CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNDERGRADUATE LIBRARY 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924012970434 
 
WORDSWORTH 
 
WORDSWORTH 
 
 BY 
 
 WALTER RALEIGH 
 
 Author of 
 ' Style,' 'The English Novel,' ' Milton,' &c. 
 
 FIFTH IMPRESSION 
 
 LONDON 
 
 EDWARD ARNOLD 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGX 
 
 Introduction ........ i 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 ' Childhood and Education . . . i6 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 The French Revolution : Coleridge ... 43 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 Poetic Diction .86 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 Nature . . . . . . . . .124 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 Humanity ... ..... 155 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 Illumination . . . . . . .197 
 
 CHAPTER Vn 
 Conclusion . . . . . . . .224 
 
 INDEX ,-....,. 229 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 " If an author, by any single composition, has 
 impressed us with respect for his talents, it is use- 
 ful to consider this as affording a presumption 
 that on other occasions where we have been dis- 
 pleased he, nevertheless, may not have written ill 
 or absurdly ; and further, to give him so much 
 credit for this one composition as may induce us 
 to review what has displeased us, with more care 
 than we should otherwise have bestowed on it." 
 This modest plea, addressed by Wordsworth to 
 his contemporaries, was by them utterly rejected. 
 It is the purpose of these pages to consider it 
 anew ; to approach the poetry of Wordsworth 
 with a favourable predisposition ; to attempt to 
 read it as he would have wished it to be read, and 
 to find in it what he attempted to express. 
 
 Literary criticism is a thing of many kinds and 
 many shapes ;• but the largest part of it perhaps is 
 judicial. To distinguish the good from the bad, 
 whether by a fine taste or by the aid of fixed prin- 
 
2 WORDSWORTH 
 
 ciples, to praise and to blame, to approve and to 
 condemn, — these are recognised activities of the 
 critic. And for Wordsworth, it may be said, all 
 this has long since been done. His cause is 
 judged. His position is secure. He has taken 
 his rank high among the greatest. The finest 
 part of his work has been separated from the 
 inferior bulk, so that new readers of his poetry may 
 make straight for the noblest numbers, without 
 wasting time in reading what the poet, less happy 
 than they, wasted time in writing. Is there any- 
 thing worth doing, it may be asked, that yet 
 remains to be done ? 
 
 No doubt, for the rougher purposes of justice, 
 the cause is judged. But there will always remain 
 a certain curious minority of the human race whose 
 desire is not so much to judge a poet as to under- 
 stand him. Like psychologists in a law-court, 
 they take little interest in the verdict, which sound 
 sense may easily supply ; much in the process, for 
 the light it throws at odd angles upon human 
 nature. Or, like antiquaries, they attempt to 
 reconstruct a vanished order from fragments that 
 others are content to use as ornaments. The 
 critic who believes, with Wordsworth, that poets 
 are " men speaking to men," will find something 
 precious in the least of their remains. One 
 problem is here which he cannot neglect. 
 Wordsworth, besides his poetry, has left a full 
 
INTRODUCTION 3 
 
 body of criticism on his own work. He was 
 a critic almost as soon as he was a poet, and 
 his theory of poetry is inextricably entangled with 
 his practice of it. We know that he professed 
 a method peculiar to himself, and that his judg- 
 ments passed on his own writings are at many points 
 in violent conflict with the judgments of his con- 
 temporaries and of later critics. Of Tennyson 
 he said, " He is not much in sympathy with 
 what I should myself most value in my attempts, 
 viz. the spirituality with which I have endeavoured 
 to invest the material universe, and the moral 
 relations under which I have wished to exhibit its 
 most ordinary appearances." When advised to 
 add a stanza to the Idiot Boy — that great rock of 
 offence in the canon of his works — he excused 
 himself because " the narration of the poem is 
 so rapid and impassioned that I could not find a 
 place in which to insert the stanza without 
 checking the progress of it, and so leaving a 
 deadness upon the feeling." And to many utter- 
 ances like this must be added the convincing 
 testimony that Wordsworth was habitually un- 
 conscious of inequalities in his work, and took 
 a keen delight in crooning over to himself his 
 least admired compositions — 
 
 Like a river murmuring 
 And talking to itself when all things else 
 Were still. 
 
4 ■ WORDSWORTH 
 
 Finally, we know that this poet, who held him- 
 self to be not as other poets are, who obstinately 
 followed a way of his own, and, so far from 
 guarding his secret, explained it, at great length 
 and with much iteration, to the world at large, 
 does actually at times awaken in the breasts of the 
 most judicial of his readers a new sensation, a 
 passing suspicion, at least, of untried possibilities 
 in the scope and power of the poetic art. What 
 he constantly professes he does sometimes achieve. 
 Are not his professions and his method worthy of 
 the closest examination even where he seems to 
 have failed ? 
 
 Impatient critics, hungry for an end of the 
 cause, have suggested a solution of the problem. 
 They feel a certain difficulty in explaining the 
 amazing inequality of Wordsworth's poetry. 
 If they were quite consistent they would not 
 attempt to explain it, but would frankly assert 
 that it is no part of the business of a selective and 
 judicial criticism to show how bad poems come to 
 be written. Yet in case the question should be 
 pressed they are ready with an answer. There 
 were two Wordsworths. They were born on the 
 same day, lived the same life, and wrote with 
 the same pen. Some of the poems belong wholly 
 to the one, some wholly to the other. More 
 usually the partners collaborated, taking turns with 
 the pen until the poem was complete. And the 
 
INTRODUCTION 5 
 
 difference between them was simply this, that the 
 less loquacious of the two was inspired, and there 
 is an end of the matter. So the selective and 
 judicial method of criticism receives the stamp of 
 divinity. The poet is no longer a man speaking 
 to men, but a reed through which a god fitfully 
 blows. 
 
 Any effort to understand Wordsworth, to 
 sympathise with his aims and achievements, to 
 look the way that he is pointing, and to accompany 
 him on his journey, must take account of the man 
 as a single-minded and single-hearted person, ex- 
 pressing himself in all his works. A criticism of a 
 poet that omits all reference to his failures is as 
 futile a thing as a biography of a great soldier 
 that passes in silence over his defeats. Indeed it 
 is from the defeats that most may commonly be 
 learned, for there the same genius and boldness 
 that lead to victory are seen over-reaching them- 
 selves, planning too ambitiously, trusting too 
 superbly, until at the crisis and height they are 
 broken by their own excess. Of Wordsworth 
 in particular it is hardly true to say that his 
 strength and his weakness are closely knit up 
 together ; rather they are the same ; his strength 
 at its best is weakness made perfect, his weakness 
 is the wasteful ebullition of his strength. It may 
 be just and necessary to pronounce some of his 
 poems childish, and others dull or silly ; it cannot 
 
6 WORDSWORTH 
 
 be right to neglect them on that account, if we 
 remember that the teachers whom he most 
 reverenced, and from whom he learned the best part 
 of his lore, were children, rustics, men of simple 
 habits and slow wits. For the right understanding 
 of his poems, he insisted, a reader must put ofFthe 
 pride that dwells by preference upon " those points 
 wherein men differ from each other, to the exclusion 
 of those in which all men are alike or the same." 
 Yet, more than the poems of otliers, his poems 
 have been made the exercising ground for gymnastic 
 displays of vanity and cleverness. 
 
 Among profitless critics of Wordsworth, Francis 
 Jeffrey deserves his established pre-eminence. It 
 is not that he was either foolish or stupid. He 
 was a shrewd lawyer, a forcible writer, a man of 
 wide taste and sound judgment, so that he is a 
 more than respectable type and embodiment of the 
 bad critic that lies hidden in the breasts of all rtlen. 
 There is nothing wrong with his criticism except 
 the point of view. Like all bad critics, he loved 
 to consider his seat as a tribunal, and himself as a 
 judge. His business, as he understood it, was to 
 know the law and to administer it without fear or 
 favour. To Wordsworth's plea that his work was 
 tentative, novel, exploratory of untried recesses of 
 the human mind, he turned a deaf ear. Every 
 sensible man, he says in effect, knows quite well 
 what a poet is about when he attempts a poem on 
 
INTRODUCTION 7 
 
 a particular subject. "A village schoolmaster, 
 for instance, is a pretty common poetical character. 
 Goldsmith has drawn him inimitably ; so has Shen- 
 stone, with the slight change of sex ; and Mr. Crabbe, 
 in two passages, has followed their footsteps. . . . 
 But by what traits is this worthy old gentle- 
 man delineated by the new poet ? No pedantry 
 — no innocent vanity of learning — no mixture of 
 indulgence with the pride of power, and of poverty 
 with the consciousness of rare acquirements. Every 
 feature which belongs to the situation, or marks the 
 character in common apprehension, is scornfully dis- 
 carded by Mr. Wordsworth." The only question 
 that remains to consider is whether the accused, in 
 these his "wide and wUful aberrations" from 
 " that eternal and universal standard of truth and 
 nature, which every one is knowing enough to 
 recognise," was acting in good faith, and really 
 attempting to write a poem. He receives the 
 benefit of the doubt, and, in mitigation of the 
 sentence, the plea of temporary insanity, and that 
 alone, is favourably entertained. From first to 
 last there is no recognition of poetry as thought, 
 as fulfilling in some sense the definition that 
 Davenant gave to wit — " a new and remoter way 
 of thinking." 
 
 Jeffrey must very early have given up the 
 attempt to enter into those peculiarities in the 
 mind of the author which cannot, as he admitted, 
 
8 WORDSWORTH 
 
 be comprehended without much effort and explanar 
 tion. A little, hard, sharp, legal mind will not 
 readily forego the choice of weapons, or learn to 
 enter into a new mood. And when once he had 
 formed his judgment on Wordsworth's poetry 
 Jeffrey did not despise the most vulgar and 
 captious devices of the pleader or the reviewer to 
 make the enemy ridiculous. One of the easiest 
 and most popular of these is the method of comic 
 summary, so much used by the average latter-day 
 reviewer of novels. The Excursion does not 
 depend for .any part of its beauty or power on the 
 story it tells. Let it therefore be impHed that in 
 this unessential feature the whole meaning of the 
 work lies ; that for this, and this alone, the poet 
 challenges our attention and admiration. Here 
 is all the account that Jeffrey gives of the Sixth 
 Book of the Excursion : — 
 
 "The Sixth contains a choice obituary, or 
 characteristic account, of several of the persons 
 who lie buried before this group of moralisers ; — 
 an unsuccessful lover, who had found consolation 
 in natural history — a miner, who worked on for 
 twenty years in despite of universal ridicule, and 
 at last found the vein he had expected — two 
 political enemies, reconciled in old age to each 
 
 other — an old female miser — a seduced damsel 
 
 and two widowers, one who had devoted himself 
 to the education of his daughters, and one who 
 
INTRODUCTION 9 
 
 had preferred marrying a prudent middle-aged 
 woman to take care of them." 
 
 His criticism of the White Doe of Rylstone, 
 to which he devoted an article in October 18 15, 
 is rich in lessons for readers and critics of poetry. 
 There are excuses to be made for Jeffrey ; he was 
 early in the field ; to him Wordsworth was merely 
 the most pretentious member of a new and para- 
 doxical school of poetry ; and, having read some 
 previous poems by the same writer, he did not 
 read, this time, with a mind susceptible to any 
 favourable impression. His choicest sarcasm is 
 to the effect that he does not understand what the 
 poet means, which is true enough. And here, 
 again, there are excuses to be made. The JVhite 
 Doe is not, in any obvious sense, a well-written 
 poem. It would furnish some instances of obscure 
 writing, some incidental weaknesses, and but few 
 models of narration, to a handbook of rhetoric. 
 The music of it is, for the most part, a music of 
 thought ; and the reader who refuses to think 
 will find in it only a rambling and tedious story, 
 where the commonest dramatic opportunities are 
 missed. Yet to any one who has felt, even 
 remotely, the strange elevation of thought and 
 the lonely strength of emotion that uphold 
 the poet throughout his dealings with this 
 human agony, the comments of Jeffrey come 
 like the noises of a street brawl breaking in 
 
lo WORDSWORTH 
 
 upon the performance of a grave and moving 
 symphony. 
 
 So far as Wordsworth is concerned, nothing like 
 this can happen again. The least sympathetic of 
 readers, the flattest and vainest of critics, approaches 
 a writer of acknowledged eminence in a spirit of 
 caution ; he modifies and temporises, and keeps 
 open a line of retreat after his cleverest onslaughts. 
 But a criticism that is valid only for settled causes 
 is a worthless and vulgar criticism ; it has nothing 
 to say to a poet until he is accepted by the 
 >_ cultured mob. And JeiFrey's standard, "that 
 eternal and universal standard of truth and nature 
 which every one is knowing enough to recognise," 
 has only to be adopted to ensure for the next new 
 poet, as great and as novel in method as Words- 
 worth, the same reception, and for the first 
 generation of his readers the same loss. 
 
 Is there any remedy or safeguard ? The 
 monkey and the parrot die hard in man ; can they 
 be taught to feel or to simulate modesty ? It is 
 they who foster the widespread belief that criticism 
 is a kind of shorthand system, whereby right 
 judgments, based on admitted principles, can be 
 attained at the cost of infinitely less labour than 
 was involved in the production of the work to be 
 judged. Given that the principles are sound and 
 sufficient, then, they argue, if there be no error 
 of detail in the application, the result must be 
 
4 
 
 INTRODUCTION 1 1 
 
 valid. They overlook, however, one important 
 element in the case. Poetry is original, or it is 
 nothing. The admitted principles can never be 
 sufficient to cover all the new cases that arise ; if 
 they were, there would be no reason why men of 
 fair intellectual abilities should employ themselves 
 in turning out goods to prescribed patterns. All ^ 
 poetry begins from the beginning ; it creates its j 
 own world, and presents the eternally novel matter | 
 of experience in words that charm the ear of the j 
 simplest listener. Criticism must do the same ; f 
 it must follow the poet, if he gives any token of 
 being worth the following, step by step, recreating 
 his experiences, hanging on his words, disciplining 
 itself to the measure of his paces, believing in 
 him and living with him, until, looking back on 
 the way that it has been led, it shall be able to say 
 whether the adventure is good and the goal 
 worthy. There is no short cut to the end desired, f 
 Standards, eternal principles, formulas, summaries,]' 
 and shibboleths, if they be substituted for thei" 
 living experience, are obstacles and pitfalls. The, 
 poet, so far as he is a poet, accepts nothing on 
 authority. The truths that he discovers have been 
 discovered by many before him, but what makes 
 them worth the communicating is that now he has 
 discovered them again, reaching them, it may be, 
 by a new track, but in any case by his own effiarts, 
 so that they come to him as the crown of his own 
 
12 WORDSWORTH 
 
 labours, and the fruit of his own sorrows and 
 struggles and joys. And if the critic is to be a 
 fit mediator between him and the home-staying 
 public, he, too, must be an explorer, ready to 
 follow where the other leads. 
 
 But what of the great critics, it may be asked, 
 and is Aristotle not a pole-star for untried seas ? 
 We are deceived by industrial and scientific 
 analogies, and expect too much from the men of 
 old time. We cannot begin to read poetry where 
 our fathers left off ; we must begin where they 
 began. The critic who, being himself a little 
 man, attempts to raise himself on Aristotle is still 
 a dwarf, and a maleficent dwarf. It is probable — 
 it cannot be called certain — that Aristotle enjoyed 
 the representation of Greek dramas. At least he 
 enjoyed thinking about them ; and his thoughts 
 turned to the general conditions of poetic pleasure, 
 and led him to frame some tentative laws ex- 
 planatory of his own experiences. He could not 
 foresee that he was arming every l iterary dunce in 
 Europe, for many centuries, with weapons of out- 
 rage and offence. Like other great critics, he was 
 an artist in science. An explanation was what he 
 sought, an explanation which naturally assumed the 
 existence of the thing to be explained. Pleasure in 
 the Greek drama is now a rarer thing than once it was, 
 but his explanation of it may still be used to decry 
 other pleasures no less spontaneous and legitimate. 
 
INTRODUCTION 13 
 
 Aristotle is of use to the critic only as one poet ;^ 
 — a great poet — is of use to another. It is good 'P 
 to see a master at work. But the material in 
 which the literary critic works is still poetry itself. 
 That a poet should be made from other poets 
 without opening his eyes on life and the world is 
 inconceivable. He will not even follow their 
 methods too exactly, lest he should falsify his own 
 gift of vision. And the material in which criticism 
 works is as abundant and diverse and incompre- 
 hensible as life itself ; it is life reflected in the mind 
 of man. 
 
 When King Asa removed his mother from 
 being queen because she had made an idol in a 
 grove, and when he destroyed his mother's idol 
 and burnt it by the brook Kidron, the high places, 
 it is further recorded, were not removed. The 
 critic, in every age, spends his zeal in vain in 
 destroying his mother's idols, while the high places 
 are not removed. And they are maintained not 
 so much by the self-importance of the few who 
 desire to speak from them as by the laziness of 
 the many, who are easily content with an arrange- 
 ment that provides them with opinions, and saves 
 them from the unwelcome necessity of thinking. 
 It is not uncommon to meet with persons, simple 
 in speech and not widely read, who are born critics; 
 they have the instinct for the essential, and the 
 sympathy that enables them at once to set them- 
 
14 WORDSWORTH 
 
 selves at the author's point of view ; but most of 
 them are careful to disclaim all authority; they 
 have read but little, they say, and their tastes and 
 opinions are uncultivated, and probably wrong. 
 It is perhaps a distorted form of the same diffidence 
 which makes the critics themselves seek shelter from 
 the ordeal of being left alone with a poem. They 
 call in a bodyguard of stalwart authorities to 
 protect them from that direct, intimate, and trust- 
 ful converse which the poet seeks. 
 
 These remarks on the failings of criticism are 
 germane to the subject, for Wordsworth felt these 
 things. He desired to appeal from the public, 
 whose brains are bemused with a little learning, 
 to the people, whose taste he held is still natural 
 and uncorrupted. But the people have not time 
 for poetry, and his dream of an edition of his 
 poems in the form of chap-books, to be eagerly 
 bought from wandering hawkers, is still a dream. 
 For his educated readers, who came to him in the 
 expectation that he would give them a familiar 
 pleasure, and "gratify certain known habits of 
 association," he did all that in him lay. He 
 warned them to abate these expectations and to 
 put off this mood. When they neglected his 
 advice he consoled himself with the thought that 
 a poet must create the taste by which he is ulti- 
 mately judged. 
 
 Here, surely, is ground enough for inquiry. 
 
INTRODUCTION 15 
 
 The critic who comes to his task with fixed 
 principles and standards is already disqualified, in 
 the opinion of Wordsworth himself, to appreciate 
 the most characteristic merits of the poems. Either"* 
 Wordsworth was the victim, during sixty years 
 devoted wholly to poetry, of a lamentable 
 illusion, or he has something to teach that will 
 repay pupilage. He was a man of a steady mind, 
 and the chance that he was not deceived seems to 
 warrant an experiment. Such an experiment can 
 take only one form. The critic must go back 
 with him to the starting-point, and, by the aid of 
 his own writings and the writings that throw light 
 on his life and purposes, must watch his poems in 
 the making. 
 
 A lifetime of strenuous poetic energy cannot 
 be recaptured from oblivion or fully understood. 
 But if the attempt be wholly vain and fantastic, 
 then Wordsworth must be content to be judged 
 by standards that he repudiated, and to be valued 
 for reasons that have little to do with the in- 
 spiration and motive of his work. 
 
CHAPTER 1 
 
 CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION 
 
 By his autobiographical poem, the Prelude, written 
 between the thirtieth and the thirty-fifth years of 
 his age, Wordsworth has released the critic from 
 a world of conjecture and research. No such 
 another authentic and minute poetic biography 
 exists, it may safely be said, in any tongue. The 
 genius of Wordsworth was a genius that naturally 
 turned inward upon itself; and in this psycho- 
 logical account of the growth of his own mind, , 
 and of the most significant of the influences that 
 shaped it, he has done the biographer's work once 
 and for all. It would be foolish to challenge the 
 truth of his account, and, so far as the critic's 
 task is concerned, it would be vain to try to 
 supplement it. He lived, it is true, for some 
 forty -five years after the completion of the 
 Prelude, and it is right that the chances and 
 changes of that later time, the story of his various 
 travels, and of the tardy honours that were heaped 
 
 i6 
 
CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION 17 
 
 upon him when he had ceased to sing, should, in 
 fit place, be set down. For the understanding 
 of his great poetic adventure, and for the appre- 
 ciation of the wonderful passages in which that 
 adventure was partly achieved, the history of his 
 first thirty years is all that need be studied. 
 
 It is not merely that the formative period of a 
 poet's life must always be the period of chief 
 interest ; in the life of Wordsworth no other 
 period presents any interest at all. His life was 
 meditative, uneventful, secluded, and, after its 
 early passions and agonies, ran its course undiverted 
 and unthwarted to the end. But the great passion 
 that sealed him to poetry and opened his eyes on 
 nature and man lost something of its virtue. The 
 Prelude, as he says in the advertisement, " conducts 
 the history of the Author's mind to the point when 
 he was emboldened to hope that his faculties were 
 sufficiently matured for entering upon the arduous 
 labour which he had proposed to himself." But 
 the labour itself, though time was not denied him, 
 was never brought to completion. Nine years 
 after the Prelude was finished there appeared the 
 Excursion, and then — an end. The other two books 
 that, together with the Excursion, were to make up 
 the great philosophical poem on man, nature, and 
 society, were barely attempted. One fragment of 
 the first book remains, while as for the third 
 book, " the materials of which it would have been 
 
1 8 WORDSWORTH 
 
 formed," as the author pathetically explains, " have 
 been incorporated, for the most part," in his " other 
 Publications written subsequently to the Excursion" 
 The materials, that is to say, of the great Gothic 
 Church, to which the Prelude was simply the Ante- 
 chapel, were found useful for humbler domestic 
 and parochial occasions, and the church was left 
 unbuilt. The Excursion, great work though it be, 
 is not greater than the Prelude, and adds to the 
 Prelude much less of what is characteristic and 
 vital than its bulk would lead the reader to expect. 
 And with the Excursion, Wordsworth's work was 
 done. By strange and hard ways he had been led 
 up to the mount of vision, he had seen through a 
 golden haze all the riches and the beauty of the 
 land that was promised to Poetry, and then the 
 vision faded ; " the sudden charm which accidents 
 of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset 
 diffuse over a known and familiar landscape," was 
 withdrawn, and he was left gazing on the woods 
 and hills and pastures under the light of common 
 day. Perhaps he hardly knew his loss, but the loss 
 itself is witnessed by the altered tone of his voice. 
 While he spoke only of what he saw, his speech 
 was like the speech of one in a dream, musical, 
 rapt, solemn, uncouth sometimes and stammering, 
 but always intense, convinced, and absorbed in the 
 novelty and wonder of his vision. In his later 
 years he sees less and preaches more ; he forages 
 
i 
 
 CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION 19 
 
 in his memory for the best of his feelings, he ex- 
 pounds, declaims, argues even ; and, save once or 
 twice, as in those lines " Composed upon an Even- 
 ing of Extraordinary Splendour and Beauty," he 
 does not again see the world illuminated by " the 
 fountain light of all our day," He had been at 
 ■ one with Coleridge in poetic aim, and was at one 
 with him also in poetic fate ; in both alike the high 
 tide of inspiration was followed by a long and 
 wandering ebb. Coleridge, we are often told, took / 
 opium ; but Wordsworth had no pleasant vices, 
 and there is something other than accident in the 
 brief course of a poetry so subtle and so elemental, 
 so much dependent on a lofty tranquillity of mood 
 and on 
 
 Sensations sweet, 
 Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart, 
 
 so little dependent on intellectual craftsmanship / 
 and labour. 
 
 However this may be, the tale of Wordsworth's 
 life, for the purposes of criticism, is the tale of his 
 earlier years. He was born, the son of a country 
 solicitor, at Cockermouth in 1770, fourteen years 
 before the death of Samuel Johnson. His mother 
 and father died during his childhood, and he was 
 educated at the charge of his uncles, who sent him 
 first to Hawkshead Grammar School, and then, at 
 the age of seventeen, to St. John's College, Cam- 
 bridge. While he was at the University the 
 
/ 
 
 20 WORDSWORTH 
 
 French Revolution broke out, without at first 
 attracting much of his interest or sympathy. 
 But two visits to France, of which the first 
 fell during the Summer Vacation of 17 90, the 
 second, and longer, after the completion of his 
 course at Cambridge, drew him by degrees into the 
 vortex of French politics. He was hastily recalled 
 to England by his guardians in December 1792, 
 and thereafter he drifted, or seemed to drift, 
 without a practical plan for his life or his liveli- 
 hood, labouring heavily in a dark sea of thought 
 and passion. Some of his tentative juvenile 
 verse was published by him at the beginning of 
 1793 in two small volumes, entitled An Evening 
 Walk and 'Descriptive Sketches, and with their 
 publication Wordsworth put behind him the fluent 
 imitations of his boyhood. It is characteristic of 
 the profundity and tenacity of his nature that he 
 did not allow himself to be driven by the stress of 
 circumstances into a profession, and that he would 
 seek no escape from the miserable thoughts that 
 haunted him until he could wrestle with them and 
 defeat them on their own ground. Events in 
 France were going from bad to worse, all the evil 
 elements of human nature seemed triumphant, and 
 the high morning hopes of those who had sought 
 the happiness and the welfare of mankind had 
 given victims to hate, dupes to fraud, and subjects 
 to tyranny. Yet in the face of this mockery the 
 
CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION 21 
 
 promulgators of moral maxims were busy vending 
 their old wares, and Wordsworth, sick at heart 
 and almost desperate, clung to his resolve to recog- 
 nise no wisdom and no morality that left him 
 without light in these dark places. 
 
 The practical problem of a livelihood was the 
 first to be solved. By the bequest of ^^ 900 which 
 came to him in 1795 from Raisley Calvert, 
 he was put beyond the reach of penury, and 
 the frugal housekeeping of himself and his sister 
 was supplied for some seven or eight years. 
 Thus, during the crucial period of his poetic 
 production, Wordsworth, like Coleridge, Shelley, 
 Tennyson, Browning, and most other poets who 
 have won to fame, was free from the necessity of 
 earning money. He settled at Racedown in 
 Dorsetshire, where he wrote the Borderers, his 
 single dramatic work ; where also he worked out 
 his deliverance from the long nightmare of doubt 
 and horror that had oppressed his spirit. It was 
 by no exploit of the reasoning powers that the 
 deliverance came, but by casting back among the 
 calm and deep memories of his childhood, and by 
 throwing himself out into the simple daily life of 
 the people around him. The grisly drama that 
 was playing itself over and over again in his 
 imagination, the drama of unjust tribunals and 
 dungeons, and implements of death, and the 
 laughter of mad crowds, was blown upon and 
 
22 WORDSWORTH 
 
 dissolved by a breath from the purer world and 
 saner life that he had known and still recognised 
 around him, so that nature and humanity were 
 raised up to testify against their own aberrations. 
 The world of eternal law, of custom, order, 
 mutual service, and affectionate intercourse 
 reasserted itself against the carnival of fever and 
 passion that had run its race in France, and the 
 perspective was changed; the noises of laughter 
 and cursing were swallowed up in the quiet of the 
 fields and the great spaces of the sky. 
 
 This hard-won victory was the crisis of Words- 
 ^worth's life. From this the best powe rsof his 
 poetry were derived ; the depth of consolation, 
 the austere tenderness, and the strength as of iron 
 that are felt in his greatest works came to him 
 from the same source in experience. Had he 
 lulled himself with opiates, or raised a panic- 
 stricken optimistic twitter of protest against the 
 awful facts that he was called upon to reckon 
 with, he would never have attained to his 
 unique position or fulfilled his allotted ministry 
 as a poet. 
 
 He was helped by his sister Dorothy, who was 
 of a gender and more buoyant disposition, and of 
 quicker and more agile perceptions than himself, 
 and by his friend Coleridge, that 
 
 capacious soul 
 Placed on this earth to love and understand. 
 
CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION 23 
 
 At Racedown and in the Quantocks in Somerset- 
 shire the three formed a kind of poetic fraternity. 
 To his sister, who encouraged him to his task and 
 brought him much material already more than half 
 adapted to the uses of poetry, Wordsworth has 
 fully and repeatedly expressed his sense of debt • — 
 
 Mine eyes did ne'er 
 Fix on a lovely object, nor my mind 
 Take, pleasure in the midst of happy thoughts, 
 But either She whom now I have, who now 
 Divides with me this loved abode, was there. 
 Or not far off. Where'er my footsteps turned. 
 Her voice was like a hidden Bird that sang, 
 The thought of her was like a flash of light. 
 Or an unseen companionship, a breath 
 Of fragrance independent of the wind. 
 
 Concerning his debt to Coleridge he is less 
 explicit; yet the debt was great, though it was 
 more than paid in kind. Much of the best work 
 of either poet took its origin from the companion- 
 ship of 1797 and 1798. Christabel, the Ancient 
 Mariner, the Recluse, Peter Bell, were schemed 
 and partly executed in those years, and, more 
 important still, the pieces included with The Ancient 
 Mariner in the volume of Lyrical Ballads (1798). 
 Talking much together, and always of poetry 
 and its appanages, the two poets evolved a kind 
 of theory of their art, which they afterwards 
 developed on very divergent lines, and gave to the 
 world in the preface to the second edition of the 
 
24 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Lyrical Ballads (1801) and in the Biographia 
 Literaria (18 17). After a brief period of travel 
 in Germany the Words worths, in 1799, settled 
 for life in the Lake country. Wordsworth's 
 marriage in 1802, and the death of his brother 
 John at sea in 1805, are the chief events of their 
 earlier years there. "In 1 8 1 3," says Wordsworth, 
 " we came to Rydal Mount, where we have since 
 lived with no further sorrow till 1836, when my 
 sister became a confirmed invalid and our sister 
 Sarah Hutchinson died." His life, as the years 
 went by, was limited more and more to his 
 immediate family circle, and his thoughts were 
 almost wholly preoccupied with his poetic work. 
 He had no intimate friends in these later years 
 save those who clung to him as disciples. His 
 lonely and intense brooding had once been fertilised, 
 ! beneath indulgent skies, by intercourse with the 
 / minds of others ; but now he toiled on single- 
 J handed, and jealously gleaned the last ears of a 
 thrice-reaped harvest. He lived till 1850 
 
 To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost 
 That blamed the living man. 
 
