differ- ence !—the one living, amongst books and amongst the wonderful creations of his own mind, a life of thinking for thinking’s sake, led by the infirmities of his con- stitution to turn away from realities, “* And haply by abstruse research to steal From his own nature all the natural man,” * * Coleridge’s ‘Ode to Dejection.? One of the few profound writers of the present day has described with singular force and truth the intellectual characteristics of which this extraordinary man afforded (as we conceive) an example—an example illustrious, no doubt, and wonderful, but to our minds not less melancholy :— ** But the imagination is not the only interceptor of affections 72 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. dealing therefore with thoughts untried in action, un- verified by application, perpetual evolutions of the divinely destined to the purposes of action. The understanding may be excited simultaneously, and when set to work in reasoning upon the relations of any given phenomena, or upon reducing them into a system, it may thus, with speculative truth for its end, be so delighted with its own energies as to lead us into forgetfulness of action. Thus it absorbs in intellectual exercise the strength that ought to have been spent in practical exertion ; and, while it seems to be doing the work of the affections, it diverts them from their own end, employing all the mental powers in the verification of terms instead of the execution of acts, and then applying them to its own work of classifying, comparing, concluding, or otherwise as the case may be. ‘Thus again, when a religious creed is presented, say to a disputatious and subtle mind, in which the action of the critical faculty overbears and absorbs all other energies, that faculty regards the creed proposed polemically, considers it with reference to logical and technical precision, and not in respect to its moral character- istics and tendencies, and wastes upon this theoretic handling of sacred themes all the sedulity which ought to be employed in seeking to give effect to the proffered means of spiritual amelioration.” — * Gladstone’s Church Principles,’ p. 67. So far the Note to the essay as originally published in 1841. But on its subsequent publication in 1848 a supplementary note was added as follows :—The view of Mr. Coleridge here taken has provoked a protest from a writer of the highest authority on that, as indeed on every other topic of which she treats. Mr. Coleridge’s daughter, Mrs. H. N. Coleridge, in a dissertation, for its depth and clearness unrivalled, which she has prefixed to a new Edition of her father’s ‘ Biographia Literaria,’ has expressed herself as follows :—‘‘ All this may be true enough of the mere intellectualist ; but who that was well acquainted with Cole- ridge, as an author or as a man, could suppose that such was his character, or speak of views like his as the product of under- standing unirradiated by reason and fancy uninspired by the spiritual sense? Of all men in the present age he was among the first and MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 73 thinking faculty which revolved into themselves, and which, though governed by the curb of a severe logic, ever among the most earnest to maintain, that ‘ religion must have a moral origin, so far at least that the evidence of its doctrines cannot, like the truths of abstract science, be wholly independent of the will:’ that ‘religion is designed to improve the nature and faculties of man, and that every part of religion is to be judged by its relation to this main end.’ These maxims he insisted on during his whole course as a religious writer ; they plainly had a deep hold on his mind, and were uttered by him, not with the lip only, as if learned from others, but as if they had indeed been drawn from ‘the fountain-head of genuine self-research.’ If he then tried a religious creed ‘with reference to logical and technical precision, and not in respect to its moral characteristics and tendencies,’ how strangely must he have deserted a principle which his own ex- perience had established !—how unaccountably shut his eyes to the light of a ‘safety lamp,’ which his own hands had hung up for the guidance of others! Let any candid reader consult on this subject the ‘ Aids to Reflection,’ especially that portion in which the author maintains that ‘revealed truths are to be judged of by us as far as they are grounds of practice or in some way connected with our moral and spiritual interests,’—that ‘the life, the sub- stance, the hope, the love, in one word, the faith,—these are derivatives from the practical, moral and spiritual nature and being of man ;’ and then ask himself whether he who wrote thus could be capable of falling into the error described above. And again let him see whether he can cite a single passage from his writings in which he appears to be trying a creed according to logical precision alone, without regard to its deeper bearings. So far from being apt to consider articles of belief exclusively in their intellectual aspect, in his departures from received orthodoxy he was chiefly influenced by moral considerations, by his sense of the discrepancy betwixt the tenet, in its ordinary form, and the teachings of conscience,—his conviction that the doctrine, as commonly understood, either meant nothing or something which opposed the spiritual sense and prac- tical reason. The mere intellectualists, who try divine things by 74 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. were not encountered by the checks and responsibilities of life ;—the other seeking rather the wisdom of philo- human measures, had in my father a life-long opponent. Why then is a charge of mere intellectualism brought against himself? Is it because he resisted the insidious sophism which splits the complex being of man; separates the moral in his nature from the rational, the spiritual from conscience and reason ; thrusts aside the under- standing from its necessary office of organizing and evolving the whole mind, and thus brings half truth and confusion into every department of thought? Did he shew himself unspiritual in de- claring that superstition is not, as some will have it, a debased form of faith, but a disguised infidelity, since men become superstitious inasmuch as they are ‘sensual and dark, slaves by their own com- pulsion ;’ or heartless because he refused to establish faith on feeling and fancy, apart from reflection, and to adopt the slavish maxim, that forms of doctrine which have been associated with religious ideas are to be received implicitly,—are not to be examined whether they stifle the truth or convey it rightly? No! it is not from a strict and careful examination of his writmgs that these notions have arisen, but from a partial view of his ¢z/e and its bearing upon his character. It has been thought that he led too exclusively a life of contemplation to be thoroughly well qualified for a moral pre- ceptor, that he dwelt too much on the speculative side of philosophy to have, in fullest measure, a true philosopher’s wisdom. It has been affirmed that he dealt with ‘thoughts untried in action, unverified by application, mere exercises of the thinking faculty revolving into itself :’ that he ‘lived a life of thinking for thinking’s sake.’ I cannot admit that this is true. Whether or no it would have been better for Mr. Coleridge’s own mind and character had he exercised a regular profession, and been less withdrawn from family cares, it is not for me to determine: but this I can affirm, that to represent him as having spent a life of inaction, or of thinking without reference to practical ends, is an injustice both to him and to the products of his mind. To write and to think were his chief business in life ; contemplation was the calling to which his Maker called him ; but to think merely for thinking’s sake,—merely for the MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 75 sophy than philosophy in itself, drawing from the well- spring of life and fact, to which books afforded merely excitement and pastime of the game, is no man’s calling ; it is an occupation utterly unworthy of a rational and immortal being. Whether or no he deserves such a judgment let men determine by a careful survey of his writings, in connection with all those studies which are necessary in order to make them understood 3 let them pronounce upon his character afterwards ; perhaps they will see it with different eyes, and with clearer ones, when they have finished the course. I cannot of course attempt here to vindicate his claim to some ‘ gift of genuine insight,’ as an ethical writer ; but in reference to the remarks lately cited I ask, of what sort are the thoughts dealt with in ‘The Friend,’ the ‘ Aids to Reflection,’ the ‘ Lay Sermons,’ the ‘ Church and State,’ the ‘ Literary Remains ?’ May it not be said that, of the thoughts they contain, one large class, that relating to politics, cannot, by their nature, ‘zsswe out of acts,’—out of the particular acts of an individual life,—or be tried and applied in action by the individual who treats of them, though they zend to acts and are to have practical consequences ; seeing that they relate to national movements, interests of bodies, dealings of communities; while another still larger class, which concern the moral and spiritual being of man, are capable of being tried and verified in the life of every Christian, whether he be given to outward action, or whether activities of an inward character, have been his chief occupation upon earth? To deny their author ¢hzs practical knewledge and experience would be a satire on his personal character rather than a review of his philosophic mind. All the poetry, all the poetical criticism which my father produced, has a practical end; for poetry is a visible creation, the final aim of which is to benefit man by means of delight. As for his moral and religious writings, if practical wisdom is not in them, they are empty indeed, for their whole aim is practical usefulness—the regulation of action, the actions of the heart and mind with their appropriate manifestations—the furtherance of man’s well-being here and hereafter. This remark, that my father lived a life of thinking for thinking’s sake is either the severest of judgments, more 76 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. tributary streams, acting as occasions arose or giving or seeking advice as to what was to be done when this or that happened, living apart from that world which sees its own reflection in the newspapers, but for that very reason penetrating further into individual natures and transactions— ‘* Sheltered, but not to social duties lost ; Secluded, but not buried ” *— and exercising his judgment in the only way which tends to its rectification—with the consciousness, namely, that according as it concludes there will follow joy or sorrow, loss or gain, injury, anger and resentment, or love and gratitude, on the part of some friend, neighbour, or well- known individual who is frequently met with face to face. From the judgment so exercised and the knowledge accruing with the exercise, comes practical wisdom ; and by duly generalising from practical wisdom we advance to philosophic wisdom. But the principle which les at the root of all is, that thoughts should either tend towards acts or issue out of them, in order to be justly deter- mined. severe than his worst and most prejudiced enemies ever passed on him in the heat of conflict, or it is no censure at all, but rather a commendation ; inasmuch as the soul is better than the body and mental activity nobler than corporeal.” I do not doubt that the account thus given of Mr. Coleridge’s mind is the more correct of the two, as well as the more authentic. * ¢ Excursion,’ Book v. MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. vy) ‘* Give to no unproportioned thought his act,” * is a negative injunction, to which may be appended an affirmative and a converse of equal truth. “Give to each well-proportioned thought his act” is the affirma- tive : the converse (if it can be so called) is, “ Give your thoughts their acts, and they will have thereby the better chance to be well proportioned.” For when a thought is to have an act and a consequence, its justness will be the quality principally regarded by the thinker: whereas, if itis to be merely a meditative effort, to end in itself or in another thought, or in being written down in prose or rhyme, its novelty or brilliancy will have a principal instead of a secondary place in the estimation of the thinker; and by the habit of thus thinking without act- ing, and therefore without fear of consequences, the justness of the judgment will be impaired, and neither practical nor philosophic wisdom will be attained in their highest degrees. Of course it is not to be inferred that, for the purposes of a writer, there must not be much thinking which neither begins nor ends in acting, nor perhaps has any dvect reference to it; but the need- ful condition is, that the adits of the mind must be formed by the thinking which has this reference, if there is to be any such “gift of genuine insight” as may con- stitute a great ethical writer, whether in poetry or prose. It is thus to the cultivation of Mr. Wordsworth’s * Shakespeare, in ‘ Hamlet.’ 78 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. mind in real life that we attribute his pre-eminence as a philosophic poet ; for with him the justness of the thought is always the first consideration: what is commonplace, so it be but true, has its due place and proportion in his mind ; and the degree to which plain and acknowledged truth enters into his writings gives them their breadth ; and perhaps, when they are regarded as a whole, even adds to their originality ; for there is no mind so rare, nor consequently so original, as one which is intel- lectually capable of the most brilliant aberrations, and is yet so tempered by the love of truth as to give old truths their place along with new, and so warmed by the same love as to make all truths impressive. And Mr. Words- worth’s example, if not his precepts, may suggest to the poetical aspirants who abound in our times, that poetry, in its highest kinds, is the result, not merely of a talent or an art, nor even only of these combined with a capa- cious mind and an ardent imagination, but also of a life led in the love of truth—and if not in action as the word is ordinarily used, yet certainly in giving practical effect to right feelings and just judgments, and in communica- ting, by conscientiousness in conduct, an habitually con- scientious justness to the operations of the reason and the understanding. ‘‘Endeavour thus to live,’—let us say to such aspirants in Mr. Wordsworth’s own words— ‘* Endeavour thus to live; these rules regard ; These helps solicit; and a steadfast seat MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 79 Shall then be yours among the happy few Who dwell on earth, yet breathe empyreal air, Sons of the morning.” * The Sonnets (with the exception of the Ecclesiastical series) bear witness more directly perhaps than any of Mr. Wordsworth’s other writings, to a principle which he has asserted of poetical, as strongly as Lord Bacon of physical philosophy—the principle that the Muse is to be the servant and interpreter of Nature. Some fact, transaction, or natural object, gives birth to almost every one of them. He does not search his mind for subjects ; he goes forth into the world and they present themselves. His mind les open to nature with an ever-wakeful susceptibility, and an impulse from without will send it far into the regions of thought; but it seldom goes to work upon itself. It is not celibate, but ** wedded to this goodly universe In love and holy passion ”— of which union poetry is the legitimate offspring; and it is owing to this love and passion that the most ordinary incidents and objects have inspired an interest in the poet, and that so soon as the impassioned character of his mind had made itself felt and understood, he was enabled to convey the same interest to his readers. It is true that it was many years before this was brought about, and also that to this day there are readers * © Excursion,’ Book iv. 80 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. to whom his poems convey nothing; and it may be acknowledged that amongst this number, rapidly dimin- ishing as it is, there are still some men of distinguished abilities. It is not difficult to account for the general neglect of Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry during the first quarter of the present century. That was a period when the poetry of reflection was so much out of fashion that verse had almost ceased to be regarded as a vehicle for thought, and even thoughtful men had recourse to it as if the very intention were to divert themselves from thinking—hung over a stitched pamphlet of rhyme with the sort of charmed ear with which they would have listened to a first-rate performer at the Opera—waited impatiently for another stitched pamphlet to come upon the stage three months afterwards—and being hurried away by their enthusiasm as one stitched pamphlet came out after another, almost mistook the “ primi cantatori” in this line for the lights of the age, and their “lean and flashy songs” for divine illuminations. Such was the bewilderment of those times: nor is it difficult to con- ceive that some intelligent men, whose intellectual con- stitution was not strong, may have had their taste so vitiated during the prevalence of this fashion as never to have recovered a natural appetite. But there are men of a very different order from these, who are still uncon- verted, and whose case it is not so easy to understand— men too robust in their frame of mind to have been debilitated by the errors of youth, too free and generous MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 81 in their temper to feel bound by past commitments, and who nevertheless do in all sincerity fail to make anything out from Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry. Had the value of the poetry consisted in some peculiar vein of fancy, had it been a matter of versifica- tion, or had it resolved itself into a particular strain of sentiment or opinion, it might have been said—This is not for the universal ear; it will naturally hit some minds and miss others; and of many of Mr. Wordsworth’s poems this may be said fairly; and probably some few of those which make the strongest impression on one reader will make little or none upon another. But look- ing to the main body of Mr. Wordsworth’s works, addressed as they are to the mind of Man at large, and, with a great variety of manner and verse, dealing for the most part with matters of universal interest, it is not easy to explain the existence of that remnant of intellectual men who are still inaccessible. It might have been thought that, verse and all embellishment apart, when one considerable understanding was brought to bear upon another, in subject-matter to which all understand- ings apply themselves, nothing but the curse of Cas- sandra could have prevented some sort of result. So it is, however; and it is chiefly for the sake of meeting this remnant on the best ground, that the ‘Sonnets’ should be brought to the front,—meeting them—not in the spirit of “‘compelling them to come in,” but for a fair trial whether it be not possible to get rid of such an V. G 82 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. intellectual anomaly as they present when standing out, and to bring together minds which are worthy of each other. For the Sonnets have not, like many of the other poems, peculiarities of manner which whilst they charm one reader will repel another; they are highly-finished com- positions distinguished, as regards the diction, only by an aptitude which can hardly fail to be approved, whatever may be the particular taste of the reader ; and they are at the same time so varied in subject and sentiment, that specimens might be