 The significance and value of his biography for 
 the appreciation of his poetry is therefore limited" 
 to certain periods and certain incidents of his life. 
 In the following attempt at criticism it will be 
 enough to take account of the influences of his 
 

 CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION 25 
 
 boyhood, of the mental crisis that he suffered 
 during the events of the French Revolution, of 
 the new poetry and the new theory of poetry that 
 were born from the struggle, and of his relations 
 to the only two persons who can claim any 
 appreciable share in his poetic development, his 
 sister, and his friend. 
 
 The story of Wordsworth's boyhood in the 
 Lakes, so fully narrated by himself, is likely to be 
 misread by those who forget that in the Prelude 
 those long past events were all interpreted by the 
 poet in the light of his later history. It was the 
 belief, almost the discovery, of Wordsworth, that 
 the memory, if it be habitually consvdted, will not 
 only supply a poet with his most valuable materials, 
 but wiU also do for him the best part of his work. 
 His famous definition of poetry is based on the' 
 workings of his own mind. "Poetry takes its'S 
 origin," he says, " in emotion recollected in tran- ^ 
 quillity ; the emotion is contemplated till, by a 
 species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually dis- 
 appears, and an emotion, kindred to that which " 
 was before the subject of contemplation, is gradu- ? 
 ally produced, and does itself actually exist in the 
 mind." As an account of the genesis of his own 
 poetry this is almost exhaustive. He indulged his 
 memory with long periods of reverie, set it to 
 travel to and fro among the past experiences of his \ 
 
26 WORDSWORTH 
 
 life, and loved solitude and indolence chiefly 
 because during the lulls of social intercourse and 
 intellectual labour lost impressions were recaptured. 
 In the "long barren silence" that he loved he 
 would sit watching his mind for the submerged 
 feelings and images that of their own accord 
 would rise and gleam for a moment at the surface. 
 His own function, as it seemed to him, was 
 simply that of a still and patient observer and 
 chronicler : — 
 
 Nor is it I who play the part, 
 
 But a shy spirit in my heart, 
 
 That comes and goes — will sometimes leap 
 
 From hiding-places ten years deep ; 
 
 Or haunts me with familiar face, 
 
 Returning, like a ghost unlaid. 
 
 Until the debt I owe be paid. 
 
 He had acquired an art like that of the naturalist, 
 the art of remaining perfectly motionless until the 
 wild and timid creatures of his mind came about 
 him. A large part of his poetry is taken up with 
 these resuscitated feelings. He cherished them 
 and pondered over them, comparing them with 
 the kindred but different emotions that accompanied 
 their revival. In his inner life they count for so 
 much, that when he meets with some new vivid 
 and joyful experience his mind naturally springs 
 forward to anticipate the time when this, too, shaU 
 be added to the treasures of memory. 
 
CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION 27 
 
 Nor was it only the keen and deep emotions of 
 the past that thus came to have a poetic value. 
 The Intensity of the life of his senses in his earlier 
 days, if it were not insisted on by himself, would be 
 sufficiently witnessed by the oddities and trivialities 
 that were sometimes presented to him by his 
 memory, and reverently accepted. The remark 
 has often been made, in one shape or another, that 
 in his own collection of thoughts, or reminiscences, 
 or poems, Wordsworth did not know a gem from 
 a pebble. It is true ; or rather, since some of the 
 best gems of his finding had been kicked aside as 
 worthless by previous seekers, he had learned to 
 distrust the usual methods of distinction, and would 
 never give a judgment against a pebble, especially 
 if it was his own property. A sincere account of 
 a real experience was never valueless in his eyes. 
 Hence his conversation and his writing ignored the 
 accepted distinctions between the trivial and the 
 profound, between general topics and those that 
 are slighted because their interest is said to be 
 purely personal. Sir Henry Taylor, who met him 
 in London in 1835, describes his conversation: 
 " He keeps tumbling out the highest and deepest 
 thoughts that the mind of man can reach, in a 
 stream of discourse which is so oddly broken by 
 the little hitches and interruptions of common life^ 
 that we admire and laugh at him by turns." The 
 notes dictated by the poet to Miss Fenwick have 
 
28 WORDSWORTH 
 
 the same character. His note on the White Doe 
 of Ryktone, beside some of the most luminous 
 things ever said on the methods of his own poetry, 
 records how he rubbed the skin off his heel by- 
 wearing too tight a shoe and how he sought and 
 obtained relief. And this insensibility to vulgar 
 contrasts, this whole-hearted preoccupation with 
 his own experiences, this absolute candour and 
 complete freedom from critical self-consciousness, 
 or, to put it otherwise, this lack of humour and 
 this almost superstitious egotism, might be easily 
 and abundantly illustrated from his poems. 
 
 All memories, then, had either an inherent or a 
 potential value for Wordsworth ; and the Prelude 
 is one long exercise of memory, reaching back over 
 the gulf that separated him, in the first flush of his 
 power and maturity, from his younger self. He 
 is throughout punctiliously careful not to confuse 
 his present with his former emotions. He knows 
 , (that the light in which he sees his early days is a 
 ;>'' flight half reflected on them, but his readers seldom 
 I follow him carefully enough to make the distinction. 
 They miss the clearest of his guidance in their 
 search for the marvellous boy of popular biography. 
 Of all great men Wordsworth was the furthest 
 in childhood from resembling the compact and 
 talented little gentleman that they seek. The 
 Prelude is the story of the process whereby, 
 out of the ordinary vague stuff of human nature, 
 
CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION 29 
 
 under the stress of fate, there was moulded a poet. 
 It was the best of clay, full of kindly qualities, very 
 tenacious of the forms impressed on it, but some- 
 thing like it is plentiful enough in any healthy 
 human society. A poet — the lesson is stiU Words- 
 worth's own — is to be had for the making ; and the 
 secret of the making, if ever it should be divined, 
 would be found, according to his conception of it, 
 exactly at that point where the free and vigorous 
 life of sense and thought in any young creature is, 
 by some predestined accident or series of accidents, 
 arrested, surprised, checked, challenged, and 
 turned in and back upon itself. Then for the 
 first time the soul makes an inventory of its 
 wealth, and discovers that it has great possessions, 
 that it has been a traveller in fairyland, and holds 
 the clue to that mystery. With the discovery 
 the period of acquisition closes, or at least the 
 incomings thenceforward are slower, less authentic, 
 more liable to sophistication, and the newly 
 awakened poet is left to make the best of what 
 he has saved from the days when, all unwittingly, 
 he enjoyed a royal revenue. 
 
 There was nothing Wordsworthlan, so to say, 
 about the boy Wordsworth. Among the hills 
 and valleys of his native place he led a healthy 
 life of sport and adventure, driven by the goad 
 that stirs young animal nature into wild activity. 
 He took birds' nests — for the eggs ; hired and 
 
30 WORDSWORTH 
 
 rode horses, when the accumulations of his pocket- 
 money warranted the unusual expense — for the 
 sport, and read books — for the story. Some- 
 thing wilful and passionate he was, with a strong 
 sense, as he remarks in the note on his most 
 famous ode, of the indomitableness of the spirit 
 within him. But these very qualities saved him, 
 both at Hawkshead and at Cambridge, from the 
 tyranny of routine and the dreary artificiality of 
 educational devices, and left his development to the 
 charge of instinct. And no doubt the tasks and 
 punishments of a school perform a useful func- 
 tion if they curb the self-indulgence of bad poets, 
 leaving the good, who are almost always wilful, to 
 follow their untamed impulses 
 
 His reading, both at school and college, was 
 large in amount, and was of that most profitable 
 kind which is called desultory. He read fairy 
 stories, the Arabian Nights, Fielding's novels, Don 
 Quixote, Gil Bias, and fell in love with Swift, 
 whose grave, ironic romancing, by a singular 
 coincidence, harmonises exactly with the serious 
 make-believe of a child. Of the authors to whom 
 he was more formally introduced at school he 
 hardly makes mention. His interests were divided 
 between the sports of his open-air life and the 
 imaginative world that he found in the books of 
 his pastime, which he read not philosophically, but 
 in good faith and complete self-abandonment. In 
 
CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION 31 
 
 this widening of the world of experience and this 
 loosening of the bonds of reality he found, whenP 
 he looked back upon it, the chief gain of his early 
 reading. We have no record of his maturer and 
 more critical verdict upon Tom Jones and Sanchcy 
 Panza, for in his later years Wordsworth read 
 little or nothing. The best of his poetic impulse 
 had come to him from Nature through the gates of 
 the senses, and to the end he is found knocking at 
 the closed portals through which he had once seen 
 Paradise. There was loss in this, but perhaps it 
 was inevitable. The business of supervising his 
 son's Latin studies at school furnished him with 
 one of his rare literary inspirations, but did not 
 permanently modify his poetic method. He had 
 tasted the spirit of poetry at its pure mountain 
 source, and would no doubt have felt it treason to 
 fall back for good upon any second-hand expedient. 
 Of the amassing of knowledge and the perfecting 
 of craftsmanship he had always thought lightly ; so 
 that from these exercises of the mind, which abide 
 and progress when the hey-day is over in the 
 blood and the senses are dulled by use, he derived 
 no consolation in his old age. He had under- 
 valued Art, and Art, which is long, took its slow 
 revenge upon him. But Nature, who " never did 
 betray the heart that loved her," stayed near him 
 to the end. 
 
 For his education in the technical accomplish- 
 
 \ 
 
32 WORDSWORTH 
 
 ment of verse Wordsworth was indebted chiefly 
 to his earlier years. When his calling had come 
 to him, he thought disparagingly, even suspici- 
 ously, of his early delight in metre and music and 
 the intricacies of poetic workmanship. Yet his 
 testimony to the attraction that these things had 
 for him is clear and explicit. Speaking of his 
 
 tenth year. 
 
 My mind (he says). 
 With conscious pleasure opened to the charm 
 Of words in tuneful order, found them sweet 
 For their own sakes, a passion, and a power j 
 And phrases pleased me, chosen for delight. 
 For pomp, or love. 
 
 Yet this first love, when he looked back upon 
 it, seemed to him to have been fraught with 
 danger. " I always feel some apprehension," he 
 wrote, later in life, to Edward Moxon, "for 
 the destiny of those who in youth addict them- 
 selves to the composition of verse." The " trade 
 in classic niceties " misled him, he says, from the 
 true standards of natural speech and natural 
 feeling, and encouraged " a wilfulness of fancy and 
 conceit " at the expense of the purer imagination. 
 So too, for a time, he judged the beauty of Nature 
 by the laws of the picturesque — 
 
 Even in pleasure pleased 
 Unworthily, disliking here, and there 
 Liking, by rules of mimic art transferred 
 To things above all art. 
 
CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION 33 
 
 The conclusion of the whole matter is stated in 
 those lines towards the end of the Prelude where 
 the poet breaks out in protest against the vanity 
 of verbal education, and declares himself 
 
 convinced at heart 
 How little those formalities, to which 
 With overweening trust alone we give 
 The name of Education, have to do 
 With real feeling and just sense ; how vain 
 A correspondence with the talking world 
 Proves to the most. 
 
 When he was more than seventy years old 
 he was impelled, he says, " by the disgusting 
 frequency with which the word artistical, imported 
 with other impertinences from the Germans, is 
 employed by writers of the present day," to 
 compose the sonnet beginning 
 
 A Poet ! — He hath put his heart to school ; 
 
 so that the old prophet continued impenitent to 
 the end. 
 
 Protests like this last, directed against the 
 weary cant of technical criticism, • have, of course, 
 been uttered by many writers ; among others by 
 Goethe. But it is not easy to match this case of 
 a great poet who pays scant respect to the formal 
 aspects of his craft, ahd who distrusts his own 
 boyhood because it delighted in melody and choice 
 diction and gorgeous phrasing. Wordsworth, it 
 
34 WORDSWORTH 
 
 cannot be too early stated, was a pure spiritualist 
 in poetry, and disliked poetic ritual, not for itself, 
 but for its power to overlay and endanger the 
 simple and delicate processes of the soul. 
 
 The consequences of his resolute spiritualism 
 are seen in his poetic history. Poetry is "the 
 breath and finer spirit of all knowledge," but it is 
 blown through instruments of human devising, 
 complex and various. Wordsworth of course 
 knew this ; more than once, in his letters, he 
 expresses his conviction that " poetry is infinitely 
 more of an art than the world is disposed to 
 believe." But when his message came to him, and 
 his eyes were opened upon a new heaven and a 
 new earth, the instruments that he had learned to 
 handle in his childhood seemed to him to be feeble 
 and false. The music of the spheres asked for a 
 larger, simpler expression, and the poet set himself 
 to devise it. Here and there he succeeds, and 
 finds his own incomparable, bleak, noble style. 
 But the memories and admirations and habits of 
 lis childhood reasserted themselves, so that his 
 style and his thought were never thoroughly 
 adapted to each other ; he never had a sure touch 
 with language. In many passages of his poetry, 
 some of them among the most admired, he is a 
 pensioner upon the art of others, and even in the 
 £«f arj-;o«~the~ sentimenti of Wordsworth often 
 come clothed, against the doctrine of Wordsworth, 
 
CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION 35 
 
 in the phrase and manner of Shakespeare. If these 
 passages were indeed the best of his gifts to English 
 poetry, this little treatise would be idle. His 
 theory of poetic diction has been attacked as an 
 inadequate explanation of his own poetry. So far 
 as that attack is directed only to compelling ad- 
 miration for kinds of poetic expression other than 
 Wordsworth's best, it is completely successful. 
 No one can deny that the much -quoted stanza 
 from the Affliction of Margaret is fine poetry : — 
 
 Perhaps some dungeon hears thee groan, 
 Maimed, mangled by inhuman men ; 
 Or thou upon a desert thrown 
 Inheritest the lion's den ; 
 Or hast been summoned to the deep. 
 Thou, thou and all thy mates, to keep 
 An incommunicable sleep. 
 
 But even the sonorous roll and pomp of that 
 verse cannot overwhelm the purer and more 
 wonderful beauty of the verse that follows later in 
 the same poem, where Wordsworth's theory is 
 illustrated in the best of his own practice : — 
 
 My apprehensions come in crowds ; 
 I dread the rustling of the grass ; 
 The very shadows of the clouds 
 Have power to shake me as they pass : 
 I question things and do not find 
 One that will answer to my mind ; 
 And all the world appears unkind. 
 
I 
 
 36 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Poetry like this is not to be produced volumin- 
 ously in a single lifetime, and although he clung 
 stubbornly to his old doctrine, in his later work he 
 fell back more and more on the poetic and rhetori- 
 cal devices that had charmed his boyhood. 
 
 The vastly more important education of his 
 feelings, passions, and receptive powers was (he 
 lived to teach it) the work of Nature. Behind and 
 around the activities of his boyhood there was 
 spread the solemn theatre of Nature — " a temperate 
 show of objects that endure." The work of 
 Wordsworth in poetry might be compared, not 
 unjustly, with the kindred art of Corot and MiUet 
 and the modern school of French painters. He 
 brought the background of human life into true 
 and vital relation with the smaller interests and 
 
 ^incidents that monopolise most men's attention. 
 He emancipated the eye from the utilitarian pre- 
 ferences that have been imposed on it by the 
 necessities of the struggle for life, whereby things 
 in motion, things near, things dangerous, things 
 whose behaviour cannot be certainly predicted, are 
 allowed to annul all consideration of the great 
 visions and presences which stand around, and 
 
 \ watch, and judge. He fixed his attention on the 
 wide spaces of earth and sky, and against that calm 
 unresting expanse he learned to see men as trees 
 walking. And although his intercourse with 
 beauty old as creation was at first almost uncon- 
 
CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION \^ 37 
 
 scious, he attributed a chief influence over the 
 growth of his genius to the work of these 
 ministering powers. There are many passages of 
 poetic rapture in the Prelude where the debt is 
 acknowledged, and some prosaic passages, more 
 useful for the present purpose, where the doctrine 
 
 is stated : — 
 
 Attention springs, 
 And comprehensiveness and memory flow 
 From early converse with the works of God 
 Among all regions ; chiefly where appear i 
 Most obviously simplicity and power. 
 
 It is not that the works of God among cities and 
 
 crowded communities are less worthy of study ; 
 
 but they are more difficult to read. They too will 
 
 come to be seen in the same clear and large light 
 
 by him whose eye has been trained in the quiet 
 
 places of Nature — 
 
 Who looks 
 In steadiness, who hath among least things 
 An undersense of greatest ; sees the parts 
 As parts, but with a feeling of the whole. 
 
 To be surrounded in childhood by the larger 
 aspects of Nature, to have them visible, a daily 
 sight, is in itself, according to Wordsworth, the 
 greater part of education. The eagernesses and 
 impulses of his own boyish life he judged 
 
 Not vain 
 Nor profitless, if haply they impressed 
 Collateral objects and appearances. 
 
38 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Albeit lifeless then, and doomed to sleep 
 Until maturer seasons called them forth 
 To impregnate and elevate the mind. 
 
 The very excitement which, in early life, absorbs 
 the powers of the mind is found, long after it has 
 passed away, to have acted as a mnemonic ; just 
 as any acute physical pain suffered amidst beautiful 
 scenery often serves to stamp the image of that 
 beauty on the memory with singular vividness and 
 persistence, when the pain itself has become an 
 indifferent and purely intellectual reminiscence. 
 The flogging of boys, as a means of impressing on 
 them the rules of the Latin grammar, has been 
 advocated on the same grounds by psychologists 
 of time past. They were right in attributing an 
 impressive virtue to a flogging, though there seems 
 to be no guarantee that the rules of the Latin 
 grammar are what will be impressed. Words- 
 worth, who, in his vocation as a poet, made it his 
 business to investigate " the manner in which we 
 associate ideas in a state of excitement," never 
 ceased to be grateful to his teacher Nature for the 
 discipline that set his own hungers and fears and 
 wild impulses to flog him in his childhood, so that 
 the forms and images of the high, enduring things 
 that stood around him were branded into his mind 
 and heart for ever. 
 
 Both in the Prelude and in the Lines written a 
 Few Miles above Tintern Abbey he is careful to 
 
CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION 39 
 
 distinguish the several stages of his education by 
 Nature, and the several phases of his love for her. 
 During the first of these stages, he says, Nature was 
 
 But secondary to my own pursuits 
 And animal activities, and all 
 Their trivial pleasures. 
 
 These activities and pleasures by degrees lost their 
 charm, yet his love of Nature, for her own sake, at 
 the same time grew deep and intense : — 
 
 The props of my affections were removed. 
 And yet the building stood, as if sustained 
 By its own spirit ! All that I beheld 
 Was dear, and hence to finer influxes 
 The mind lay open to a more exact 
 And close communion. 
 
 This second phase of his love for Nature baffled 
 his own powers of description : — 
 
 I cannot paint 
 What then I was. The sounding cataract 
 Haunted me like a passion : the tall rock, 
 The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, 
 Their colours and their forms, were then to me 
 An appetite ; a feeling and a love. 
 That had no need of a remoter charm. 
 By thought supplied, or any interest 
 Unborrowed from the eye. 
 
 And it lasted, by his own account, until he was 
 more than two and twenty — that is to say, until the 
 fever of political thought and passion drove it out. 
 
40 WORDSWORTH 
 
 When the crisis was past, the love of Nature 
 returned to him, but shorn of its old despotism ; it 
 was subdued to a dominant scheme of thought, and 
 became fellow-inmate in his mind with the love of 
 man, and with a deep sense of the pathos of things. 
 The roots of Wordsworth's poetic mysticism 
 drew their life from this virgin passion. He 
 falters and apologises whenever he attempts to 
 describe it. Yet some passages in the Prelude 
 give help to those who can piece them out with 
 the memory of their own experiences. It was a 
 despotism of the senses that held sway over him, 
 a life of the senses so strong and full and exclusive 
 that all other emotions save the joy of the eye in 
 seeing, and of the ear in hearing, seemed dull and 
 irrelevant. The mere joy of seeing con tained all 
 .lhixigs_ in itself, without the te Hipng glnccpc ci^ppljpf^ 
 by comparison and thought. Like the religious 
 enthusiasts 6r~tEe East, Wordsworth sought in 
 fixed and passionate contemplation for admission 
 to the heart of things. And this method of 
 intuition, which became habitual to him in the 
 prime of life, took its origin in the self-sufficient 
 vitality of his youthful senses and perceptions : — 
 
 I roamed from hill to hill, from rock to rock. 
 Still craving combinations of new forms, 
 New pleasure, wider empire for the sight, 
 Proud of her own endowments, and rejoiced 
 To lay the inner faculties asleep. 
 
CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION 41 
 
 Nature herself — as he remarks in a passage 
 which breaks off suddenly in the midst of a 
 metaphysical argument — Nature herself employs 
 means to thwart this tyranny of the several 
 senses by setting each of them to counteract the 
 other, and by subduing each, in its highest develop- 
 ments, to the powers of the will and the inteUect. 
 His thraldom to the objects of sight, though it 
 seemed to spring from causes " inherent in the 
 creature," is lamented by Wordsworth as an 
 intoxication, an excess incident to youth. Women, 
 he says, escape it ; with them the heart governs 
 the eye, not the eye the heart ; and he tells of one 
 whom he knew (Mary Hutchinson, who became 
 
 his wife), how — 
 
 Wise as women are 
 When genial circumstance hath favoured them. 
 She welcomed what was given, and craved no more. 
 
 The same difference of character in the sexes is 
 noted by Chaucer in his tale of the Princess Canace — 
 
 She was ful mesurable, as wommen be; 
 
 and when the revellers were preparing to turn 
 night into day, she thought of the necessities of 
 the morrow, and took leave of her father to go 
 to rest. But this measurable dispesition, though 
 it is the soul of wisdom and sanity, is not the 
 begetter of poetry. If Wordsworth's transports of 
 alFection for the sights and sounds of Nature were. 
 
42 WORDSWORTH 
 
 as he says, not profound, they were strong enough 
 to survive the clash with thought, and to take on 
 new life in more fruitful and enduring forms. 
 
 So far as the tale of his early converse with 
 Nature can be disengaged from the reflection 
 and argument in which he swathes it, the im- 
 pression it makes is the same throughout. It is a 
 tale of a smothered fire, of fierce loves and wild 
 feasts of the senses celebrated in solitude, of 
 superstitious fears, and of joy so jealous of control 
 that it shuns all contact with thought. But the 
 malady of thought is an inevitable malady, and 
 there is no good immunity from it to be had by 
 shunning the infection. The escape from it is 
 only for those whose system it has permeated ; 
 ^hey alone may dare to hold it cheap. When 
 ^ordsworth depreciates the ardours and passions 
 of his youth, it is because, looking back on them, 
 he sees the peril of the course they have yet to 
 run, and vainly dreams of precautions that might 
 be taken to save them from the long disease that 
 1 lies in wait for them. But this is to wish them 
 i weaker, and it was by their strength that they 
 survived. When he became an apostle, with the 
 joy of life for his gospel, the experiences of his 
 I early unthinking days gave him matter for his 
 I most moving and heart-felt discourses. An earlier 
 ordination would have robbed him of half his 
 ,, message. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION : COLERIDGE 
 
 At a time when the study of literary influences, 
 the influence of nation on nation, of poet on poet, 
 of book on book, threatens to claim the whole 
 field of literary history, the case of Wordsworth 
 has a special interest. The rainbow of Roman- 
 ticism has been unweaved ; the imports of Roman- 
 ticism have been traced to the places of their 
 growth. One man read Shakespeare ; another 
 buried himself in Northern mythology ; a third, 
 weary of the monotony of his own good sense and 
 sound judgment, brought drugs and perfumes 
 from the East. A whole tribe of workers busied 
 themselves with the resuscitation of the ideas and 
 arts of the Middle Ages. And it cannot be denied 
 that the Middle Ages, misunderstood, in its own 
 way and for its own purposes, by the Eighteenth 
 Century, furnished the most picturesque part of 
 its outfit to the Romantic Revival. Of all 
 literary influences in the England of the close of 
 
 43 
 
44 WORDSWORTH 
 
 the century Percy's Reliques was incomparably the 
 most powerful. But the complex machinery of 
 loans, imports, bequests, letters of credit, and 
 orders of affiliation does not in the end explain 
 Romanticism. The compass of human expression 
 is limited ; the variations of human thought are, 
 after all, slight variations ; and an age that seeks 
 expression for its philosophy is always to be found 
 wisely foraging in the storehouse of the past. Its 
 philosophy, nevertheless, is its own, and, unless 
 it is no better than a foolish imitation, derives 
 from experience of life. One and the same 
 tendency of thought and feeling, resulting from 
 the pressure of a single age and civilisation on 
 the eternal motives of human nature, is mani- 
 fested in many minds at the same time ; and 
 then, and then only, does the search for expression 
 begin. 
 
 It is the interest of Wordsworth's career, 
 studied as an episode in literary history, that it 
 takes us at once to the root of the matter, and 
 shows us the genesis of poetry from its living 
 material, without literary intermediary. The in- 
 fluence of the Reliques, the reaction from the 
 " gaudy and inane phraseology " of the school of 
 Pope, though both are to be reckoned with, are 
 symptoms merely, indications of the natural 
 I affinities and differences of a poetry which sprang 
 neither from imitation nor from disgust. The 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 45 
 
 dominant passion of Wordsworth's life owed 
 nothing to books. There was for him no question 
 of the return to Nature ; he had never deserted 
 her. There was a question, nevertheless, akin to ' 
 this, suggested by the events of his own time, 
 which he wrestled with and solved. The horrors 
 of the French Revolution cast a doubt on the 
 legitimacy of his youthful joys and discoloured 
 his view of human nature. When he regained hisj 
 delight in nature and his faith in man, and taught 
 that delight and that faith to others, it was a 
 triumph for the deepest of the feelings that had 
 given strength and vogue to the doctrine of 
 Rousseau, the father of the literary Romantics. 
 So it is that Wordsworth's poetic career is a history 
 of Romanticism in epitome. The country-bred 
 youth was marked by fate to be the champion of 
 the ideas that turned the current of European 
 thought ; and while those ideas were struggling 
 darkly and confusedly in the arena of the Revolu- 
 tion, soiled with dust and blood, he was winning 
 for them a pure and lasting victory elsewhere. 
 His simple fidelity to his memories and his severe 
 devotion to truth earned him his success where 
 others, more sumptuously equipped, had been 
 betrayed by the deceits of the heart. If Rousseau 
 had survived to witness the Revolution, would he 
 have kept the kernel of his faith ; or would he 
 rather have been found, blinded by clouds of vanity 
 
46 WORDSWORTH 
 
 and sentiment, urging on the murderous fury of 
 the mob ? 
 
 ' The Revolution, in its earlier phases, involved 
 no revolution in Wordsworth's mental life. In 
 common with a large number of his countrymen, he 
 accepted it gladly, and expected for its principles a 
 ' peaceful and beneficent triumph. The societies 
 with which he had been most familiar in his youth 
 were, as he explains, essentially democratic in their 
 basis. Among the dalesmen of Cumberland there 
 reigned an absolute equality. The sole distin- 
 guished individual of each of these valley com- 
 munities was their minister, who, except on the 
 Sabbath day, differed not at all in clothing or in 
 manner of life from themselves. "Everything 
 else, person and possession, exhibited a perfect 
 equality, a community of shepherds and agricul- 
 turists, proprietors, for the most part, of the lands 
 
 , which they occupied and cultivated." At Cam- 
 bridge, again, he found that strong infusion of 
 democratic principles which from the first has been 
 the mark of university life — 
 
 All stood thus far 
 Upon equal ground ; that we were brothers all 
 In honour, as in one community, 
 Scholars and gentlemen. 
 
 Political problems were almost indifferent to 
 him ; they seemed cold and theoretic ; and history 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 47 
 
 was valued only as another form of fiction, a 
 
 collection of tales that 
 
 made the heart 
 Beat high, and filled the fancy with fair forms. 
 
 Even after his first visit to France his attitude was 
 little changed. The walking tour in Switzerland 
 that he adventured with his friend Robert Jones 
 took him on foot through France, going and 
 returning. When he saw the Brabant armies 
 making ready for war, he says, 
 
 I looked upon these things \ 
 
 As from a distance ; heard, and saw, and felt, y 
 
 Was touched, but with no intimate concern. / 
 
 The joy of life and the sure and easy faith in a 
 glorious outcome for the new spirit of fraternity 
 possessed him, to the exclusion of refiection. 
 Kings had never impressed his imagination, and 
 he was willing to do without them. 
 
 The record of this first visit to France supplies 
 an interesting comment on the usual conception of 
 Wordsworth's character. He was naturally, he 1 
 says, of a violent, impulsive, and passionate dis- | 
 position. But to most of those who make ac- 
 quaintance with him he is known as the solitary of 
 the Lakes, the embodiment of mild wisdom and 
 gentle precept, who was to be seen day by day 
 wandering on the public roads muttering to himself. 
 Many of his critics find in him too little of those 
 
r 
 
 48 WORDSWORTH 
 
 qualities of the beast of prey which seem essential to 
 a full manhood, too much of the patient agrarian 
 animal, grazing and ruminating. His own com- 
 parison between the nightingale and the stock-dove 
 lends itself to this conception. The fierce and 
 tumultuous song of the nightingale appeals to him 
 less than the homely tale of the dove : — 
 
 He cooed, and cooed ; 
 And somewhat pensively he wooed : 
 He sang of love, with quiet blending. 
 Slow to begin, and never ending ; 
 Of serious faith, and inward glee ; 
 That was the song — the song for me ! 
 
 This Studied quietness and self-control were not 
 habitual with him from the first. The enthusiasm 
 of his younger heart in greeting the Revolution 
 was like the aching joys and dizzy raptures that 
 I filled him in the presence of Nature. Both in the 
 ^history recorded in the Prelude and in the account 
 iven in the Excursion of how the Solitary was 
 'awakened from the despondency of his bereave- 
 /ment there is evidence enough of the buoyancy 
 and fervour of his early years. When he and 
 his friend first landed in France the national re- 
 joicings, 
 
 Songs, garlands, mirth. 
 Banners, and happy faces, far and nigh, 
 
 captured all his ardour for the cause : — 
 
 I 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 49 
 
 Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 
 But to be young was very Heaven ! O times 
 In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways 
 Of custom, law, and statute took at once 
 The attraction of a country in romance ! 
 
 The pair of romantic adventurers was ready to 
 share in all the festivity of the time. At Lyons 
 they fell in with a company of delegates returning 
 from Paris, and sailed with them down the Rhone. 
 
 In this proud company 
 We landed — took with them our evening meal. 
 Guests welcome almost as the angels were 
 To Abraham of old. The supper done, 
 With flowing cups elate and happy thoughts 
 We rose at signal given, and formed a ring. 
 And, hand in hand, danced round and round the board ; 
 All hearts were open, every tongue was loud 
 With amity and glee ; . . . 
 And round and round the board we danced again. 
 
 Those who knew him only when his youth was 
 past were never privileged to hear Wordsworth 
 boisterous with wine and mirth, or to see him 
 keeping revel by dancing round and round the 
 supper table. Perhaps, twenty-five years later, 
 the memory of this gleeful scene helped him to his 
 spirited defence of the convivial exaltation of Tam 
 o' Shanter, as drawn by Burns. " Permit me to 
 remind you," he says in his Letter to a Friend of 
 Robert Burns, " that it is the privilege of poetic 
 genius to catch, under certain restrictions, of which, 
 
 E 
 
50 WORDSWORTH 
 
 perhaps, at the time of its being exerted it is but 
 
 dimly conscious, a spirit of pleasure wherever it 
 
 can be found — in the walks of nature and in the 
 
 business of men. The poet, trusting to primary 
 
 instincts, luxuriates among the felicities of love 
 
 and wine, and is enraptured while he describes the 
 
 fairer aspects of war ; nor does he shrink from the 
 
 company of the passion of love though immoderate 
 
 — from convivial pleasure though intemperate 
 
 — nor from the presence of war though savage, and 
 
 recognised as the handmaid of desolation," In 
 
 society as well as in nature Wordsworth had 
 
 learned the secret of whole-hearted pleasure ; and 
 
 when he came to theory he boldly insisted, in spite 
 
 of a didactic age, on the single necessity laid on 
 
 every poet, the necessity of giving pleasure. For 
 
 himself — and he never was tired of telling it — he 
 
 found that 
 
 Pleasure is spread through the earth 
 In stray gifts, to be claimed by whoever shall find ; 
 
 and his own zest was so keen that his youth, it 
 might plausibly be said, burned itself out prema- 
 turely, and delivered him over to a prolonged, 
 majestic middle age. 
 
 From November 1791 onward Wordsworth 
 was in France again for more than a year. He 
 held introductions to aristocratic society, but, 
 growing weary of a conversation that busied itself 
 with anything rather than the living interests of 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 51 
 
 the day, he soon sought the acquaintance of the 
 patriots. Now at last he came to close quarters 
 with the suffering that everywhere underlay the 
 Revolution, and with the thoughts and designs oi 
 its friends. He formed a close friendship with , 
 Michael Beaupuis, an officer, nobly born, some 
 fifteen years his senior, whose tenderness, meek- 
 ness, gallantry, and utter devotion to the cause of 
 the people are celebrated in glowing language 
 in the Prelude. With Beaupuis he spent the early 
 summer months of 1792, on the banks of the 
 Loire. They talked of many things ; of history 
 and the heroes of the ancient states, of philosophy 
 and the regeneration of the people. In the ever- 
 present consciousness that Beaupuis was pledged to 
 serve the national cause with his life, Wordsworth 
 felt that these questions had passed out of the 
 domain of theory, that politics had suddenly 
 become real and all-important. The miseries of 
 the old order were brought home to him in like 
 fashion. He must tell it in his own words : — 
 
 When we chanced 
 One day to meet a hunger-bitten girl. 
 Who crept along fitting her languid gait 
 Unto a heifer's motion, by a cord 
 Tied to her arm, and picking thus from the lane 
 Its sustenance, while the girl with pallid hands 
 Was busy knitting in a heartless mood 
 Of solitude, and at the sight my friend 
 In agitation said, " 'Tis against that 
 
52 WORDSWORTH 
 
 That we are fighting," I with him believed 
 That a benignant spirit was abroad 
 Which might not be withstood, that poverty- 
 Abject as this would in a little time 
 Be found no more, that we should see the earth 
 Unthwarted in her wish to recompense 
 The meek, the lowly, patient child of toil, 
 All institutes for ever blotted out 
 That legalised exclusion, empty pomp 
 Abolished, sensual state and cruel power. 
 Whether by edict of the one or few ; 
 And finally, as sum and crown of all, 
 Should see the people having a strong hand 
 In framing their own laws ; whence better days 
 To all mankind. 
 
 Wordsworth was not qviick at seizing on occa- 
 sions for sentiment. The inner life of his thought 
 and emotion was protected by a natural rampart of 
 reserve and self - absorption from the lighter 
 intrusions of pity and sympathy. He could look 
 
 Ion the seething life of London with a glazed 
 philosophic eye, and find in that confused theatre 
 of pleasure and pain no more than the tumbling 
 of so many marionettes. Before it could touch 
 .^him near, an experience had to be simple and 
 ^isolated. But when once a scene or attitude of 
 human life caught his attention and wakened his 
 ' pity, the impression was deep and lasting. The 
 picture haunted him when his eyes were shut; 
 the drama possessed his heart and brain, and 
 enacted itself over and over again with labour and 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 53 
 
 sufFering. He could not put it behind him 
 without the promise of a satisfactory solution. 
 So when he saw the girl with the heifer in the lane 
 he clutched the more eagerly at the Revolutionary 
 creed. He believed that a benignant spirit was 
 abroad ; and the September massacres were the 
 comment of destiny on that belief. He expected 
 to see the power of the one or few abolished ; and 
 Napoleon arose to mock his expectations. He 
 believed that in a little time the extreme of 
 poverty woiald be found no more ; and some ten 
 years later he met the leech-gatherer at Grasmere. 
 He had far to travel in those ten years ; from the 
 fallacious vanities of the reformer and the large, 
 easy hopes of the philanthropist to the humility 
 of the mind that was to seek comfort for itself 
 from the old man on the moor. The length of 
 the journey is a measure of Wordsworth's spiritual 
 progress ; in that later meeting he no longer 
 indulges himself with large dreams of benefaction ; 
 humanity has risen in his esteem, and has become 
 his teacher and consoler : — 
 
 I could have laughed myself to scorn to find 
 
 In that decrepit man so firm a mind. 
 
 " God," said I, " be my help and stay secure ; 
 
 I'll think of the leech-gatherer on the lonely moor ! " 
 
 In the meantime, after the September massacres, 
 he was back in Paris alone, wandering about the 
 
54 WORDSWORTH 
 
 city, imagining the furious scenes that had filled it 
 so lately, studying in his attic-room, and agitating 
 his mind so incessantly that his troubled dreams 
 gained the force of hallucinations. He was about 
 to seek an issue for his long vicarious sufferings by 
 allying himself definitely with one of the Revolu- 
 tionary parties when his recall came, and he 
 returned unwillingly to London, there to continue 
 / to brood over the unfolding tragedy as a passive 
 spectator. When he looked back, in after years, 
 on these events he recognised that, had he been 
 left to his own devices, he must have been drawn 
 into the rapids : — 
 
 Doubtless, I should have then made common cause 
 With some who perished ; haply perished too, 
 A poor mistaken and bewildered offering, — 
 Should to the breast of Nature have gone back. 
 With all my resolutions, all my hopes, 
 A Poet only to myself. 
 
 The timely and decisive mandate of his 
 guardians saved him, if not from an early death, 
 at least from committing himself to a programme. 
 
 ' The consequence was that_frQm firsts to last he 
 watcHed the Rev olution with other e yes than those 
 
 ,^<#a p^TtisanT He was forbidden to act, but he 
 saw ^n3~sufFered the more. It was while these 
 long years of painful thought still lay heavy 
 on his spirit that he wrote these lines in the 
 Borderers — 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 55 
 
 Action is transitory — a step, a blow, \ , 
 
 The motion of a muscle — this way or that — ) ^ 
 
 'Tis done, and in the after-vacancy 
 
 We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed : 
 
 Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark, 
 
 And shares the nature of infinity. 
 
 A great crisis in human afFairs usually closes the 
 education of those who bear a part in it. They, 
 make their choice by the best of their lights, and 
 then, whether they win or lose, pride does the ' 
 rest. And this danger besets especially all , 
 democratic leaders. The people rarely has good 
 friends ; those who are readiest with their services 
 commonly settle down, after a hot fit of generous 
 impulse in youth, to befriend their own ideas and 
 to vindicate their own history. Devotion to the 
 people gives much freer play to a man's conceit 
 than devotion to a person can ever do. The 
 friend of the people often feels no reverence for 
 the objects of his affection ; he is arrogant, 
 opinionative, and amazingly slow to recognise in 
 them an intelligence and virtue equal to his own. 
 Accustomed as he is to speaking for his big vague 
 client, he drops out of the habit of considering 
 himself as a private person, and obliterates all 
 individual sincerity under a mass of statistics and 
 principles. Hence he loses touch with reality, 
 and leads in the end a purely artificial existence as 
 lieutenant to an abstraction, without the advantage 
 
56 WORDSWORTH 
 
 of the corrections that a flesh and blood master 
 might give. 
 
 r. Now Wordsworth loved the people almost as 
 others love persons, with the same admiration and 
 
 * reverential tenderness. His natural affections and 
 his strong instinctive appreciation of the things 
 that are deepest and most real in human nature 
 rescued him from the pitfalls of the politician. 
 His honour had not been irredeemably engaged to 
 a party or a line of action, his deepest concern was 
 
 ' still truth, and his enormous capacity for open-eyed 
 endurance enabled him to make of those years of 
 disaster and chaos a period of probation, a furnace 
 for the tempering of his new affections. 
 
 The furnace was fierce, and his pride struggled 
 long and hard. When Great Britain declared war 
 on the French Republic he suffered a shock, he 
 
 I says, that threw him out of the pale of love, and 
 soured and corrupted his feelings upwards to the 
 
 j source. When prayers for victory were offered 
 up in the churches he sat silent among the con- 
 gregation, and " fed on the day of vengeance yet 
 to come." And, worse than this, the foothold of 
 his sympathies on the other side was steadily being 
 undermined. The best blood of France had been 
 spilt on the scaffold, and among the victims were 
 many of the chiefs whom he admired and had 
 been willing to follow. The war for liberty was 
 changed by its own success into a war for con- 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 57 
 
 quest, and the French appeared as the oppressors 
 of humbler peoples. Yet stiU Wordsworth, angry 
 and stubborn, clung to his old tenets, as if they 
 were " the very being of the immortal soul." 
 
 The violence of the shock he suffered may be 
 judged from this, that now for a time he sought 
 refuge in the arid rationalism of the day, best 
 exemplified in England by the newly published 
 work of Willia m Jjodwin. The system that/ 
 makes the gymnastic Reason sole governor of 
 human life, and submits, or attempts to submit, to 
 its impartial control all social and personal rela- 
 tions and affections, was congenial to many barren, 
 dexterous little minds, who found in it, indeed, 
 the basis of their sympathy with the Revolution. 
 Wordsworth's sympathy with the Revolution had 
 a widely different origin, and it was only by stress 
 of weather, and from the dire need of reinforce- 
 ment for his faith, that he was driven into that 
 harbour. He had trusted to the event to vindicate 
 his belief in the inherent purity and goodness of 
 human nature, and the event had failed him. The 
 feelings and passions of men had played him false, 
 but the doctrine might yet be saved if those 
 feelings and passions could only be regarded as 
 "infirmities of nature, time, and place," to be 
 shaken off by a regenerated humanity. The 
 modes of mathematical thought, exhibiting all 
 things imder the forms of necessity, always had a 
 
58 WORDSWORTH 
 
 distant fascination for his mind ; and now he set 
 himself to apply them to the whole frame of social 
 life, to test by them all the motives and standards 
 of human action. 
 
 The result is described by himself : — 
 
 Demanding formal proof. 
 And seeking it in everything, I lost 
 All feeling of conviction, and, in fine. 
 Sick, wearied out with contrarieties. 
 Yielded up moral questions in despair. 
 
 But for his own explicit statement, it would 
 be difficult to believe that a scheme of thought 
 like that of the Political Justice could ever have 
 established an ascendancy over his mind. In 
 the Prelude he shows himself well aware of 
 the weaknesses of a system which gave license 
 to fanatic zeal under the guise of sober reason, 
 and which flattered youthful pride of intellect 
 by allowing it to hold itself superior to the 
 shackles of custom and the claims of natural 
 feeling. Already, in 1795, when he planned the 
 tragedy of the Borderers, he exhibited in his 
 philosophic villain, Oswald, all the practical 
 dangers of the creed. His own attachment to 
 the doctrine 'of Godwin was brief and almost 
 'experimental in its nature- — an experiment of 
 despair. The result was inevitable ; his life of 
 feeling and thought was plunged into chaos. The 
 spirit of Shelley, compact of fire and air, could 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 59 
 
 find sustenance for a time in the wilderness of 
 Godwin's thought. But a nature like Words- 
 worth's, rooted in personal memories and local 
 pieties, slow of growth and sensitive in every fibre 
 of its affections, could not without mortal violence 
 be reduced to a geometric pattern or transplanted 
 to a frozen climate. The very attempt was a 
 sufficient refutation of the theory, and from that 
 time forth Wordsworth never again put his trust 
 in the reasonings of political philosophy. Standing 
 in that Churchyard among the Mountains which 
 was the academy of his loftiest teaching, he utters 
 the conviction that had been forced upon him by 
 the struggles of his youth • — 
 
 Earth is sick, 
 And Heaven is weary, of the hollow words 
 Which States and Kingdoms utter when they talk 
 Of truth and justice. 
 
 He turned away from politics : it was only by 
 slow degrees that he won his way out to poetry. 
 His depression was not so great as to make him 
 forswear all study ; but he ptit aside all branches 
 of study that involve that element of disease and 
 uncertainty, human nature, and devoted him- 
 self to abstract science. His long feverish dream 
 of abstract thought was thus no longer peopled 
 with unhappy figures ; and, after a time, by the 
 gentle influence of his sister, who was now living 
 with him, and by the natural operation of the 
 
6o WORDSWORTH 
 
 daily interests and sights of country life, the dream 
 was broken ; the outer world reasserted itself, and 
 the things that he had loved in his childhood 
 came back cool and sweet upon his senses. It was 
 his sister, he says, who restored him to his true 
 self and preserved him for poetry. Old trains 
 of feeling and old memories by her aid were 
 recaptured ; by infection from her he caught zest 
 in the little observations, and pleasures, and solici- 
 tudes of daily existence, so that the tribute which 
 he pays to her in the poem called the Sparrow^ s 
 Nest was earned over again : — 
 
 The Blessing of my later years 
 Was with me when a boy : 
 She gave me eyes, she gave me ears ; 
 And humble cares, and delicate fears ; 
 A heart, the fountain of sweet tears ; 
 And love, and thought, and joy. 
 
 This restoration of the life of the senses after 
 the dark tyranny of a life of abstract thought is 
 the turning-point of Wordsworth's career. To 
 
 ' understand it is to have the key to his poetry and 
 to his theories concerning the function of poetry. 
 
 "Even the question of poetic diction takes its 
 meaning and interest from this crisis, when the 
 world of mTTiTnnn pprrep^irm came back upon the 
 m an like a revelation, and the forms of daily 
 speech seemed fraught with inexhaustible meaning. 
 Henceforward the searchings of the intellect and 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 61 
 
 all the apparatus of means and ends are discredited 
 and done with, swallowed up in the mere wonder 
 of living. He sits, as by Esthwaite lake, in the 
 mood described in his own Expostulation : — 
 
 You look round on your Mother Earth, 
 As if she for no purpose bore you j 
 As if you were her first-born birth, 
 And none had lived before you. 
 
 Poetry to Wordsworth meant this mood of 
 wonder and acceptance and delight, whereby the 
 intellectual questionings of the mind are, if not 
 finally set at rest, reduced to their just dimensions, 
 and seen, as a mode of human activity, in a larger 
 perspective. The world, which the intellect had 
 vainly attempted to subdue to a system, is resolved, 
 in the twinkling of an eye, by this new method of 
 consideration, to harmony and peace. 
 
 The thing almost defies explanation, for since 
 th^ change that made the poet was the discovery 
 of a new way of seeing and feeling, the categories 
 of a language that has been hammered into shape 
 for the purposes of thinking, reasoning, and ex- 
 pounding are quite beside the mark. Bg neath al T 
 Wordsworth's theory and practice of poetry there 
 li es a profound mystici sm , a distrust of all ration al 
 process . The difficulty is his own, no less than/ 
 his critic's ; he found language ill-suited to be the 
 vehicle of his message, and after a few years of j 
 heroic effort to convert it to his uses, after some 
 
62 WORDSWORTH 
 
 splendid half-successes which give him his unique 
 place in English poetry, and some brave futile 
 attempts at a forlorn hope, he bowed to defeat 
 and subdued his hand to what it worked in. Even 
 in the marvellous Twelfth Book of the Prelude, 
 I where he endeavours to explain the nature of the 
 change that came over him, he works only by 
 hints and indirections ; Jiis subject eludes h im, 
 and he chases it through the scenes and memories 
 that had been glorified by its momentary 
 presence : — 
 
 The days gone by 
 Return upon me almost from the dawn 
 Of life : the hiding-places of man's power 
 Open ; I would approach them, but they close. 
 I see by glimpses now ; when age comes on. 
 May scarcely see at all ; and I would give, 
 While yet we may, as far as words can give, 
 Substance and life to what I feel, enshrining. 
 Such is my hope, the spirit of the Past 
 For future restoration. 
 
 So difficult is it to set in words a true account 
 of this matter, that the way is left open for any 
 objector who cares to maintain that here is a 
 mighty pother about a very simple and ordinary 
 occurrence. A young man puzzles his brains 
 over problems of government and society, he 
 distresses himself with too deep a sense of responsi- 
 bility for the right conduct of the Universe, and 
 falls into a morbid and irritable state. But he is 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 63 
 
 blest with a sound constitution, good lungs, and 
 equable heart, so that time works his cure, and he 
 suddenly realises, with a sense of surprise, that the 
 world is not so black as it has been painted in his 
 imagination, that bread, after all, tastes sweet, that 
 water quenches thirst, and that life is worth the 
 living. Or put it from another point of view : 
 what if Wordsworth the poet were partly in the 
 wrong ? The questions that had distressed him 
 were, after all, real questions ; if he was unable to 
 solve them, he may quite well have been" right in 
 falling back upon a life of quiet enjoyment and 
 satisfied instinct ; but, none the less, the reasoning 
 powers that he despaired of remain the sole 
 instrument whereby man can make good his title 
 to truth. In any case, there is no excuse for 
 giving the importance of a discovery to the simple 
 indulgence of feelings and meditations that are 
 familiar to every peasant. 
 
 So might an Edinburgh Reviewer, in an un- 
 usually charitable and discerning mood, have 
 argued with the poet. And for a full century an 
 attitude like this, or like one of these, has been 
 responsible for much impatience with the claims 
 of Wordsworth's poetry. The objection, one 
 way or the other, is ultimately the same ; there j 
 is no new thing, it argues, in what he tells us ; 
 we have heard it all before ; only a sophisticated 
 mind could find a marvel in these commonplaces. 
 
64 WORDSWORTH 
 
 If sense-perception is the divinely appointed way 
 to truth, it is a high-road beaten by the feet of 
 many generations, and there needs no poet to give 
 us the right of passage. 
 
 Wordsworth would have been the last to den) 
 that his secret is within the reach of average 
 humanity. Yet somehow average humanity seems 
 to miss it. For the majority the beauties and 
 wonders presented by the world of sense early 
 lose their freshness, and are worn down into the 
 soiled currency of a tediously restless intellect. 
 Some others, who see and know, do not tell. 
 They worship at the Temple's inner shrine, and in 
 their familiarity with the secrets of the Holy of 
 Holies, seem hardly aware of the existence of the 
 Gentiles. In either case a single mode of ex- 
 perience, becoming the very habit of the soul, has 
 cut off all means of expression. Now a poet is 
 essentially an interpreter. If his conversation is 
 uninterruptedly in heaven, he cannot speak to 
 men. If he lives too intimately with men, 
 learning their language and trafficking with them 
 in their places of business, he ends by having 
 nothing to tell them. His commission holds 
 good only for a period, lest he fall into the 
 dialect of Nineveh. Some accident of passion or 
 peril startles him into utterance ; his memories, 
 brought from afar, burn within him, and by 
 that strange light things appear for a moment 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 65 
 
 in their true likeness, as they are and always 
 have been. 
 
 By the shock of his disappointment, and by his 
 long immersion in the welter of vainly striving 
 thought, Wordsworth was sent back to Naturel 
 with quickened sensibilities and new perceptions. 
 He regained his old communion, yet it was not 
 the same. The calm of Nature now seemed to 
 conceal an acquaintance with grief ; the memories 
 of childhood were as if they had contained im- 
 plicitly from the first all the passion of humanity. 
 The solemnities and beauties that had surrounded 
 him, and by the perfect composure of their silent 
 endurance had deluded him into a belief of 
 Arcadia, were now seen to be the pillars of a 
 tragic theatre. And with this came the sense of 
 consolation ; for the stars and the mountains were 
 unchanged, yet the stars and the mountains knew. 
 The heart of the poet went out to these strong 
 witnesses in an ecstasy of sensibility and tender- 
 ness, tremulous with the need for expression. 
 
 But for his initiation in the mystery of dark- 
 ness and pain, Wordsworth's voice could never 
 have come vibrating with the intensity that is felt 
 in all his poems, even in those that sometimes pass 
 for silly-sooth. His sister Dorothy was as true a 
 lover of Nature as he, quicker in observation, and 
 happier, perhaps, in the simplest happinesses of 
 life. But for all that, they are deeply in error 
 
66 WORDSWORTH 
 
 who, on the strength of her Journal^ find in her 
 the makings of a better poet than her brother. 
 She was too much a native of the golden clime 
 to be able to describe its wonders. Indeed it 
 may be doubted whether good women are ever 
 sceptical enough to become great poets. The soul 
 of them is loyalty to this life and to the race. Sanity 
 is in their keeping, and there are questions that 
 they dare not entertain, speculations that they cannot 
 indulge without an acute personal sense of treason. 
 They are poets in the sense in which Wordsworth 
 sometimes dallied with the word ; they understand, 
 and feel, and see, but how should they make an 
 evangel of pleasures and duties that are the simplest 
 matters of course ? It was while he kept a sense 
 of the utter foreignness and strangeness of the most 
 trivial human experiences that Wordsworth was a 
 great poet. 
 
 Now once more the mere act of seeing became 
 a sufficient instigation to poetry ; and his new life 
 brought him close to those former times when the 
 visible world had a reality and nearness almost 
 oppressive. As he says of his poetical counterpart, 
 the Wanderer : — 
 
 Deep feelings had impressed 
 So vividly great objects that they lay 
 Upon his mind like substances, wrhose presence 
 Perplexed the bodily sense. 
 
 It was a kind of possession through the eye 
 
COLERIDGE 67 
 
 that became the type of poetic inspiration to him, 
 a possession nowhere better described than in the 
 First Book of the Excursion, where the Wanderer 
 sees the sun rise : — 
 
 Far and wide the clouds were touched, 
 And in their silent faces could he read 
 Unutterable love. Sound needed none, 
 Nor any voice of joy ; his spirit drank 
 The spectacle : sensation, soul, and form, 
 All melted into him ; they swallowed up 
 - His animal being ; in them did he live, 
 And by them did he live ; they were his life. 
 In such access of mind, in such high hour 
 Of visitation from the living God, 
 Thought was not ; in enjoyment it expired. 
 
 And from moments of insight comparable to 
 this, glimpses granted to high-wrought feeling, he 
 sought light on the problems that were never 
 again to be long out of his thought, problems 
 concerning the constitution and capabilities of the 
 mind of man. 
 
 It was a high piece of good fortune that sent 
 Coleridge across his path at this very time, now 
 when health had returned to him, when he had 
 found his poetic method, and while every day 
 was increasing his creative vigour. It was 
 Coleridge who came to him, not he who went to 
 Coleridge. The friendship began in the en- 
 thusiastic admiration whereby Coleridge stormed 
 
68 WORDSWORTH 
 
 his way over all barriers of reserve. We hear, it 
 is true, of some slight tokens of reciprocity very 
 early in the story. " Wordsworth," says Coleridge 
 in a letter to Joseph Cottle, dated from Racedown, 
 " admires my tragedy, which gives me great hopes." 
 It was the least that Wordsworth could do, for 
 very shame. Not once, but again and again, to 
 diverse correspondents, Coleridge pours out his 
 paean of adoration. " Wordsworth," he says to 
 Southey, " is a very great man, the only man to 
 whom at all times and in all modes of excellence I 
 feel myself inferior." And again, to Joseph 
 Cottle, when the acquaintance had grown riper : 
 " The Giant Wordsworth — God love him ! Even 
 when I speak in the terms of admiration due to his 
 intellect, I fear lest those terms should keep out 
 of sight the amiableness of his manners." Before 
 long the ties of friendship had been fast knit, and 
 Wordsworth had gone further out of himself to 
 meet Coleridge than ever he went, before or after, 
 for the sake of any other human being. Both 
 were poets, and both were specially intent on the 
 new sources of sensibility that were being opened 
 to poetry in all directions. Both were philosophers, 
 eager to do away with the artificial boundaries 
 that divided life into compartments, and the con- 
 ventions that hampered the activities of poetry. 
 The world lay before them, a fair subject for 
 talk, and for talk of that most stimulating kind 
 
COLERIDGE 69 
 
 where a chance idea, struck out at random, may 
 become the germ of an immortal work or the battle- 
 cry of a victorious crusade. To men who have 
 gauged their own powers and have felt the twitch 
 of their tether, conversation is more of a pastime 
 and less of a conspiracy. But youth, in the delight 
 of its new-found liberty, feels as if it were endowed 
 with illimitable power and the faculty of endless 
 choice. 
 
 The temptation of such conversation proved 
 irresistible ; the Wordsworths moved from Dorset- 
 shire to Alfoxden in Somersetshire, to be near 
 Coleridge at Nether Stowey. For a year, from ^ 
 the summer of 1797 to the summer of 1798, the 
 two poets lived in close companionship, with the 
 happiest results for both. Wordsworth wasj 
 dragged forth from his self-centred meditations 
 and enabled to define and develop his own ideas 
 in the give-and-take of discussion. " His genius," 
 says Coleridge, in 1798, "is most apparent in 
 poetry, and rarely, except to me in tite-a-tite, 
 breaks forth in conversational eloquence." And 
 later, in regard to the removal of the Words- 
 worths to the north of England, he expresses a 
 doubt whether Wordsworth will find there " any 
 person or persons who can feel and understand 
 him, and reciprocate and react on him." " Dear 
 Wordsworth," he adds, " appears to me to have 
 hurtfully segregated and isolated his being. 
 
70 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Doubtless his delights are more deep and sublime, 
 but he has likewise more hours that prey upon the 
 flesh and blood." At Alfoxden these hours were 
 few indeed. As if by reaction from his long strain 
 of lonely thought, Wordsworth gave himself up 
 to the life of a happy child; he bubbled over 
 with glee, and babbled in unpremeditated verse. 
 In his dedication of the Prelude to his friend, a 
 dedication inspired by the memory of that happi- 
 ness, he speaks truly enough of 
 
 the buoyant spirits 
 That were our daily portion when we first 
 Together wantoned in wild Poesy. 
 