adduced from them of almost every kind of serious poetry to which the sonnet can lend itself. The majority of the four hundred and forty-four which have been published are of a character in which the doctrinal predominates. But the series on the River Duddon rests the mind whilst it charms the ear. It is a register of the thoughts which may be sug- gested to a poet in tracking this stream from its source in the mountains to its junction with the sea. We are told what may occur when it flows in human society, and Childhood, Youth, and Age step across it. But there is a previous stage of its course in which it flows through a remote and untrodden solitude, and then everything that is to be seen being what it had been from time imme- morial, the poet’s fancy is carried far back into the past. ‘* What aspect bore the man who roved or fled, First of his tribe, to this dark dell? who first In this pellucid current slaked his thirst ? What hopes came with him? what designs were spread MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 83 Along his path? His unprotected bed What dreams encompassed? Was the intruder nursed In hideous usages and rights accursed That thinned the living and disturbed the dead? No voice replies ; both air and earth are mute ; And thou, blue streamlet, murmuring yield’st no more Than a soft record, that whatever fruit Of ignorance thou might’st witness heretofore, Thy function was to heal and to restore, To soothe and cleanse, not madden and pollute !” How simple and yet how full is the diction of this sonnet! How much of the wildness and insecurity of savage life is in those words “ roved or fled,” and in the presentation to the fancy of the one sole man wandering or fugitive ! Then the darkness and cruelty of Druidical superstition and barbarian warfare are alluded to in a tone of almost fearful inquiry; and after the pause of silence in the ninth line, how beautifully and with what an expressive change of the music is the mind turned to the perennial influences of Nature, as healing, soothing, and restorative in all times, whatever be the condition of Man! This sonnet is a study in versification throughout; and observe especially the use of duplicate, triplicate, and even quad- ruplicate consonants in our language,—how admirably they may be made to serve the purposes of rhythmical melody which they are often supposed to thwart— ‘* And thou, blue streamlet, murmuring yie/w’st no more,” etc. How the slight check, delay, and resistance of the four- fold consonant makes the flow of the verse to be still more musically felt! The Northern languages have 84 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. often been reproached for their excess in consonants, guttural, sibilant, or mute; and it has been concluded as a matter of course, that languages in which vowels and liquids predominate must be better adapted to poetry, and that the most mellifluous language must be also the most melodious. This, however, is a somewhat rash and ill-considered condemnation of our native tongue. Poetry has been often compared ‘to embroidery, and when a language is all of one texture, and that texture nothing but silk and satin, the skilful hand will have but little advantage, and the workmanship of finer art will not stand out so distinctly from ordinary fabrics. Nor indeed will such a language supply adequate materials to the hand of art. In dramatic verse more particularly, our English combinations of consonants are invaluable ; not only for the purpose of reflecting grace and softness by contrast, or precipitating the verse by a‘! momentary detention, but also in giving expression to the harsher passions, and in imparting keenness and significancy to the language of discrimination, and especially to that of scorn. In Shakespeare, for instance, what a blast of sarcasm whistles through that word, “ 7hzz/t, Thrift, Horatio!” with its one vowel and five consonants, and then how the verse runs on with a low confidential smoothness, as if to give effect to the outbreak by the subsequent suppression— : ** The funeral baked meats Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.” MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 85 And in Beaumont and Fletcher— ** Fave I not every night Expostulated with my wandering thoughts ? ” With what felicity the doubled consonants in the first word of the second line express the effort to restrain, and how fully in the fourth word they tell us that the “wandering” thoughts have had their way; so that whether the arrest or the overflow is to be signified, the reduplication of the consonants, mute or liquid, takes an effect that no one can fail to feel. It is not necessary to insist, as some philologists have done of late years, on a preference for the Saxon element of our language as affording a purer and better English than any other; rather let it be remembered that ours is essentially a highly composite language ; that it derives its force, as well as its richness, from the great variety and diversity of its constituents, and that it will be best written by him who avails himself of all its elements in their natural proportion, tempering one with another. And their zaturaZ proportion means that which comes naturally to the individual writer ; for, after all, art and instruction can do little more in this matter of rythm than to remove theories out of the way and leave a writer to his own intuitive ear and perceptions to find him the better or worse language which is suitable to him. Mr. Wordsworth’s diction is neither Saxon nor Latin particularly, but abounding in all the treasures of our 86 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. vocabulary, and making the music which no man can make who has but one string to his fiddle. “What is a spinning-wheel?” is a question which may now be asked by a full-grown person who cannot recollect to have seen one; and it might be answered by a person twenty years older, that in his youth such an implement was seen in every cottage and in many houses of somewhat higher pretensions—that it was a wheel mounted two or three feet above the ground, to which the spinner’s foot, by means of a sort of pedal, com- municated a uniform rotatory motion, whilst her fingers were busy in manipulating the line of flax drawn from it,—that the motion was just not so rapid but that it could be distinctly discerned by the eye, and that the sound which accompanied it was something between the humming of a top and the purring of a cat. But if, having explained the mechanism of the spinning-wheel and its direct use and purpose, he were asked to give some account of its moral influences, he might require the aid of the poet :— ‘* Grief, thou hast lost an ever-ready friend Now that the cottage spinning-wheel is mute ; And Care—a comforter that best could suit Her froward mood, and_softliest reprehend ; And Love—a charmer’s voice, that used to lend, More efficaciously than aught that flows From harp or lute, kind influence to compose The throbbing pulse—else troubled without end ? Even Joy could tell, Joy craving truce and rest From her own overflow, what power sedate MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 87 On those revolving motions did await Assiduously—to soothe her aching breast, And, to a point of just relief, abate The mantling triumphs of a day too blest.” Mechanical employment, even without these peculiar charms of the spinning-wheel, has no doubt a tendency to alleviate suffering and subdue excitability, and this truth has a political as well as a moral bearing ; for in seasons of commercial or agricultural difficulty, the political disturbances which arise amongst the lower orders of the people may be attributed, not to distress and destitution only—for it has often been observed that they extend to many who are under no immediate pressure of want—but also to the concurrent deprivation of that great sedative to the human mind which is found in the employment of the body. Neither hunger nor full feeding act alike upon all men—the one will not invariably produce irritability, still less will the other be unfailingly attended with contentment—but steady labour or manual employment will always promote composure of mind ;—a fact which may add one more to the many considerations which lead the politician, as well as the moralist, to insist that a high rate of wages is less to be desired for a country, than work which is regular even though ill paid. But whilst Mr. Wordsworth appreciates the moral influence of mechanical labour in abating excitement to “@ point of just relief,” many passages might be adduced 88 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. from the ‘ Excursion’ to show that its benefits become more than questionable in his eyes when it is carried so far as to suppress the activity of the understanding and render the mind callous and insensible. The subject is discussed at length in the eighth book, with no pseudo-poetical partiality—no preference of previous and ancient evils to those of the manufacturing system, but philosophically and fairly ; and it is resumed in the ninth book in its natural connection with the subject of national education. If reference be made to these two books it will be seen by those who are practically acquainted with the subject that the experience and Parliamentary inquiries of the seven and twenty years which have elapsed since the ‘ Excursion’ was published have only shown more conclusively the justness of the poet’s views and feelings as to the evils which are, per- haps to a certain extent unavoidably, but at all events most unhappily and fatally to many of the lower classes, mixed up with the unsteady and inordinate activities of our manufacturing system. In the course of those years other eminent writers joined in denouncing these evils with all the fervour of the poetical temperament (one great man, Mr. Southey, we need scarcely name), and more recently public men have been found in the House of Commons, of an ardent and indefatigable benevolence, to suggest remedies; whilst there has remained for political economists the ungracious but indispensable task of determining which of these were practicable and — = MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 89 which were not. Some progress—much, we trust—has been made in the matter; and by a kindly alliance and concurrence of all the lights and powers which are requisite for the treatment of this difficult problem—by philanthropical, philosophical, economical, and practical efforts, and by eloquence poetical and Parliamentary, and by the press and by the pulpit, it may be hoped that much more progress will be made in no long time. Thus the Sonnet to the spinning-wheel might not have been altogether misplaced in the series entitled * Political Sonnets.’ But of that series, those which were in earlier editions entitled ‘Sonnets to Liberty,’ are to be placed first. Amongst these there are some loftier strains than almost any that_have been sounded upon historical and contemporary themes since the breath ceased which uttered that tremendous imprecation— ** Avenge, oh Lord! thy slaughtered saints, whose bones Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold !”— loftier than a/most any; for Mr. Southey’s ‘Ode written during the Negociations with Buonaparte in 1814,’ is not to be forgotten. The catalogue of massacres in the penultimate stanza, followed by the summary of murders in the last stanza of that ode; the grave and not un- governed but at the same time irresistible and fiery vehemence which pervades it, may well give it a pre- eminence as the most awful judgment that ever was denounced in song. Mr. Wordsworth’s series of ‘Sonnets 90 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. to Liberty’ arose also out of the events connected with Buonaparte’s domination ; but 4e writes more in sorrow than in anger, whilst Southey, like Milton, fulminates his censures more in anger and scorn than in sorrow,— pursuing the oppressor in a just and virtuous spirit, but also in a spirit deeply vindictive, and with what would have been called in old times ‘‘a mineral hatred.” The dignified and melancholy anger, the anger “slow and spiritual,” with which Mr. Wordsworth contemplates the tyrant’s career, admits more of meditative thought into his effusions on such topics; though dull must be the reader to whom these also are not ‘soul-animating strains :”—witness the following, addressed to Toussaint Louverture :— “TOUSSAINT, the most unhappy man of men! Whether the whistling rustic tend his plough Within thy hearing, or thy head be now Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den ;— Oh miserable chieftain ! where and when Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not; do thou Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow : Though fallen thyself, never to rise again, Live and take comfort. Thou hast left behind Powers that will work for thee ; air, earth, and skies ; There’s not a breathing of the common wind That will forget thee ; thou hast great allies ; Thy friends are exultations, agonies, And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.” Mr. Wordsworth’s sentiments respecting liberty in the — various senses in which the word is used, as applying to i MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. QI national independence, to civil liberty, and to individual freedom, are everywhere pervaded by a deep sense of the truth that liberty is essentially of a moral and spiritual nature; and that whilst she is closely connected no doubt with forms and organizations, and whilst dictating and requiring them for her conservation, yet these forms do not constitute, and cannot of themselves impart, the spirit of liberty—that the forms must result from the spirit, otherwise the spirit will not result from the forms—a doctrine which has a constant application to practical politics. A celebrated event in ancient history is made - the occasion of delivering this doctrine in reference both to civil liberty and national independence :— ‘*A Roman Master stands on Grecian ground ; And to the people at the Isthmian games Assembled, he, by a herald’s voice, proclaims THE LIBERTY OF GREECE :—the words rebound Until all voices in one voice are drowned ; Glad acclamation by which air was rent ! And birds, -high flying in the element, Drop to the earth, astonished at the sound ! Yet were the thoughtful grieved ; and still that voice Haunts, with sad echoes, musing Fancy’s ear ; Ah! that a Congueror’s words should be so dear ! Ah! that a 00m could shed such rapturous joys ! A gift of that which is not to be given By all the blended powers of Earth and Heaven.” Again, in a sonnet written when Buonaparte was threatening the independence of this country, the poet, being at that time on the coast near Dover, contemplates Q2 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. the “span of waters” which divides England from France, and admitting the mighty power of the physical barrier, yet regards it as merely subordinate and instrumental, and still insists upon the higher agency as the vital protection :— ‘*Even so doth God protect us if we be Virtuous and wise. Winds blow and waters roll Strength to the brave, and Power, and Deity ; Yet in themselves are nothing! One decree Spake laws to ¢hem, and said that by the soul Only, the nations shall be great and free.” The same strain of sentiment will be found to recur repeatedly in the sonnets which relate to the events of Buonaparte’s wars and the subjugation or resistance of the several States whose independence he invaded ; and at the close of the series, which ends in 1811, a censure is pronounced upon the deplorable infirmity of man’s nature which at that time came in aid of Buonaparte’s power, sapping the hearts of many weak brethren in this country as well as in his own and others,—the tendency to lose all sense of right and wrong, and all sense of horror at cruelties and crimes, in an effeminate admiration of talents, achievements, and power. ‘This admiration, thus counteracting the heart’s better nature, was in truth, wheresoever it prevailed, an index of the absence or decay of the virtues which are essential to. liberty. An efemenate admiration, it may be truly desig- nated; for it prevailed chiefly amongst women, who are more prone than men to feel, concerning things at MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 93 a distance, according to their effect in story, and not according to their reality in life. Casca, in Shakespeare’s play, says of the women who forgave Cesar, that “if Ceesar had stabbed their mothers they would have done no less.” The admirers of Buonaparte, whether women or effeminate men, were not perverted to this extent; facts which are brought before the bodily eyes or come home to the individual feelings of such persons, will set them right in their sentiments concerning an ambitious conqueror ;—the women of Zaragoza were under no mistake ;—but that nothing else may have power to do so, there was many a pitiable proof in this country during Buonaparte’s career; and to such cases the latter part of the following sonnet adverts in the strongest language of reprehension to which Mr. Wordsworth has ever permitted himself to give utterance :— ‘Here pause : the poet claims at least this praise, That virtuous Liberty hath been the scope Of his pure song, which did not shrink from hope In the worst moments of these evil days ; From hope, the paramount duty that Heaven lays, For its own honour, on man’s suffering heart. Never may from our souls one truth depart— That an accursed thing it is to gaze On prosperous tyrants with a dazzled eye; Nor—touched with due abhorrence of ¢hezr guilt For whose dire ends tears flow and blood is spilt And justice labours in extremity— Forget thy weakness, upon which is built, O wretched Man, the throne of tyranny !” The corollary from this sonnet is, that when the 94 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. admiration of anything opposed to virtue is stronger than virtue itself in a people, that people is unfit for liberty, and the vital spirit of liberty is not in them. Through how much of political theory and practice ought this doctrine to be carried! Is there in this country any constituency to which what are called popular talents will recommend a representative no- toriously profligate and reprobate? That constituency is unfit for its franchise ; and whatever specious pretences may be made of supporting a public principle and distinguishing between public and private conduct—as if the support of virtue was wot a public principle—such an exercise of the franchise is tainting the very sources of liberty in the land. For to suppose that liberty can be promoted whilst virtue is overlooked, is nothing else than to suppose that the consequence can be produced without having regard to the cause. That liberty must rest upon a moral rather than a political basis, and that the attempt is vain to build it up by a merely political agency or promote it in a merely political spirit, is a truth which has always been before the eyes of our great poets, though often lost to those of our politicians. Coleridge saw it in his youth, mstructed by the events that were occurring in France, and ex- pressed it with characteristic force :— ‘* The sensual and the dark rebel in vain, Slaves by their own compulsion.” * * ‘France,’ an Ode. MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 95 Milton saw it, ardently political as he was; or perhaps he saw it only when the ardour of his political mind had been informed by experience and tempered by adversity. He asks (‘Paradise Regained,’ iv. 145) what wise man would seek to free a people “‘ by themselves enslaved,” ‘* Or could of inward slaves make outward free ?” And in ‘Paradise Lost’ (xi. 79) Michael explains to Adam that perfect liberty could only exist in Paradise, being inseparable from virtue, which again is identical with right reason. These great men knew the nature of liberty; and those who may study, along with their