 Of the Idiot Boy he says, "This long poem was 
 composed in the groves of Alfoxden, almost ex- 
 tempore, not a word, I believe, being corrected, 
 though one stanza was omitted. I mention this 
 in gratitude to those happy moments, for, in 
 truth, I never wrote anything with so much glee." 
 The garrulous and vain repetitions of this poem, 
 as of many of his poems of this period, are not 
 really dramatic in purpose, though, by an after- 
 thought, a dramatic excuse was found for some of 
 them. They are the effervescence of the wildest 
 high spirits ; the narrative, like the mother of the 
 idiot, " cannot move for joy " ; and the diction, 
 like her son, is "idle all for very joy." The 
 thing has some of the points of a fine poem, but 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 71 
 
 it curvets and frisks so uncontrollably that it can 
 hardly be recognised for what it is. Yet to the 
 end of his life Wordsworth, remembering the 
 exuberance of his own delight in the composition 
 of it, was unable to conceive how the Idiot Boy 
 should fail to arouse the same feeling in every 
 reader. And the zest of the lines in which he 
 reminds Coleridge of those golden days might 
 indeed bring the most phlegmatic of readers 
 under the spell : — 
 
 Thou, in bewitching words, with happy heart, 
 Didst chaunt the vision of that Ancient Man, 
 The bright-eyed Mariner, and rueful woes 
 Didst utter of the Lady Christabel ; 
 And I, associate with such labour, steeped 
 In soft forgetfulness the livelong hours, 
 Murmuring of him who, joyous hap, was found. 
 After the perils of his moonlight ride, 
 Near the loud waterfall ; or her who sate 
 In misery near the miserable Thorn. 
 
 The nature and functions of poetry were the 
 theme, as might be expected, of much of the 
 conversation of the two friends. And here, too, 
 the happy influences of the place and season came 
 in aid of thought. Most of the poetry of that 
 wonderful year was picked up out of doors. His 
 delight, for example, in noticing the habits, tricks, 
 and physiognomy of the asses in the woods of 
 Alfoxden put Wordsworth upon writing Peter 
 Bell. 
 
72 WORDSWORTH 
 
 The one red leaf, the last of its clan, 
 That dances as often as dance it can. 
 Hanging so light, and hanging so high. 
 On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky, 
 
 before ever it was hung over the steps of Christ- 
 abel, danced in the woods of Alfoxden, and was 
 seen by Dorothy. And the Alfoxden moon — 
 for how much was the moon not responsible? 
 Wordsworth's little boat, dismissed at last so 
 contemptuously ; half the magic of the Ancient 
 Manner — these and other things of no less 
 import were born during the moonlight nights in 
 the Quantocks. The very theory and ground- 
 work of the Lyrical Ballads was suggested, it 
 seems, by the moon. Poetry, the two poets 
 believed, must be true to Nature ; poetry, they 
 further agreed, must give to its subject the 
 interest of novelty by the modifying power of the 
 imagination. Then the moon broke in. "The 
 sudden charm," says Coleridge, " which accidents 
 of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset, 
 diffused over a known and familiar landscape 
 appeared to represent the practicability of com- 
 bining both. These are the poetry of Nature." 
 
 It is easy to see how, from this first conception, 
 the scheme of the Lyrical Ballads grew up, and 
 how there were included in it the two sorts of 
 poems. The accidents of light and shade affected 
 the two poets in different ways. To Coleridge 
 
COLERIDGE 73 
 
 the rise of the moon made witchcraft credible, 
 and gave warrant for the boldest imaginations. 
 To Wordsworth these imaginations seemed super- 
 fluous ; the moonlight was witchcraft enough ; 
 his interest and affections turned homeward to 
 the things of every day, now seen to be susceptible 
 of this heavenly glamour. The two sorts of 
 poems were not both attempted by both poets. 
 " It was agreed," says Coleridge, " that my 
 endeavours should be directed to persons and 
 characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet 
 so as to transfer from our inward nature a human 
 interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to 
 procure for these shadows of imagination that 
 willing suspension of disbelief for the moment 
 which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, 
 on the other hand, was to propose to himself as 
 his object, to give the charm of novelty to things 
 of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to 
 the supernatural, by awakening the mind's atten- 
 tion from the lethargy of custom, and directing it 
 to the loveliness and the wonders of the world 
 before us : an inexhaustible treasure, but for 
 which, in consequence of the film of familiarity 
 and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, 
 ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor 
 understand." 
 
 This famous and momentous agreement was, 
 no doubt, a treaty arrived at after much discussion 
 
74 WORDSWORTH 
 
 and not a few differences. We have no record of 
 the discussion, but it is plain enough that Words- 
 worth, though he was full of admiration for the 
 originality of his friend's genius, yet thought his 
 own ambition loftier and his own method more 
 poetic. The Ancient Mariner was begun in 
 collaboration, but, "as we endeavoured," says 
 Wordsworth, "to proceed conjointly, . . . our 
 respective manners proved so widely different 
 that it would have been quite presumptuous in 
 me to do anything but separate from an under- 
 taking upon which I could only have been a 
 clog." In a note to the second edition of the 
 Lyrical Ballads he is more plain-spoken. " The 
 Poem of my Friend," he says, " has indeed great 
 defects." In the meantime he had set himself, 
 with a barely concealed competitive intent, to 
 work out a better way. Peter Belly which was 
 finished in the summer of 1798, is Wordsworth's 
 Ancient Mariner. It was composed, as he tells 
 Southey in the Dedication, "under a belief that 
 the Imagination not only does not require for its 
 exercise the intervention of supernatural agency, 
 but that, though such agency be excluded, the 
 faculty may be called forth as imperiously and 
 for kindred results of pleasure, by incidents, 
 within the compass of poetic probability, in the 
 humblest departments of daily life." It is un- 
 fortunate that we have not the original text of 
 
COLERIDGE 75 
 
 Peter Bell, for when at last it was published in 
 1 8 19 it had undergone repeated revisions. But 
 even in the poem as it stands the comparison 
 peeps out at every turn. For motto it bears this 
 line : — " Brutus will start a Spirit as soon as 
 Cassar," and the contrasted methods of spirit- 
 raising supply the matter of the Prologue : — 
 
 Long have I loved what I behold, 
 
 The night that calms, the day that cheers ; 
 
 The common growrth of mother-earth 
 
 Suffices me — her tears, her mirth, 
 
 Her humblest mirth and tears. 
 
 The dragon's wing, the magic ring, 
 I shall not covet for my dower. 
 If I ilong that lowly way 
 With sympathetic heart may stray. 
 And with a soul of power. 
 
 These given, what more need I desire 
 To stir, to soothe, or elevate i 
 What nobler marvels than the mind 
 May in life's daily prospect find. 
 May find or there create ? 
 
 The protagonist of Wordsworth's tale, in place of 
 the Mariner, is a drunken itinerant potter. He 
 has not killed an albatross, but in the course of his 
 reckless life he has committed a hundred more 
 accessible crimes. At the opening of the poem he 
 is discovered by the light of the moon cruelly 
 beating a stray ass. The ordeal for the softening 
 
76 WORDSWORTH 
 
 of his heart begins. Like the Mariner, he beholds 
 a sign in the element, and horror follows. It is 
 not a skeleton ship, but the corpse of the ass's 
 dead master, seen in the river. Like the Mariner, 
 though by strictly natural means, he is cast into a 
 trance. There are no spirits of the air to contend, 
 one with another, over his fate, although on him 
 too, as surely as if it had been supernaturaUy 
 uttered, the verdict is given — 
 
 The man hath penance done. 
 And penance more will do. 
 
 In place of all the unearthly machinery of penance 
 that is brought to bear on the Mariner, Words- 
 worth is resolved to content himself with the 
 simplest incidents and chances of a moonlight 
 night, as they might operate upon an excited and 
 ignorant mind. And here he throws out a direct 
 challenge. Although he has denied himself super- 
 natural aid, he too has spirits within call — 
 
 Then, coming from the wayward world, 
 That powerful world in which ye dwell, 
 Come, Spirits of the Mind ! and try 
 To-night, beneath the moonlight sky, 
 What may be done with Peter Bell ! 
 
 The supernatural impression is very carefully 
 elaborated from a series of natural causes. A 
 withered leaf scurrying along in chase of Peter 
 fills him with alarm — 
 
COLERIDGE 77 
 
 The very leaves they follow me — 
 So huge hath been my wickedness ! 
 
 A drop of blood on a stone proves to have fallen 
 from the wound that Peter had inflicted on the 
 ass. The rumbling noise tmderground is due, 
 though he knows it not, to the blasting operations 
 of miners. In his excitement his eyesight plays 
 tricks with him ; by a brake of furze, under the 
 shiver of aspen leaves, he fancies that he sees the 
 Highland girl whom long ago he had betrayed, 
 and hears her crying the words that she cried at 
 the moment of her death. Then, on a heart made 
 ready by these repeated blows, there falls the 
 strident voice of the Methodist preacher, shouting 
 in his wayside tabernacle — 
 
 Repent ! repent ! though ye have gone, 
 Through paths of wickedness and woe. 
 After the Babylonian harlot ; 
 And, though your sins be red as scarlet. 
 They shall be white as snow ! 
 
 The gentle moral of the Ancient Mariner, which 
 comes at the end of that far flight of the imagina- 
 tion like the settling of a bird into the nest, has its 
 near counterpart in the close of Veter Bell. We 
 do not leave Peter until, 
 
 taught to feel 
 That man's heart is a holy thing, 
 
 he is overwhelmed with sorrow and pity for the 
 
78 WORDSWORTH 
 
 widow and children of the dead man. Even 
 towards the ass (for Wordsworth is perfectly 
 courageous about the ass) Peter feels the out- 
 goings of tenderness and admiration — 
 
 Oh ! would, poor beast, that I had now 
 A heart but half as good as thine ! 
 
 so that, for all the differences of imagination 
 and expression that separate the two tales, the 
 wicked Potter is saved very much after the 
 fashion of the Mariner, who felt a spring of love 
 gush from his heart at the apparition of the water- 
 snakes. 
 
 No one, not even the writer of a book in 
 honour of Wordsworth, can afford to suggest 
 any question as to which is the finer poem. The 
 Ancient Mariner is one of the dearest possessions 
 of English poetry. Peter Bell is a deeply interest- 
 ing experiment. But though Peter Bell can never 
 be preferred, as a whole, that does not settle out 
 of hand the question raised by Wordsworth's 
 hard-bitten and stubborn naturalism. It is easy 
 to perceive that for him there was no question ; 
 he did as he felt bound to do ; on this point of 
 his convictions and practice we strike bed-rock. 
 He gives formal expression to the law that binds 
 him — 
 
 Let good men feel the soul of nature. 
 
 And see things as they are. 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 79 
 
 His unflinching determination to see things as 
 they are, without ornament and without sophisti- 
 cation, produced the great poems of the next few 
 years^ Had he not held to his creed jealously, 
 almost fanatically, he might never have scaled 
 those heights. He was saving himself and train- 
 ing himself, one feels, for a giant feat of strength. 
 Apart from this personal aspect of the question, 
 it is still open to inquiry whether the subtler 
 methods of awakening a sense of awe and wonder 
 are not, after all, more convincing, even as they 
 are more difficult to handle. They are used in 
 the Ancient Mariner — 
 
 I quaked to think of my own voice 
 How frightful it would be. 
 
 These two lines were omitted from the revised 
 version of the poem — ^perhaps because, where they 
 stood, they were in the nature of an anti-climax ; 
 one who is helping a corpse to hoist a sail may 
 well be beyond the reach of these more delicate 
 terrors. But it is exactly by these subtle thrills of 
 supernatural eflFect, imparted from natural objects, 
 that Wordsworth moves his readers. His very 
 name for the sailor in the story of the Waggoner 
 would have lent an added touch of romance even 
 to the Ancient Mariner. "The old Familiar of 
 the seas" — does he not carry an atmosphere of 
 mystery about him } By means as slight as this 
 
8o WORDSWORTH 
 
 " a feeling analogous to the supernatural " is fre- 
 quently excited by Wordsworth. A good example 
 is to be found in the White Doe of Rylstone, where 
 the entry of the Doe into the Abbey churchyard 
 during service is thus described : — 
 
 The only voice which you can hear 
 
 Is the river murmuring near. 
 
 — ^When soft ! — the dusky trees between, 
 
 And down the path through the open green. 
 
 Where is no living thing to be seen ; 
 
 And through yon gateway, where is found. 
 
 Beneath the arch with ivy bound. 
 
 Free entrance to the churchyard ground — 
 
 Comes gliding in serene and slow, 
 
 Soft and silent as a dream, 
 
 A solitary Doe ! 
 
 White she is as lily of June, 
 
 And beauteous as the silver moon 
 
 When out of sight the clouds are driven 
 
 And she is left alone in heaven ; 
 
 Or like a ship some gentle day 
 
 In sunshine sailing far away, 
 
 A glittering ship, that hath the plain 
 
 Of ocean for her own domain. 
 
 Such a description almost prepares us to regard 
 the Doe as 
 
 A Spirit for one day given, 
 
 A pledge of grace from purest heaven, 
 
 and illustrates its author's remark that " the human 
 mind is capable of being excited without the 
 application of gross and violent stimulants." 
 
COLERIDGE 8i 
 
 This point of divergence between the two poets 
 of the Lyrical Ballads has been dwelt upon because 
 of its value in the consideration of Wordsworth's 
 later work. For all his poetry he claims this dis- 
 tinction — " that the feeling therein developed gives 
 importance to the action and situation, and not the 
 action and situation to the feeling." No doubt ' 
 feelings of mystery and awe may readily be aroused 
 by the vivid presentment of miraculous actions and 
 situations. But so far as these feelings have any 
 title to respect, whence do they derive it ? Not 
 from the occurrences described, if once these occur- 
 rences are shown to be incredible and impossible. 
 They are respectable rather because the same 
 feelings are often aroused in the mind by the 
 strange things of the world of daily experience. 
 " I dislike all the miraculous part of it," said Lamb 
 of the Ancient Mariner, " but the feelings of the 
 man under the operation of such scenery dragged 
 me along like Tom Pipe's magic whistle." Words- 
 worth thought it a better and more legitimate aim 
 for a poet to attempt to quicken and develop the | 
 growth of these feelings from their natural roots, 
 which are found everywhere, than to bring them 
 to a brief and unhealthy luxuriance by processes of 1 
 artificial grafting. It is easier to see that he was 
 not wholly successful than it is to see that he was 
 wrong.^ 
 
 The question is involved with another, which 
 
82 WORDSWORTH 
 
 the poets, we know, often discussed, and on which 
 each of them, when they had moved further apart, 
 expounded his views at length. There is more of 
 poetic conception, it will probably be admitted, in 
 poems like Feter Bell, the Idiot Boy, and the 
 Thorn than of poetic result. The expression is not 
 equal to its task. And this opens the old debate, 
 which raged fiercely round the earlier part of 
 Wordsworth's poetic career, — ^the debate concerning 
 the nature of Poetic Diction. An investigation of 
 Wordsworth's theory of Poetic Diction, if it be 
 undertaken with the desire of finding some reason- 
 able ground or intelligible origin for the theory, 
 will lead straight to the heart of the critical position, 
 and will raise some fundamental questions suggested 
 by the existence of poetry. 
 
 Before taking leave of Coleridge it will be con- 
 venient here to say a word or two more on the 
 relations of the two poets. They came closer to 
 each other in sympathy than great poets are usually 
 privileged to come, even in the happiest intimacies. 
 It is difficult therefore to assess the debts of each to 
 the other while communism was the principle of 
 their intellectual life. Coleridge was the apter, no 
 doubt, to receive impressions. Whoever will read 
 Frost at Midnight or Fears in Solitude, and com- 
 pare these poems with the work their author did 
 before he knew Wordsworth, whoever, indeed, will 
 note the profound differences of poetic method that 
 
COLERIDGE 83 
 
 di^^de France, an Ode^ from the earlier Ode on the 
 Departing Tear will not be inclined to make light 
 of Wordsworth's influence on his friend. Here, 
 from Frost at Midnight^ are the lines describing 
 the stillness of the night in the poet's seaside 
 
 cottage : — 
 
 Sea, and hill, and wood. 
 With all the numberless goings-on of life, 
 Inaudible as dreams ! The thin blue flame 
 Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not ; 
 Only that film, which fluttered on the grate. 
 Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing. 
 Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature 
 Gives it dim sympathies with me who live. 
 Making it a companionable form. 
 Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit 
 By its own moods interprets, everywhere 
 Echo or mirror seeking of itself. 
 And makes a toy of Thought 
 
 And here are the lines at the end of the poem, 
 wherein he promises to the infant sleeping beside 
 him an education far different from his own : — 
 
 Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee. 
 
 Whether the summer clothe the general earth 
 
 With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing 
 
 Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch 
 
 Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch 
 
 Smokes in the sun-thaw ; whether the eave-drops fall 
 
 Heard only in the trances of the blast. 
 
 Or if the secret ministry of frost 
 
 Shall hang them up in silent icicles, 
 
 Quietly shining to the quiet Moon. 
 
84 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Both moods, the mood of solitary brooding that 
 concentrates all the meditative sympathies on the 
 smallest objects, and the mood of catholic enjoy- 
 ment and abandonment of the feelings to the 
 varying tides of nature, are moods that might have 
 been learned from Wordsworth. Coleridge is, of 
 course, expressing his own feelings ; but the 
 influence of Wordsworth caused him to turn over 
 afresh the material for poetry that he found in his 
 own mind, and to seek a new value and significance 
 in parts of it that had not heretofore held the 
 central place in his attention. 
 
 The counter-influence is more difficult to trace, 
 for a reason remarked by Mr. Dykes Campbell ; 
 when Wordsworth was impressed by the thought of 
 others, the influences " permeated his whole being, 
 and were so completely assimilated as to have 
 become part of himself before any of their results 
 came to the surface." The main thought of 
 Dejection: An Ode, conveyed in the stanza be- 
 ginning — 
 
 O Lady ! we receive but what we give, 
 And in our life alone does Nature live, 
 
 whether he learned it from Coleridge or not, had 
 a long and momentous history in Wordsworth's 
 poetry. It is a safe conjecture that his friendship 
 with Coleridge quickened his critical powers, and 
 taught him to study the workings of his own 
 
COLERIDGE 85 
 
 imagination in a more conscious and detached 
 manner. It may ev^ have encouraged him to 
 advance as explicit doctrine what had value merely 
 as perception, and so to make the Lyrical Ballads 
 seem like a gauntlet flung in the face of public 
 taste. But the chief benefit he received from 
 Coleridge's friendship lay, after all, in the strength 
 that comes from early appreciation. To be under- 
 stood is a rare and great happiness ; it helped 
 Wordsworth to bear with equanimity many long 
 years of public indifference and ridicule. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 POETIC DICTION 
 
 When the Lyrical Ballads were first published the 
 larger and more difficult questions concerning the 
 nature and methods of the poetic imagination were 
 not mentioned in the Preface. Only one question 
 is there conspicuous, a question of diction. " The 
 majority of the following poems," says the Preface, 
 " are to be considered as experiments. They were 
 written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far 
 the language of conversation in the middle and 
 lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes 
 of poetic pleasure." 
 
 A poet should think twice and thrice before he 
 writes a preface to his own work. By writing 
 these two short sentences Wordsworth secured for 
 certain years an almost complete neglect of many 
 novel aspects of his poetic manner, and ranged 
 against him, as opponents of his poetry, all who 
 disagreed with his theory. He involved himself 
 also (and this was no unmixed misfortune) in a 
 
 86 
 
POETIC DICTION 87 
 
 more elaborate exposition and defence of that 
 theory. In the long preface to the second edition 
 of the Lyrical Ballads he puts the issue on broader 
 grounds, and, in wonderfully condensed language, 
 explains his own view of the principles of Poetry. 
 The most important paragraph of this famous 
 apology must be quoted at length : — 
 
 The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems 
 was to choose incidents and situations from common life, 
 and to relate or describe them throughout, as far as this 
 was possible, in a selection of language really used by 
 men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain 
 colouring of the imagination, whereby ordinary things 
 should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect ; 
 and further, and above all, to make these incidents and 
 situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though 
 not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature, 
 chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we 
 associate ideas in a state of excitement. Humble and 
 rustic life was generally chosen because in that con- 
 dition the essential passions of the heart find a better soil 
 in which they can attain their maturity, are less under 
 restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language ; 
 because in that condition of life our elementary feelings 
 co-exist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, 
 may be more accurately contemplated and more forcibly 
 communicated j because the manners of rural life ger- 
 minate from those elementary feelings, and, from the 
 necessary character of rural occupations, are more easily 
 comprehended, and are more durable ; and, lastly, be- 
 cause in that condition the passions of men are incorpor- 
 
l- 
 
 88 WORDSWORTH 
 
 ated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature. 
 The language, too, of these men has been adopted 
 (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, 
 from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust) 
 because such men hourly communicate with the best 
 objects from which the best part of language is originally 
 derived ; and because, from their rank in society and the 
 sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less 
 under the influence of social vanity, they convey their 
 feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated 
 expressions. 
 
 To this comprehensive statement of his intent 
 Wordsworth adds a demonstration that some of the 
 most interesting parts of good poems will be found 
 to be written in what is strictly the language of 
 prose. Emboldened by his own argument, he 
 proceeds to a wider generalisation : "It may be 
 safely affirmed that there neither is, nor can be, 
 any essential difference between the language of 
 prose and metrical composition." And in a note 
 on " what is usually called Poetic Diction" he 
 gives a yet more marked prominence to what, on 
 his own showing, was not the most important or 
 significant part of his original statement. 
 
 In the admirable chapters of the Biographia 
 Literaria that deal with Wordsworth's theory, 
 some of these contentions are answered once and 
 for all by Oileridge, and a much deeper and more 
 philosophic conception of language than was ever 
 attained by Wordsworth is set forth in reply, 
 
POETIC DICTION 89 
 
 With the license of a friend, Coleridge, having 
 disposed of the arguments advanced in support of 
 the theory, attempts a sympathetic elucidation of 
 "the real object, which, it is probable, Mr. 
 Wordsworth had before him in his critical pre- 
 face," and finds it in that style of poetry — the 
 "neutral style" he calls it — where everything is 
 expressed just as one would wish to talk, and yet 
 all dignified, attractive, and interesting. But it is 
 not in this style of poetry, he adds, that Words- 
 worth has achieved his highest excellence. " Were 
 there excluded from Mr. Wordsworth's poetic 
 compositions aU that a literal adherence to the 
 theory of his preface would exclude, two-thirds at 
 least of the marked beauties of his poetry must be 
 erased." 
 
 The question is worth handling again, if only 
 for the sake of the remaining third. Once 
 more, what was the real object which Words- 
 worth had before him in his critical preface ? 
 Did he mean simply to profess his adherence to 
 the purest doctrine of the classical school of poets 
 in England and France? It was that school 
 which brought the natural, easy style in verse to 
 its highest perfection. The campaign against long 
 words, Latinisms, provmciaksms, poetic fictions, 
 bombast, and idle ornament was opened by the 
 fathers of all the Academies. Malherbe was not a 
 Lake Poet, and it was Malherbe who took as his 
 
1 
 
 90 WORDSWORTH 
 
 masters in language the day-labourers of Paris, 
 and struck out of his compositions any word or 
 figure of speech that was not readily intelligible to 
 them. It was Ben Jonson, the forerunner and 
 teacher of the English classical school, who wrote 
 lines like these, wherein the language used differs 
 in no respect from the language of prose com- 
 position : — 
 
 Drink to me only with thine eyes. 
 And I will pledge with mine ; 
 
 Or leave a kiss within the cup, 
 And I'll not ask for wine. 
 
 It was Pope who assured his friend that plain 
 truth needs no flowers of speech. Was Words- 
 worth a belated, unwitting follower of Malherbe 
 and Jonson and Pope ? If he is not ranked among 
 their disciples, is it chiefly because the exuberance 
 of his imagination continually breaks out in a 
 loftier vein of romantic hyperbole and a greater 
 audacity of poetic expression ? 
 
 The practice of Wordsworth, it is agreed by all, 
 is not conformable to the principles that he lays 
 down in his prose prefaces. But the deviations 
 from the theory that have attracted most attention 
 are those which occur in some of his finest poems. 
 When he writes well, it has been argued, he breaks 
 his own rules ; and when he writes ill, it has been 
 implied, he keeps them. But the fact is that he 
 hardly ever observes his own rules, and the poems 
 
POETIC DICTION 91 
 
 in which he most nearly observes them are often 
 among his best. ^ 
 
 In the simpler numbers of the Lyrical Ballads 
 he offends consistently and continually against 
 prose standards of speech. The prose choice of ^ 
 words is, in the main, observed. But the prose 
 order is broken, not for the sake of emphasis or 
 melody, but from the constraint imposed by metre 
 and rhyme. Now, for the preservation of that ^ 
 simplidty and sincerity which he valued so highly, 
 the prose order of words is much more Important 
 than the prose choice of words. A phrase that 
 lives in common speech becomes absurd when its 
 component parts are tumbled and disarranged ; 
 and this absurdity, which could easily be avoided 
 by any master of metre, is largely responsible for 
 the distresses felt by the reader of the Lyrical 
 Ballads. Simon Lee was an old huntsman, and 
 his age is thus described : — 
 
 Of years he has upon his back, 
 No doubt, a burthen weighty. 
 
 And again — 
 
 Few months of life has he in store 
 As he to you will tell. 
 
 The effect that Wordsworth seeks is the plain 
 colloquial directness of such a sentence as this, 
 spoken in explanation of Simon Lee's shrunken 
 stature — " He has a heavy burden of years upon 
 
92 WORDSWORTH 
 
 his back, no doubt." But first "weighty" is 
 needed for the rhyme, and then every word in the 
 sentence must take up a forced artificial posture 
 for the rhythm. So in the Last of the Flock 
 occur these lines : — 
 
 And crazily, and wearily, 
 I went my work about. 
 
 And in the Thorn these : — 
 
 You must take care and chuse your time 
 The mountain when to cross. 
 
 In his prose apologies Wordsworth habitually 
 speaks of metre as a charm " superadded " to the 
 other beauties of poetry. In many parts of the 
 Lyrical Ballads it is an extravagantly costly super- 
 addition. 
 
 The "neutral style" in poetry (to preserve 
 Coleridge's name for the well-bred easy manner 
 of many poets of the Seventeenth Century) depends 
 for its success on a delicate observance of natural 
 idiom and natural cadence. If these be respected, 
 an unusual word or two will not appreciably alter 
 the general impression. The poets who most 
 excel in this style ordered their practice by social 
 standards and usages. But these standards counted 
 for little with Wordsworth, who held aloof from 
 society, even among the dalesmen of the Lakes. 
 The impression that his way of life made upon 
 his neighbours is vividly recorded in Canon 
 
POETIC DICTION 93 
 
 Rawnsley's delightful Reminiscences. "Many's 
 the time," said an old inn-keeper, " I've seed him 
 a takin' his family out in a string, and niver geein' 
 the deadest bit of notice to 'em ; standin' by 
 hissel' and stoppin' behind agapin,' wi! his jaws 
 workin' the whoal time ; but niver no crackin' wi' 
 'em, nor no pleasure in *em, — a desolate-minded 
 man, ye kna. . . , It was potry as did it." If, 
 therefore, Wordsworth proposed to acquire for 
 himself the fluent colloquial graces of poets who 
 lived much in the company of their fellows, he 
 chose a mode of life which put success in that 
 attempt almost beyond his reach. 
 
 In truth it is the merest coincidence that brings 
 him into line with "the mob of gentlemen who 
 wrote with ease." He valued colloquial forms 
 and phrases not as the chosen vehicle of sound 
 sense and habitual feeling, but as the most sincere 
 expression of deep and rare passions. His model 
 is not to be found in the pleasant ease of Waller 
 or Cotton, but in the bare intolerable force of such 
 a speech as this of King Lear — 
 
 Do not laugh at me, 
 For as I am a man, I think this lady 
 To be my child Cordelia. 
 
 And he sought the occasion for these passions 
 less in crises of great events than among the 
 humblest incidents and situations of common life 
 
>Q4 WORDSWORTH 
 
 CBy intense concentration of the sympathies and 
 imaginative powers on any single object of per- 
 ception or thought he produced in himself vague 
 and deep emotions which, it seemed, could best be 
 perpetuated and imparted by the simplest form of 
 words that might serve to recall the original 
 Ijuggestion. 
 
 This entirely l aystical conceptio n of the func- 
 tions of poetry led him into various faults of 
 
 r expression. Sometimes his own conceptions take 
 so complete a possession of his mind, that he 
 forgets to give help to the reader, and presents 
 
 " him merely with the naked unaccommodated 
 object which has been the source of his own 
 
 - wonder and delight. There is a passage in his 
 essay upon Epitaphs, contributed to the Friend, 
 which might serve as commentary on some of his 
 poems. " In an obscure corner of a country 
 churchyard," he says, "I once espied, half over- 
 grown with hemlock and nettles, a very small 
 stone laid upon the ground, bearing nothing more 
 than the name of the deceased, with the date of 
 birth and death, importing that it was an infant 
 which had been born one day and died the 
 following. I know not how far the Reader may 
 be in sympathy with me, but more awfiil thoughts 
 of rights conferred, of hopes awakened, of remem- 
 brances stealing away or vanishing were imparted 
 to my mind by that inscription there before my 
 
POETIC DICTION 95 
 
 eyes than by any other that it has ever been my 
 lot to meet with upon a tombstone." The bare 
 feet — there, according to Wordsworth, is poetry 
 in essence. What that can be added by way of 
 reflection or exhortation is not poor and partial 
 compared with the writing on the stone.? In 
 this case the reader may fairly be trusted to share 
 those impulses of deeper birth that come from 
 the simple record. But in other cases the reader 
 is left without a clue ; he is caught and misled by 
 some common association of words or ideas ; he 
 is looking, perhaps, for argument or narrative, 
 neither of which he is likely to find, and he feels 
 irritation or contempt when he sees the poet excited 
 by a music inaudible to other ears. Wordsworth's^ 
 poetic career was one long campaign against the 
 dominion of vulgar associations ; but he sometimes 
 underestimated their strength. " My language," 
 he confesses, " may frequently have suffered from 
 those arbitrary connections of feelings and ideas 
 with particular words and phrases from which no 
 man can altogether protect himself." In a letter 
 to Professor Wilson he deals with the objections y 
 made to the Idiot Boy. " I have often applied to 
 idiots," he remarks, "in my own mind, that 
 ' sublime expression of Scripture that ' their life is 
 hidden with God' ... It is probable that the 
 principal cause of your dislike to this particular 
 poem lies in the word Idiot. If there had been 
 
96 WORDSWORTH 
 
 any such word in our language to which we had 
 attached passion, as lack-wit, half-wit, witless, etc,, 
 I should have certainly employed it in preference ; 
 but there is no such word," The poet, it is to be 
 noted, attached passion to the very name " Idiot " ; 
 he found the pure elements of the poetic temper 
 in that trance of pleasure which kept the boy a 
 whole night long wandering in the moonlight and 
 listening to the hootings of the owls. "When 
 we see the idiot in his glory," said Byron, " we 
 think the Bard the hero of the story." He was 
 right ; Wordsworth is completely at one with the 
 hero of the story, whereas Susan Gale and the 
 doctor are the merest lay-figures. One of the 
 verses of A Poet^s Epitaph might serve to describe 
 either the idiot or the poet who celebrated his 
 adventures — 
 
 But he is weak ; both Man and Boy 
 Hath been an idler in the land ; 
 Contented if he might enjoy 
 The things which others understand. 
 
 Nevertheless, the word "Idiot" does its old 
 accustomed work ; the very mention of it, like 
 the raising of a latch, lets loose all the small, 
 watchful, competitive instincts of the human 
 breast ; against the will of the poet the race is 
 run ; the Idiot is defeated, and the sudden glory 
 of superiority that flushes through the victorious 
 reader explodes in pleasant laughter. 
 
POETIC DICTION 97 
 
 The poor ass of Peter Bell is in almost as bad 1 
 a case. Wordsworth found something weird and 
 solemn in the patience and immobility of the ass — 
 even to the slow movements of its long left ear. 
 The steadfast suffering of a creature which when 
 cruelly beaten will neither yield, nor retaliate, nor 
 complain impressed him with something of tragic 
 dignity, and he exhibits its moving power in the 
 panic of hatred and superstitious terror that it 
 inspires in Peter. He might have spared his 
 pains, for the ass is a dull beast, duller than most 
 men ; the opportunity is not to be lost, and the 
 intellectual rivalry begins again, with another 
 victory for the clever reader. 
 
 This is a question not so much of poetic diction^* 
 as of poetic imagination. A mind may so confirm 
 itself, by natural predilection and long habit, in all 
 tricky and fortuitous associations of ideas as to cut 
 itself off from fresh sources of imaginative sugges- 
 tion. The arbitrary links between ideas are 
 multiplied and strengthened by conversation in 
 society, which exacts ready-made judgments and 
 encourages brisk conceits. For the solitary poet 
 in contemplation they have no value, or rather, 
 they are hindrances and misdirections. They are 
 as plentiful as weeds ; they make the stock-in-trade 
 of a pert, barren man ; and even good wits are 
 troubled by them. A recent critic of Matthew 
 Arnold finds the title " Mixed Essays " an unhappy 
 
 H 
 
98 WORDSWORTH 
 
 title, because, he says, it suggests biscuits. These 
 bad habits of the mind are not easily conquered, 
 and they are the despair of poets. Wordsworth, 
 who, more than other poets, was carefiil for the 
 chastity of the imagination, asks his readers to try 
 to conquer them, to endeavour to look steadily at 
 the subject, as he has looked at it. Being himself 
 little versed in the small traffic of social inter- 
 course and the paltry entanglements of commonplace 
 association, he was surprised and puzzled to find 
 that by merely naming the subject of his contem- 
 plation he had raised a horde of false issues. Both 
 his friends and the critics, who were not his 
 friends, were against him. His confidence in 
 himself wavered, and he did what originally he 
 had refused to do — he made alterations in his text 
 on the advice of others, though his understanding 
 was not convinced. Some of these alterations 
 have happily disappeared from the definitive 
 edition ; others remain. Thus the poem on 
 Gipsies originally ended with these two lines — 
 
 The silent Heavens have goings-on ; 
 
 The stars have tasks — but these have none. 
 
 To some mind or other the word "goings-on" 
 suggested flippant associations, and the lines were 
 altered thus — 
 
 Life wrhich the very stars reprove 
 As on their silent tasks they move ! 
 
POETIC DICTION 99 
 
 Not only is the most telling word suppressed ; 
 there is a more fundamental change, typical of 
 many changes made by Wordsworth when he had 
 lost touch with his original impressions. The bare 
 contrast of the earlier poem is moralised. The 
 strangeness of the simple impression is lost for the 
 sake of a most impotent didactic application. The 
 poet, after a day of crowded and changeful ex- 
 perience under the open sky, returns to find the 
 group of gypsies sitting as before round their camp- 
 fire. The winds are blowing and the clouds 
 moving, so that the little knot of human beings 
 seems the only stationary thing in nature. The 
 restless joy of the poet, his fellow-feeling with the 
 mighty activities of Nature, breaks out in a single 
 remonstrance — 
 
 Oh better wrong and strife, 
 Better vain deeds and evil than such life ! 
 
 Even this he changed when his sensibilities had 
 been crusted over and his appetite for explicit 
 moral teaching increased by the passage of years. 
 In the edition of 1820 these lines read — 
 
 Oh better wrong and strife 
 (By nature transient) than such torpid life ! 
 
 The change introduces an argument — and a bad 
 argument. Evil-doing is preferred to torpor 
 because it is less permanent in its nature and 
 effects — a statement which might very readily be 
 
loo WORDSWORTH 
 
 challenged. The whole passage illustrates, as well 
 
 as another, the difficulties that confronted Words- 
 
 ^ worth in the attempt to mend his own work. He 
 
 4 lost sympathy in his later life with his earlier 
 
 V mystical intuitions. He desired, in his decline, to 
 
 • give the age the moral lessons that it asked. And 
 
 • the maxims of practical morality, if they are to be 
 warranted, not by the moral sense of the com- 
 munity, but by the sudden impulses of imagina- 
 tion that come to a poet as he gazes on the open 
 sky, are driven to seek help from fantastic argu- 
 ments. 
 
 The famous case of the Blind Highland Boy 
 shows Wordsworth once more troubled and 
 puzzled by the advice of his friends, and attempt- 
 ing to remedy a misunderstanding of the workings 
 of his imagination by a change in his machinery 
 and diction. The blind boy, it is well known, put 
 forth on Loch Leven in the first craft he could 
 find— 
 
 A Household Tub, like one of those 
 Which women use to wash their clothes, 
 This carried the blind Boy. 
 
 '' The enormity of the rhyme justified protest. And 
 then came Coleridge with his green turtle-shell, 
 recommended as a substitute for the washing-tub 
 . on the ground of its " romantic uncommonness." 
 Coleridge himself would, no doubt, as he said, 
 have used the turtle-shell. Before he had done 
 
POETIC DICTION loi 
 
 with it he would probably have launched it on 
 Alph, the sacred river, for a voyage of strange 
 adventure. The tub, which was good enough for 
 the blind boy, was good enough for Wordsworth. 
 But he listened and yielded, and, at the expense 
 of nine laborious stanzas, he got the shell into Scot- 
 land, and put it within reach of his hero. Mean- 
 time the movement of the poem is retarded, and 
 the careless triumph of the child is less convincing 
 from the forethought necessary for the carrying 
 out of his scheme to navigate the shell. We may 
 be thankful that a regard for the dictates of pru- 
 dential morality did not cause the poet to omit this 
 other stanza from his later editions — 
 
 And let him, let him go his way. 
 Alone, and innocent, and gay ! 
 For, if good Angels love to wait 
 On the forlorn unfortunate, 
 
 This Child will take no harm. 
 
 If the aged poet's attention had been called to the 
 possible influence of this verse as an exhortation to 
 culpable negligence, there is far too much reason 
 to think that he would have tinkered it or sup- 
 pressed it. 
 
 All these much-discussed audacities of the work 
 of his prime — these "tubs" and "goings-on" — 
 are not, therefore, to be treated as faults of diction. 
 They are of a piece with the simple and fervid 
 quality of his mind. His error, if error it be, lies" 
 
I02 WORDSWORTH 
 
 ' in the little care he takes to put the reader at his 
 own point of view. He asks to be heard as if his 
 were the first descriptions of a new-found world. 
 An ordinary reader must have fair warning if he 
 is to divest himself of all literary predispositions, 
 put his books behind him, and begin again from 
 the beginning. Nevertheless, for Wordsworth's 
 purpose, and in relation to his chosen subjects, the 
 diction that he used was the best diction ; indeed, 
 in many cases, the only diction possible, 
 r Faults of diction he has, but they are not 
 these. While passion holds him, while he is 
 ^ moved or exalted, his language keeps its naked 
 : intensity. But when his own feeling flags and 
 r there is ground to be covered he is a bad traveller 
 1 on the flat. The plain words of common life no 
 / longer satisfy him, for the glow has gone out of 
 \ them. Sometimes he makes what he can of them ; 
 and there are no more prosy passages in English 
 verse than some of those where Wordsworth has 
 an explanation to interpolate, a mechanical junc- 
 tion to efi^sct, or a narrative to carry on to the 
 next place where reflection may rest and brood. 
 In these passages, while he is simple, he is often 
 feeble and talkative. But sometimes, on the other 
 hand, the lack of vitality consciously oppresses 
 him, and he endeavours to make it good by forced 
 decoration and fancy. At such times he produces 
 samples of false poetic diction as vapid as any 
 
POETIC DICTION 103 
 
 invented by the rhymesters of the Eighteenth 
 Century. Of mere flatness, as might be expected, 
 there are many examples in the Prelude, and more 
 in the Excursion. Lines like these are all too 
 common — 
 
 Nor less do I remember to have felt, 
 Distinctly manifested at this time, 
 A human-heartedness about my love 
 For objects hitherto the absolute wealth 
 Of my own private being and no more. 
 
 In some of the shorter poems, where there is 
 a piece of commonplace information to be conveyed 
 — say a postal address, " The Pantheon, Oxford 
 Street " — it is often conveyed after this fashion : — 
 
 Near the stately Pantheon you'll meet with the same. 
 In the street that from Oxford hath borrowed its name. 
 
 The false poetic diction that he condemned is easy 
 to example from his own work. Here is the 
 beginning of his poem on Water-fowl : — 
 
 Mark how the feathered tenants of the flood, 
 With grace of motion that might scarcely seem 
 Inferior to angelical, prolong 
 Their curious pastime ! 
 
 And here, from the Prelude, is a record of the 
 fact that he first entered London on a stage- 
 coach : — 
 
 On the roof 
 
 Of an itinerant vehicle I sate, 
 
 With vulgar men about me. 
 
I04 WORDSWORTH 
 
 '^Or a better instance, too long to quote, may 
 be found in the First Book of the Prelude, where 
 every device of fanciful elaboration is bestowed on 
 the description of the soiled and imperfect packs of 
 cards which helped to pass away the long winter 
 evenings of his boyhood in the Lakes. 
 
 Whereve r, deep emotion fails him, these orna- 
 mental excrescences are liable to occur. And 
 therefore they occur least frequently in the poems 
 written during the years immediately following his 
 return to poetry. During those years his most 
 casual feelings, aroused by trivial events, had a 
 strength and vivacity that made all adornment a 
 profanation, and his resolve to be quit of all 
 deceits and sentimentalities was then an instru- 
 mental part of his religion. Wordsworth's style 
 at its best has many virtues ; but one virtue, all 
 his own, is greater than the rest. He can, and 
 often does, write like other poets, in a manner 
 that, without a trace of imitation, gives a familiar 
 pleasure to a trained literary sense. The best 
 passages so written have been perhaps more praised 
 than any other parts of his work ; but they are 
 not Wordsworth's best. His description of 
 skating in the Prelude is a wonderful piece of 
 verbal melody : — 
 
 So through the darkness and the cold we flew. 
 And not a voice was idle ; with the din 
 Smitten, the precipices rang aloud ; 
 
POETIC DICTION 105 
 
 The leafless trees and every icy crag 
 Tinkled like iron ; while far distant hills 
 Into the tumult sent an alien sound 
 Of melancholy not unnoticed, while the stars 
 Eastward were sparkling clear, and in the west 
 The orange sky of evening died away. 
 
 And his own genius, his own love for the far 
 spaces, makes itself felt in that " alien sound of 
 melancholy." He can write magnificently, again, 
 in a style which, from the time of Shakespeare 
 onward, has been one of the great faculties of 
 English literature, the style of the metaphysical 
 imagination. So, in the Excursion, the Solitary 
 describes his agony of thought : — 
 
 Then my soul 
 Turned inward, — to examine of what stuff 
 Time's fetters are composed ; and life was put 
 To inquisition long and profitless ! 
 By pain of heart — now checked — and now impelled — 
 The intellectual power, through words and things, 
 Went sounding on, a dim and perilous way 1 
 
 And here, to quote one more passage that 
 reconciles all tastes, are the sombre imaginings 
 suggested to him by the four yew-trees of Borrow- 
 dale: — 
 
 Beneath whose sable roof 
 Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked 
 With unrejoicing berries — ^ghostly Shapes 
 May meet at noontide ; Fear and trembling Hope, 
 Silence and Foresight ; Death the Skeleton 
 
io6 WORDSWORTH 
 
 And Time the Shadow ; — there to celebrate, 
 As in a natural temple scattered o'er 
 With altars undisturbed of mossy stone, 
 United worship ; or in mute repose 
 To He, and listen to the mountain flood 
 Murmuring from Glaramara's inmost caves. 
 
 Had Wordsworth always written thus, he 
 would have escaped all blame. Here is "a 
 certain colouring of the imagination " thrown over 
 ordinary things, whereby they are " presented to 
 the mind in an unusual aspect," and no question 
 of poetic diction is raised. Yet he was bound 
 to raise the question and to make attempts in a 
 style unlike this oecumenical style of poetry ; for 
 his views concerning poetic diction followed in- 
 evitably from his beliefs concerning the highest 
 functions of poetry. 
 
 The poet is, first of all, a seer. He is a man, 
 speaking to men ; but he sees more truly, and 
 consequently feels more deeply, than they ; and his 
 business is to teach them to see and feel. He 
 can easily engage their attention by presenting 
 them with abnormal, rare, or strange objects. So 
 poetry becomes a pastime, a delight apart from the 
 interests of common life. Or, by the power of 
 language, he can call forth in full flood those 
 feelings that blur vision, those merciful and 
 tender suffusions that soften the hard outlines of 
 fact and bring relief to the weaker sense. But 
 
POETIC DICTION 107 
 
 neither is this, according to Wordsworth, the 
 right work of poetry. To feel deeply and sanely 1 
 and wisely in the presence of things seen is what 
 he teaches ; but first, to see them. He had 
 found deliverance for himself by opening his eyes^ 
 on the world after a nightmare of dark, confused 
 mental agitation, and he believed in truth as 
 few men believe in it. His determination to 
 look steadUy on life made him Intolerant of the 
 myriad delusions, " as thick as motes that people 
 the sunbeam," which Intercept the eye and focus 
 it on some nearer object than the face of truth. 
 He does injustice to himself by describing the 
 poet as one who throws "a certain colouring 
 of the imagination " over common incidents and 
 situations. The working of his own imagination, 
 so long as it remained pure and strong, is 111 com- 
 pared to painting or to any light but the whitest. 
 In his Elegiac Stanzas on the death of his brother, 
 who was drowned at sea, he expounds his creed 
 more justly. He is looking at a picture of Peele 
 Castle In a storm, and remembering how, many 
 years before, he had lived in Its neighbourhood for 
 a whole summer month and had never seen the 
 glassy calm of the sea broken : — 
 
 Ah ! THEN, if mine had been the Painter's hand, 
 To express what then I saw ; and add the gleam, 
 The light that never was, on sea or land, 
 The consecration, and the Poet's dream ; 
 
io8 WORDSWORTH 
 
 I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile, 
 Amid a world how different from this ! 
 Beside a sea that could not cease to smile ; 
 On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss. 
 
 These lines, or some of them, have been so 
 frequently quoted apart from their context, that it 
 has become almost a hopeless task to get them 
 understood. The misunderstanding must have 
 come to Wordsworth's notice, for in the edition 
 of 1820 he altered the first stanza thus : — 
 
 Ah ! THEN, if mine bad been the Painter's hand. 
 To express what then I saw, and add a gleam 
 Of lustre, known to neither sea nor land, 
 But borrowed &om the youthful Poet's dream. 
 
 This later version removes all misunderstand- 
 ing. But the poet's readers, intelligibly enough, 
 preferred the earlier version; preferred, indeed, to 
 keep their two lines in an inverted sense, and to 
 misread or neglect the rest of the poem. It is the 
 word " consecration," used, as it would seem, for 
 a dream-like glory, a peace attained by shunning 
 reality, which is chiefly responsible for the mis- 
 reading. Yet the original version, which is also 
 the final version, may be kept without danger of 
 mistake, if only the poem be read as a whole. 
 The following verses make all clear : — 
 
 Such, in the fond illusion of my heart. 
 
 Such Picture would I at that time have made : 
 
POETIC DICTION 109 
 
 And seen the soul of truth in every part, 
 A stedfast peace that might not be betrayed. 
 
 So once it would have been, — 'tis so no more ; 
 I have submitted to a nevr control : 
 A power is gone, which nothing can restore; 
 A deep distress hath humanised my Soul. 
 
 Farewell, farewell the heart that lives alone, 
 Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind ! 
 Such happiness, wherever it be known, 
 Is to be pitied ; for 'tis surely blind. 
 
 But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer. 
 And frequent sights of what is to be borne ! 
 Such sights, or worse, as are before me here.— 
 Not without hope we suffer and we mourn. 
 
 The happiness that is to be pitied is blind 
 happiness, which nourishes itself on its own false 
 fancies. The happiness that is to be coveted is 
 the happiness of fearless vision, "and frequent 
 sights of what is to be borne." And it is by the 
 daylight of truth, not by "the light that never 
 was, on sea or land," that the poet desires to look 
 upon the things of earth. He is strong enough 
 to bear it, and can face a life-long grief without 
 flinching : — 
 
 This, which I know, I speak with mind serene. 
 
 The greatness of Wordsworth's best work 
 derives from this calm and almost terrible strength. 
 
no WORDSWORTH 
 
 It asks strength to be a seer. To accept all truth of 
 experience, yet to cherish rather than try to deaden 
 the human feelings that attend on the knowledge 
 of such truth — to believe in them, too — is a 
 feat not to be compassed save by the highest 
 courage and the profoundest humility. It was a 
 new courage and a new humility that Wordsworth 
 introduced into the poetic treatment of Nature 
 and of Man. And it was also a new joy ; for 
 just because he has dared to the uttermost, and in 
 his heart asks for nothing but what he is to have, 
 his joy in the pleasures that come his way is pure 
 and gay and whole-hearted, without a drop of 
 bitterness in it. He has put some of his own 
 experience into the story of Ruth : — 
 
 The engines of her pain, the tools 
 That shaped her sorrow, rocks and pools. 
 And airs that gently stir 
 The vernal leaves — she loved them still ; 
 Nor ever taxed them with the ill 
 Which had been done to her. 
 
 Wordsworth attained to the simple pleasures and 
 the calm resignation of the poor mad girl with 
 his eyes open and his reason unclouded. 
 
 These qualities manifest themselves in his 
 greatest poems, and — to return to the immediate 
 subject — they give its inspired simplicity to his 
 style. His strength makes no demonstration ; 
 his reserve is so complete as to be almost inex- 
 
POETIC DICTION iii 
 
 pressive. There is an indissoluble self-possession, 
 as of the mountains, in the poems of his prime. 
 The four or five poems written in Germany 
 on the unknown Lucy show this quality at 
 its highest. He can say all that he has to say 
 in the form of a brief record of facts. So in the 
 address to England : — 
 
 Among thy mountains did I feel 
 
 The joy of my desire ; 
 And she I cherished turned her wheel 
 
 Beside an English fire. 
 
 Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed 
 The bowers where Lucy played ; 
 
 And thine too is the last green field 
 That Lucy's eyes surveyed. 
 
 So in the even greater poem, almost superhuman 
 in its power of control, where each of the short 
 sentences is half a tragedy : — 
 
 A slumber did my spirit seal ; 
 
 I had no human fears: 
 She seemed a thing that could not feel 
 
 The touch of earthly years. 
 
 No motion has she now, no force ; 
 
 She neither hears nor sees ; 
 Rolled round in earth's diurnal course 
 
 With rocks, and stones, and trees. 
 
 It is impossible to speak of the style of such a 
 poem as this ; for a style is something habitual, 
 
112 WORDSWORTH 
 
 and here is a unique feat of strength, the achieve- 
 ment of a lifetime. Yet Wordsworth, if he 
 never equalled it again, came near it so often that 
 he has almost earned the right to a definition of 
 his style as a continuous fabric of great imagina- 
 tive moments. Many suitors of the Muse have 
 tried to draw his bow since the strength and 
 cunning of his own hand failed, and none of them 
 is strong enough. Dora^ and Aylmer's Field, and 
 Enoch Arden are moving poems, but they belong 
 to a tamer world, and do not come near to the 
 elemental pathos of the story of Michael and the 
 sheep-fold, or of that other story, which has 
 nothing but the passage of years for its incidents, 
 of Margaret in the wayside (pottage. It is wrong, 
 indeed, to call these two works stories ; they are 
 the very stuiF of first-hand experience, and their 
 reader lives through many more hours than they 
 take in the telling. Tennyson is a story-teller; 
 his directing will makes itself felt throughout ; 
 he presides over the destinies of his characters, 
 and imposes his judgments on them and on the 
 reader. When he has brought Enoch Arden to 
 the last harbour he cannot refrain from comment : — 
 So past the strong heroic soul away. 
 And when they buried him the little port 
 Had seldom seen a costlier funeral. 
 
 But Wordsworth is satisfied with the solemnity 
 and weight of the mere event : — 
 
I'UlillU DICTION 113 
 
 She is dead, 
 The light extinguished of her lonely hut, 
 The hut itself abandoned to decay, 
 And she forgotten in the quiet grave. 
 
 He shuns all dramatic developments that are not 
 inherent in the event itself. When the old man 
 lost his only son, 
 
 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 inheritance. 
 
 And the consolation sought is sought in no special 
 or personal alleviations, but in the processes of 
 eternal Law : — 
 
 There is a comfort in the strength of love ; 
 'Twill make a thing endurable, which else 
 Would overset the brain, or break the heart. 
 
 There is a comfort also, slow and dearly pur- 
 chased, in 
 
 the calm oblivious tendencies 
 
 Of Nature, 'mid her plants, and weeds, and flowers, 
 
 And silent overgrowings, 
 
 whereby she reclaims humanity from its restless 
 dream and blends it with herself, 
 
 A comparison of Wordsworth's greater poems 
 with those which Tennyson wrote under his 
 immediate influence must not be used to de- 
 preciate the younger poet. Tennyson was un- 
 
 1 
 
114 WORDSWORTH 
 
 happy in yielding too easily to that overmastering 
 influence. His right masters were Coleridge and 
 Keats, and his best work does not disgrace them. 
 So that if Enoch Arden be set for a moment beside 
 Michael or the tale of Margaret, it is only for 
 the sake of just proportion, as a man of ordinary 
 stature may be introduced into a picture to give 
 some idea of the sheer height of the cliffs that 
 tower above him. 
 
 There are few, even of Wordsworth's poems, 
 that maintain themselves throughout at the 
 elevation of these two. But everywhere, when 
 his deepest and sincerest feelings are touched, his 
 language answers to them, and becomes simpler, 
 more matter-of-fact, a bare transcript of ex- 
 perience, without commentary. It may be in a 
 description of Peter Bell's journeys on foot 
 
 through Yorkshire dales. 
 Among the rocks and winding scars ; 
 Where deep and low the hamlets lie 
 Beneath their little patch of sky 
 And little lot of stars. 
 
 Or it may be in a Complaint, "suggested by a 
 change in the manner of a friend " : — 
 
 There is a change — and I am poor ; 
 Yoiir love hath been, not long ago, 
 A fountain at my fond heart's door, 
 Whose only business was to flow ; 
 And flow it did : not taking heed 
 Of its own bounty, or my need. 
 
POETIC DICTION 115 
 
 Where the feeling deepens he avoids even 
 simple metaphors like this, that he may bring , 
 his words as close as possible to the actual ex- j 
 perience. ^ 
 
 And now the vexed question of diction may ' 
 be taken up once more, with better hope. 
 Wordsworth's devotion to the mere fact, his 
 fixed and jealous gaze on truth, brought him ^ 
 into difficulties and dangers unlike those which 
 beset poets who indulge the imagination with a 
 freer course. The mere fact said everything to 
 him ; the dates on a tombstone spoke eloquently ;) 
 and a parish register, without addition, touched 
 the spring of sympathy and tears. But the mere I 
 fact, which says everything, comes perilously near j 
 also to saying nothing. A parish register is noty 
 in itself a poem ; and the poet who aims at a 
 similar economy of matter, while he avoids all 
 the flowery enticements that allure weaker feet, 
 is likely enough to fall out of poetry on the 
 other side. There is scant foothold for him in 
 these bare places. He must plant his steps, one 
 by one, with unremitting skill and care ; a single 
 error of judgment will precipitate him into bathos, 
 And here Wordsworth found that language, the 
 instrument of poetry, which had played other 
 poets false, was not true to him ; that words 
 were deceitful, clumsy, unmanageable, and tricky. 
 He speaks, in his theoretical prefaces, of the 
 
r 
 
 ii6 WORDSWORTH 
 
 misuse of language, of distorted expressions and 
 adulterated phraseology, as if to get rid of these 
 things once for all required only an act of com- 
 mon honesty ; as if the disease were of a recent 
 and easily assignable origin, and could be stamped 
 out by the self-denial of poets. He was to find 
 out later that his quarrel with the corruptions of 
 
 'language was a quarrel with language itself, and 
 that when men do not speak the truth it is as 
 
 'often because they cannot as because they will 
 not. The thing to be expressed, even at its 
 simplest, is far beyond the limited compass of 
 the instrument, and, save by partial indications, 
 can no more be interpreted in words than a 
 
 \ symphony can be rendered upon the flute. A 
 confession of the inadequacy of language for the 
 communication of the poet's thoughts and feelings 
 interrupts the Prelude and the Excursion again and 
 again. The " heroic argument " of the might of 
 souls, and of their inner workings while yet they 
 are new to the world, is propounded in the Third 
 Book of the Prelude, but is soon set aside, for 
 
 in the main 
 It lies far hidden from the reach of words. 
 
 The men who are best framed for contempla- 
 tion, whose life is nourished on the feelings that 
 are also the life of poetry, are often mute and 
 incapable of imparting their experience : — 
 
i'UETlC DICTION 117 
 
 Theirs is the language of the heavens, the power, 
 The thought, the image, and the silent joy : 
 Words are but under-agents in their souls ; 
 When they are grasping with their greatest strength. 
 They do not breathe among them. 
 
 And the wonders of mountain and lake defj| 
 the powers of the most accomplished speech : — f 
 
 Such beauty, varying in the light 
 Of living nature, cannot be portrayed 
 By words, nor by the pencil's silent still j 
 But is the property of him alone 
 Who hath beheld it, noted it with care, 
 And in his mind recorded it with love ! 
 
 Man, therefore, cannot speak the truth, which is 
 beyond him and above him. When he attempts it 
 he must needs use the words that have been put 
 into his mouth by others, and use them very much 
 as he has been taught to use them. And words 
 were not invented at first, and are very imperfectly 
 adapted at best, for the severer purposes of truth. 
 They bear upon them aU the weaknesses of their ' 
 origin, and aU the maims inflicted by the prejudices 
 and fanaticisms of generations of their employers. 
 They perpetuate the memory or prolong the life 
 of many noble forms of human extravagance, and 
 they are the monuments of many splendid virtues. 
 But with all their abilities and dignities they are 
 seldom well fitted for the quiet and accurate state- 
 ment of the thing that is. In short, they are 
 
ii8 WORDSWORTH 
 
 necessary instruments of Rhetoric, and are thereby 
 often spoilt for the rarer and purer service of 
 Poetry, 
 
 The difficulties of truth -telling have been 
 noticed by the poets, but the chief cause of those 
 difficulties, so far as they are superable, has received 
 less attention ; and it stands in the closest relation 
 to the present problem. Browning has put a part 
 of the case admirably : — 
 
 When man walks the garden of this world 
 For his own solace, and unchecked by law. 
 Speaks or keeps silence as himself sees fit. 
 Without the least incumbency to lie, 
 Why, can he tell you what a rose is like, 
 Or how the birds fly, and not slip to false 
 Though truth serve better ? 
 