writings, Mr. Wordsworth’s political sonnets and the large portion of his other works which bear upon the state and prospects of society, can hardly fail to increase and refresh their knowledge of these subjects, and to appreciate more justly the connection between true liberty and the mere political outworks which often take its name without by any means comprising its sub- stance. For in what does the worth and gloriousness of liberty consist? Not in charters, statutes, and franchises : these are merely the documents and conveyances of liberty. Not in the political powers and functions which they authenticate: these, indeed, may constitute liberty as a means: but the end and sanctifying principle of liberty consists in the peace and happiness, the independ- ence and elevation of the minds of individual men. 96 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. Let us pursue the principle, therefore, into practical life, and observe how far political institutions succeed, and wherein they fail, to produce personal independence. Take, for instance, an Austrian or Prussian tradesman, and place him side by side with the London shop- keeper, obsequious behind his counter—which is the free man? The Austrian or Prussian will generally be found to wear a countenance and manner of inde- pendent courtesy, confident of meeting the same in return, but not much more bent upon conciliating his customer than he expects his customer to be on con- ciliating him. The relations between them are marked by no other desire to please on the part of the trades- man than belongs to the goodwill which ought to sub- sist between fellow-creatures. True, he is legally lable to be watched by a spy or imprisoned without a warrant : but he lives in no fear that such a thing will happen, and there is no sign that the degradation of his political state enters into his daily feelings, his transactions in business, or his habits in social intercourse. Turn, then, to the London shopkeeper. Of the signs and tokens to be observed in /zs manners it is enough to say that they are tinctured with a courtesy which is ot independent. And whence comes this? It is not for want of statutes, charters, privileges, and immunities ; it is for want of an independence which these gross instrumentalities can neither give nor take away; it is because his mind has been reached by a far more penetrating influence than MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 97 any which is thus derived—because his z7// is enslaved ; because his heart is venal, and he is ready to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage. It is true that he shouts for liberty at the hustings; but though the voice is Jacob’s voice, the hands are the hands of Esau ; what he values in what he calls liberty is chiefly protection from a tax; money is still the tyrant of his mind ; and the very colours of his political liberty may very often be nothing else than the badge of his inward servitude. Is, then,—this class, this minority, this mere feature in our society,—to be adduced as impeaching the value of our free institutions in their general results. Far from it. Those institutions are to be valued beyond everything except the spirit which produced them and the ends they are to serve. But what may be insisted on is that political liberty is good and glorious only so far as it con- duces to moral and spiritual liberty and to personal independence—that it is pure and nghteous only in so far as it is— ‘¢ Subservient still to moral purposes, Auzxiliar to divine.” * And the practical conclusion is—not that any lover of liberty is to be in any one act or thought of his heart less ardent or strenuous in the love of liberty—but that for the very sake and in the spirit of that love, he is diligently to consider the mixed and contrarious effects * ¢xcursion,’ Book iv. 98 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. to which merely political proceedings give birth; and if he supports measures which are brought forward in the name of political liberty, he is to see at least that they may be expected to promote personal independence, and so far as may be possible, not independence only and of itself, but an independence virtuous, enlightened, and founded in humility. If this be overlooked, our popular Patriots may give power to the people, but not liberty. | Having these principles in view, and taking the eighth book of the ‘Excursion’ for a connecting commentary, the reader may be led by the Sonnets to trace the course of political liberty through some of its leading conse- quences in our own country. Its earliest and most assured result is wealth. From wealth is derived national power and independence, and a numerous population : but seeking for its effects within and amongst that popu- lation, we find them to be of a chequered and multi- farious character, with perhaps only one characteristic common to all, whether good or bad,—that of actzvity. And believing—as it would be impious to disbelieve— believing with a deep trust and assurance that the good elements in human nature are more powerful than the bad and are continually gaining upon them, it follows that an increase of activity to all will impart an increase of preponderance to the good. Thus wealth and activity, whilst adding largely to the ignorant and bedarkened part of the population, produce a more than propor- MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 99 tionate addition to those parts which are in some degree instructed ; and have a yet more important result in carrying the instruction of those who were already instructed to a higher point, and along with greater enlightenment, communicating to those classes greater power and efficacy in good works. Hence we have a race of clergymen and country gentlemen far superior to their predecessors. But whilst we never forget that the results of our institutions are good in the main, and whilst we hope that there will accrue under them an incalculable acces- sion of good in the end, it is fit that we should also look the evil results fairly in the face. Wealth and com- mercial activity, whilst they make the life of man in general a life of progress, make it also a life of vicissi- tude as regards worldly condition. By vicissitude the minds of men are exercised in worldly hopes and fears, the passions connected with gain and loss are unduly excited, and the industry of the trading classes (which are perhaps the most important class as regards the stamp given to the national character) is no longer the industry of necessity or duty, but an inordinate and greedy industry, carrying with it often a taint of gam- bling speculation, and resembling that vice in its wasting effect upon the heart. This species of industry, if it intermits at all, is of too excited a nature to leave the heart to repose even in its intervals ; it may possibly not be altogether absorbing and engrossing ; but in that case 100 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. the excitement of getting will alternate—not with rest, but with excitement of another kind—the excitement of spending :— ‘*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 rising from the sea ; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.” In a subsequent sonnet, riches are denounced for the fears which they generate. In October, 1803, at the approach of the great conflict with Buonaparte, Mr. Words- worth had remarked that whilst other classes were hope- ful and manful, it was the rich who were fearful and desponding :— ** What do we gather hence but firmer faith That every gift of noble origin Is breathed upon by Hope’s perpetual breath ; That virtue and the faculties within Are vital,—and that riches are akin To fear, to change, to cowardice, and death?” But though in these and other poems he animadverts upon riches or the love of riches as working against the MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. IOI freedom of the heart, he nowhere advocates equality of station as fostering either independence or any other virtue. Yet it may be asked, do not riches lie at the root of all worldly inequalities? Undoubtedly they do, and riches are as undoubtedly the basis of many social virtues. But in order to be so, they must not be thrown up suddenly by commercial vicissitude; they must be stable and permanent, and give birth to permanent social relations. Riches which are stable and permanent are overgrown in the course of time with many associations and imaginative colourings, until they seem to be rather the adjuncts of a social pre-eminence than the substance and essence of it. This equable and settled wealth neither agitates the mind of the possessor nor provokes others to a jealous emulation ; and without the differences of social rank which spring from it, it may well be questioned whether some of the best parts of our nature would not remain uncultivated. For the truth is, that there is nothing so uninteresting to man, nothing so ungenial and unfruitful, as social equality. Man’s nature and the wants of his imagination call for the contrary ; and where institutions are ostensibly calculated to re- move the sense of inequality, they will in reality remove only so much of it as is connected with our better nature, and bring into strong and naked operation the inequalities of a monied scale. ‘This is no doubt one of the tendencies of our institutions at the present time—a tendency which will be counteracted and conquered, as we trust Hl 102 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. —one tendency only amongst many; but one against which those who value the true liberty of their country, the liberty of its individual minds and hearts, should strenuously contend. And it is not a tendency as regards the lower classes only. Social distinction is an object to high and low, and is open to every one of us through money, and money will procure for every one considera- tion, service, and what is equally indispensable to man- kind, civility ; and in this state of society the liberty of the higher classes is not less in danger than that of the lower. For with the restless activity, the ambition, the importance attached to money, the pecuniary taint which infects all the relations between the upper and lower classes, the absence of the disinterested courtesies and unpaid good offices of life which inspire confidence between those classes and seem to place them in a rela- tion of human brotherhood with each other—with all these elements of our society, there arises naturally its chief characteristic on the evil side of the account, pride, or a pusillanimous fear of opinion—pride which— ‘* Howe’er disguised In its own majesty, is littleness ”— and invariably undermines the strength and independence of the heart. The study of Mr. Wordsworth’s writings will assist more than any other literary influence that is now abroad to abate the spirit of pride and cherish the spirit of independence ; and it may be well in coming MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 103 to the end of the political series of his Sonnets, to sum up the doctrine to be derived from them as teaching, that in so far as the political institutions of a country place any man in such circumstances as to give avarice, ambition, or pride the dominion over his heart, whatever may be the name given or the virtue ascribed to those institutions, they cost that man his liberty. Next comes the series which Mr. Wordsworth has entitled ‘Itinerary,’—already alluded to as “the sundry contemplation of his travels.” Scenery, cities, manners, local traditions, recorded events, incidents of the moment, remains of antiquity, products of modern taste, abodes, sites and occupants, viaducts, railways, and steam- boats, names, clouds, and echoes,—nothing comes amiss to Mr. Wordsworth on his travels, and sonnets spring up in his path wherever he goes. And amidst the multitude of objects which attract his attention, it is difficult to say that any one class has more power over him than another. Natural objects have undoubtedly had the greatest influence originally, as we may learn from the celebrated lines written on visiting Tintern Abbey and from many other passages; and amongst these “the family of floods” are mentioned by the poet as standing first in his regard, and many members of that family are celebrated in the Sonnets, from “the stately Eden” in his own country, to ‘‘That young stream that smites the throbbing rocks Of Viamala.” 104 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. But natural objects are so vividly recalled to his memory when others are presented to his eyes,—the colours of them are so interwoven with the whole tissue of his mind,—that hardly any subject is treated separately from them. And on the other hand, his sense of the beauty of external nature is seldom merely passive ; the activities of his intellect are excited by it rather than merged in it, and his poetry is not often purely descriptive. The sonnet which is perhaps the most so, is a description of the plain between Namur and Liege, in which the effect of nature’s tranquillity is heightened by allusion to the frequent warfare of which that plain has been the theatre :— ‘¢ What lovelier home could gentle Fancy choose ? Is this the stream, whose cities, heights, and plains, War’s favourite playground, are with crimson stains Familiar, as the morn with pearly dews? The morn, that now, along the silver MEUSE, Spreading her peaceful ensigns, calls the swains To tend their silent boats and ringing wains, Or strip the bough whose mellow fruit bestrews The ripening corn beneath it. As mine eyes Turn from the fortified and threatening hill, How sweet the prospect of yon watery glade, With its grey rocks clustering in pensive shade, That, shaped like old monastic turrets, rise From the smooth meadow-ground, serene and still!” . This seems pure description ; yet what a serious satire is expressed in one word, ‘“ War's favourite playground!” In the following sonnet, entitled ‘The Trosachs,’ y MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 105 the moral is blended with the description through- out: — ‘¢ There’s not a nook within this solemn Pass, But were an apt confessional for one Taught by his summer spent, his autumn gone, That life is but a tale of morning grass Withered at eve. From scenes of art which chase That thought away, turn, and with watchful eyes Feed it ’mid Nature’s old felicities, Rocks, rivers, and smooth lakes more clear than glass Untouched, unbreathed upon. Thrice happy quest, If from a golden perch of aspen spray (October’s workmanship to rival May) The pensive warbler of the ruddy breast That moral sweeten by a heaven-taught lay, Lulling the year, with all its cares, to rest!” How skilfully does that suggestion in the parenthesis, of the sunshiny colouring of the aspen in October, adum- brate the cheerfulness to be bestowed by natural piety upon the decline of life! preparing for the principal illustration of the same idea in the song of the red-breast, which only begins to sing when other birds have ceased. Congenial with this in sentiment and imagery is a sonnet written at Bala-sala, Isle of Man, in the person of a friend of the author. The convent spoken of is Rushen Abbey : ‘¢ Broken in fortune, but in mind entire And sound in principle, I seek repose Where ancient trees this convent-pile enclose In ruin beautiful. When vain desire Intrudes on peace, I pray the eternal Sire To cast a soul-subduing shade on me, A gray-haired, pensive, thankful refugee ; A shade—but with some sparks of heavenly fire 106 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. Once to these cells vouchsafed. And when I note The old tower’s brow yellowed as with the beams Of sunset ever there, albeit streams Of stormy weather-stains that semblance wrought, I thank the silent monitor, and say ‘ Shine so, my aged brow, at all hours of the day 19» When Mr. Wordsworth is upon his travels, the very modes of conveyance “have their authentic comment,” and suggest thoughts, recollections, and feelings. We find him, in 1820, in a carriage on the banks of the Rhine, travelling with a speed which cheats him of half his enjoyment, and wishing to be on foot as in the days of his youth :— ** Amid this dance of objects sadness steals O’er the defrauded heart—while sweeping by, As in a fit of Thespian jollity, Beneath her vine-leaf crown the green Earth reels : Backward, in rapid evanescence, wheels The venerable pageantry of Time, Each beetling rampart and each tower sublime, And what the dell unwillingly reveals Of lurking cloistral arch, through trees espied Near the bright river’s edge. Yet why repine ? To muse, to creep, to halt at will, to gaze— Such sweet wayfaring—of life’s spring the pride, Her summer’s faithful joy—+¢ha¢ still is mine, And in fit measure cheers autumnal days.” It is a happiness to know that the “ fit measure” of pedestrian strength which remained to Mr. Wordsworth in the year 1820 is yet with him in 1841, and that the fainting London tourist may still meet with him, robust and fresh, on the top of Helvellyn or other “ cloud- MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 107 sequestered height,” exercising his functions as one of ‘‘ Nature’s Privy Council.” If Mr. Wordsworth was not quite content to be whirled along the banks of the Rhine in a carriage, it was to be expected that he should betray more impatience in a steam-boat :— ** Who but must covet a cloud-seat, or skiff Built for the air, or wingéd Hippogriff ? That he might fly, where no one could pursue, From this dull Monster and her sooty crew.” But, what some persons would consider the poetic or romantic view of things never shuts out from Mr. Words- worth’s mind the contemplation of the whole truth. For the whole truth received into a poetic mind of the highest, that is, of the philosophic order, may always take a poetical shape, and cannot but be more fruitful than half-truths. And thus, we have a notice, in a sonnet on steam-boats, viaducts, and railways, that Mr. Words- worth is not to be misled by any false lights into regard- ing with other feelings than those of hope and gratulation the victories of mind over matter :— ‘Motions and Means, on land and sea at war With old poetic feeling, not for this Shall ye, by Poets even, be judged amiss! Nor shall your presence, howsoe’er it mar The loveliness of Nature, prove a bar To the Mind’s gaining that prophetic sense Of future change, that point of vision, whence May be discovered what in soul ye are. 108 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 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.” Twenty years ago there was a literary controversy of some celebrity, in which Lord Byron, Mr. Campbell, and Mr. Bowles were the principal performers, on the subject of the comparative merits of nature and art in supplying subjects for poetry. A little of Mr. Wordsworth’s philo- sophy, or a little of Shakespeare’s, would have taught the disputants either not to distinguish at all between these subjects, or to distinguish more clearly. There are a few words in the ‘Winter’s Tale’ which say more than any- thing said then :— ‘* Perdita. Sir, the year growing ancient, — Nor yet on summer’s death, nor on the birth Of trembling winter,—the fairest flowers 0’ the season Are our carnations, and streak’d gilliflowers Which some call Nature’s bastards: of that kind Our rustic garden’s barren ; and I care not To get slips of them. Polixenes. Wherefore, gentle maiden, Do you neglect them ? Lerdita. For I have heard it said, There is an art which in their piedness shares With great creating Nature. Polixenes. Say there be ; Yet Nature is made better by no mean, But Nature makes that mean : so, o’er that art, Which, you say, adds to Nature, is an art That Nature makes.”’