 But truth does not always serve better, and 
 the man who is sincerely attempting to tell you 
 what a rose is like is engaged in a very unusual 
 kind of intellectual exercise. Words are shaped 
 for warfare ; they have acquired their uses in that 
 \^ never-ending struggle for pre-eminence and power 
 which is called society. The struggle itself 
 Wordsworth recognised, and he knew how incon- 
 sistent it is with the disinterested vision of poetry. 
 " There neither is," he writes to Lady Beaumont, 
 " nor can be, any genuine enjoyment of poetry 
 among nineteen out of twenty of those persons 
 who live, or wish to live, in the broad light of the 
 
POETIC DICTION 119 
 
 world — among those who either are, or are striving 
 to make themselves, people of consideration in 
 society. This is a truth, and an awful one, 
 because to be incapable of a feeling for poetry, in 
 my sense of the word, is to be without love of 
 human nature and reverence for God." But here, 
 again, he is perhaps hardly conscious of the scope of 
 his indictment ; those interferences with poetry of 
 which he complains are caused not by the vices of 
 a class, but by the habits of the human race, 
 imposed on them by the necessities of life. 
 Wherever there is human society there is war ; 
 and if Wordsworth had been intimate with the 
 dalesmen whom he contemplated from on high, he 
 would have found it in the Lakes. Beasts fight 
 with horns, and men, when the guns are silent, 
 with words. The changes of meaning in words, 
 from good to bad and from bad to good senses, 
 are incidents in the campaign, the capture and 
 recapture of weapons. The very existence of 
 these good and bad senses, which are quite 
 independent of the root meaning, is proof enough, 
 without detailed illustration, of the incessant 
 nature of the strife. The question is not what a 
 word means, but what it imputes. The com- 
 batants are always manceuvring for the possession 
 of the higher ground, which is claimed and re- 
 claimed by successive adaptations of language to 
 the needs of the case. Grown men and women 
 
I20 WORDSWORTH 
 
 who live in the world do very little thinking with 
 words apart from these military operations. If 
 language serves their turn they are content ; its 
 fitness for the representation of absolute truth, of 
 fact or impression, is no part of their daily care. 
 
 What is a poet or a philosopher to do who 
 tries to carry on his work in the midst of this 
 mellay ? He finds no instruments ready to his 
 hand and fitted for his peaceful investigations. 
 Even those which seem likeliest, the simple names 
 of things and qualities, have had an edge and a 
 point put on them by some industrious warrior. 
 "The word material" said a great critic of this 
 generation, "should never be used but with the 
 highest respect." It has shared the fortunes of many 
 other words deserving of reverence, and has been 
 degraded by controversy to a term of opprobrium. 
 The stuff of which the world is made, in all its 
 variety and marvel, may stir thought in the artist 
 or poet ; the fighter needs it only as a vantage- 
 ground whence he may assert his own superiority 
 or make good his own contentions. 
 
 Wordsworth, though to see things as they are 
 was his dearest aim, knew that man is a creature 
 too perturbed to see all things clearly. " Angels," 
 he says in the Excursion, 
 
 perceive 
 With undistempered and unclouded spirit 
 The object as it is ; but, for ourselves, 
 
POETIC DICTION 121 
 
 That speculative height we may not reach. 
 
 The good and evil are our own ; and we 
 
 Are that which we would contemplate from far. 
 
 He found also that these perturbations interfere 
 with the communication and reception of such 
 truth as may be discerned. This caused him to 
 attempt the purification of language. He desired 
 to purge it of its rhetorical elements, and even 
 of its logical elements, in so far as the operations 
 of logic impede the breadth and unity of vision. 
 He distrusted 
 
 that false secondary power 
 By which we multiply distinctions, then 
 Deem that our puny boundaries are things 
 That we perceive, and not that we have made. 
 
 But language is a social product, and cannot be 
 purer in the lump than the society that shapes it 
 and uses it. Wordsworth turned naturally, there- 
 fore, to the purest society known to him — to the 
 simple people of the Lakes. Surely these people, 
 who passed their life in the presence of the great 
 things of Nature, 
 
 in lights and shades 
 That marched and countermarched about the hills 
 In glorious apparition, 
 
 would furnish him with a speech which might 
 express something of the glory that he saw. 
 
 His reason for choosing humble and rustic life 
 as his academy of language was thus, like the rest 
 
122 WORDSWORTH 
 
 of his theory of poe try, purely mystical. He 
 knew no dialect, and did not trouble himself to 
 acquire one. His strongest motive appears clearly 
 in the short sentence where he says that in a humble 
 condition of life " men hourly communicate with 
 the best objects from which the best part of 
 language is originally derived." Coleridge made 
 short work of this philological theory. But its 
 interest remains ; for it shows that the best part of 
 language, to Wordsworth's mind, was to be found 
 in the mere names of natural objects. Could not 
 the men who had these names daily on their lips 
 give him some help in the effort to penetrate the 
 mystery and to enter into a closer communion ? 
 
 Another society, which uses a language greater, 
 more passionate, and purer than the language of 
 the shepherds of the Lakes, was, in his theory at 
 least, overlooked by Wordsworth — the society of 
 poets, living and dead. It is they who preserve 
 langu£^e from pollution and enrich it with new 
 powers. They redeem words from degradation 
 by a single noble employment. They establish a 
 tradition that bridges over the treacherous currents 
 and quicksands of time and fashion. And they 
 were Wordsworth's masters, though he pays them 
 scant acknowledgment. It was an acute criticism 
 of Coleridge's, passed on Wordsworth's descrip- 
 tion of his own language as "a selection of the 
 language really used by men," that the very power 
 
POETIC DICTION 12^ 
 
 of making a selection implies the previous posses- 
 sion of the language selected. The dalesmen 
 brought their humble speeches to the poet, who 
 accepted or rejected them, sitting himself as judge, 
 with Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser as assessors. 
 This procedure, though not consistently observed, 
 was good enough ; it renewed the warrant of 
 experience for phrases which without that warrant 
 might have sounded distant and languid. The 
 experience, like all vivid experiences, seemed so 
 unprecedented that it imparted a strange air to 
 the words that set it forth, and Wordsworth was 
 apt at times to forget that the language he spoke 
 and wrote was indeed the English language, and 
 that his handling of it, when he put forth all his 
 strength, was guided by the same principles and 
 the same tact that gave Chaucer a place among 
 the masters. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 NATURE 
 
 What then is the work of Poetry — the work for 
 which words, the poet's instruments, seemed all 
 too feeble? Man, in his passage through this 
 world, is the plaything of great forces. Some; 
 startle his soul into passionate feeling, some lull 
 it in Elysian pleasure, some tease it into fret and 
 futility. Yet through all its adventures the soul 
 is conscious that it is something other than a help- 
 less pawn, that the forces which assail it draw 
 some of their reality from its own creative energy, 
 that the spectacle which it looks out upon is partly 
 "of its own arranging. Wordsworth wished to 
 reproduce and communicate the highest raptures 
 and the most exalted moods that result from this 
 twofold agency — to s how how the mind of man 
 is g'ffggted by^ t he external world , and jp Lits turn 
 reacts upon it. and how the heart of man may be 
 so d isposed as to be l^tgd on the wa veof circum- 
 stance, no t stupefied or overwhelmed by it. 
 
 124 
 
JNAiUKE 125 
 
 For this task, language/was a makeshift, be- 
 cause the great crises of/feeling that he wished 
 to reproduce, still more the settled moods of lofty ' 
 peace that came to him among the mountains, 
 existed altogether apart from language, and with- 
 out any dependence on expression for their 
 vitality. The drama that he tried to transfer tOj 
 the poet's small stage was played from beginning 
 to end in silence ; it rested with him to translate 
 it into words. And hence, in his view, poetry, 
 the poetry of words and metre, was always a 
 secondary thing, an imitation or reminiscence of 
 something deeper in import than itself — a sort of 
 chantry, so to say, where the souls of great moments 
 that had perished on distant fields with never a 
 word said might be commemorated by the voice 
 of piety. 
 
 The attempt might well seem as vain as the^ 
 attempt to paint a picture of a sunset. No sooner ^ 
 is the living experience repeated than the books all 
 seem empty, and false, and superfluous. The 
 silence of a damp evening in early autumn, when 
 the clouds rest like a weight upon the horizon, 
 and the cattle are ghosts in the twilight, and the 
 trees and hills wear an appearance of gray expectant 
 suiFeringjiij a stillness so absolute that the whole scene 
 seems laid for the sudden signal that never comes, 
 to change it and end it ; the talk of the summer 
 wind among the trees, monotonous and ceaseless, 
 
-p 
 
 126 WORDSWORTH 
 
 as the leaves are lifted and fall and are lifted 
 again ; the glow of a field of ripe corn, so poorly 
 likened to gold ; the sheen of wide waters in 
 the evening, not really like silver or steel, daily 
 observed and never the same, or, if the same, 
 never remembered well enough to prevent another 
 surprise — how should the actual impressions of 
 these things be preserved in the speech of the 
 market-place ? They can never be described to 
 those who have not known them, and those who 
 have known them know also how little language 
 avails to reanimate the pale memory. 
 
 This difficulty, no doubt, attends on all poetry ; 
 
 '' but the ex periences that Wordsworth took for his 
 poetic material are thos e which adapt them selves 
 
 ^ least readil^to v erbal expressio n. Poetry that 
 deals with the social relationships of mankind, or 
 with the truths of the discursive intellect — the 
 
 [ poetry of human charg,cter, morality, and wit — 
 finds the stuff of its building ready to its hand, in 
 need of no such transmuting. The thing that 
 happens, in these cases, involves the words — some- 
 times, indeed, the words themselves are the only 
 thing that happens. There is no Platonic idea of 
 a pun ; it represents nothing but itself ; and the 
 like is true of many of the conceits, epigrams, and 
 antitheses of the school of poetry from which Words- 
 worth recoiled. He would have nothing to do 
 with these, nor with the gymnastic of the intellect. 
 
NATURE 127 
 
 as it catches at particular points in things observed, 
 and uses them for the exhibition of its activities. 
 Analytic industry, he says, was less pleasing to 
 him than the observation of affinities, the " creative 
 energy," he calls it, which strives to grasp an 
 unbroken unity in what is presented to it. The 
 intellect works by definition and distinction ; it 
 resolves the pageant of the senses into a multitude 
 of single independent things, and invents classi- 
 fications even of the faculties of the mind, 
 ranged in scale and order ; but to what purpose, 
 Wordsworth asks, 
 
 If each most obvious and particular thought. 
 Not in a mystical and idle sense, 
 But in the words of Reason deeply weighed, 
 Hath no beginning. 
 
 The whole energy of his mind was spent to reunite "■ 
 what man had put asunder, to fuse, in a holy 
 passion, the differences that are invented by the 
 near-sighted activities of the discriminating human 
 intellect. His own thought, as he truly says, was ^ 
 aU " steeped in feeling " : — 
 
 I was only then 
 Contented, when with bliss ineffable 
 I felt the sentiment of Being spread 
 O'er all that moves and all that seemeth still ; 
 O'er all that, lost beyond the reach of thought 
 And human knowledge, to the human eye 
 Invisible, yet liveth to the heart ; 
 
128 WORDSWORTH 
 
 O'er all that leaps and runs, and shouts and sings. 
 Or beats the gladsome air ; o'er all that glides 
 Beneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself, 
 And mighty depth of waters. 
 
 This purpose and temper brought him out of 
 sympathy not only, as has already been shown, 
 with dialectic and logic, but even with morality, as 
 morality is commonly understood. The behaviour 
 of his fellows, especially where it immediately 
 affects his own welfare, is the subject of all others 
 which has the liveliest interest for man, and which 
 often preoccupies him so entirely that it determines 
 his view of the Universe and blinds him to what 
 lies beyond itself. Such a blindness had fallen on 
 John Stuart Mill at the time when the reading of 
 Wordsworth's poems made an epoch in his life. 
 "From them," he says, "I seemed to learn ^what^ 
 would be the perennial sources of happiness, when 
 all the greater evils of life shall have been re- 
 moved." But even Mill postpones the happiness 
 to the grim business of reform — as if a sick man 
 should make a vow to taste no food till his 
 recovery is complete. It is pot the least of the 
 sacrifices made by social reformers and those who 
 do battle with the active evils of an age that they 
 often disable their own capacity for simple happi- 
 ness, so that if their ends were all attained, they 
 would find nothing to occupy their thoughts. Like 
 men who have spent a lifetime in accumulating 
 
JNATUKE 129 
 
 wealth, they become unable to enjoy the fruits of 
 their labours. And not reformers and rich men 
 only, but many poets also would find their occupa- 
 tion gone if they lived in a golden world of peace 
 and innocence. In such a world the poetic works 
 of Alexander Pope — as much of them as would be 
 appreciated — might be published in the outward 
 form of a religious tract. But the Canticle of St. 
 Francis and many of the greatest poems of Words- 
 worth would not suffer the loss of a line. 
 
 It is inevitable, while man lives in the world as 
 it is, that his poetry should reflect the knowledge 
 of good and evil. Morality colours all language, 
 and lends to it the most delicate of its powers of 
 distinction. Take from as poet his moral reflec- 
 tions, his saws, and his sentences ; you rob him 
 of his most eiFective instrument. It is by these, 
 indeed, rather than by his constructive or explora- 
 tory powers, that Shakespeare holds his most 
 popular title. A poet who coins proverbs and gives ^ 
 point and polish to moral truth is a poet whose , 
 fortune is quickly made. But how, except in some 
 completely transcendental sense, can a moral 
 expression be given to a sunset ? No clearly j 
 rounded period can reproduce that marvel, with 
 all its vague messages to the heart. And it was 
 this sort of power and this sort of beauty that was 
 the inspiration of Wordsworth's poetry. He did 
 not undervalue another sort of beauty, which 
 
 K 
 
I30 WORDSWORTH 
 
 appeals chiefly to the intellect — the beauty of con- 
 trivance, of perfect adaptation to an end, which 
 makes a steam-engine or a masterly game of chess 
 a source of pure joy. But this is a beauty im- 
 posed by the active intelligence of man on the 
 shapeless material that comes to his hand. So also 
 does human morality, in so far as it takes its origin 
 from the necessities of social life, impose itself on 
 the raw material of society. There is no question 
 here of the intuitions of a great prophet or teacher, 
 but simply of that wide field of social judgment 
 and social sanction, far wider than the operation of 
 any definite enactments, where the moral sense of 
 a community imposes itself on the tastes and habits 
 of the individual and brings order out of chaos. 
 
 IBut the contriving power of the intelligence and 
 the assertive power of the will are equally at a loss 
 in the presence of the mighty things of Nature. 
 They cannot impose themselves on a sunset. 
 Curious searchings and strenuous purposes must 
 be laid aside if man is to approach Nature in the 
 right humble temper — he must bring with him 
 only " a heart that watches and receives." 
 
 Four short poems written at Alfoxden in the 
 spring of 1798 — the Lines written in Early Spring, 
 the verses To my Sister, and the twin poems called 
 Expostulation and Reply and the Tables Turned — 
 contain the first full expression of this most 
 [^essential part of Wordsworth's poetic teaching : — 
 
NATURE 131 
 
 Books ! 'tis a dull and endless strife : 
 Come, hear the woodland linnet. 
 How sweet his music ! on my life, 
 There's more of wisdom in it. 
 
 And hark ! how blithe the throstle sings ! 
 He, too, is no mean preacher : 
 Come forth into the light of things. 
 Let Nature be your teacher. 
 
 She has a world of ready wealth, 
 Our minds and hearts to bless — 
 Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health, 
 Truth breathed by cheerfulness. 
 
 One impulse from a vernal wood 
 May teach you more of man, 
 Of moral evil and of good, 
 Than all the sages can. 
 
 Sweet is the lore which Nature brings ; 
 Our meddling intellect 
 Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things : — 
 We murder to dissect. 
 
 The last three stanzas are a condensed and pro- 
 found expression of a thought that Wordsworth 
 never tired of repeating ; the Prelude and the 
 Excursion are very largely commentaries on this 
 text. Mr. John Morley, it is true, will have 
 it that these verses are only the poet's fun. ** It 
 is best," he says, " to be entirely sceptical as to the 
 existence of system and ordered philosophy in 
 Wordsworth. When he tells us that 
 
132 WORDSWORTH 
 
 " One impulse from a vernal wood 
 May teach you more of man, 
 Of moral evil and of good. 
 Than all the sages can, 
 
 such a proposition cannot be seriously taken as 
 more than a half-playful saUy for the benefit of 
 some too bookish friend. No impulse from a 
 vernal wood can teach us anything at aU of moral 
 evil and of good." If this be so, then Words- 
 ^ / worth himself can teach us nothing at all of moral 
 evil and of good. The secret of his strength is 
 stolen from him. It was this very entanglement, 
 which ties up all moral teaching to the dry bones 
 of system and ordered philosophy, that Words- 
 worth tried to cut through. It is best, at any 
 rate, and wisest to disbelieve any one who says that 
 a great poet does not mean that which he many 
 , times solemnly asserts. The thought recurs in the 
 verses To my Sister: — 
 
 Love, now a universal birth. 
 From heart to heart is stealing, 
 From earth to man, from man to earth : 
 — It is the hour of feeling. 
 
 One moment now may give us more 
 Than years of toiling reason : 
 Our minds shall drink at every pore 
 The spirit of the season. 
 
 Some silent laws our hearts will make. 
 Which they shall long obey : 
 
NATURE 133 
 
 We for the year to come may take 
 Our temper from to-day. 
 
 Let us treat this matter in prose. The right 
 knowledge of good and evil depends largely on 
 the actual content of the two ideas as they are 
 conceived by the mind. And that content may be 
 immeasurably enriched by experiences which involve 
 no exercise of the toiling reason, and are quite 
 independent of all ordered philosophy. A moral 
 philosopher, indeed, may attain to unimpeachable 
 conclusions and yet have very imperfect ideas of 
 morality because his conceptions of good and evil 
 are meagre and languid — his black is brown and 
 his white is merely grey. No one who is not 
 capable of great happiness can be a highly moral 
 being. And the happiness that comes to a soul 
 from finely attuned sympathies with all the joyful 
 impulses of Nature seemed to Wordsworth to be, 
 in the deepest and most serious sense, a factor of 
 morality. In the Lines written above Tintern 
 Abbey he repeats his conviction that these feelings ^ 
 of unremembered pleasure are 
 
 such, perhaps, 
 As may have had no trivial influence 
 On that best portion of a good man's life. 
 His little, nameless, unremembered acts 
 Of kindness and of love. 
 
 The natural counterpart to this belief is ex- 
 pressed most clearly in the first of the four poems 
 
134 WORDSWORTH 
 
 mentioned above. Wordsworth held it to be true, 
 in sober fact, that pleasure and pain and the moral 
 life which man is apt to claim as his prerogative 
 have a domain as wide as what is called " animated 
 .Nature " — and wider : — 
 
 Through primrose tufts, in that green bower. 
 The periwinkle trailed its wreaths ; 
 And 'tis my faith that every flower 
 Enjoys the air it breathes. 
 
 The birds around me hopped and played, 
 Their thoughts I cannot measure : — 
 But the least motion which they made 
 It seemed a thrill of pleasure. 
 
 The budding twigs spread out their fan 
 To catch the breezy air ; 
 And I must think, do all I can, 
 That there was pleasure there. 
 
 But this again, says Mr. Morley — so far at least 
 as the flowers and twigs are concerned, for he does 
 not challenge the birds — is "a charming poetic 
 fancy and no more." Since an eloquent admirer 
 of the poet reads him thus, it seems not idle to try 
 to show that what Wordsworth here calls his faith 
 is the corner-stone of his poetry and no less. In 
 his early days, as he tells in the Second and Third 
 Books of the Prelude^ it was by this way that he 
 mounted to " community with highest truth " : — 
 
 To every natural form, rock, fruits, or flower. 
 Even the loose stones that cover the highway. 
 
NATURE 135 
 
 I gave a moral life : I saw them feel. 
 Or linked them to some feeling : the great mass 
 Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all 
 That I beheld respired with inward meaning. 
 
 And a few lines farther on he anticipates criticism: — 
 
 Some called it madness — so indeed it was. 
 If child-like fruitfulness in passing joy. 
 If steady moods of thoughtfulness matured 
 To inspiration, sort with such a name ; 
 If prophecy be madness ; if things viewed 
 By poets in old time, and higher up 
 By the first men, earth's first inhabitants, 
 May in these tutored days no more be seen 
 With undisordered sight. 
 
 In the Ninth Book of the Excursion the Wanderer 
 asserts as doctrine what the poet, in the Lines 
 written above Tintern Abbey, had expressed as 
 feeling. In every form of Being he finds an aqtive 
 Principle — in stars, clouds, flowers, trees, stones, 
 rocks, the waters, the air, and the mind of man — 
 
 Spirit that knows no insulated spot. 
 
 No chasm, no solitude ; from link to link 
 
 It circulates, the Soul of all the worlds. 
 
 Might, wisdom, joy, peace, these were not qualities 
 projected by the imagination of man into a life- 
 less universe, but qualities that exist outside of 
 man, and may pass into his life, if only he will be 
 quiet and will attend. 
 
 It is this belief, with all its consequences, which 
 
136 WORDSWORTH 
 
 makes Wordsworth's attitude to Nature a very 
 difFerent thing from what, by an appropriate 
 theatrical analogy, is called a love of beautiful 
 "scenery." His stage was bare of scenery, and 
 held nothing but the actors. And this made him 
 feel a special sympathy for Greek myth — a sym- 
 pathy expressed at length in the Fourth Book of the 
 Excursion, and yet more feelingly in one of the 
 best known of his sonnets. It was from as intense 
 a love of natural things as was ever felt by the 
 pagans, and from a far greater familiarity with 
 them, that Wordsworth's imagination peopled the 
 lonely places. In early civilisations men are never 
 really familiar with wild Nature — she is too danger- 
 ous. The Greeks themselves clung close to the 
 shelter of the city, and to this day, in all countries, 
 the peasant is reluctant to be abroad in the dark. 
 But Wordsworth from early childhood had been 
 a wanderer at aU hours. " Let the moon," he says 
 to his sister. 
 
 Shine on thee in thy solitary walk ; 
 
 And let the misty mountain winds be free 
 
 To blow against thee. 
 
 The streams and trees and hills showed him no 
 human faces ; he loved them for themselves, and 
 recognised in them a kindred vitality. In his 
 sonnet of 18 15, to the brook, he disclaims the 
 forms of the Greek imagination : — 
 
NATURE 137 
 
 If wish were mine some type of thee to view, 
 Thee, and not thee thyself, I would not do 
 Like Grecian Artists, give thee human cheeks, 
 Channels for tears ; no Naiad should'st thou be, — 
 Have neither limbs, feet, feathers, joints nor hairs : 
 It seems the Eternal Soul is clothed in thee 
 With purer robes than those of flesh and blood. 
 And hath bestowed on thee a safer good ; 
 Unwearied joy, and life without its cares. 
 
 This fixed conception of a life animating all things 1 
 may be found also in that passage of the First 
 Book of the Prelude where is described the weird 
 adventure of the poet's boyhood, how the mountain 
 seemed to rise up and pursue him, and in the 
 poem on Nutting, and — not to multiply needless 
 illustrations — in a hundred other places. 
 
 These other lives that surround him may 
 become, Wordsworth said, — and he is to be taken 
 seriously, — man's teachers. Power and virtue may 
 pass from them to him, if he will submit to their 
 influence. But he must be initiated in the right 
 art of learning. And here again the Alfoxden 
 poems contain the most compact statement : — 
 
 The eye — it cannot choose but see ; 
 We cannot bid the ear be still ; 
 Our bodies feel, where'er they be. 
 Against or with our will. 
 
 Nor less I deem that there are Powers 
 Which of themselves our minds impress ; 
 
f 
 
 138 WORDSWORTH 
 
 That we can feed this mind of ours 
 In a wise passiveness. 
 
 Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum 
 Of things for ever speaking. 
 That nothing of itself will come. 
 But we must still be seeking ? 
 
 If only the eye and the ear be open and the mind 
 free from preoccupation and the innumerable dis- 
 quieting movements of mental self-assertion, 
 Nature will do the rest, and we have but to be 
 passive. How little open the eye and ear generally 
 are may be observed by any one who will take 
 notice of the first hundred faces that he sees on 
 the road, and will search among them for those 
 that wear an expression consistent with the attitude 
 of "wise passiveness." "An idle poet here and 
 there looks round him," ready to be delighted by 
 what he sees, but for the most of men it needs some 
 strong and deep emotion to shake them out of the 
 lethargy of custom and to grant them for a brief 
 space the full enjoyment of their senses. Words- 
 worth held that the mood he so valued, the " happy 
 stillness of the mind," can be induced. Just as the 
 muscles, we are told, can be developed by a con- 
 centrated attention given to the slowest natural 
 movements, so he believed that the strivings of the 
 intellect can be put away by a voluntary relaxation 
 of the will, and the receptive possibilities of the 
 whole nature enormously increased. 
 
NATURE 139 
 
 For Nature's favoured children no such effort 
 is needful ; they have the secret by instinct, and 
 are educated under the charge of Nature herself. 
 By the education of Nature, Wordsworth meant J 
 a real process, not a series of ingenious analogies. W 
 In Ruth he describes how winds and tempests, the \ 
 splendours and languors of the tropics, nourished 
 wild impulses and voluptuous tendencies in the 
 heart of the young soldier ; but these influences, 
 he adds, were not whoUy evil — 
 
 For passions linked to forms so fair 
 And stately, needs must have their share 
 Of noble sentiment. 
 
 And in the wonderful poem on the education of 
 Lucy he speaks mystically, perhaps, but not 
 fancifully : — 
 
 The stars of midnight shall be dear 
 
 To her ; and she shall lean her ear 
 
 In many a secret place 
 
 Where rivulets dance their wayward round. 
 
 And beauty born of murmuring sound 
 
 Shall pass into her face. 
 
 A real discipline of the mind and heart must surely 
 be obtainable from Nature, if Nature be, as Words- 
 worth conceived her, 
 
 A Power 
 That is the visible quality and shape 
 And image of right reason ; that matures 
 Her processes by steadfast laws ; gives birth 
 
I40 WORDSWORTH 
 
 To no impatient or fallacious hopes, 
 No heat of passion or excessive zeal, 
 No vain conceits ; provokes to no quick turns 
 Of self-applauding intellect ; but trains 
 To meekness and exalts by humble faith ; 
 Holds up before the mind intoxicate 
 With present objects, and the busy dance 
 Of things that pass away, a temperate show 
 Of objects that endure. 
 
 f Men of sound practical sense may be impatient 
 of these conclusions. They will humour poetic 
 license, but they must not be asked seriously to 
 believe that there is a moral life in the material 
 world, that trees enjoy the air they breathe, or 
 that the motion of clouds and willows can teach 
 
 (grace to a girl. They may be right; but what 
 they must not say is that Wordsworth does not 
 believe these things. 
 
 Man, the Moralist, is not very quick to recognise 
 moral capacity in anything that cannot talk. He 
 fears an extension of the moral franchise, lest it 
 should diminish his own dignity. When Thoreau 
 said that if ever he got to heaven he should expect 
 to find the pine-trees there, and still above him, he 
 offended cultured Boston. And if Wordsworth 
 does not offend, neither does he convince the 
 Moralist when he professes feelings of fraternal 
 love for " the unassuming things that hold a silent 
 station in this beauteous world." 
 
 But the real issue lies deeper than this. Nature, 
 
NATURE 141 
 
 it is urged, is cruel, and careless of the happiness 
 of her millions of subjects. The woods where the 
 poet found refreshment are a battlefield and a 
 slaughter-house for other creatures. Pain and fear 
 and bloodshed are a part of the law of life. This is 
 no new truth, but it has been presented in a new 
 and impressive guise by biological science. Did 
 Wordsworth fail to realise it ; did the seclusion and 
 the peacefulness of his way of life limit the range 
 of his imaginative vision and, to some extent at 
 least, vitiate his thinking ? It is a crucial inquiry, 
 and Wordsworth's claim to the title of a great poet 
 depends on the verdict. He wished to bring con- 
 solation to men, and the consolation that is obtained 
 by shutting the eyes to fact is a poor gift for a poet 
 to offer. If his optimism be no stronger in fibre 
 than the genial good-temper, nourished by easyf[ 
 circumstances, which sometimes masquerades under! 
 that name, if it take no account of problems that 
 were an old story when the Book of Job was 
 written, he may still be a pleasant companion for 
 a summer afternoon ; a great teacher of mankind ' 
 he cannot be. * 
 
 To say that Wordsworth had considered the 
 question at issue, and, so far as it can be 
 answered, had answered it for himself, is not to 
 say that his solution is valid for others. In that 
 sense the question never can be answered. The 
 opposed camps represent two ways of feeling in 
 
 c 
 
142 WORDSWORTH 
 
 regard to the admitted facts, not two methods of 
 I reasoning. There will always be those who con- 
 ceive of man, at his best and highest, as a martyr 
 in the arena of brute forces, maintaining a faith 
 L that burns all the brighter in the midst of the 
 dark devices of his insensate and cruel enemies. 
 Such a view of human life is natural to a dramatic 
 \ temper. It groups all other facts round the 
 I strange and moving fact of death, and sees life 
 j by the light of that crisis. Perhaps it is not the 
 view of the martyr himself, who is fearless and 
 happy in his death, as in his life, but rather the 
 view of his shuddering friends among the on- 
 lookers. For them the by-gone quiet years of 
 labour, and sympathy, and delight in common 
 things are well-nigh blotted out under that 
 intolerable spectacle. To these tragic elements 
 in life there must be added, moreover, all the 
 dull dead weight of daily and hourly suffering 
 which is relieved by no hope and lightened by no 
 sense of a cause, all the pain and weariness of 
 man, and all the mute anguish of the other 
 creatures. 
 j Wordsworth does not deny these things, and 
 that he pondered them and felt them deeply is 
 plain enough to any reader of his poems. His 
 pathos is an unmitigated, hard pathos, beyond the 
 reach of sentimental palliatives. His sympathy 
 with the humbler animals brings their sufferings, 
 
NATURE 143 
 
 too, within the pale of tragedy, as in Hart-leap 
 Well, where he guesses at the memories that must 
 have passed through the brain of the hunted 
 creature when it directed its course, after a thirteen 
 hours' desperate chase, to the fountain where it 
 died : — 
 
 Here on the grass perhaps asleep he sank, 
 Lulled by the fountain in the summer-tide ; 
 This water was perhaps the first he drank 
 When he had wandered from his mother's side. 
 