—(Act iv., sc. 3.) MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 109 This is the philosophical view of the matter, and Mr. Wordsworth’s taste is as universal as philosophy itself; and his philosophy and his poetry are never found in collision with each other, but always in an easy alliance. It has sometimes been said that Mr. Wordsworth has written in disparagement of science. The charge has been brought, by two very different classes of persons,— by those who mistake certain scientific nomenclatures and classifications for sciences themselves, and, on the other hand, by those who have a genuine comprehension of science, but are led, from the want of other knowledge, faculties, or feelings, to think that the material sciences are the highest walks of human contemplation. Yet in reality neither the sciolist nor the adept has any reason to complain. For the former Mr. Wordsworth has not perhaps absolute respect, but certainly a genuine indul- gence—witness the sketches in the ‘ Excursion,’ of “the wandering herbalist,” and his fellow wanderer: — **He who with pocket-hammer smites the edge Of luckless rock or prominent stone, disguised In weather-stains or crusted o’er by Nature With her first growths—detaching by the stroke A chip or splinter to resolve his doubts. — ” He finds no fault with either of these gentlemen— “*Tntrusted safely each to his pursuit, Earnest alike, let both from hill to hill Range ; if it please them speed from clime to clime ; The mind is full—no pain is in their sport.” IIo MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. Thus gently does he, even when speaking by the mouth of the least gentle of his pdematis persone, deal with the dabblers in-science. Shakespeare also was a good-natured observer ; yet these men of nomenclatures did not escape so easily in his hands :— ‘¢ These earthly godfathers of heaven’s lights, That give a name to every fixed star, Have no more profit of their shining nights Than those that walk and wot not what they are.” * So much for the sciolist. And next for the complaint of the adept. It may be that Mr. Wordsworth does not pay knee-worship even to zs idol, or reverence as the highest knowledge that which, however consummate in its kind, is limited to the purely material sciences. But as in the sonnets heretofore quoted, so in his other writings, he invariably treats the material sciences with the respect which is due to their place amongst the powers and instrumentalities of nature. He would not deny that they are powers of stupendous importance in their results, but neither would he admit that they are on that account entitled, when standing alone, to confer the highest rank upon the intellects through which those results are brought about. He would not deny, certainly, that incalculable moral as well as material results are the offspring of the purely material sciences ; for as matter is always acting upon spirit with prodigious force throughout * © Love’s Labour’s Lost.’ MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 1IL the portion of the universe which is known to Man, so there can be no doubt that the material products of science operate incalculable changes in the moral con- dition of mankind. But neither would he admit that that which acts upon spirit through matter, however im- portant the agency may be in its consequences, can be regarded as an agency of an equally high order with that which acts upon spirit through spirit. » Thus, in the eighth book of the ‘Excursion,’ he rejoices and exults in the mastery exercised by science over the elements ; but rejoices in it hoping that the time will come when man, “strengthened yet not dazzled” by his scientific conquests— ‘¢ Shall learn, though late, that all true glory rests, All praise, all safety, and all happiness, Upon the moral law.” And he proceeds to show that even the sciences them- selves must have the same support, in order to ensure them against decay and oblivion :— “¢ Egyptian Thebes, Tyre, by the margin of the sounding waves, Palmyra, central in the desert, fell ; And the arts died by which they had been raised. Call Archimedes from his buried tomb Upon the plain of vanished Syracuse, And feelingly the sage shall make report How insecure, how baseless in itself, Is the philosophy whose sway depends On mere material instruments ; how weak Those arts and high inventions, if unpropped 112 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. By Virtue! He, sighing with pensive grief, Amid his calm abstractions, would admit That not the slender privilege is theirs To save themselves from blank forgetfulness !” If, therefore, we are to separate what we cannot wish to see separated—if we must separate knowledge and intel- lectual power into degrees and orders of precedency—let us concur with Mr, Wordsworth in giving the first place to the kind which lives in the hearts of men and fortifies the imaginative faith, which kindles the affections, ani- mates the belief in things unseen, and multiplies “The spiritual presences of absent things.” This kind of knowledge and power, depending immedi- ately upon the imagination, but not to be cast loose from scientific laws, may without wrong to any other, be placed in the first rank of human intelligences. In the Celestial Hierarchy, according to Dionysius Areopagita, the Angels of Love hold the first place, the Angels of Light the second, and Thrones and Dominations the third. Amongst Terrestrials, the intellects which act through — the imagination upon the heart of man, may be accounted the first in order, the merely scientific intellects the second, and the merely ruling intellects—those which apply themselves to the government of mankind without the aid of either science or imagination—will not be dis- paraged if they are placed last. But Mr. Wordsworth, no doubt, would be better pleased to contemplate the conjunction, than the sub- MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 113 ordinated separation of these powers, and he anticipates the time when science, allying itself with the imaginative faculty, and through this reaching and inspiring the heart, shall be exalted into philosophy :— ** Science then Shall be a precious visitant ; and then, And only then, be worthy of her name. For then her heart shall kindle ; her dull eye, Dull and inanimate, no more shall hang Chained to its object in brute slavery ; But taught with patient interest to watch The processes of things, and serve the cause Of order and distinctness, not for this Shall it forget that its most noble use, Its most illustrious province, must be found In furnishing clear guidance, a support Not treacherous, to the mind’s excursive power.” * Nor does Mr. Wordsworth regard the advances of science with any jealousy, as if it were possible that they could tend to limit the province of the imagination. That province he knows to be boundless; and though many of the secrets of Nature may be discovered, and the pride of Man may for the moment exult inordinately, forgetting what mysteries remain which Science can never penetrate and Faith can but see darkly, yet he is assured that Man is and always will be an imaginative being ; and that whatever he may search out and lay open, he must still come to the unseen and the inscrutable at last, * ‘Excursion,’ Book iv. 114 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. and be recalled to the awe and humility which befits his condition :— “* Desire we past illusions to recal ? To reinstate wild Fancy would we hide Truths whose thick veil Science has drawn aside ? No,—let this age, high as she may, instal In her esteem the thirst that wrought man’s fall, The universe is infinitely wide ; And conquering Reason, if self-glorified, Can nowhere move uncrossed by some new wall Or gulf of mystery, which thou alone, Imaginative Faith! canst overleap, In progress toward the fount of Love, —the throne Of Power, whose ministers the records keep Of periods fixed and laws established, less Flesh to exalt than prove its nothingness.” It was in no other spirit—it was in the profound humility of his own nature, and with a deep insight into man’s nature, that the great founder of modern material philosophy offered up his ‘ Student’s Prayer’— ‘“‘'This also we humbly and earnestly beg, that human things may not prejudice such as are divine, neither that from the unlocking of the gates of sense, and the kindling of a greater natural light, anything of incredulity or intel- lectual night may arise in our minds towards divine mysteries. But rather that, by our mind thoroughly cleansed and purged from fancy and vanities, and yet subject and perfectly given up to the divine oracles, there may be given unto Faith the things which are Faith’s.” Devoutly is it to be wished that, along with the ardour MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. II5 in material philosophy which has thrown so much light on the natural world in the generations succeeding Lord Bacon, there could have been communicated to all of his disciples, as it has been in degree to some, the greatness of that man’s religious heart. But let us proceed with the Itinerant. Manners are regarded by him, no less than arts and sciences, with an inquisitive eye, and pondered in a spirit of compre- hensive appreciation. He observes the decay of ancient manners and the progress of innovation, reaching even to the Scotch Highlands,—but he observes them with no predisposition to prefer what is old to what is modern on any other than just and reasonable grounds ; his desire is only to examine into the different effects of changes, to weigh losses against gains, and to “have a right judg- ment in all things.” When, indeed, he sees ‘the umbrella spread To weather-fend the Celtic herdsman’s head ’’— there arise in his mind some doubts and misgivings, and he pauses before he can regard the superior comforts of the Celtic herdsman with unmixed satisfaction. Still it is but a doubt and an inquiry, not a decision ; and he does not fail to intimate that there is another side to the question :— ‘¢ The pibroch’s note, discountenanced or mute ; The Roman kilt, degraded to a toy Of quaint apparel for a half-spoilt boy ; The target, mouldering like ungathered fruit 116 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. The smoking steam-boat eager in pursuit, As eagerly pursued ; the umbrella spread To weather-fend the Celtic herdsman’s head— All speak of manners withering to the root, And of old honours, too, and passions high : Then may we ask, though pleased that thought should range Among the conquests of civility, Survives imagination—to the change Superior? Help to virtue does she give? If not, O Mortals, better cease to live!” In the series of ecclesiastical sonnets Mr. Words- worth is found for the first time planning a work in which his inspiration and his themes were to be drawn more immediately from books than from Nature or from his own experience and observation. It is thus that he represents the recovery of the Church after the perse- cution under Diocletian :— ‘* As, when a storm hath ceased, the birds regain Their cheerfulness, and busily re-trim Their nests, or chant a gratulating hymn To the blue ether and bespangled plain ; Even so, in many a reconstructed fane, Have the survivors of this storm renewed Their holy rites with vocal gratitude : And solemn ceremonials they ordain To celebrate their great deliverance ; Most feelingly instructed ’mid their fear— That persecution, blind with rage extreme, May not the less, through Heaven’s mild countenance, Even in her own despite, both feed and cheer ; For all things are less dreadful than they seem.” The last line expresses one of those truths which MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 117 present themselves with peculiar force to an imaginative mind, owing to its individual experience. For to such a mind the absent and the distant appear with a vividness of colouring which realities when present will generally be found to fall short of; and when fear is the passion by which such a mind is seized, it will be apt to lose sight, in the liveliness of its prospective emotions, of the resources with which its imaginative and _ susceptible nature abounds, and which might enable it to deal victoriously with the actual presence of the thing feared, or even with the nearer approach of danger. For fear itself is not more the characteristic of a highly imaginative mind than faith; and the love which casteth out fear will grow in power, and all the antagonist emotions will be awakened, as the thing apprehended becomes less matter of imagination and more matter of distinct per- ception and knowledge. Poets, therefore, have perpetual occasion to remind themselves that ce all things are less dreadful than they seem,” — and thereby to apply the consolations of the imaginative reason as a corrective to the excesses of imaginative passion. ‘“ Present fears,” says Shakespeare, “ce are less than horrible imaginings.” * And Milton may have been thinking less of the Devil than of what he had himself experienced, when he gave * “Macbeth,’ Act i. Sc. iii. 118 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. expression, in the person of Satan, to a similar senti- ment --—— “* If there be worse, the expectation more Of worse torments me than the feeling can ; I would be at the worst ; worst is my port, My harbour and my ultimate repose, The end I would attain, my final good.” * Fear is, indeed, a far greater evil in the world than danger; as it is also to a far greater extent an evil of Man’s making. Mr. Wordsworth’s sonnets are a world-wide theme ; there is always something left to say: more than this, the charm of them is a lingering charm ; and in closing the volume it is with a sense that though all things have an end, the end in this case is one which it is not easy to realize— ‘¢ The Angel ended, and in Adam’s ear So charming left his voice, that he awhile Thought him still speaking, still stood fixed to hear.” It has been the chief object and endeavour of this essay, as already said, to justify the growing fame of Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry in the eyes of a few dis- sentients whose intellectual rank and position make it both natural and important that they should go along with the world when the world happens to go right. To such men the opinion of the world on poetical * * Paradise Regained,’ Book iii. line 209. 1 ae Bes MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. Ig matters is not of high authority; nor is it so, as may be imagined, to Mr. Wordsworth himself. But there is a distinction to be taken between the world’s opinion when it is obtained by captivation, and the same opinion when it has formed itself by slow and difficult progress and the gradual conquest of prejudice. Lord Bacon says the maxim of Phocion as to moral matters may be well transferred to intellectual—that if the multitude shall assent and applaud, a man should forthwith examine himself to find wherein he has erred ;* but this is to be understood of assent and applause by acclamation, not of the diligent and cultivated approval which creeps upon the popular mind, in the first instance from deference to the authority of competent judges, and afterwards from the genuine and heartfelt adoption of that judgment when the better part of the popular mind has been brought to the serious study of what is good. Upon that approval, coming sooner or later, but seldom very soon, the fame of Lord Bacon himself, and of Phocion, and of every other great man rests. In the case of some of the greatest English poets of former times, fame, in the loftiest sense at least of that word, was postponed till it was posthumous. In the case of Mr. Wordsworth it would have been so, had his life not been a longer one \ * ‘*Optime traducitur illud Phocionis 4 moribus ad _ intellec- tualia ; wt statim se examinare debeant homines, quid erraverint aut peccaverint, st multitudo consentiat et complaudat.”—‘ Novum Organum,’ 1. 77. 120 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. than theirs; for it is only within the last few years that the latent love of his poetry, which was cherished here and there in secret places amongst the wise and good, has caught and spread into a more general admiration. Had Mr. Wordsworth died, like Shakespeare, at fifty-three years of age, he would have died in confident antici- pation, no doubt, of a lasting fame, but without any witness of it in this world. Had he died, like Milton, at sixty-six years of age, he would have seen more than the beginnings of it certainly, but he would not have seen it in the stage which it has now reached. But if he were to live to the age of Methuselah, he would not see the time come when there were no able and learned men indisposed, or disqualified by some unlucky peculharity, for the appreciation of his poetry: for the human intel- lect, even when eminently gifted, seems in peculiar cases to be subject to some strange sort of cramp or stricture ; and whilst in the full vigour of its general powers, to be stricken with particular incapacities, which, to those who are not affected by them, are as incomprehensible as the incapacity (which sometimes occurs) of the visual sense to distinguish between red and green. ‘There have been men of acknowledged abilities to whom Milton was a dead letter,—or rather let us say, in the case of whom the living letter of Milton fell upon a dead mind; and one like instance there was in our time in which Dryden was preferred to Shakespeare. It is often in vain to minister to a mind in this state; but all such are not MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. 121 incurable, and what can be done ought to be done to reduce the number of cases. And there is one caution it may be well to convey to those who have yet to learn, and who are sincerely desirous to learn, to appreciate Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry ; namely, that it is to be read studiously. Mr. Wordsworth never intended so to write that those who ran might read. To detain for a brief moment these scampering readers is the proper aim of those who are snatching at a tran- sient popularity ; and this writing for a cursory perusal has been the bane of literature in our times and the ruin of art. But neither to this aim nor to this way of writing has Mr. Wordsworth ever lent himself. In his earlier efforts we find him wishing to write that which ** The high and tender Muses shall accept With gracious smile, deliberately pleased ;” and in his valedictory effusion at the end of this volume, in which he speaks of having drawn together and classi- fied the Sonnets, like flowerets— ‘* Fach kind in several beds of one parterre,”— he says he has thus disposed them in order that ** So placed his nurselings may requite Studious regard with opportune delight.” Those who read the Sonnets in this studious spirit will not often find that they are detained by the style longer than they would themselves wish to be for the sake of 122 MR. WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS. dwelling upon the thoughts. Occasional obscurity there may be; the sonnet is a form of poetry in which style is put under high pressure; Mr. Wordsworth is not of course an impeccable poet: but a poet who writes for posterity, though he will bestow infinite labour upon perspicuity, will not sacrifice to it the depth and com- prehensiveness which, whilst it is indispensable to the truthfulness of his conceptions, may be often irrecon- cilable with absolute distinctness of expression. Those writers who never go further into a subject than is com- patible with making what they say indisputably clear to man, woman, and child, may be the lights of this age, but they will not illuminate another. Boao yen Diy VERE S. PORNS. (First published in 1843, tncorporated with one first published in 1864.) ae ooo Ir was once observed in conversation by the eldest of our living poets * that there is in the poetry of the young a charm of youthfulness which, however far it may be from compensating for youth’s imperfections, is still not to be met with in the poetical products of the maturer mind. It may be added that there is also a knowledge to be derived from the poetry of a rising generation which other poetry cannot yield. We know from the general cast and character of it what spirit is abroad amongst our literary and meditative youth—amongst the many who, though not gifted with any poetical utterance of their own, are nevertheless one in spirit with those who are. And this is an important class to be ac- quainted with for those who would look a little before them and anticipate the flower and the fruit which this * Wordsworth, living in 1843, 124 DE VERE’S POEMS. bud of poetry may seem to promise—the influence over literature and society likely to be exercised by the spirit which dictates this poetry when it shall have passed on to maturity. Those who have thought it worth while to observe the nascent poetical spirit of the last few years will have perceived that it is very different from that which ruled the poetical youth of twenty years ago. At that period there was not only a want of moral and spiritual truth in our juvenile poetry, but also an absence of moral and spiritual doctrine, whether true or false. There seemed to be no consciousness on the part of the aspirant that either his reader or himself was to have any share in the higher interests or the deeper nature of man. Super- ficial beauty and sentimental passion filled up the circle of his aims: the Thalassian Venus did not, according to the apologue, bring him to the Uranian ; and invoking the former deity only, she heard him according to her kind; she “ gave him his desire and sent a leanness into his soul withal.” These effeminacies, if not altogether extinct, have at all events ceased to be the prevailing characteristic. ‘The sorry sensibilities of twenty years ago have given place to higher moods and worthier endeavours— ‘* For now ’tis stale to sigh, to weep and groan, So woe hath wearied woe, moan tired moan.” * Middle age has overtaken the aspirants who had nothing * Shakespeare’s ‘ Sonnets.’ DE VERE’S POEMS. 125 to show us but the complexion of youth; and from the juvenile poets who are succeeding to them, perhaps the last thing that we should look for is the merely erotic effusion, the love-elegy, or *¢___. serenate which the starved lover sings To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain.” * A love of the unearthly is what takes its place in Mr. de Vere’s earliest poetry, and especially in “The Fall of Rora,” of which, though the volume in which it was published has been suppressed, some portions are republished now :— ‘*There was silence in the heavens When the Son of Man was led From the Garden to the Judgment ; Sudden silence, strange and dread! All along the empyreal coasts On their knees the immortal hosts Watched with sad and wondering eyes That tremendous sacrifice. ‘‘ There was silence in the heavens When the priest his garment tore : Silence when that twain accursed Their false witness faintly bore. Silence (though a tremor crept O’er their ranks) the Angels kept While that judge, dismayed though proud, Washed his hands before the crowd.” These are the first two stanzas of an ode which takes itself off the earth altogether; but other poems * Milton, 126 DE VERE’S POEMS. of this earlier date remind us of those old works ~ of the sister art, which are divided into two com- partments—one terrestrial, the other celestial—the one representing the solid earth and certain of her sons and daughters with faces upturned—the other representing the firmament with groups of glorified spirits which wing the air or tread the clouds. Neither in Mr. de Vere’s poems, nor in those of any other poet, nor in the paint- ings, is it possible to be entirely satisfied with the upper or celestial compartments. Milton may be called up to confront this contention; but even he, though rising with a glory round his head, will be incompetent to con- fute it. His great work is a continued struggle with insuperable difficulties, and the victory gained is a victory, not over the difficulties, but independently of them—a victory in which the faults of the design stand out un- subdued in the execution; and the triumphs achieved are those of unrivalled powers of intellect, diction, and rhythm, affording a thousand compensations for the faults, but not in any degree abating, not even disguising them. Admire and applaud as we may, we cannot but be painfully sensible, as often as the supernatural agencies occur, that the artist has set out in a fallacious plane and elevation from the first; and that in mounting the flying steed and presuming into the Heaven of Heavens, he has unduly slighted the warning to which he himself alludes, and has in sad: truth “fallen on the Aleian field, erroneous there to wander.” And the more relief and DE VERE’S POEMS. 124 delight we find in the parts of the poem which are bound “within the visible diurnal sphere,” and the more we find of surpassing excellence in the discursive and collateral passages, the more we lament the error of the poet in adopting a scheme so utterly impracticable,—exalting our imagination at the outset only to abase it as we proceed —a scheme of such celestial dignity in its aim and scope that every detail is in derogation of it and every realli- zation felt to be false to the ideal. The example of the ‘Paradise Lost,’ is no evidence therefore of the claim of supernatural machinery to be admitted as a principal constituent into the highest works of art; and it may be said of its author, as Lord Bacon has said of the alchemist,* that he has endowed mankind with great treasures of invention, disclosed incidentally and odcter, whilst prosecuting a project which it was not in human art to accomplish. But if it be asked whether to refuse to art in its highest efforts every glimpse of an excursion, however rapid and transitory, beyond the borders of nature, the answer is that there is a region beyond those borders, seen as through a glass darkly, into which art in its highest moods may well be allowed to deviate, provided there be no notion indulged of dwelling in it, describing it, and making it cognizable by the senses. There are supernatural agencies of a spiritual kind, which, in the way of occasional visitations, the highest art may well be * “Novum Organum,’ 1. 85. 128 DE VERE’S POEMS. allowed to invoke—especially those agencies which, though carried farther than nature carries them, are still in the direction of the course of nature—the gift of prophecy, for instance, carried somewhat farther than “old experience” might of itself attain to—or a super- natural significancy in natural phenomena, as dreams and coincidences. And admitting these, if it be asked which specifically are not to be admitted, answer may be made they are such as present to us embodied functions out of nature and contrary to nature, and such as do not strike the mind as possible detections of the secrets of nature, but as mere inventions and additions ; and in so far as poet or painter introduces physical forms or agencies which in structure, kind, dimension, or combination, are alien from humanity, he should be regarded as no longer with- in the province of the highest imaginative art. The wings of angels—what are they but labels to denote that the human shape to which they are appended is to be deemed and taken to be superhuman? And as to the physical attribute which they indicate, the conception of aman that flies like a bird cannot be supposed to be a high effort of imagination. And in short, throughout every walk of art, when the attempt is made to elevate humanity above itself by means of physical adjuncts not belonging to it, the faculty employed falls short in some degree of that spiritual power of the imagination by which a true revelation is made to us of what is most sublime in the nature and destinies of man. DE VERE’S POEMS. 129 Henricus Morus (in one of the two enormous folios * in which he conceived that he had ensured himself a never-dying remembrance), undertakes to give an exact account of the kind of feathers with which the wings of angels were provided, and he quarrels with Vaninus for being “tam obscene rationis” as to differ from him ; and if any such inculcation were wanting, we might hold our- selves indebted to his prosaic mind for thus bringing home to us what is really unpoetical in the endeavour to realize conceptions of celestial life by means of a detailed analogy with terrestial. Of another order are the poems which confess the faith that is in them without striving after fanciful imper- sonations. The few following lines, though all that is in them will not perhaps be seen at a first reading or ata second, are full of meaning, and they close with a salutary admonition admirably expressed :— ‘Mere inward feelings, self-supplanted, perish ; Things outward, void of spirit, ne’er had life : Then, either class who prizes, both must cherish, And learn to harmonize their natural strife. Christ, that in Heaven our visible nature wears, Permits the union, consecrates it, shares : And man with his own heart must be at one Who lives with God in genuine unison. The electric flame, by which, through air dispersed, All life of herb or animal is nursed, Consumes us, when compacted and intense. Spirit we are: yet spirit bound in Sense: * ‘Enchiridion Metaphysicum.’ 130 DE VERE’S POEMS. In Sense fast bound, though working daily through, Till Sense grows Spirit to the Spirit’s eye. But Faith drops low, when Fancy soars too high : We cannot clasp a rosary of dew.” This, it may be said, is alarming. We open a volume of poetry, and are we to puzzle over a lecture in divinity condensed in a poetical knot, which it would take us half an hour to untie? The answer is,—not unless you like it: and if you like it not, then pass on to a poem the merit of which is to be found in the ease, the lightness, the clear and graceful fluency, with which a story of medizeval life is made to bring before us the antique simplicity of the olden time. ‘The Infant Bridal’ is a story of medizeval childhood, fresh and pure in all its features, that carries with it the savour of the ‘sweet hour of prime,” and ‘‘like a garment, wears The beauty of the morning.” ‘ Two neighbouring countries had been engaged in hereditary wars from age to age, till at length their respective Sovereigns fell in single combat, each by the hand of the other, leaving—the one an only son, the other an only daughter, both infants. The hostile pas- sions of the two nations being sobered by the catastrophe of the duel which was to have decided their quarrel, it was agreed that the foundations of peace and amity should be laid in a marriage between the two infants— not a very unusual species of arrangement in the Middle DE VERE’S POEMS. 131 Ages.* After some account of what had seemed an interminable warfare, the nuptials are thus solemnized— ** While the young bride in triumph home was led, They strewed beneath her litter branches green ; And kissed light flowers, then rained them on a head Unconscious as the flowers what all might mean. Men, as she passed them, knelt ; and women raised Their children in their arms, who laughed and gazed. ** That pomp approaching woodland villages, Or shadowing convents piled near rivers dim, The church-bells from grey towers girt round with trees Reiterated their loud wordless hymn ; And golden cross and snowy choir serene Moved on, old trunks and older towers between. * * * * * * ** The shrine is gained. Two mighty. gates expanding Let forth a breeze of music onward gushing, In pathos lulled, yet awful and commanding : Down sink the crowds, at once their murmur hushing, Filled with one soul: the smooth procession slowly Advances with joined palms, cross-led and lowly. “* Lo ! where they stand, in yon high, fan-roofed chamber, Martyrs and saints in dyed and mystic glass With sumptuous haloes, vermeil, green and amber, Flood the far aisles, and all that by them pass : Rich like their painter’s visions——in those gleams Blazoning the burden of his Patmian dreams. * Vide Froissart’s account of the marriage of John, Earl of Cambridge, and Beatrice, daughter of the King of Portugal: ‘‘ At the weddynge of these two chyldrene there was made great feaste amonge the lordes and prelates of the realme ; and as younge as they were they were layde toguyder in one bedde.”—Vol. i. p. 389, Lord Berners’ Translation. 132 DE VERE’S POEMS. *¢ The ladies held aloft the bridal pair : They on each other smiled, and gazed around With unabashed delight and generous air, Their infant brows with golden circlet bound. The prelates blessed them, and the nobles swore True faith and fealty by the sword they bore. ‘* Home to the palace, still in order keeping, That train returned ; and in the stateliest room Laid down their lovely burden, all but sleeping, Together in one cradle’s curtained gloom ; And lulled them with low melody and song, While jest past lightly ’mid the courtly throng.” If the spirit of Spenser were to revisit the earth in order to see what had been done in his own way since he left it, he would find nothing that would give him more pleasure than this. Nor is the childhood that follows this infancy less delightfully depicted— ‘¢ Ah, lovely sight ! behold them—creatures twain Hand-in-hand wandering through some verdant alley Or sunny lawn of their serene domain, Their wind-caught laughter echoing musically ; Or skimming in pursuit of bird-cast shadows With feet immaculate the enamelled meadows. ‘* Tiptoe now stand they by some towering lily And fain would peer into its snowy cave: Now the boy bending o’er some current chilly, The feebler backward draws him from the wave ; But he persists, and gains for her at last Some bright flower from the dull weeds hurrying past. “* Oft, if some aged priest the cloister crossed, Both hands they caught, and bade him explicate (That nought of good through idlesse might be lost) At large all duties of the nuptial state ; DE VERE’S POEMS. 133 And oft each other kissed with infant glee, As though this were some great solemnity. ** In some old missal sometimes would they look, Touching with awe the illuminated page ; And scarce for tears the spectacle might brook Of babes destroyed by Herod’s murderous rage. Here sank a martyr in ensanguined vest : With more familiar smile there beamed the Virgin blest.” The children grew up good,—that is, not naughtier than children must be and ought to be: they quarrelled but seldom; and they were the better no doubt for the following grave and politic admonition addressed to them by “an ancient dame,” their nurse— “* The turtle, widowed of her mate, no more Lifts her lone head, but pines, and pining dies ; In many a tomb ’mid yon Cathedral hoar Monarch or Knight beside his lady lies : Such tenderness and truth they showed, that fate No power was given their dust to separate. ** Rachael not less, and Ruth, whereof men read In book ordained our life below to guide, Loved her own husband each, in word and deed, Loved him full well, nor any loved beside : And Orpheus too, and Pyramus men say, Though Paynim born, lived true, and so shall live for aye. ** What makes us, children, to good Angels dear? Unblemished Truth and hearts in sweet accord : These also draw the people to revere With stronger faith their King and Sovereign Lord : Then perfect make your love and amity Alway : but most of all if men are by.” 134 DE VERE’S POEMS. At twelve years of age the boy follows the standard of the Cross to Palestine ; and, after some years spent in the wars, to his great honour and glory, he returns to the home and wife of his childhood— ‘* Strange joy they found all day in wandering over The spots in which their childish sports had been, Husband and wife whilome, now loved and lover. A broken light brightened yet more the scene : Night came: a gay yet startled bride he led, Old rites scarce trusting, to the bridal bed. ‘‘ No more remains of all this grand old story. They loved with love eternal : spent their days In peace, in good to man, in genuine glory. No spoils unjust they sought, or unjust praise. Their children loved them, and their people blest— God grant us all such lives—in Heaven for aye such rest ! ‘** But ye profane and unbelieving crowd Who dare to mock our childish bridal, cease ! Make answer first, and answer make aloud, Unblest was that which gave two kingdoms peace? Much less, much less the high-souled Muse approves Grey hairs in rage and hate than infant loves!” There is nothing for which Mr. de Vere’s poetry is more remarkable than its variety—variety of theme, variety of mood, variety in the faculties exercised, in the regions it frequents or visits. No account can be given of it otherwise than by extracts, and of course these can give an account only of isolated effects. In not a few of his poems there is a jocund and jubilant DE VERE’S POEMS. 135 spirit. We come upon others, and then we know and feel that his Muse is at home in the house of mourning— ** Count each affliction, whether light or grave, God’s messenger sent down to thee. Do thou With courtesy receive him: rise and bow, And ere his shadow pass thy threshold, crave Permission first his heavenly feet to lave. Then lay before him all thou hast. Allow No cloud of passion to usurp thy brow, Or mar thy hospitality ; no wave Of mortal tumult to obliterate The soul’s marmoreal calmness. Grief should be, Like joy, majestic, equable, sedate : Confirming, cleansing, raising, making free ; Strong to consume small troubles ; to commend Great thoughts, grave thoughts, thoughts lasting to the end.” If in this and in many other poems he recognizes the elevating and tranquillizing power of pain, in none of those which are in the opposite mood, does the spirit of enjoyment savour of any such sentiments as would lead us to fear pain or to fly from it; rather would they teach as to rely upon its power of stirring the deeper affections, and through love passing into a purer joy and a profounder peace; not visiting the heart as a tormentor, but rather on the same mission as that of the Angel who descended from time to time to trouble the waters of the pool of Bethesda. If a personal affliction is to be thus regarded, how is it with a national affliction? It is rarely that poems struck out by public and passing events have been very impressive ; whether it be that the poetical imagination 136 . DE VERE’S POEMS. tends to reject the real and the present for its theme, or that the mind of the reader, pre-occupied by fact, does not lend itself easily to impressions from poetry. It is possible, however, that poems of the occasional kind may be eminently poetical. Miulton’s on the Piedmontese Massacre Is one instance ; Southey’s on the Funeral of the Princess Charlotte, and on the Negociations for Peace with Buonaparte in 1814, and Mr. Tennyson’s on the Funeral of the Duke of Wellington, are others; and there are several scattered through the works of Wordsworth. Mr. de Vere, in a series of four poems, under the title of ‘The Year of Sorrow,’ has treated of the spring, summer, autumn, and winter of the year of the great famine in Ireland. Of these four the last is this— ‘““THE YEAR OF SORROW. WINTER. ‘Fall, snow, and cease not! Flake by flake The decent winding-sheet compose ; Thy task is just and pious; make An end of blasphemies and woes. ‘* Fall flake by flake ! by thee alone, Last friend, the sleeping draught is given ; Kind nurse, by thee the couch is strown— The couch whose covering is from heaven. ** Descend and clasp the mountain’s crest ; Inherit plain and valley deep : This night, in thy maternal breast, A vanquished nation dies in sleep. DE VERE’S POEMS. 137 ‘*Lo! from the starry Temple gates Death rides, and bears the flag of peace ; The combatants he separates : He bids the wrath of ages cease. ** Descend, benignant Power! But O, Ye torrents, shake no more the vale ; Dark streams, in silence seaward flow ; Thou rising storm, remit thy wail. *¢ Shake not, to-night, the cliffs of Moher, Nor Brandon’s base, rough sea! Thou Isle, The rite proceeds! From shore to shore, Hold in thy gathered breath the while. “** Fall, snow! in stillness fall, like dew, On temple’s roof and cedar’s fan ; And mould thyself on pine and yew, And on the awful face of man. ** Without a sound, without a stir, In streets and wolds, on rock and mound, O omnipresent Comforter, By thee, this night, the lost are found ! **On quaking moor, and mountain moss, With eyes upstaring at the sky, And arms extended like a cross, The long-expectant sufferers lie. ‘* Bend o’er them, white-robed Acolyte ! Put forth thine hand from cloud and mist, And minister the last sad rite Where altar there is none, nor priest. ‘* Touch thou the gates of soul and sense ; Touch darkening eyes and dying ears ; Touch stiffening hands and feet, and thence Remove the trace of sin and tears : 138 DE VERE’S POEMS. ‘¢ And ere thou seal those filmed eyes, Into God’s urn thy fingers dip, And lay, ’mid eucharistic sighs, The sacred wafer on the lip. ‘¢ This night the absolver issues forth : This night the Eternal Victim bleeds : O winds and woods—O heaven and earth, Be still this night. The rite proceeds !” The subject of this poem and of its companions in the ‘Year of Sorrow,’ is not only of that public, real, and recent nature which is so seldom impressively dealt with in verse, but it is likewise so large and general in its scope as to be not easily tractable, unless to an imaginative faculty of a peculiar kind. But though it is more easy to represent in a manner to affect the feelings, a fabulous than a real catastrophe, and a catastrophe to an individual than one which has fallen upon a nation, yet when the way zs found to bear in upon the mind the wider and the matter-of-fact tragedy, the tragic effect is rather deepened than flattened by vastness and reality in the theme. The sonnet quoted above is one of many. It is difficult to say in what way, except by accident, this form came to be regarded as especially fitted for amatory admiration or complaint. Wordsworth has told us that— ** The gods approve The depth and not the tumult of the soul, A fervent, not ungovernable love.” If so, the love which the gods approve may,-no doubt, DE VERE’S POEMS. 139 be adequately expressed in a sonnet. But to the im- petuosities of passion it is not fitted to give utterance ; and it is singular that the first of the great masters who adopted the form in Italy has no sooner given birth to an amatory sonnet than he proceeds to analyse and expound his own effusion (God ‘forgive him!) with the soul of a critic and commentator: “ Questo sonetto ha due parte principali, che nella prima intendo chiamare i fedeli d’amore per quelle parole di Geremia profeta,— oh vos omnes, qui transitis per viam, attendite et videte, si est dolor sicut dolor meus,” &c. And so throughout the Vita Nuova every sonnet is followed by its argument and exposition. Nor did the great sonneteer who followed next break the bounds of his form so as to give utterance to any abandoned or tumultuous cries. There is indeed a deep and exquisite tenderness in Petrarch, but his sadness is luxurious, not tempestuous. Spencer, ** Disguising diversely his troubled wits,” * found expression in the sonnet for such amatory emotions as were natural to him ; but it was a gentle perturbation. The spirit and passion of Shakespeare no form could always and absolutely confine ; but in his sonnets it is often in a single line or little more that the passion is thrown out, the rest being but the tail of the comet— ** Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing.” — There is the sonnet! Itis by that line that we remember * Fifty-fourth Sonnet. 140 DE VERE’S POEMS. it, and the other thirteen we scarcely care to recall. As to Milton, when he was writing in Italian, or on an Italian model, he borrowed the theme as weil as the form ; but writing out of his own mind and mood, it would have been no more in his way to sigh forth an amatory sonnet than to deliver himself of a madrigal or an acrostic. And it was he perhaps chiefly who brought about the conversion of the sonnet to other than amatory purposes. . Wordsworth, who had to guard against a tendency to be redundant and discursive, found the form convenient, and gathered his thoughts into sonnets, as a reaper gathers the corn into sheaves: and though his nature was vehement, it was a governed ardour only that was permitted to appear in his verse ; and when he sang of love, it was “‘such love as spirits feel,’— too impersonal to be impassioned.* Of the few of Mr. de Vere’s sonnets which are amatory, it may be:said that if there is felt to be a passion in them it is rather because the passion is felt to be suppressed than because it is felt to be declared ; and the force they certainly possess is due perhaps to a certain realizing plainness in the enunciation of the relations of feeling which are the subject. A sonnet entitled ‘ Incompatibility’ is an instance— ‘* Forgive me that I love you as I do, Friend patient long ; too patient to reprove * I ventured once to ask him whether it was not otherwise in the case of the sonnet beginning, ‘‘ Why art thou silent?” ‘‘No,” | he said, ‘‘merely an act of the intellect.” DE VERE’S POEMS, 141 The inconvenience of superfluous love. You feel that it molests you, and ’tis true. In a light bark you sit, with a full crew. Your life full-orbed, compelled strange love to meet, Becomes, by such addition, incomplete :— ' Because I love I leave you. O adieu ! Perhaps when I am gone the thought of me May sometimes be your acceptable guest. Indeed you love me: but my company Old time makes tedious ; and to part is best. Not without Nature’s will are natures wed :— O gentle Death, how dear thou mak’st the dead !”’ As it is in the first line of that sonnet of Shakespeare’s which has been quoted, so is it in the last line of this, that the depth of the feeling is divulged. The rest is accessory. And when we read the opening lines of another sonnet,— ‘*¢ The spring of my sweet life thou madest thine, And on my summer glories thou hast fed,”— again, as in Shakespeare’s, we seem to hear in one bar the motive of the strain, and to feel it so fully that we hardly want what follows; we could do it for ourselves. In another there is a moral strength, bordering on a moral sternness, which almost takes it out of the category of amorous effusions :— ‘“TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. ** Had I been worthy of the love you gave That love withdrawn had left me sad but strong ; My heart had been as silent as my tongue, My bed had been unfevered as my grave ; 142 DE VERE’S POEMS, I had not striven for what I could not save ; Back, back to heaven my great hopes I had flung ; To have much suffered, having done no wrong, Had seemed to me that noble part the brave Account it ever. What this hour I am Affirms the unworthiness that in me lurked : Some sapping poison through my substance worked, Some sin not trivial, though it lacked a name, Which ratifies the deed that you have done With plain approval. Other plea seek none. The sonnet entitled ‘Poland’ would seem to have been written in or before 1848, and may be read by the light of 1863 and 1864. ‘Lo, as a prophet, old, and fierce, and gaunt, Spurning the plains, when some detested foe His country and his country’s hearths lays low, Makes in the mountain walls his caverned haunt : There lurks ; thence leans ; half blind, yet vigilant; Watches red morning tinge the ensanguined snow ; And bends his ear, and says, ‘ Thy foot is slow, Deliver ! see thy vengeance be not scant ’— Not otherwise a trampled Nation waits, Regioned in fell resolve : her heart thus feeds On iron: muses thus on coming fates ; Revels in rapture of predestined deeds : And finds at last the hour, and finds the way :— Let sceptre-wielding Rebels fear that day !” The ‘‘red morning” has dawned once again, and again the snow is ensanguined, and the prophetic soul of Poland, instead of “dreaming on things to come” or “revelling in the rapture of predestined deeds,” is once more in action and in agony,—only, if appearances may be trusted, to be again hunted back to its “caverned © DE VERE’S POEMS. 143 haunt,” there to dream in a still fiercer spirit than before, with more dreadful wrongs to revenge, over which it will not cease to brood, and with deeds as dreadful of its own to look back upon, for which it will feel no penitence, because the spirit of revenge and the spirit of repentance cannot dwell together. And these dark nights of dream- ing and these red mornings must be expected to alternate, until to the prophetic soul of that people shall be united a substantial body more in harmony with its impulses and better fitted to be its organ. If the body of the Polish people had been of the English or Scotch or Dutch or Tyrolese, and not of the Irish or Oriental type, it would not have been hitherto tyrannically governed by Russia, nor would there be a possibility that, revolting from that tyranny, it should again undergo the somewhat grievous oppression from which it suffered under the Nobles and the cultivated, patriotic, and ambitious classes of its own race. The sonnet represents the nation as the prophet. The question is, Where in the body of the nation is the seat of the prophetic soul? When it shall pervade the body, then, or soon after, will its prophecies be self- fulfilled. A sonnet entitled ‘Conversion’ would seem to have been occasioned by the conversion of an infidel or sceptic to Christianity, but not to that form of Christian faith which the poet would have preferred. ** Loud as that trumpet doomed to raise the dead God’s voice doth sometimes fall on us in fear : ° 144 DE VERE’S POEMS. More often with a music low yet clear, Soft whispering, ‘It is 1; be not afraid.’ And sometimes mingling strangely joy with dread, It thrills the spirit’s caverned sepulchre, Deep as the voice which on the awe-struck ear Of him, the three-days-buried, murmuring said, ‘Come forth,’—and he arose. O Christians, hail As brethren all on whom our glorious Sun At morn, at noon, or latest eve, hath shone With light and life; and neither mourn nor rail Because one light, itself unchanging, showers A thousand colours on a thousand flowers.” The last lines may be taken as a poetical expression of that tolerant but pious philosophy by which Lord Bacon was guided when he was led to regard differences of opinion in religion as indicating reality of belief, and identity of professed opinion as indicating no opinion at all. ‘Reason teacheth us that in ignorance and implied belief it is easy to agree, as colours agree in the dark ; or if any country decline into Atheism, then contro- versies wax dainty, because men do think religion scarce worth the falling out for. So as ct ts weak divinity to account controversies an wl sign in the church.”* One sonnet more— “TO AN INFANT. ‘¢ Familiar Spirit, that so graciously Dost take whatever fortune may befall, * ‘Certain observations made upon a libel published this present year, 1552.’—Spedding’s ‘ Letters and Life of Lord Bacon,’ vol. i. p. 165. DE VERE’S POEMS. 145 Trusting thy fragile form to the arms of all, And never counting it indignity To be caressed upon the humblest knee ; Thou, having yet no words, aloud dost call Upon our hearts ; the fever and the gall Of our dark bosoms are reproved in thee. From selfish fears and lawless wishes free, Thou hast no painful feeling of thy weakness ; From shafts malign and pride’s base agony Protected by the pillows of thy meekness : Thou hast thy little loves which do not grieve thee Unquiet make thee, or unhappy leave thee.” Mr. de Vere’s songs, though not so numerous as his sonnets, are not a few; and perhaps no poet has written many songs of which some were not all that a song should be; for there is more of haphazard and the felicity of the moment in the case of a song than in that of any other form of verse; and a man cannot make so sure of what is ejaculated as of what is concocted,—of his song as of his sonnet. When the Oriental critic, disparaging a certain other poet in comparison with Hafiz, says that “like him he flung the jereed carelessly, but not like him to the mark,” the rejoinder might have been that there is no such thing as careless hitting of the mark, except by rare and happy accident. It is perhaps to such accidents that many songs owe their charm; and to accidents which are not happy that ‘so many more owe their infelicity ; and at all events there is no space in the compass of a song for compensating failure at one point by success at another, and the song must be either a total and undivided success or not successful at all. More- V. L 146 DE VERE’S POEMS. over, there is the difficulty of being brief, presented in its most inevitable form. Sterne says, ‘“ Let no man say to himself—come, I will write a duodecimo ;” and still less should a man resolve to write a song, unless the song have presented itself to him under a sufficient assurance that it will come to an end with the first impulse. Mr. de Vere’s best songs are not of the light and bounding movement which was so popular thirty or forty years ago—a movement so sensuous and saltatory as to push aside the finer spirits of song. Something more gentle and sedate will now be appreciated— ** When I was young, I said to Sorrow, ‘Come, and I will play with thee.’ He is near me now all day, And at night returns to say, ‘I will come again to-morrow, I will come and stay with thee.’ ** Through the woods we walk together ; Soft his steps that rustle nigh me ; To shield an unregarded head He hath built a winter shed ; And all night in winter’s weather, I hear his gentle breathings by me.” The vein here is less that of the present century than of two or three hundred years ago—of Herbert or Hervie or Crashaw ; and its panegyric might be written in the words of the last— ‘* Not in the evening’s eyes When they red with weeping are For the Sun that dies, Sits sorrow with a face as fair ; DE VERE’S POEMS. 147 Nowhere but here did ever meet Sweetness so sad, sadness so sweet.” * Nor is it other than a merit in a song to be more lke the songs of the past than those of the present time. The half-proverbial expression by which “an old song” is made to represent something of singularly small value, has come down to us from at least as early a time as the reign of Henry VIIL., for it is used by Sir Thomas More ; but it seems rather out of date now: for what- ever those may have been which have passed out of memory, the old songs that are still with us have a value set upon them which is scarcely accorded to any that are new. “This thing or that,” Mr. Landor observes, “ is often said not to be worth an old song. Alas! how few things are!” In the song that follows, there is a touch, though little more than a touch, of the modern muse :— ** My hope, in happier days than these ; My Love (hope past)— Memory’s one star on lonely seas : My anchor, last ! Why askest thou, with soft surprise, And that mild glee, Wherefore I turn, still turn mine eyes From all, to thee? ‘* The blind man turns—and none forbids— Into sunshine Iiis filmy, cold, unlighted lids : The deaf incline * Crashaw’s ‘ Steps to the Temple.’ 148 DE VERE’S POEMS. Toward harps whence sounds, to them not borne, Flow, light and free ; To graves long cherished hearts forlorn ; And I to thee.” The mirth and merriment which used to dance attend- ance upon the Spirit of Song have now dropped off, and Sadness is its ministering Angel. Drinking songs have had their day and we are no longer admonished that— “* He that goes to bed, Goes to bed sober, Falls as the leaves do, Falls as the leaves do, Falls as the leaves do, And dies in October ; ” or instructed that— ‘* He that goes to bed, Goes to bed mellow, Lives as he ought to do, Lives as he ought to do, Lives as he ought to do, And dies an honest fellow.” Such songs are no longer written now, any more than the satires, their cotemporaries, which took no note of them or of the vice they applauded, and which perhaps, if they had, would have done nothing in the way of correction. Satires have indeed been more frequently an offence in themselves than effective in the chastisement of offences. As Swift observes, “There is no other so insensible a member as the World’s posteriors ;” and it is not much to be regretted that in this century the lash of DE VERE’S POEMS. 149 the Satirist has been laid aside.* There is more reason to regret that the Spirit of Song has gone into mourning ; or appears but seldom in any other garb. Welcome, therefore, are some of Mr. de Vere’s songs; which, in no mood of boisterous mirth, but with a pleasant sportive- ness, remind us that light hearts can be playmates of the Muse. ** Give me back my heart, fair child ; To you as yet t’were worth but little. Half beguiler, half beguiled, Be you warned ; your own is brittle ; I know it by your redd’ning cheeks, I know it by those two black streaks Arching up your pearly brows In a momentary laughter, Stretched in long and dark repose With a sigh the moment after. ‘« ¢ Hid it! dropt it on the moors ! Lost it, and you cannot find it ’— My own heart I want, not yours ; You have bound and must unbind it. * Some years ago, a volume of strange, incoherent, not altogether unpoetical, but often unintelligible verses, was printed, and a notice advertising it was placarded along the roads through which the body of a young female performer in horsemanship passed to its grave. A copy of it was put into my hands, and opposite the title- page was this quatrain— ** Leaves faded and sombre and ruddy, Dead fruits of the fugitive years, Some stained as with wine and made bloody, And some as with tears.” Who was the author of the lines I have not been told, but no one acquainted with our recent poetry can doubt. They are worth fifty satires, 150 DE VERE’S POEMS. Set it free then from your net ; We will love, Sweet—but not yet ; Fling it from you ; we are strong ; Love is trouble, love is folly ; Love, that makes an old heart young, Makes a young heart melancholy.” Something between these pleasantries of some songs, and the deeper and melancholy mood of others, is the invocation which follows,—neither gay nor mournful, and rather tender than passionate :— ‘* Softly, O midnight hours, Move softly o’er the bowers Where lies in happy sleep a girl so fair ; For ye have power, men say, Our hearts in sleep to sway, And cage cold fancies in a moonlight snare : Round ivory neck and arm Enclasp a separate charm ; Hang o’er her poised ; but breathe nor sigh nor prayer ; Silently ye may smile, But hold your breath the while, And let the wind sweep back your cloudy hair, ** Bend down your glittering urns, (Ere yet the dawn returns) And star with dew the lawn her feet shall tread ; Upon the air rain balm ; Bid all the woods be calm ; Ambrosial dreams with healthful slumbers wed ; That so the Maiden may With smiles your care repay When from her couch she lifts her golden head ; Waking with earliest birds, Ere yet the misty herds Leave warm ’mid the grey grass their dusky bed.” DE VERE’S POEMS. I51 The last line brings with it an indication that some- thing should be said of Mr. de Vere’s powers in the picturesque. And it is singular that the most eminent manifestation of those powers is to be seen in two of his odes, the ‘Ode on the Ascent of the Alps,’ and the ‘Ode to the Daffodil.’* It might be thought that the lyrical form was not the best fitted for description; but these odes are strong to persuade an opposite belief; or, at least, the belief that the fitness or unfitness depends less on the form than on the hands by which it is handled; and that, if the feeling for nature be genuine, it may very well and very buoyantly sustain the de- scriptive presentation along with the lyrical impulse. The appearances described should, however, be distinct, so as to be rapidly passed in review without confusion ; and if minute, the minutiz should be bright and charac- teristic. Mr. Wordsworth is, without doubt, the highest authority on descriptive poetry ; and his authority may be quoted for the preference to be given in description for what is remembered over what is actually before the eyes. He objected + to some of Sir Walter Scott’s descriptions, derived from notes taken on the spot, inas- much as a close copy from nature must include some disfigurements, whereas the memory will leave behind what is insignificant, unworthy, and inharmonious, pre- * Now, in 1878, the ‘Autumnal Ode’ is to be added ;—with which few indeed in the language can take rank. + In conversation. 