 The poet does not make light of such suffering ; 
 he invokes no special providences to justify it or 
 rectify it, but leaves it unintelligible and awful. 
 If he is moved to no protest, and does not permit 
 these solemn facts to cast a gloom over his view 
 of creation, this is not due to insensibility. Butjt 
 here, as elsewhere, he attempts to alter and widen! 
 the perspective, to set man at a point of view 
 whence he may see things more truly and less' 
 partially. 
 
 It was happiness that Wordsworth taught — 
 like every other poet. And this happiness was 
 a happiness found, not made. His poems are 
 one long and various exposition of "the grand 
 elementary principle of pleasure," as he calls it, 
 " by which man knows, and feels, and lives, and 
 moves." He could not conceive of being save as 
 happiness, which, thwarted and checked in one 
 direction, is, like a stream, diverted merely to 
 
144 WORDSWORTH 
 
 nim 
 
 r seek another oudet. He found this principle of 
 ^^Tfjo^animating all nature, and, so far as his con- 
 
 j templations carried him, he saw it in all human 
 life. Except during his early residence in London, 
 he had little acquaintance with great cities, and he 
 acknowledges that these crowded and confused 
 masses of struggling humanity produce a sense 
 of " oppression, under which even highest minds 
 must labour." Yet he did not shrink from this 
 test ; the unmanageable sight may be resolved into 
 its simpler elements by die mind of him "who 
 looks in steadiness " ; and even of London he 
 writes : — 
 
 The Spirit of Nature was upon me there ; 
 The soul of Beauty and enduring Life 
 Vouchsafed her inspiration, and diiFused, 
 Through meagre lines and colours, and the press 
 Of self-destroying, transitory things. 
 Composure, and ennobling Harmony. 
 
 When, under a dusky, damp pall of smoke 
 and fog, on a chill and comfortless morning, the 
 hum and stir of a great city begins again, when 
 the streets are full of hurrying figures and the air 
 is tortured with jarring noises, what, after all, 
 is the real motive - power of this bewildering 
 I machinery? Are these people only fleeing from 
 \ death? Are they the puppet-show of an ironic 
 Fate that makes them dance on the strings of 
 blind desire ? Or is it the eternal joy of life, in 
 
NATURE 
 
 H5 
 
 the city as in the country, that wakes with the 
 dawn? Wordsworth was not at a loss for an 
 answer to these questions. In all human activity, 
 in lust and ambition, in love and brotherly 
 kindness, in the slow persistence of habit and iii 
 the wildest freaks of impulse he recognised th^ 
 spirit that asserts man's ri ght to hap piness^ and' 
 wins its case in the very assertio n — the same in-| 
 domitable spirit which in the lowest abyss willl 
 declare that all is not lost. If his fiery trials ' 
 and extreme perils and privations bulk larger in 
 man's imagination than the gentler courses of his 
 customary life, this is partly because the exception 
 and not the rule is the centre of dramatic interest. 
 The Greeks refused to speak of human happiness, 
 lest the jealous deities should destroy it ; and their 
 feeling in this matter is rooted deep in human 
 nature. There is a false pessimism best described 
 as the protective device whereby timid happiness 
 simulates misery ; the man who is full of com- 
 plaints of the hardness of his lot is not really 
 wretched ; he is glad that his pleasures should 
 escape notice and elude envy. Despair is silen t, 
 as Wordsworth knew. 
 
 He was not a dramatic poet ; and he did 
 not explore the darkest recesses of the soul. 
 It is not physical tortures nor the intellectual 
 and moral throes of a Hamlet which give the 
 most disquieting pause to thought on these dim 
 
 L 
 
 •^ 
 
146 WORDSWORTH 
 
 1 questions, but base suffering and the pangs of 
 '^ craven fear in a selfish and cruel nature. When 
 Browning has exhibited in all their workings 
 the heart and mind of his Count Guido, he is 
 almost compelled to suppose, resolute optimist 
 though he be, that the very existence of such a 
 nature is a foul anomaly, serving some mysteri- 
 ous purpose, giving opportunity, perhaps, to the 
 rarest human virtues, but, for itself, doomed to 
 merciful dissolution in some dark limbo, 
 
 Where God unmakes but to remake the soul. 
 
 Ij Pain and evil, as Wordsworth saw them, did 
 I not shake his faith in the law of happiness. 
 Indeed, in their tragic forms they bear their own 
 testimony to the law which they break. The 
 deprivation of light and air is what makes the 
 horror of a dungeon. Without happiness for its 
 <- background tragedy is inconceivable. It is in a 
 world of filial affection and married happiness 
 that the tragedies of Oedipus and Lear and 
 Othello become possible. For the true pessimist 
 the keenest sufferings are merely specially perfect 
 examples of the universal rule, and that pessimist 
 spoke consistently who said, "Life is not a 
 tragedy, but a farcical melodrama, which is the 
 worst kind of play." Wordsworth's view of the 
 world, therefore, so far from being inconsistent 
 with the view of the greatest tragic poets, is a 
 
NATURE 147 
 
 necessary complement to theirs. He saw the ) 
 things that they saw, and left them not wholly 
 unrecorded. But, for the most part, he strove, ' 
 here as elsewhere, to call attention to the neglected 
 background, to show how real a thing is "joy / 
 in widest commonalty spread," how the loves and 
 loyalties, the pleasures and consolations that are the 
 sustenance of common life are as fit a theme for 
 poetry as the heroic achievements and rare passions 
 of romance. The air that we breathe, he held, 
 should have its sacred bard. 
 
 No doctrine of the struggle for existence could 
 have impaired this faith. Modern science cannot 
 number suffering among its discoveries ; what it 
 has done, rather, is to exhibit the sufferings of 
 countless creatures as part of a large scheme of 
 progress, and thereby to lend to them a certain 
 sacrificial dignity. Science has widened man's 
 outlook on created things, and this in itself is a 
 kind of magnanimous happiness. " The horizon of 
 sorrow," says M. Maeterlinck, " surveyed from 
 the height of a tho ught that has ceased to be 
 selfish, Jnstinctive, or commonplace, differs but 
 little from the horizon of happiness when this last 
 is regarded from the height of a thought of similar 
 nature, but other in origin. After all, it matters 
 but little whether the clouds be golden or gloomy 
 that yonder float over the plain ; the traveller is 
 glad to have reached the eminence whence his eye 
 

 148 WORDSWORTH 
 
 may at last repose on illimitable space. The sea 
 is not the less marvellous and mysterious to us 
 though white sails be not for ever flitting over its 
 surface ; and neither— tempest_n_or day that is 
 radiant, _and^calm is able to brin g enfee blement 
 into the^ life of our soul. Enfeeblement comes 
 through ourHweUing, by night and by day, in the 
 airless room of our cold, self-satisfied, trivial, un- 
 generous thoughts, at a time when the sky all 
 around our abode is reflecting the light of the 
 ocean." 
 
 It was a rare joy that Wordsworth felt in com- 
 mon things. The things that inspired it were not 
 little things important only by their multitude, but 
 great things overlooked because of their omni- 
 presence : — 
 
 The primal duties shine aloft — like stars ; 
 The charities that soothe, and heal, and bless. 
 Are scattered at the feet of Man — like flowers. 
 
 He meditated on these gifts with a fixed gaze which 
 produced in him transports of worship and love 
 like those of the mystics. In the Life of the 
 Learned and Pious Dr. Henry More (17 10), by 
 Richard Ward, there are passages, descriptive of 
 these ecstasies of joy, which might truly be applied 
 to Wordsworth : — 
 
 He hath professed soberly to some; That he hath 
 been sometimes almost Mad with Pleasure : (The ex- 
 
NATURE 149 
 
 perienc'd will easily understand how to take the Expres- 
 sion). And that, walking abroad after his Studies^ his 
 Sallies towards Nature would be often unexpressihly en- 
 ravishing, and beyond what he could convey to others. . . . 
 He enjoy'd his Maker in All the Parts of the Universe ; 
 and saw the Marks both of his Counsel and Benignity in 
 All. Nay, he was transported, we have seen, with 
 Wonder, as well as Pleasure, even in the Contemplation 
 of those things that are here below. And he was so 
 enamour' d, as I may say, with the Wisdom of God in 
 the Contrivance of things ; that he hath been heard to 
 say, j1 good Man could be sometimes ready, in his own 
 private Reflections^ to kiss the very Stones of the Street. 
 
 A simple, irrepressible joy in things is the 
 motive of many of Wordsworth's shorter poems. 
 His heart leaps up when he beholds a rainbow in 
 the sky. The daffodils, dancing in the breeze, 
 fill him with the spirit of gaiety, and live in his 
 mind and heart, a joyful memory. His poetry 
 does not convert these things into food for 
 reflection ; it is the mark of all mystics that they 
 make the intellect feed the emotions , not the 
 emotions the intellect. He tries to catch the ex- 
 perience, just as it was, and to preserve its bright- 
 ness. And this made his poems a butt for 
 ridicule ; his joy in trivial things seemed a trivial 
 joy, which it was not. Perhaps the best example 
 of this extreme simplicity is to be found in the 
 poem beginning — 
 
 Among all lovely things my Love had been, 
 
I50 WORDSWORTH 
 
 where he records with the eager fervour of a child 
 how on a stormy night he found a glow-worm, 
 and, knowing that Lucy had never seen one, took 
 it quietly into her orchard, 
 
 And left the glow-worm, blessing it by name, 
 Laid safely by itself, beneath a tree. 
 
 The inexperienced reader will now expect a plot — 
 a revolution of fortune from good to bad. There 
 is no such revolution, except in the excited 
 alternations of hope and fear in the mind of the 
 poet. The glow-worm stayed where it was 
 placed : — 
 
 The whole next day I hoped, and hoped with fear ; 
 At night the glow-worm shone beneath the tree j 
 I led my Lucy to the spot, " Look here ! " 
 Oh ! joy it was for her, and joy for me ! 
 
 And with that joy the poem closes. 
 
 A poet's delight in Nature is sometimes shown 
 in his loving and minute descriptions of natural 
 objects. But the business of description commonly 
 gives only too much work to the "meddling 
 intellect." The usual resources of poetic descrip- 
 tion appear in that poem on the Daisy where the 
 flower is compared to a nun, a queen, a cyclops, a 
 fairy shield, a star. But Wordsworth knows that 
 this is simply a pleasant pastime for the fancy : 
 
 Oft on the dappled turf at ease 
 I sit, and play with similes, 
 
NATURE 151 
 
 Loose types of things through all degrees. 
 
 Thoughts of thy raising ; 
 And many a fond and idle name 
 I give to thee, for praise or blame, 
 As is the humour of the game. 
 
 While I am gazing. 
 
 His descriptions never stray far from the object 
 before him, and sometimes are the work of the 
 most delicate observation.. The poem on the 
 Green Linnet was praised by Coleridge for its 
 accurate loveliness : — 
 
 Amid yon tuft of hazel trees. 
 That twinkle to the gusty breeze. 
 Behold him perched in ecstasies, 
 
 Yet seeming still to hover ; 
 There ! where the flutter of his wings 
 Upon his back and body flings 
 Shadows and sunny glimmerings, 
 
 That cover him all over. 
 
 Beauties like this are most frequent in his least ^ 
 ambitious poems, where his mind plays at ease and 
 has time for observation. When his heart is 
 deeply stirred the description is almost drowned 
 in the emotion. So in his account of his cliff- 
 climbing after the raven's nest : — ^ 
 
 Oh, at that time 
 While on the perilous ridge I hung alone. 
 With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind 
 Blow through my ear ! The sky seemed not a sky 
 Of earth — and with what motion moved the clouds I 
 
:^ 
 
 152 WORDSWORTH 
 
 At such times he is not so much an observer as 
 a priest of Nature. Love and awe possess him 
 wholly, and make his voice to sound like the 
 voice of great natural forces. He almost becomes 
 what he aspires to be, a presence and a motion, 
 an equal among mightiest energies. In Shake- 
 speare's time the terrors of the mediaeval imagina- 
 tion still held sway, and for Claudio, in Measure 
 for Measure, the middle air is still the abode of 
 demons and lost souls : — 
 
 To be imprisoned in the viewless winds, 
 And blown with restless violence round about 
 The pendent world ; or to be worse than worst 
 Of those that lawless and incertain thoughts 
 Imagine howling : 'tis too horrible ! 
 
 But Wordsworth, in his passionate desire for one- 
 ness with Nature, finds a heaven of delight in the 
 very fate that Claudio so dreaded : — 
 
 Oh ! what a joy it were, in vigorous health. 
 To have a body (this our vital frame 
 With shrinking sensibility endued, 
 And all the nice regards of flesh and blood) 
 And to the elements siirrpt^Hpr it 
 As if it were a spirit ! — How divine. 
 The liberty, for frail, for mortal man 
 To roam at large among unpeopled glens 
 And mountainous retirements, only trod 
 By devious footsteps ; regions consecrate 
 To oldest time ! and, reckless of the storm 
 That keeps the raven quiet in her nest, 
 
NATURE 153 
 
 Be as a presence or a motion — one 
 
 Among the many there ; and while the mists 
 
 Flying, and rainy vapours, call out shapes 
 
 And phantoms from the crags and solid earth 
 
 As fast as a musician scatters sounds 
 
 Out of an instrument ; and while the streams 
 
 (As at a first creation and in haste 
 
 To exercise their untried faculties) 
 
 Descending from the region of the clouds, 
 
 And starting from the hollows of the earth 
 
 More multitudinous every moment, rend 
 
 Their way before them — what a joy to roam 
 
 An equal among mightiest energies ; 
 
 And haply sometimes with articulate voice, 
 
 Amid the deafening tumult, scarcely heard 
 
 By him that utters it, exclaim aloud, 
 
 " Rage on, ye elements ! let moon and stars 
 
 Their aspects lend, and mingle in their turn 
 
 With this commotion (ruinous though it be) 
 
 From day to night, from night to day, prolonged ! " 
 
 The spirit of science, which has found no loftier 
 or loyaller prophet than Wordsworth, may have 
 cast a chill and a shadow of uncertainty on some 
 of man's most ancient hopes. But it has loosened 
 the clutch of fear at his heart, and has taught him 
 that the universe is not like his morbid dreams, 
 grotesque and indecent. It has shown him that 
 Joy an d sacrifice are eternal principles of nature, 
 and that he need not transgress the natural to find 
 the marvellous. It has left scope enough for the 
 loftiest imagination and the deepest insight of any 
 poet who "rejoices in the presence of truth as 
 
154 WORDSWORTH 
 
 our visible friend and hourly companion." And 
 Wordsworth, by fulfilling this ideal, has given 
 substance and meaning to his own splendid defini- 
 tion : — " Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of 
 all knowledge ; it is the impassioned expression 
 which is in the countenance of all Science." 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 HUMANITY 
 
 Wordsworth's exaltation of Nature as the best 
 teacher of man might seem to involve him in 
 difEculties. He held fast to the loftiest conception 
 of the poet's oiEce, and advanced the largest 
 claims for the poet's power to benefit mankind. 
 But if to live in communion with Nature, to enter 
 by sympathy into her greater and more elemental 
 life, be the most enlightening discipline for man- 
 kind, this highest reach of wisdom may be achieved 
 by men who never wrote or read a single line of 
 verse. What need of priests and temples if the 
 temple of Nature stands open, and all that the 
 priest can do is to comment, in poor and halting 
 language, on the mysteries there discovered to the 
 sincere worshipper ? 
 
 This difficulty is admitted, or rather emphati- 
 cally asserted, by Wordsworth. It appears in the 
 Excursion : — 
 
156 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Oh ! many are the Poets that are sown 
 
 By Nature ; men endowed with highest gifts. 
 
 The vision and the faculty divine ; 
 
 Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse ; 
 
 ■ ■•■•• 
 
 These favoured Beings, 
 All but a scattered few, live out their time, 
 Husbanding that which they possess within. 
 And go to the grave, unthought of. 
 
 And again, yet more emphatically, in the Third 
 
 Book of the Prelude : — 
 
 There's not a man 
 That lives who hath not known his god-like hours, 
 And feels not what an empire we inherit 
 As natural beings in the strength of Nature. 
 
 Does the poet diiFer from other men only by 
 virtue of his gift of expression, which is greater 
 than theirs by nature, and has been improved and 
 strengthened by constant practice ? Is it the chief 
 of his business, as an earlier poet believed, to give 
 utterance to *• what oft was thought, but ne'er so 
 C well expressed " ? 
 
 In the preface to the later editions of the 
 Lyrical Ballads, where he gives a careful analysis 
 of the character of the poet, Wordsworth makes 
 only the barest allusion to this essential gift of 
 expression. Yet the delight in giving a resonant 
 voice to feeling, the love of the exquisitely turned 
 phrase and of the gorgeous trappings of imagery 
 are found in many, if not all, of the best poets. 
 
HUMANITY 157 
 
 Both Shakespeare and Keats, in the days of their 
 youth, fell head over ears in love v?ith language. 
 Of Shakespeare, indeed, it has been maintained, 
 absurdly enough, but not without plausible argu- 
 ment, that his delight in voluble expression so far 
 outran his powers of thought that it was only by 
 some unknown accident of his prime that he 
 became a thinking being and the world's greatest 
 poet. Certainly it is possible in the case of Keats, 
 whose poetic development can be traced from an 
 earlier point, to note how growing powers of 
 thought may take up and utilise the rich stores of 
 diction and imagery that have been acquired by 
 the devout student during his nonage. And 
 Wordsworth had this same gift of expression, but, "^ 
 as he thought, it had misled him, and he did not 
 prize it. The claims of a teacher and prophet 
 must be deeper and surelier based than on a ready 
 command of beautiful and appropriate speech. 
 The poet, he says, is a man " who has a greater 
 knowledge of human nature, and a more compre- 
 hensive sovd, than are supposed to be common 
 among mankind ; a man pleased with his own 
 passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than 
 other men in the spirit of life that is in him ; 
 delighting to contemplate similar volitions and 
 passions in the goings-on of the universe, and 
 habitually impelled to create them where he does 
 not find them." 
 
1^ 
 
 158 WORDSWORTH 
 
 It is chiefly, then, by his intenser and more 
 concentrated powers of feeling and contemplation 
 that a poet differs from other men. And these 
 powers may reveal a new world. In the Lines 
 written above Tintem Abbey, and often elsewhere, 
 Wordsworth makes division of "all the mighty 
 world of eye and ear " into " what they half-create, 
 ' and what perceive." The shaping energy of the 
 mind is never dormant. Perception itself is largely 
 >--the work of imagination ; it is a transaction be- 
 1 tween the outer powers which operate on the mind 
 through the senses and the inner powers of the 
 mind itself, wl^ich impose their own forms on the 
 Jliings submitted to it. This doctrine, which was 
 perhaps matured in conversation with Coleridge, 
 furnished Wordsworth with an explanation of the 
 poet's creative faculty. He illustrates it, in the 
 Fourteenth Book of the Prelude, from one of his 
 own experiences in North Wales. He had 
 climbed a mountain at night, when, suddenly, the 
 Moon broke forth from behind a cloudy sky and 
 revealed, at his feet, " a silent sea of hoary mist " 
 islanding the dusky backs of a hundred hills, and 
 at the same time, from below, now first heard, 
 there mounted a roar of innumerable swollen 
 torrents. The power thus exerted by Nature in 
 giving so sublime a single aspect to the face of 
 outward things is likened by the poet to the work 
 of a majestic mind, brooding over the dark abyss, 
 
HUMANITY 159 
 
 moulding and subduing the mutations of the 
 visible world and the vast expanse of the genera- 
 tions of mankind to the forms imposed on them by 
 its own supremacy. All lasting grandeur in things 
 perceived is a quality with which they are inve sted 
 by the powers of^_the soul, by loyei and by 
 
 imagination — 
 
 which, in truth. 
 Is but another name for absolute power 
 And clearest insight, amplitude of mind. 
 And Reason in her most exalted mood. 
 
 Reality, then, cannot be considered apart from 
 the activities of the mind. The mind brings tOs 
 the world of outward things not only the glass 
 through which they are viewed, but the glass 
 which throws on them the light that makes them 
 visible. And therefore the study of the workings 
 of the imagination of man affords a means of 
 access to the knowledge of things as they are. 
 
 It was by this train of thought that Words- 
 worth was led to a curious and searching investi- 
 gation of the habits of the human mind. " There . 
 is scarcely one of my poems," he writes to Lady 
 Beaumont, "which does not aim to direct the 
 attention to some moral sentiment, or to some 
 general principle, or law of thought, of our in- 
 tellectual constitution." He set himself to under- 
 stand, so far as he might, the human agency 
 which co-operates with external powers, and makes 
 
i6o WORDSWORTH 
 
 beauty and grandeur possible. And so he learned, 
 and was able to teach, 
 
 how the mind of man becomes 
 A thousand times more beautiful than the earth 
 On which he dwells, above this frame of things 
 (Which, 'mid all revolution in the hopes 
 And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged) 
 In beauty exalted, as it is itself 
 Of quality and fabric more divine. 
 
 To a careless apprehension poetry that directs 
 the attention "to some moral sentiment, or to 
 some general principle or law of thought" may 
 seem dangerously like a handbook of mental 
 philosophy. But the two things are worlds 
 'i asunder. Wordsworth does not dissect the human 
 mind ; he watches it at work, in the hope that 
 I among the attitudes into which it is thrown by the 
 I free exertion of its powers he may find some 
 . happy posture that is an aid to vision. Painters 
 are familiar with a device that helps the eye to a 
 truer perception of the broad tones of a natural 
 landscape ; they stand facing in the opposite 
 direction, and, by bending oy^er, look at the object 
 upside down. This washes away, as it were, all 
 the commonplace plot-interest of the scene, and 
 leaves the eye free to discern a more general and 
 simpler truth. It is no exaggeration to say that 
 Wordsworth practised a similar method in poetry. 
 If he loves to trace the workings of the mind of a 
 
HUMANITY i6i 
 
 distracted woman, or of a careless, happy child, or 
 of a weak-witted person, it is always with the 
 same hope. True vision, he held, is not to be 
 attained by any sort of intellectual elaboration, but 
 by a purging of the eye, an intense and rare 
 simplicity of outlook. He was haunted by a 
 sense that truth was there, directly before him, 
 filling the whole compass of the universe — the 
 greatest and most obvious and clearest of all things, 
 if only the eye could learn to see it. But the 
 tricky and ill-trained sense of man moves vacantly 
 over its surface and finds nothing to arrest atten- 
 tion ; sees nothing, indeed, until it is caught by the 
 antics of some of its old accomplices. Just so a 
 traveller may spend a day on a snow-mountain and 
 see nothing but footmarks and hand-holds, until, 
 when the eye is released from its preoccupation, 
 it falls in with some chance-met relics of earlier 
 adventurers, and sets the wits to work at their old 
 task of inference, conjecture, and interpretation. 
 
 It may well be that these deceits and obstructions 
 of vision are inseparable from mortal life. Yet 
 glimpses of a deeper truth are obtainable, Words- 
 worth believed, if the right way be followed. For ' 
 himself, he sought admittance to the mystery by' 
 two principal means. It is something to rid the 
 mind of petty cares and to be still and attentive, 
 but it is not enough. There are guides to the, 
 heights of contemplation ; and there are fortunate 
 
 M 
 
? 
 
 
 
 1 62 WORDSWORTH 
 
 moments of excitement that roll away the clouds 
 against which the traveller has long been straining 
 his baffled eyesight. For one thing, then, Words- 
 worth sought, in his own mind and in the minds 
 of others, the illumination which comes from the 
 transfiguring power of high-wrought emotions, 
 
 Most worthy then of trust when most intense. 
 
 A man or a woman in such a state of excitement 
 .seemed to him already half inspired. The mind 
 ^ thus excited becomes almost miraculously clear, the 
 perceptions are strangely vivid, and the associations 
 of ideas are rapid, instinctive, and surprising. But 
 this is illumination by the lightning-flash ; it is pre- 
 r carious, and uncontrollable, and brief. A steadier 
 light came to him from the second of his two 
 resources : the unsophisticated perceptions and 
 thoughts of children and of the peasantry, of half- 
 witted human creatures and of the animals that are 
 nearer to earth than we, lent him a more com- 
 panionable guidance, and to these spiritual directors 
 he submitted his heart in humble reverence and 
 L gratitude. 
 
 He came to these teachers in no mood of artless 
 companionship, but intent on what he might learn ; 
 he was an acolyte, not a boon-fellow. His own 
 unresting thoughts drove him into strange courses ; 
 his steadfast following of the gleam led him into 
 unfamiliar company. The dalesmen whom Canon 
 
HUMANITY 163 
 
 Rawnsley questioned could hardly be induced to 
 recount their reminiscences of the greater poet 
 when once the figure of Hartley Coleridge, who 
 " knawed the insides of cottages for miles round, 
 and was welcome at 'em all," rose into their 
 memory and warmed their affections. "Wuds- 
 worth was no dog-fancier," said one of them, 
 who had been in his service, " and as for cats, he 
 couldn't abide them ; and he didn't care for sheep, 
 or horses, a deal, but if he was fond of onything it 
 was of lile ponies. He was a man of fancies, ye 
 kna. It was a fancy of his. He was fond of li'le 
 ponies." And when it was suggested that he must 
 have been fond of children, — "Ay, ay," said the 
 same recorder, " he was fond of children, like 
 enough, but children was niver vara fond o' him. 
 Ye see he was a man o' moods, niver no certainty 
 about him." 
 
 It is likely enough that children were never very 
 fond of him. They are quick to discern the 
 presence of a foreigner, or of one who looks at 
 them instead of looking the way that they look. 
 Wordsworth was looking in the opposite direction ; 
 he longed 
 
 to travel back 
 And tread again that ancient track, 
 
 if haply he might come nearer than other explorers 
 to the starting-point. When he met a child he 
 would embarrass it with questions, uttered or 
 
1 64 WORDSWORTH 
 
 implied, as to its past history and its present 
 opinions. But children are themselves an eager 
 and practical-minded race of explorers, intent on 
 the future, very ready to believe in the wisdom of 
 their elders, very grateful for help in the forward 
 journey, and, like all practical people, not a little 
 suspicious and intolerant of those who treat them 
 as oracles and arrest the business of life to make 
 inquiry concerning the soul. Mutual friendship 
 is impossible between two inhabitants of different 
 countries when each is so keenly anxious to learn 
 that neither is willing to teach. 
 
 The 0^1? on Intimations of Immortality from 
 Recollections of Early Childhood contains a general 
 statement of the doctrine which receives particular 
 application in many of the shorter poems : — 
 
 Our childhood sits. 
 Our simple childhood, sits upon a throne 
 That hath more power than all the elements. 
 
 In a prose note to the Ode, written in his later 
 years, the poet thought it right to protest against 
 a conclusion which, he says, had given pain to some 
 good and pious persons, namely, that he meant to 
 inculcate a belief in a prior state of existence. 
 These good and pious persons, who have long ago 
 done with speculation, and who fear lest the air of 
 heaven should reach them through an unstopped 
 chink in their creed, are responsible for many of 
 
HUMANITY 165 
 
 Wordsworth's later prosy utterances. But his 
 disclaimer here is of interest. It was not by an 
 acquaintance with Platonic philosophy that he 
 arrived at his glorification of childhood, but by 
 looking at nature and life with an open mind. 
 The greater scholars of the Renaissance were, many 
 of them, Platonists ; they took the writings of 
 Plato for a second Bible, to be accepted, expounded, 
 and glossed, text by text. Wordsworth sought 
 help from a nearer source for difficulties that sprang 
 from his daily perceptions and memories. Why 
 does the world seem phantasmal to the perceptions 
 of a child ? Whence come those sudden monitions 
 which start up from the wayside of life and, speak- 
 ing to the mind in an unknown language, awaken 
 vague echoes in the memory ? What is the mean- ■? 
 ing of the preferences which the mind itself, for no 
 assignable reason, exercises among common objects 
 — the little gusts of liking and suspicion that affect 
 it, as if it knew its old friends and enemies under 
 their disguise?] These feelings fade by degrees 
 out of the experience of mature man ; they are 
 dominated and driven out by the operation of the 
 reasoning powers, and by the necessity laid upon 
 man of adapting himself to this present world. 
 Are they the relics of a lost sense.? They are 
 stronger in children ; and if Wordsworth finds 
 cause for gratitude and praise in the experiences of 
 childhood, it is not chiefly, he says, from admira- 
 
 ■i 
 
1 66 WORDSWORTH 
 
 tion for the child's illimitable faith in happiness, 
 and hope, and liberty : — 
 
 Not for these I raise 
 The song of thanks and praise ; 
 But for those obstinate questionings 
 Of sense and outward things, 
 Fallings from us, vanishings ; 
 Blank misgivings of a Creature 
 Moving about in worlds not realised, 
 High instincts before which our mortal Nature 
 Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised : 
 But for those first affections. 
 Those shadowy recollections. 
 Which, be they what they may. 
 Are yet the fountain light of all our day, 
 Are yet a master light of all our seeing. 
 
 Habitually his mind turned back to this source 
 of light. The experiences he most values are those 
 which carry him farthest on the backward road. 
 He listens to the cuckoo with delight, for it re- 
 minds him of his school-boy days, and helps him 
 to " beget that golden time again," when the world 
 seemed "an unsubstantial fairy place." Or he 
 hears the mountain Echo giving back the shouts 
 of the cuckoo, and straightway thinks of the rever- 
 berations and intelligences that come to us we 
 know not whence : — 
 
 Such rebounds our inward ear 
 Catches sometimes from afar— 
 
HUMANITY 167 
 
 Listen, ponder, hold them dear ; 
 For of God, — of God they are. 
 