152 DE VERE’S POEMS. senting only what is congruous and impressive. If this be true doctrine in respect of picturesque poetry in general, it is especially applicable to picturesque lyrics ; in which the flow of feeling, though it may have its checks and changes and be not unbroken, should suffer no interrup- tion from entanglement in any but vivid and charac- teristic details. The vernal feeling is that which inspires the ‘ Ode to the Daffodil.’ It is in this country a mixed and composite feeling, as we all know; for if here, as elsewhere, we feel spring to be the season of hope, we do not forget how often it is the season of hope deferred; and if we rejoice in the gleams from earth and sky, and win some solace or sanguine anticipation from the young adventurers of the time—the anemones or the ** Daffodils That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty—”’ yet we know that all the beauty of the daffodils cannot so soften the winds of March, but that they will search out our little infirmities and make us wish that the unfriendly month were well over. It is this mixed and tempered feeling which we find in the ‘Ode to a Daffodil’ :— ** O love-star of the unbeloved March, When, cold and shrill, Forth flows beneath a low, dim-lighted arch The wind that beats sharp crag and barren hill, And keeps unfilmed the lately torpid rill ! * * * * * DE VERE’S POEMS. 153 ‘* Herald and harbinger ! with thee Begins the year’s great jubilee ! Of her solemnities sublime (A sacristan whose gusty taper Flashes through earliest morning vapour), Thou ring’st dark nocturns and dim prime. Birds that have yet no heart for song Gain strength with thee to twitter ; And, warm at last, where hollies throng, The mirrored sunbeams glitter. With silk the osier plumes her tendrils thin : Sweet blasts, though keen as sweet, the blue lake wrinkle ; And buds on leafless boughs begin Against grey skies to twinkle. * * * * * ‘© To thee belongs the youngling of the flock, When first it lies, close-huddled from the cold, Between the sheltering rock And gorse-bush slowly overcrept with gold. Thou laugh’st, bold outcast bright as brave, When the wood bellows, and the cave, And leagues inland is heard the wave ! Hating the dainty and the fine As sings the blackbird thou dost shine ! Thou com’st while yet on mountain lawns high up Lurks the last snow-wreath, by the berried breer, While yet the black spring in its craggy cup No music makes or charms no listening ear. Thou com’st while from the oak stock or red beech Dead Autumn scoffs young Spring with splenetic speech ;— When in her vidual chastity the Year With frozen memories of the sacred past Her door and heart makes fast, And loves no flower save those that deck the bier :— Ere yet the blossomed sycamore With golden surf is curdled o’er ; Ere yet the birch against the blue Her silken tissue weaves anew. 154 DE VERE’S POEMS. Thou com’st while, meteor like ’mid fens, the weed Swims, wan in light ; while sleet-showers whitening glare ;— Weeks ere by river brims, new furred, the reed Leans its green javelin level in the air. ** Child of the strong and strenuous East ! Now scattered wide o’er dusk hill bases, Now massed in broad, illuminate spaces ;— Torchbearer at a wedding feast Whereof thou mayst not be partaker, But mime, at most, and merrymaker ;— Phosphor of an ungrateful sun That rises but to bid thy lamp begone :— Farewell! I saw Writ large on woods and lawns to-day that Law Which back remands thy race and thee To hero-haunted shades of dark Persephone. To-day the Spring has pledged her marriage vow : Her voice, late tremulous, strong has grown and steady : To-day the Spring is crowned a queen: but thou Thy winter hast already ! Take my song’s blessing, and depart, Type of true service—unrequited heart.”’ Next shall come one of those curious poems, ‘ Ione, Glaucus, and Lycius,’ called, when first published, in 1843, by the name of ‘ Idylls;’ a name now no longer retained, probably because it has been since appropriated by a more popular poet to poems of a different kind. The classic grace and delicate humour of ‘ Lycius’ is neither like the Idylls of the other poet,—nor like anything else that I know :— cor VCLUS. ‘* Lycius! the female race is all the same! All variable, as the Poets tell us ; DE VERE’S POEMS. 155 Mad through caprice—half way ’twixt men and children. Acasta, mildest late of all our maids, Colder and calmer than a sacred well, Is now more changed than Spring has changed these thickets : Hers is the fault, not mine. Yourself shall judge. From Epidaurus, where for three long days With Nicias I had stayed, honouring the God, Last evening we returned. The way was dull, And vexed with mountains : tired ere long was I From warding off the oleander boughs Which, as my comrade o’er the stream’s dry bed Pushed on, closed backward on my mule and me ; The flies maintained a melody unblest ; While Nicias, of his wreath Nemean proud, Sang of the Satyrs and the Nymphs all day Like one by Esculapius fever-smitten. Arrived at eve we bathed ; and drank, and ate Of figs and olives till our souls exulted. Lastly we slept like Gods. When morning shone, So filled was I with weariness and sleep That as a log till noon I lay ; then rose, And in the bath-room sat. While there I languished, Reading that old, divine and holy tale Of sad Ismené and Antigoné, Two warm soft hands flung suddenly around me Closed both mine eyes ; and a clear, shrill, sweet laughter Told me that she it was, Acasta’s self, That brake upon my dreams. ‘ What would you, child? ‘Child, child!’ Acasta cried: ‘I am no child— You do me wrong in calling me a child! Come with me to the willowy river’s brim : There read, if read you must.’ Her eyes not less Than hands uplifted me, and forth we strayed. O’er all the Argolic plain Apollo’s shafts So fiercely fell, methought the least had slain A second Python. From that theatre Scooped in the rock the Argive tumult rolled. 156 DE VERE’S POEMS. Before the fane of Juno seven vast oxen Lowed loud, denouncing Heaven ere yet they fell : While from the hill-girt meadows rose a scent So rich, the salt sea odours vainly strove To pierce the fumes it curled about my brain And sting the nimbler spirits. Nodding I watched The pale herbs from the parched bank that trailed, Bathing delighted in voluptuous cold, And scarcely swayed by the slow-winding stream. I heard a sigh—I asked not whence it came: At last a breeze went by, to glossy waves Rippling that steely flood ; I noted then The reflex of the poplar stem thereon Curled into spiral wreaths, and toward me darting Like a long, shining water-snake : I laughed To see its restlessness. Acasta cried, ‘Read—if you will not talk or look at me !’ Unconsciously I glanced upon the page, Bent o’er it, and began to chant that chorus, ‘ Favoured by Love are they that love not deeply,’ When leaping from my side she snatched the book, Into the river dashed it, bounded by, And, no word spoken, left me there alone. Lycius ! I see you smile : but know you not Nothing is trifling which the Muse records, And lovers love to muse on? Let the Gods Act as to them seems fitting. Hermes loved— Phcebus loved also—but the hearts of Gods Are everlasting like the sun and stars, Their loves as transient as the clouds. For me A peaceful life is all I seek, and far Removed from cares and from the female kind !” This Grecian colouring and costume invests no small portion of Mr. de Vere’s poetry; taking many forms—a few of them light, like this; more of them grave: and Grecian life, Grecian art, and Grecian mythology, are DE VERE’S POEMS. 157 dealt with, sometimes for the love of their beauty, some- times for the searching out of their meaning or the tracing of the analogies by which, under the operation of the spiritual and intellectual element common to humanity in all times and countries, they connect them- selves with subsequent and possibly also with precedent systems of philosophy or forms of faith. And in these latter dealings Mr. de Vere seems rather to cling to some such theory as that adopted by Bacon in his tract ‘De Sapientia Veterum ’—according to which the mytho- logical fables of the Greeks are the symbolic exponents of an elder physical and psychological philosophy where- of no record remains—than to adopt the theory of Professor Max Miiller, who regards them as due to the mere verbal impersonations of aboriginal language (not yet furnished with words from abstract ideas), which verbal impersonations, as language advanced, mistrans- lated themselves into traditional gods and heroes. The Baconian theory is no doubt the more poetical of the two, and the richer in the fruits of interpretation ; and what can be done by a free and fruitful interpretation, Lord Bacon well knew, and amply exemplified, whether applying it to the proverbs of Solomon or to the mytho- logy of Greece. Nor is Mr. de Vere’s philosophy of mythology less large and discursive: and it is most prominently announced in the ‘Lines written under Delphi’ :— ‘*Phoebus Apollo ! loftiest shape of all That glorified the range of Grecian song, 158 DE VERE’S POEMS. By Poet hymned or Shepherd, when the rocks Confessed the first bright impress of thy feet ; By many an old man praised when Thracian blasts Sang loud and pine-wood stores began to fail ; Served by the sick man searching hill and plain For herb assuasive ; courted by sad maids On whose pure lips thy fancied kiss descended Softly as vernal beam on primrose cold ; By Fortune’s troubled Favourites ofttime sued For dubious answer, then when Fate malign, Mounting beyond the horizon of high Hopes, Her long fell glance had cast on them—Apollo ! Who, what wert thou ?” He absolutely rejects the supposition that Apollo and his Olympian kindred were the mere creations of a fabling fancy, and regards them rather as the embodi- ment of what remained to man of spiritual instincts after the Fall; and as containing, in an early stage of develop- ment and under much sensuous depravation, the germs of spiritual life destined eventually to spring up in man regenerate ; towards which end they were to operate by animating the intellect and imagination of man, and organizing his social existence— ‘* Were these but fancies? O’er the world they reared The only empire verily universal Founded by man: for Fancy heralds Thought ; Thought Act ; and Nations Are as they Believe. * * * * * O! frank and graceful life of Grecian years ! Whence came thy model? From the Grecian heaven. The loves and wars of Gods, their works and ways, Their several spheres distinct yet interwreathed, By Greece were copied on a lesser stage. DE VERE’S POEMS. 159 Our thoughts soar high to light our paths on earth ; Terrestrial circles from celestial take Their impress in men’s science ; stars unreached Our course o’er ocean guide ; Orphean sounds The walls of cities raised ; thus mythic Bards For all the legislators legislated ! . * * * * * Though fallen, man was great, Remembering ancient greatness : Hymn and tale Held, each, some portion of dismembered Truth, Severely sung by Poets wise and brave. They sang of Justice, God’s great attribute, With tragic buskin and a larger stride Following the fated victim step by step: They sang of Love crowning the toils of life : Of Joy they sang ; for Joy, that gift divine, Primal and winged creature, with full breath Through all the elastic limbs of Grecian fable Poured her redundant life ; the noble tongue, Strong as the brazen clang of ringing arms, Sweetening with vowels like the laugh of Gods: Of heavenly Pity, Prophet-like they sang ; - And, feeling after Good though finding not, Of Him that Good not yet in flesh revealed, By ceaseless vigils, tears, and lifted palms, And yearnings infinite and unrepressed, A separate and authentic witness bore. Thus was the end foreshown.” This is something like the ‘Teste David cum Sibylla’ of the Medizval Church, though with an earlier date and a wider scope. It may claim, perhaps, to have a less spurious foundation ; though still the foundation must be sought in nothing more definite than the correlations of all exalted moral and spiritual truth, and the gravita- tion of each portion of moral and spiritual truth towards 160 DE VERE’S POEMS. moral and spiritual truth in its unity and wholeness. In this sense, the great Pagan poets may have been unconsciously prophetic of Christianity, masmuch as they maintained the memory and promoted the dominion of certain primal truths, first promulgated when “in the ” and inasmuch as, by so doing, beginning was the word ; they were the voice of one crying, “ Make straight the way of the Lord :” and, in this sense— ‘* Blind Thamyris and blind Mzeonides And Tiresias and Phineus, Prophets old,”— may have been, though without divine inspiration, each in his degree, a prophet of Christ, foreshowing what he did not foresee ; and as the star of an intermediate and imperfect Epiphany, casting a glimmer of primal light on the path which led the heathen from the birthplace of the first Adam to that of the second. But here let us see what we are about; and when we are told that the Grecian poets and the Grecian mythology— ‘* A separate and authentic witness bore” to the coming of Christ, it may be well to guard our- selves against any general and indefinite assent; and maintain that they can only be so considered so far forth as they recognized the truth that God is Love, and that Love is to be the ultimate salvation of mankind : nor is it more than in a small measure that even the purest and highest of the Grecian poets, or the least terrestrial of the Grecian apotheosis of attributes, fulfilled this condition.. ° DE VERE’S POEMS. 161 Nevertheless, these ‘Lines written under Delphi’ are well worthy of consideration in matter of doctrine ; and in matter of poetry full of life and light. Of the poems on Grecian subjects, the ‘Search after Proserpine’ is the longest and most brilliant, and the lightest in its lyrical movements. In this there is no moralizing of mythological meanings ; and the fancy of the poet, casting off the robes of philosophy, rambles, with a free and musical step, from fountain to forest and from forest to sea-shore, in company with the disconsolate Ceres, who asks of nymphs and wood-gods and nereids, what they can tell her of Proserpine :— “* I’ve searched the deep Sicilian meads, And sacred Latium, where of yore Saturn hid his forehead hoar : I’ve sought her by the Alphean reeds : Where solitary Cyclops squanders On the unlistening oleanders Vain song that makes the sea-wells quiver, T’ve sought my child, and seek for ever. ** By Cretan lawns and vales oak-sprinkled, By sands of Libya, brown and wrinkled, And where for leagues, o’er Nile, is borne The murmur of the yellowing corn, And where o’er Ida’s sealike plain White, waving harvests mock the main ; Past Taurus, and past Caucasus, Have I been vainly wandering thus ; In vain the Heavens my absence mourn, And Iris’ self in vain is faint With wafting down their fond complaint : O’er earth, unresting though outworn, I roam for aye, a shape forlorn !” V. M 162 DE VERE’S POEMS. Then follows a chorus of fountain nymphs, and Ceres, attracted to the spot, makes her accustomed appeal— ** CERES. Fair nymphs ! whose music o’er the meadows gliding Hath been your gentle herald, and for me A guide obsequious to this spot—fair nymphs ! Fair graceful nymphs, my daughter’s sweet companions, Say, say but where she dwells ; asking from me, In turn, what boon you will. NYMPHS. Alas, we know not! CERES. May the pure ripple of your founts for ever Leap up, unsoiled, against their verdurous banks ; May your fresh kisses ripple up as lightly, As softly, and with undiscovering noise, Against the embowering arms of prisoning lovers, Shadowing the charms they seek ! NYMPHS. We have no lovers. CERES. No, and need none. Alas, Proserpina, Thou wert as these ! so innocent no fountain, Nor half so gay ; no flower so light, so fair. Ah, fair mild nymphs, my daughter’s sweet companions ! May Jove, as ye run by, make blind the eyes Of Wood-gods and the Fauns ; in matted ivy Tangle their beards ; catch them in sudden clefts Of deep-mossed stems, till ye have glided by— But tell me where she dwells. NYMPHS. Goddess! we know not.” DE VERE’S POEMS. 163 They can tell her, however, of certain fauns and wood- gods from whom it is possible that she may learn something, and the scene changes— ** CERES. O Fauns and Satyrs of the merry forests ! Sharp-hoofed, long-horned, nymph-dreaded deities! Grant me this hour your aid. Secrets I know Of herbs grass-hidden and medicinal blossoms, Whereof one leaf into your cups distilled Would make them rise into a fount of foam Wide as the broad arch of yon flowering myrtle : Those secrets shall be yours—only restore me My infant child. FAUNS. O venerable Goddess! Large-browed, large-eyed, presence august and holy! In our green forests dwells no infant child.” The search proceeds; but here it must be left. It was not quite correct to say that the fable is not moralized in the poem. The poem is not embarrassed by any moralizing as it proceeds; but at the close, Iris descends with a message which contains the moral. Poems such as these lend themselves easily enough to popular appreciation. There are others which will be much admired only by the few; those namely of the philosophical poems in which philosophic thought is the main element. Ordinary readers of poetry will tolerate much obscurity in our popular poets when merely brooding over the common mysteries of our being on which all men who think at all ruminate more or less, 164 DE VERE’S POEMS. and into which no one thinker, think he never so deeply, can penetrate much further than another: for, however obscurely the theme may be treated, the ordinary reader accounts the obscurity as inevitable, and does not find himself in the dilemma of either blaming his author or blaming himself for what he cannot comprehend : when we may reasonably presume that we are out of soundings, we make no complaint of the man who throws the deep- sea line. But when novel views are presented of subjects which, though deep and dark, are not confessedly inscru- table, the ordinary reader resents everything which he does not understand as an insult to his understanding. He wrangles with his author, and under a secret suspicion that his author’s reply will be ‘intelligibilia non intel- lectum adfero,” he makes it his business, and a duty which he owes to himself, to convict his author of incom- prehensibility. It is otherwise when the poetic prevails over the philosophic element; and the philosophic mind merely flashes an occasional light into human life and the nature of man— ‘¢ Alas ! and with what gifts shall I pursue thee, What offerings bring, what treasures lay before thee, When Earth with all her floral train doth woo thee, And all old poets and old songs adore thee ; And love to thee is nought ; from passionate mood Secured by joys complacent plenitude. Goodness, Spinoza tells us, does not more surely DE VERE’S POEMS. 165 make men happy than happiness makes them good. But it remained for Mr. de Vere to indicate this other effect of a happiness, or rather joyfulness, of temperament. Nature so endowed, not only rejoices in its strength, but, as against one enemy, is strong by reason of its joy- fulness. Again— **Vainly tries the soul to mingle, With a being of our kind, Vainly hearts with hearts are twined, For the deepest still ts single.” Many a voice crying from the deeps will bear witness to this. And there will be an echo from more quarters than one,—from the ecclesiastical, not less than from the political,__to another enunciation— ‘*To whom the truth makes free Sacred as law itself is lawful liberty.” The moral epigram which follows has a sort of savour of Quarles— ** Three prayers to heaven the Lover doth present That she he loves rest ever innocent ; Next for her happiness ; and last that he Shield of that goodness and that peace may be. Dear friend, repine no longer; be content ; For thou hast gained two wishes out of three.” There is now but one class and kind more of Mr. de Vere’s poems to take account of; and that the class and kind most opposite to the ethical and doctrinal—the lyrical series, entitled Jnzsfaz?, published with other poems in 1861, and separately in 1863. It is a chrono- 166 DE VERE’S POEMS. logical series of poems illustrative of Irish history from the twelfth to the eighteenth century; each poem clothing itself in the character and costume of the time to which it belongs, as though it had been the growth of the time. The actual growth of this kind which Ireland produced in past ages is unfortunately known only to antiquaries. The songs and ballads which spring out of the heart of a country at particular periods of its existence are some- times of great interest to the historian—a light to his steps and a lantern to his paths; but to be popular in after times they must be in a language which is popularly understood by a literate race. ercy’s Reliques have been generally believed to have wrought the great change which took place in English poetry in the beginning of this century, from didactic to romantic. ‘The ballads restored to life by Percy were in our own tongue; with modifications of time and place which were perhaps rather advantageous than otherwise, veiling their defects and vouching for their antiquity. But ancient Irish songs are utterly inaccessible to us; and it seems to have been Mr. de Vere’s endeavour to supply from his imagination the songs which we might have had and ought to have had, if it had pleased Providence to put English tongues into the mouths of Irish bards. If there be any large class of readers to whom Irish history and its heroes are as familiar as Scotch history and the names of Wallace and Bruce, in those readers /zsfaz7 may awaken the same feelings as those which have responded to the DE VERE’S POEMS. 167 ballads of Burns and Scott. In Ireland, if their own history is well known to the Irish, and if they do not talk too much to read, such a response may well be expected. In England, /uzsfa will have to rely more upon the romantic and dramatic spirit of its verse; and will have little assistance, it is to be feared, from his- torical associations. In the range of epochs which the volume covers the poet finds mankind in divers moods even in Ireland; though Ireland is, no doubt, the least mutable of nations, the strongest in its idiosyncracies, and the least accessible to influences from without for evil or for good—even the infusion of alien blood having been subdued in no long time to the aboriginal complexion. The poet, however, changes his hand with the change of epoch; and many varieties of ballad, legend, ode, and song, are included in the series ; the Irish idiosyncracy, to a certain degree, harmonizing the whole. The bard Ethell, who lived in the thirteenth century and was a good Christian in his way, but eminently an Irish Christian, in giving some account of the changes which had taken place during his long life, states the objections he cannot but feel to the extreme views of the Franciscans, who had established a convent in his neigh- bourhood, and preached forgiveness of injuries with a want of discrimination which was highly distasteful to Ethell— ‘* All praise to the man who brought us the Faith! *Tis a staff by day and our pillow in death ! 168 DE VERE’S POEMS. All praise, I say, to the holy youth Who heard in a dream from Tyrawley’s strand That wail, ‘ Put forth o’er the sea thy hand ; In the dark we die: give us hope and truth !” But Patrick built not on Iorras’ shore That convent where now the Franciscans dwell : Columba was mighty in prayer and war; But the young monk preaches as loud as the bell That love must rule all and all wrongs be forgiven Or else, he is sure, we shall reach not heaven ! This doctrine I count right cruel and hard : And when I am laid in the old churchyard The habit of Francis I will not wear. * * * * * ‘*T forgive old Cathbar who sank my boat : Must I pardon Feargal who slew my son ? Or the pirate, Strongbow, who burn’d Granote, They tell me, and in it nine priests, a nun, And, worst, Saint Finian’s crosier staff ? At forgiveness like that I spit and laugh. My chief, in his wine-cups, forgave twelve men ; And of these a dozen rebelled again ! There never was chief more brave than he! The night he was born Loch Dool up-burst : He was bard-loving, gift-making, loud of glee, The last to fly, to assault the first. He was like the top spray upon Uladh’s oak, He was like the tap-root of Argial’s pine: He was secret and sudden : as lightning his stroke : There was none that could fathom his hid design ! He slept not: if any man scorned his alliance He struck the first blow for a frank defiance, With that look in his face, half night half light, Like the lake gust-blacken’d and ridged with white ! —— * * * * * ‘¢ There never was king, and there never will be, In battle or banquet like Malachi ! DE VERE’S POEMS. 169 The Seers his reign had predicted long ; He honour’d the bards, and gave gold for song. If robbers plunder’d or burn’d the fanes He hung them in chaplets, like rosaries, That others beholding might take more pains. There was none to women more reverent-minded For he held his mother, and Mary, dear ; If any man wrong’d them, that man he blinded Or straight amerced him of hand or ear. There was none who founded more convents—none ; In his palace the old and the poor were fed ; The orphan might walk, or the widow’s son, Without groom or page to his throne or bed. In his council he mused with great brows divine And eyes like the eyes of the musing kine ; Upholding a Sceptre o’er which men said Seven Spirits of Wisdom like fire-tongues played. He drain’d ten lakes and he built ten bridges ; He bought a gold book for a thousand cows ; He slew ten Princes who brake their pledges ; With the bribed and the base he scorn’d to carouse. He was sweet and awful ; through all his reign God gave great harvests to vale and plain ; From his nurse’s milk he was kind and brave ; And when he went down to his well-wept grave Through the triumph of penance his soul uprose To God and the saints. Not so his foes.” With this, which might have been supposed to be the product of another man, if not of another time, there must be an end of extracting from these wonderfully variegated volumes. I have not said all that I think of Mr. de Vere and his poetry. It would not be wise to say much at present. What we all say of Wordsworth and Coleridge now, it would not have been wise to say 170 DE VERE’S POEMS. sixty years ago. There were men who thought then what is commonly said now: but sixty years ago ‘In silence Joy and Admiration sate Suspending praise.” * For those men knew that praise which is not recognized as an echo of the world’s praise is not met by many in a genial spirit; whilst there are not a few, perhaps, to whom praise is, as it was to Sir Philip Francis, “ only tolerable when it is spoken zz odiuwm tertzi.” A voice from the dead however may be heard with more in- dulgence ; and the voice of Walter Savage Landor is such a voice as is not heard from the living above once or twice in a century. Let him speak :— *¢ Welcome who last hast climbed the cloven hill Forsaken by its Muses and their God ! Show us the way ; we miss it, young and old. Roses that cannot clasp their languid leaves, Puffy and colourless and overblown, Encumber all our walks of poetry ; The satin slipper and the mirror boot Delight in pressing them: but who hath track’d A Grace’s naked foot amid them all ? Or who hath seen (ah ! how few care to see !) The close-bound tresses and the robe succinct ? Thou hast ; and she hath placed her palm in thine: Walk ye together in our fields and groves : We have gay birds and graver ; we have none Of varied note, none to whose harmony Late hours will listen, none who sing alone. * Glover’s ‘ Leonidas.’ DE VERE’S POEMS. 171 Make thy proud name yet prouder for thy sons, Aubrey de Vere ! * * * * * Come re-ascend with me the steeps of Greece With firmer foot than mine ; none stop the road And few will follow : we shall breathe apart That pure fresh air and drink the untroubled spring. Lead thou the way ; I knew it once; my sight May miss old marks ; lend me thy hand ; press on, Elastic is thy step, thy guidance sure.” ‘Odo una voce Cui del mio cor nota é la via.” * * Alfieri, ‘Saul,’ Atto primo, Scena secunda. CONSIDERED —IN-A LETTER TO THE PREPAC be THE letter to Mr. Gladstone, of which this is a much enlarged edition, was not, when first written in 1868, intended to be published. But circumstances of the time led to its publication ; of which one consequence was that some men eminent in judicial, and some eminent in political life, wrote to me on the subjects treated in it; and the present edition contains the results of much discussion and correspondence subsequent to the first. CRIME CONSIDERED IN A LETTER TO Metre iGtil HON. W. Ee GLADSTONE, The Roost, Bournemouth, August, 1808—December, 1877. My DEAR GLADSTONE, Whilst you are yet in vacation and not yet in office, and may have leisure to attend to me, I wish to bring under your consideration a matter, to my mind of great importance, and to which circumstances have led me to give some attention for the last few years. The circumstances are these. It has been the way of late years with one or another of the Colonies, to transfer to their statute books bodily, or with slight adap- tations, our Criminal Consolidation Acts, 24 & 25 Vict. caps. 96 and 100, and perhaps one or two auxiliary enact- ments: and no doubt these statutes may effect an improvement on the particular jumble of criminal and V. N 178 CRIME CONSIDERED IN A LETTER TO statute law in force in this or that Colony on the subject of crime. But though better on the whole, it seemed desirable to inquire whether it was, moreover, better in all its parts ; and further, whether, if better, it was the best that could be. To any one acquainted with our criminal law it is needless to say that inquiry had not far to go before it was plain that what was wanted was a new criminal code. Such a code had been constructed for India, and might be for those of the Colonies in which the legislative power of the crown is paramount. Whether it would be of any avail to construct such a code for the con- sideration of the British Parliament is another question ; and that it should be a question, exposes more, perhaps, than any other feature of our representative govern- ments, the sins of which it is capable. What has been done and left undone about the most palpable and acknowledged defects of our system is © instructive. No one can doubt, and no one does doubt, that the want of a public prosecutor stupefies the ad- ministration of criminal justice in its whole range and scope. Forty years ago any one unacquainted with the House of Commons might have rashly assumed that it was only for some one of authority as a jurist to explain this and other flaws to some one of authority as a statesman, and they would be rectified forthwith. Look- ing back through those forty years what is it that we see? Here are eight Blue Books, containing reports of THE RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE. 179 the Criminal Law Commissioners from 1834 to 1845, with the evidence on which they were founded; and two Blue Books, containing the reports of Commons Com- mittees of 1855 and 1856: and I find that the most laborious and searching investigations have been carried on ; that huge masses of material and of evidence have been got together; that out of it all has stood con- spicuously the opinions of the most eminent jurists, judges, and statesmen—of Lord Brougham, Lord Camp- bell, Sir Alexander Cockburn, Mr. Hay Cameron, Mr. John Austin, Sir Frederick Pollock, Lord Stanley, and others; that on this most needful of all amendments, the provision of a Public Prosecutor, these great autho- rities were emphatically of the same mind; and that a certainty having been thus arrived at as to what ought to be done, there was an end of the matter, and nothing was done. The House of Commons was always occupied with what it cared more about than the redemption of the country from the curse and misery of crime; and for no inconsiderable portion of its time it was occupied with itself. Organic changes were no doubt of primary import- ance till the reform of 1830; but by that reform every essential rectification was effected; and looking at the course of legislation since, any unpolitical looker-on might be disposed to say,—if the House does in any sense represent the nation, where is the wisdom of a nation 180 CRIME CONSIDERED IN A LETTER TO which is so constantly and recurrently occupied with political and structural questions that life and property are left to take care of themselves,—so perpetually intent upon mending its machinery that there is no getting it set to work P Lord Bacon deprecated controversies about the Church, not because they were an ill sign for religion (he thought they were not), but because when custom went to one mill it was taken from the other,—when men’s minds went to polemics they were taken away from matters on which he conceived that they might be bestowed with more benefit to mankind. “The miller of Granchester,” he said, “was wont to pray for peace among the willows ; for whilst the winds blew the windmills wrought, and his water-mill was less customed.” As Lord Bacon felt about the Church, so may any rational patriot feel about the State, and pray devoutly that in God’s good time there may be peace among the willows. The results of political measures are matters of speculation and conjecture; those of some sorts of administrative measures are as little matters of uncer- tainty as anything human can be; and if the people could be brought to care about depravity and guilt but half as much as they care about franchises or rates and taxes, the House of Commons might be less self-occupied, and looking to the proportions of the objects before it, and trusting to experts what none but experts can THE RIGHT HON. W.’E. GLADSTONE. 181 adequately understand, might be brought to see that what is a paramount duty incumbent upon it is to cleanse the country from violence and blood—from the pollution of drunkenness (in which crime is spawned), and from the shame and reproach of gigantic commercia frauds. But even in the case of India, where there was no House of Commons to stand in the way, the habits and habitual sentiments generated in public men by responsi- bility to Parliament were sufficient of themselves, though not ultimately to defeat, yet to withhold from one entire generation, the boon and blessing of an improved criminal code ; a code provided for our Indian Empire with unsparing labour, and by experts of the highest authority. This code, prepared by the commission of which Lord Macaulay was one member and Mr. Macleod another, lay strangely neglected from 1837 till 1860, when, under the supervision I believe of Sir R. Maine, it was finally constructed and enacted ; and then, having wakened up and become a living law, the benefits it conferred upon the more than two hundred millions of our Indian population proved to be, what it might have been well known they would be, of inestimable value. Who was responsible for all the crime and suffering which might have been and was not prevented during its dead sleep of twenty-three years, I know not. Perhaps it never occurred to them, whoever they were, that they were answerable for all that misery and demoralization. When we confess that 182 CRIME CONSIDERED IN A LETTER TO “we have left undone the things we ought to have done, and done those things which we ought not to have done,”—if the things in question are legislative or ad- ministrative, those that we have left undone go for littleh— little in the account of conscience, and often less than little in the account which public opinion calls upon us to render. And thus it is that public men are careful not to do what may subject them to censure, let the chance of miscarriage be ever so insignificant ; whilst they hardly cast a glance at the momentous evils due to inaction or delay. What happened to the Indian code may seem to preclude the hope that our English criminal law can be amended otherwise than slowly and by piecemeal legisla- tion; but much of the same material is required for the one kind of work as for the other. Guidance from the same principles is needed, and it would be highly desir- able to have a code constructed, both in aid of the purposes of piecemeal progress and in order that it may be ready for any unlooked-for turn of fortune which might give it a chance of being enacted. The object of my letter is to submit to you some considerations preliminary to such a task. The criminal law of England as it exists has been thus described by a lawyer and jurist of the highest authority :— “It consists of three parts :—First, the Old Common THE RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE. 183 Law, a crude and meagre theory, adapted to a rough state of society long since passed away: secondly, a vast mass of unsystematic and ill-arranged Acts of Parliament, rendered necessary by the defects of this system, un- connected with each other, passed at different times, written in different styles, intended for different purposes, and finally consolidated into a small number of Acts faithfully preserving the confusion and intricacy of the materials out of which they were put together: thirdly, a number of cases filling many volumes, and deciding isolated points as they happened to arise, totally un- arranged, glancing at innumerable questions which they do not solve, and which never will be solved till some circumstance occurs to call for their solution. This is the bad side of the criminal law. Its good side is, that it is the work of successive generations of Judges, ad- mirably qualified to discharge such a task as far as their powers allowed them to do so. The English Judges have always formed one of the best subordinate Legis- latures in the world. They are the picked members of the most active and energetic profession in the country, by the members of which their decisions are jealously tested and criticized. The Courts are checks on each other; for they are not bound by each other’s decisions, — and they may even overrule those. of their predecessors on cause shown. The Judges are numerous enough to give their decisions weight, but not enough to lose their individual sense of responsibility. They are also the 184 CRIME CONSIDERED IN A LETTER TO only body of the kind. The Court at Lyons and the Court at Bordeaux may take different views, but a de- cision in Westminster Hall is the Law throughout the whole of England. It is to these circumstances that Case Law owes its merits. Decided cases embody the result of an immense amount of experience and of shrewd practical acquaintance with the subject-matter to which it refers. The Old Common Law was, no doubt, meagre and crude, and most of the Statute Law is special and narrow-minded ; but the modern Case Law contains an immense store of true principles and strong common sense, applied to the facts with consummate practical skill, though so much mixed up with special circum- stances that it is infinitely less useful than it might be made. The general result is, that the Common Law, the Statute Law, and the cases which explain the one and the other, hold in suspension an admirable criminal code well adapted to the wants and feelings of the nation, and framed upon practical experience of them, but destitute of arrangement, deformed by strange technicalities, and mixed up with a heterogeneous mass of foreign matter.” * In the Indian Code and in some Foreign Codes of this century,—that for the United States drafted by Living- ston in 1828, and the more recent draft of a New York Code,—it may be presumed that as much of the material of English law was used as their authors conceived to be *