 The fascination that children had for him is 
 best and most curiously illustrated by the poems 
 founded on incidents of his conversation with them. 
 These poems, which are accurate records of real 
 occurrences, derive all their interest from the 
 dramatic situation, the game of cross-purposes 
 played between the poet and the oracles whom 
 he consulted. He was attracted by the very 
 indifference of children to the things on which he 
 was brooding ; if they evade discussion, he thinks, 
 it is because they have a more direct access to the 
 truth. Those who read to find fault may very^ 
 easily quarrel with the address to the child in the 
 Ode— 
 
 thou Eye among the blind. 
 
 That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep. 
 
 Haunted for ever by the eternal mind ; 
 
 but those who read to find a meaning will not be 
 disappointed. The child, to put it baldly, would 
 neither listen to the poet nor answer him, but was 
 absorbed in its own converse, and intent upon its 
 own vision. In We are Seven it is the matter-of- 
 fact simplicity of the little cottage girl, her refusal 
 to shdre in his wonder at the mysteries of life and 
 death that seems to him a marvellous thing. In 
 vain he attempts to put the question : — 
 
1 68 WORDSWORTH 
 
 You run about, my little Maid, 
 Your limbs they are alive ; 
 If two are in the church-yard laid 
 Then ye are only five. 
 
 The child finds no metaphysical difEculties in 
 the fact of her own life, and no matter for dubious 
 investigation in the change to another state. All 
 things to her are credible and obvious. And this 
 clearness, thought Wordsworth, in so unintel- 
 ligible a world, can be due only to some inner 
 light. 
 
 In the Anecdote for Fathers the question asked 
 of the little boy was a random experiment, as the 
 poet confesses. Would he rather be at Kilve, by 
 the sea -shore, or here at Liswyn farm? The 
 child, hoping perhaps for an end of this matter, 
 replies that he prefers Kilve. But the poet, not 
 to be denied, insists on learning a reason for the 
 preference, and makes the poor child unhappy by 
 his repeated questions. Dr. Johnson, on a similar 
 provocation, did swift execution upon his ques- 
 tioner : — "I will not be put to the question. 
 Don't you consider, sir, that these are not the 
 manners of a gentleman.? I will not be baited 
 with what and why ; what is this ? what is that ? 
 why is a cow's tail long.? why is a fox's tail 
 bushy?" But children are only half-articvilate, 
 and the boy, seeking for help from the all-engross- 
 ing visible world, looks around for something 
 
HUMANITY 169 
 
 wherewith to buy off the attacks of this absurd 
 and aggressive grown-up person. His eye catches 
 a weather-cock, and he presents it, with ready tact 
 and courtesy, to the poet : — 
 
 At Kilve there was no weather-cock ; 
 And that's the reason why. 
 
 Wordsworth points the moral of the incident, with 
 perfect candour, against himself. In this way, as 
 his original title to the poem indicates, the art of 
 lying may be taught. But, once more, is not the 
 art of reasoning, the art even of coherent speech, 
 a kind of art of lying ? This idea, and not any 
 formal insistence on veracity, is the motive of 
 the poem. The boy had clear enough perceptions 
 and tastes of his own, but when he was compelled 
 to argue the case he was driven to a makeshift. ' 
 Intuition is vindicated again, and the poet grate- 
 fully takes the lesson to heart. ■" 
 One more illustration of this phase of his 
 discipleship must suffice. In the poem called 
 Beggars he appropriates and versifies an experience 
 of his sister's, recorded in her Journal. Two 
 ragged boys, seen by the poet, are in the wildest 
 high spirits, chasing a butterfly. They drop their 
 sport, and, assuming a professional whine, beg an 
 alms. Their mother, they say, is dead. He 
 reproves them for lying ; not half an hour ago 
 he has given alms to their mother, whom he met 
 
lyo WORDSWORTH 
 
 upon the road. When once they see that per- 
 sistence is useless, they cast ofF the suppliant 
 manner and lose no time in returning to their 
 interrupted play. The business of life is a trouble- 
 some piece of assumption, gladly thrown aside in 
 favour of the joy of life. This moral, which is 
 pointed by the poem, is absent from the Journal. 
 The real beggars, as described by Dorothy Words- 
 worth, were more diligent in their profession. 
 •' Says the elder, ' Let's away,' and away they flew 
 like lightning. They had, however, sauntered so 
 long in their road that they did not reach Amble- 
 side before me, and I saw them go up to Matthew 
 Harrison's house with their wallet upon the elder's 
 shoulder, and creeping with a beggar's complaining 
 foot." 
 
 These three poems, judged by any purely 
 literary standard, are almost void of merit. They 
 could find no place in a volume of Selections 
 chosen for beauty and glamour of expression ; they 
 would even be called silly by many a critic com- 
 petent to choose such a selection. But they are 
 poetry in the making ; they lead us by the way 
 that the poet trod, and bring us at last to the 
 Ode^ or to the Sonnet composed on the beach near 
 Calais, with quickened perceptions and an under- 
 standing that recognises how much of the stuff of 
 human experience was distilled in these master- 
 works : — 
 
HUMANITY 171 
 
 It is a beauteous evening, calm and free, 
 
 The holy time is quiet as a Nun 
 
 Breathless with adoration ; the broad sun 
 
 Is sinking down in its tranquillity ; 
 
 The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the Sea : 
 
 Listen ! the mighty Baing is awake. 
 
 And doth with his eternal motion make 
 
 A sound like thunder — everlastingly. 
 
 Dear Child ! dear Girl ! that walkest with me here, 
 
 If thou appear untouched by solemn thought, 
 
 Thy nature is not therefore less divine : 
 
 Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year ; 
 
 And worship'st at the Temple's inner shrine, 
 
 God being with thee when we know it not. 
 
 If Wordsworth was not at all times either easy 
 or happy in his intercourse with children, he had 
 better fortune with the humble people whom he 
 met on the road or in the pastures. The same 
 motives that sent him to school to the young led 
 him, for many consecutive years, to observe and 
 question men and women of a lowly station in 
 society. They were not so shy as children, and 
 were readier to discern and appreciate the wholly 
 disinterested attitude of the questioner. He came 
 to them, perhaps, not without illusions, but without 
 a trace of the self-consciousness which so often shuts 
 the gates of knowledge to the rich, or the well- 
 born, or the much-educated man. He was ardently 
 inquisitive, absolutely modest, and free from a 
 thought of self-defence, so that he obtained the 
 confidences which are readily given to a humane 
 
172 WORDSWORTH 
 
 traveller of an inquiring turn of mind. His 
 observation of the peasantry — if that word may 
 be used without prejudice to designate all those 
 who live on the land by their own labour — yielded 
 him the best and finest part of his poetic harvest. 
 
 Here, he thought, among the peasantry, are 
 none of the deceits of idle fashion, the social 
 vanities and the intellectual pretensions that over- 
 
 , lay the fundamental facts of life in a more ambi- 
 ( tious society. His method of research was that 
 of a chemical investigator ; he wanted to isolate 
 the elements of human life, and he therefore chose 
 for his experiment the least complex forms of 
 society known to him. His motives have been 
 somewhat obscured by Coleridge's criticisms in 
 
 '/the seventeenth chapter of the Biographia Liter- 
 aria, where the question is reduced to a question 
 of diction. Coleridge has no difficulty in showing 
 that the language of rustic life is largely borrowed, 
 through the popular agencies of education and 
 religion, from the language used by scholars, 
 philosophers, and poets ; that it is not a separate 
 primitive speech, but, when freed from provincial- 
 ism and grossness, differs not at all, except by 
 its limitations, from the language of any man of 
 common sense, however educated or refined. But 
 he had moved far from his earlier sympathy with 
 Wordsworth by the time he wrote his criticism, 
 and he seriously confuses the issues. The case 
 
1 
 
 HUMANITY 173 
 
 for the peasant's speech, he says, is not rendered 
 more tenable by the addition of the words " in a 
 state of excitement." "The nature of a man's 
 words, when he is strongly affected by joy, grief, 
 or anger, must necessarily depend on the number 
 and quality of the general truths, conceptions, and 
 images, and of the words expressing them, with 
 which his mind had been previously stored." 
 This is very true, and quite irrelevant. Words- 
 worth's allusion to "the manner in which we 
 associate ideas in a state of excitement" was no 
 part of his theory of diction. Men and women 
 in a state of excitement were chosen by him, as 
 any one who reads his preface will see, not as 
 teachers of language, but as unusually favourable 
 subjects for the exhibition of " the primary laws 
 of our nature." What he stated was a truth thatj 
 may be illustrated from the works of any great 
 poet in any language ; it may be proved from 
 PeUr Bell, but it may still better be proved from 
 the cry of Marlowe's dying king : — 
 
 Tell Isabel the Queen I looked not thus 
 When for her sake I ran at tilt in France, 
 And there unhorsed the Duke of Clerimont. 
 
 Doubtless Coleridge was right in some other 
 parts of his contention. The dalesmen, he says 
 truly, are not a peasantry, but an aristocracy ; their 
 society is a society governed by strict and proud 
 
174 WORDSWORTH 
 
 conventions ; they are better educated and greater 
 readers than men of equal rank elsewhere. He 
 corrects some of Wordsworth's misconceptions in 
 the light of a broader philosophy of language and 
 society. But he touches the root of the matter 
 
 Tonly incidentally. A real and fundamental dif- 
 ference between himself and Wordsworth appears 
 in his denial of Wordsworth's statement that from 
 the objects with which the rustic hourly com- 
 municates " the best part of the language is 
 derived." On the contrary, says Coleridge, " the 
 best part of human language, properly so called, 
 is derived from reflection on the acts of the mind 
 itself. It is formed by a voluntary appropriation 
 of fixed symbols to internal acts, to processes and 
 results of imagination, the greater part of which 
 have no place in the consciousness of uneducated 
 
 i^man." Here, at least, is flat opposition. To 
 Wordsworth the very names of the simplest things 
 that are dear to the heart, with their tender 
 associations, conveyed an infinitely more profound 
 meaning than all the instrumental wealth, the 
 abstract and general terms, of a highly developed 
 and philosophical language. He tried to keep 
 his reader " in the company of flesh and blood " ; 
 he wrote poems on the Naming of Places. Both 
 disputants, perhaps, were right. Language has work 
 to do ; it is a necessary instrument of culture ; and 
 the poet who scorns its more elaborate develop- 
 
HUMANITY 175 
 
 ments is very much in the position of the farmer 
 who will have nothing to do with the reaping- 
 machine. Yet the sickle can reach humble patches 
 and plots that are neglected by its rival ; and it 
 cuts closer. 
 
 The influence of a single great man, who must 
 be listened to because he speaks nothing in vain, 
 will sometimes darken counsel for ages. Coleridge's 
 philosophic concern with questions of language gave 
 a bias to later and meaner criticism of Wordsworth 
 from which it has not yet recovered. There is 
 another account of the reasons for Wordsworth's 
 choice of humble and rustic life as the theme of 
 his poetry, but it appeared thirty-three years later 
 than the Biographia, and has been little consulted. 
 It is to be found in the Thirteenth Book of the 
 Prelude. 
 
 In his despondency at the ill consequences of 
 the French Revolution, Wordsworth had turned 
 away from the works of Man to seek and find 
 comfort in the works of Nature. And Nature 
 led him back, with more composed and surer 
 feelings, to consider Man once more — not Man of 
 the politicians, the statists, and the moralists, but 
 the individual man. " the man whom we behold ^ 
 with our own eyes." The individual man, how- 
 ever, had already been found wanting ; he was the 
 dupe of passion, the victim of folly, frenzy, and 
 presumption ; and hence a question. How is it 
 
176 WORDSWORTH 
 
 that so few among mankind — one in ten thousand 
 — exhibit mental power and genuine virtue ? The 
 ideal of the Revolution, the simple, good man, 
 clear in mind and strong in act, is surely not 
 fantastic ; here and there the ideal is realised. 
 Why is it not the rule ? Is there anything in 
 the natural constitution of man or in the natural 
 laws that govern his life, anything in his daily 
 needs and animal appetites which hinders and 
 stunts ? If not, then other hindrances are of little 
 account. Wordsworth was resolved to reduce 
 human life to its lowest terms, to see whether 
 it is in itself a thing of worth. The men who 
 pass their lives under a weight of labour and hard- 
 ship, battling for a bare subsistence, would be able, 
 he thought, to tell him more than all the theorists 
 and economists. He took to the road, where, even 
 now, a hundred years and more after his initiation, 
 any poet may find wealth of human passion enough 
 to furnish him with his stock-in-trade. In the lonely 
 road, where every face met is a separate adventure, 
 like the speaking of a ship at sea, he found " the 
 books, the arts, the academes " which qualified him 
 in his profession. Another memory of his child- 
 hood came back to him like a portent, the memory 
 of an open road, winding up a hill, and lost to the 
 eye against the sky-line, as if it were an invitation 
 into space or a guide into eternity. 
 
 In Dorsetshire, at Alfoxden, and during his 
 
HUMANITY 177 
 
 early time at Grasmere he accumulated those 
 experiences which made of him a prophet new- 
 inspired. After some years he lost his zest in 
 fresh acquaintance, and in his later age, by the 
 general consent of his neighbours, he was " distant, 
 very distant." Is this a thing to be lamented, 
 and do the words that he spoke over the lesser 
 Celandine apply to his own lot ? — 
 
 It doth not seek the cold : 
 This neither is its courage nor its choice, 
 But its necessity in being old. 
 
 Yet what would we have? The mind of man 
 is frugal, and of the spendthrift feast of experience 
 will take no more than may serve for its own 
 nurture. In the plenteous years, while he was 
 a prodigal's favourite, he gathered store enough to 
 turn any man into a miser. The roads rewarded 
 their disciple. " There I heard," he says, 
 
 From mouths of men obscure and lowly, truths 
 Replete with honour ; sounds in unison 
 With loftiest promises of good and fair. 
 
 He came to a sense of another world, a world 
 governed by fixed laws, like the world of external 
 Nature ; in Man's essential character he found 
 spiritual dignity, as in Nature he had found grace 
 and power. The two thenceforward were one for 
 him ; the beatings of the heart of man were felt to 
 
 N 
 
178 WORDSWORTH 
 
 obey the same law that holds the stars in their 
 courses. " It shall be my pride," he says, 
 
 That I have dared to tread this holy ground. 
 Speaking no dream, but things oracular. 
 
 Among the vagrants and beggars and pensioners 
 who were his chosen subjects he found those 
 qualities which gave Rome her empire in the ancient 
 world, and those also which, in the mediaeval world, 
 (drew whole peoples on pilgrimage. So, speaking 
 only of what he saw " in the familiar circuit of his 
 home," he saved poetry from that touch of un- 
 reality which comes from too prolonged and too 
 deep an obeisance made to hearsay virtues, and 
 brought it back to the miracles that transform the 
 
 "^ face of daily life. 
 
 Two or three examples must be chosen 
 from Wordsworth's sketches of these lowly 
 teachers, for in these descriptions he quietly 
 achieves the work which he had gone about, 
 with a flourish of trumpets and a deal of un- 
 remunerative industry, in the tale of Peter Bell. 
 The Fourth Book of the Prelude closes with an 
 account of a night adventure near Windermere. 
 It was during his College vacation ; Wordsworth 
 had attended the annual regatta, and had stayed 
 late at an evening entertainment. He had far to 
 walk home, and on the road he met a ghost — the 
 
 ^ embodied Spirit of Sol itude. It appeared to him 
 
HUMANITY 179 
 
 in the figure of a man, taller than the common 
 stature, stiff, lank, and upright, companionless, 
 with no dog or staff, leaning against a milestone, 
 and looking ghastly in the moonlight. There was 
 light enough to see that he was dressed like 
 a soldier : — 
 
 From his lips, ere long, 
 Issued low muttered sounds, as if of pain 
 Or some uneasy thought ; yet still his form 
 Kept the same awful steadiness — at his feet 
 His shadow lay, and moved not. 
 
 Wordsworth at last summoned up courage to 
 address him. The figure, he says, 
 
 Rose, and with a lean and wasted arm 
 In measured gesture lifted to his head 
 Returned my salutation ; then resumed 
 His station as before ; and when I asked 
 His history, the veteran, in reply, 
 Was neither slow nor eager; but, unmoved, 
 And with a quiet uncomplaining voice, 
 A stately air of mild indifference, 
 He told in few plain words a soldier's tale — 
 That in the Tropic Islands he had served, 
 Whence he had landed scarcely three weeks past ; 
 That on his landing he had been dismissed, 
 And now was travelling towards his native home. 
 
 He consented to go with the poet to seek for 
 shelter, and they walked on together: — 
 
 Though weak his step and cautious, he appeared 
 To travel without pain, and I beheld, 
 
i8o WORDSWORTH 
 
 With an astonishment but ill suppressed. 
 His ghostly figure moving at my side. 
 
 They talked for a time, and Wordsworth asked 
 him questions concerning his military experi- 
 ences : 
 
 He all the while was in demeanour calm, 
 Concise in answer ; solemn and sublime 
 He might have seemed, but that in all he said 
 There was a strange half-absence, as of one 
 Knowing too well the importance of his theme, 
 But feeling it no longer. Our discourse 
 Soon ended, and together on we passed 
 In silence through a wood gloomy and still. 
 Up-turning, then, along an open field. 
 We reached a cottage. 
 
 Here shelter was asked and obtained for the 
 soldier, and the poet entreated him that in future 
 he would not linger in the public highway, but 
 would ask for help when he needed it : — 
 
 At this reproof. 
 With the same ghastly mildness in his look. 
 He said, " My trust is in the God of Heaven, 
 And in the eye of him who passes me." 
 
 When they parted at the door, the soldier's voice 
 in expressing his thanks showed, for the first time, 
 a trace of feeling; and the poet, after looking 
 back at the cottage and lingering near it for a 
 while, went on his way, with qmet heart, to his 
 own home. 
 
HUMANITY i8i 
 
 The magic of this description is not wholly due 
 to that romantic spirit of wonder which notices, 
 for instance, the stillness of the soldier's shadow. 
 There is a subtler element in it ; the figure of thei 
 man is invested with an eflfect of romantic distance 
 by Wordsworth's hesitating and delicate reverence 
 for the personality of another. The dalesmen, 
 said Coleridge, are an aristocracy ; Wordsworth's 
 treatment of them would have been suitable enough 
 for royalty itself. There is a- kind of bustling 
 warm-heartedness which sometimes claims to speak 
 in the name of democracy, as if the coarse man 
 were the only fit representative of his fellow- 
 creatures, or as if reserve were the selfish privilege 
 of an aristocracy, to be broken down wherever it is 
 found. These political terms, in truth, are beside 
 the mark ; Wordsworth has nothing to do with 
 them. Democracy recognises the rights of man, 
 and, for the most part, leaves it to every one to 
 assert his own. But no system of society can ' 
 secure for every one that courtly deference and that 
 separate tender consideration with which the poet 
 treated the humblest of his fellow-men. j 
 
 Resolution and Independence, the poem that 
 describes the interview with the old Leech-gatherer, 
 is not an exact transcript from life. The meeting 
 and the conversation took place in September 
 1800 on the road at Grasmere, a few hundred 
 yards from Dove Cottage. Wordsworth shifts 
 
1 82 WORDSWORTH 
 
 the scene in order to show the old man at his 
 work, and to set him among elemental powers 
 akin to his majestic and indomitable spirit. For 
 the rest, the record is true enough. The dejection, 
 the sad fears and fancies that haunted the poet's 
 thoughts, were no invention. In the year 1 800 his 
 means of subsistence were nearing an end ; he had 
 devoted himself diligently to poetry without win- 
 ning substantial recognition, and a visit from his 
 brother John, who followed a practical profession, 
 had perhaps suggested to him the thought of self- 
 reproach : — 
 
 My whole life I have lived in pleasant thought, 
 
 As if life's business were a summer mood ; 
 
 As if all needful things would come unsought 
 
 To genial faith, still rich in genial good ; 
 
 But how can He expect that others should 
 
 Build for him, sow for him, and at his call 
 
 Love him, who for himself will take no heed at all ? 
 
 This is the common lot of poets, he thought ; 
 they are glad and confident in their youth, but it 
 all leads to poverty and misery and madness. 
 And then, as if by " peculiar grace, a leading from 
 above, a something given," there appears to him 
 the minister of consolation : — 
 
 Beside a pool bare to the eye of heaven, 
 
 I saw a Man before me unawares : 
 
 The oldest man he seemed that ever wore grey hairs. 
 
HUMANITY 183 
 
 Half in absence of mind, still troubled by his own 
 meditations, the poet questions him as to his occu- 
 pation, and learns that he gains a livelihood by 
 roaming the moors and gathering leeches from the 
 ponds. They are much scarcer, the old man 
 says, than they used to be : — 
 
 Yet still I persevere, and find them where I may. 
 
 Then, with cheerful indifference, he goes on to 
 speak of other matters, and the poet takes shame 
 to himself for his own weakness. 
 
 That is the whole dramatic action of this 
 wonderful poem. The management of it shows 
 Wordsworth at his greatest. He had not loved 
 and studied Nature in vain. The man is com- 
 pared to certain natural appearances which have 
 something of mystery and dignity about them — to 
 a huge boulder, deposited, none knows how, on a 
 hill-top — to a slow-moving cloud, seen from afar, 
 untroubled by the tumult of the winds — to a sea- 
 beast that has crawled out of its native element to 
 taste the strange warmth of the sun. Before he 
 delivers his message the Leech-gatherer is felt to be 
 " a man from some far region sent." And when 
 he has delivered his message, the old pauper on 
 the lonely moor has won a place beside the great 
 heroic figures of history, or epic, or drama. 
 
 Some changes were made in the text of the 
 poem, most of them for the worse, out of deference 
 
184 WORDSWORTH 
 
 to Coleridge's criticisms. One very characteristic 
 stanza was omitted :— 
 
 My course I stopped as soon as I espied 
 The Old Man in that naked wilderness : 
 Close by a Pond, upon the further side, 
 He stood alone : a minute's space I guess 
 I watched him, he continuing motionless : 
 To the Pool's further margin then I drew ; 
 He being all the while before me in full view. 
 
 This well illustrates that certain " matter-of-fact- 
 ness" which Coleridge blamed. But has it no 
 poetic value here ? Is it not spoken exactly as a 
 witness would speak who is about to tell how he 
 saw a murder done or a life saved ? Does it not 
 prepare the reader for great doings ? And, finally, 
 is he disappointed ? 
 
 Enough of this ever-recurring argument. It is 
 a good thing that Wordsworth was not urged by 
 his friend to change the profession of the Leech- 
 gatherer and to make of him a Collector of 
 Humming-birds. The humming-birds, it is true, 
 would have had to be brought into Britain for the 
 purpose. But so had the Blind Boy's Indian shell ; 
 and brought it was. 
 
 The Old Cumberland Beggar is, like the Leech- 
 gatherer, a commissioner from Heaven, a kind of 
 good angel, calling forth, wherever he passes, acts 
 of human kindness, pity, and love. He is far too 
 
HUMANITY 185 
 
 old and frail to do anything for his living. But is 
 he therefore useless ? 
 
 'Tis Nature's law 
 That none, the meanest of created things, 
 Or 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. 
 
 Much more is the innocent and helpless life of the 
 old man a means of good. The youngest and 
 the most thoughtless pay respect to his feebleness. . 
 He keeps unselfishness alive and continues traditions 
 of charity. The sight of him serves as a silent 
 monitor to the prosperous, the robust, and the gay, 
 touching them to thought and to a keener sense of 
 thankfulness for what they enjoy. And all this is 
 illustrated by Wordsworth in carefully detailed 
 incidents and pictures, so that the weary steps of 
 the solitary beggar, as he goes on his rounds, have 
 the dramatic value of the song of the girl in 
 Browning's Pippa Passes, The same effect is 
 obtained, without any operatic machinery or any 
 departure from the daily experiences of village life. 
 Sketches like these make it easier to understand 
 Wordsworth's account of the way by which he was 
 led to sympathy with humanity. Nature, as he 
 tells in the Prelude, held for long an exclusive 
 place in his affections. When the feeling for 
 
1 86 WORDSWORTH 
 
 humanity was aroused in him by sufFering, Man was 
 still subordinate to Nature, in this sense, that he 
 was always conceived in a larger setting, exhibited 
 in close relations with a greater whole, and played 
 around by the emotions that it begets. From 
 beginning to end Wordsworth covild not bring 
 himself to regard the network of human relation- 
 i^ ships as a thing to be studied for its own sake. 
 V In crowded societies of men he found 
 
 the same perpetual whirl 
 " Of trivial objects melted and reduced 
 
 To one identity, by differences 
 4_ That have no law, no meaning, and no end. 
 
 The clamour and confusion of St. Bartholomew's 
 Fair seemed to him an epitome of the great City 
 of London ; it distracted the senses with its multi- 
 tudinous solicitations, and left no work for the 
 imagination to do. Like a huge hall for the 
 display of machinery, a great city exhibits a vast 
 multiplicity of objects, each designed only for the 
 end which it is fulfilling. In such a spectacle, 
 says Wordsworth, we see 
 
 A work completed to our hands, which lays, 
 
 If any spectacle on earth can do, 
 
 The whole creative powers of man asleep ! 
 
 It acted on him like an opiate ; whereas the lonely 
 glen or bare hill excited his imagination and 
 quickened his thought. In the Eighth Book of 
 
HUMANITY 187 
 
 the Prelude he describes how his imagination was 
 sometimes touched by the sights of London, but 
 touched in a familiar mode. The vast city became 
 the dwelling-place of mystic presences ; the living 
 inhabitants were like a vague sea over which the 
 ghosts of ancient passions fluttered and brooded. 
 
 But solitary man, under the spreading sky, in 
 living contact with the earth, and governed by the 
 simple, stern necessities of his daily out -door 
 existence, was conceived by Wordsworth with a 
 depth of insight and a sympathy that no other 
 poet has achieved. The distinction between Man 
 and Nature, it has often been observed, is a falla- 
 cious distinction, not warranted by science. Man, 
 as any one of the race who has studied Science can 
 explain, is a part of Nature, not a separate kingdom. 
 But how many can bring themselves to feel this — 
 to feel it habitually and sincerely in all human 
 affairs ? The pride of knowledge may work a 
 more complete alienation between Man and Nature 
 than ever was effected by ignorance and superstition. 
 It is by a great imaginative gift that Wordsworth 
 sees man in his surroundings ; his men are spirits 
 of the Earth, wrought upon by the elements from 
 which they are compounded. Hence in his 
 descriptions of humanity there is a kind of magi c 
 purity ; the influences of earth and sky are every- 
 where felt in human feature and character. The 
 affinity between Man and Nature expresses itself 
 
1 88 WORDSWORTH 
 
 in a hundred incidental comparisons. The poet 
 when he sees the daffodils is wandering " lonely 
 as a cloud " ; when he is composing his verses, 
 
 He murmurs near the running brooks 
 A music sweeter than their own. 
 
 Is he shy and averse from society, — this also is a 
 quality of Nature : 
 
 He is retired as noon-tide dew 
 Or fountain in a noon-day grove ; 
 And you must love him, ere to you 
 He will seem worthy of your love. 
 
 And not only in these gentler qualities is the 
 impress of Nature felt. Peter Bell also is a being 
 compounded of the elements ; before he was the 
 convert of Nature he was her child : — 
 
 And you might see 
 At once, that Peter Bell and she 
 Had often been together. 
 
 A savage wildness round him hung 
 As of a dweller out of doors ; 
 In his whole figure and his mien 
 A savage character was seen 
 Of mountains and of dreary moors. 
 • • . . , 
 
 There was a hardness in his cheek. 
 There was a hardness in his eye. 
 As if the man had fixed his face. 
 
HUMANITY 189 
 
 In many a solitary place, 
 Against the wind and open sky ! 
 
 Matthew, the village schoolmaster, at rest after his 
 cares and joys, is " silent as a standing pool " ; and 
 the Ancient Mariner, in the description which 
 Wordsworth contributed to his story, is 
 
 Long, and lank, and brown, 
 As is the ribbed sea-sand. 
 
 The simple and cheerful peasant who guides the 
 timber wain, in the Seventh Book of the Excursion, 
 is described by the like elemental similitudes : — 
 
 Grey locks profusely round his temples hung 
 In clustering curls, like ivy, which the bite 
 Of winter cannot thin ; the fresh air lodged 
 Within his cheek, as light within a cloud. 
 
 And in the Sixth Book it is told how, when her 
 child died and she had nothing to live for, 
 
 the green stalk of Ellen's life was snapped, 
 And the flower drooped ; as every eye could see 
 It hung its head in mortal languishment. 
 
 All the qualities and appearances of Nature thus 
 find their counterpart in Man — the child who is 
 bone of her bone, and who inherits her form and 
 favour. 
 
 This is not all ; the imaginative _fusion of Nature \ 
 and Man was with Wordsworth so complete that 
 he came to see a close affinity between the ordi- 
 
I90 WORDSWORTH 
 
 nances of Nature and the highest human virtues. 
 The moral law, the law of love, and duty, and 
 sacrifice, which is sometimes made into a barrier 
 between Man and the rest of creation — this also, 
 for Wordsworth, is the law of Nature. " Wherever 
 life and sense are given by God," there he found 
 L. love. The poem Fidelity is a tribute to the dog 
 that watched for three months by its master's 
 body in the wildest recesses of Helvellyn : — 
 
 How nourished here through such long time 
 He knows, who gave that love sublime ; 
 And gave that strength of feeling, great 
 Above all human estimate ! 
 
 'X It is not in a spirit of idle wonder at a super- 
 natural reach of virtue that Wordsworth pays his 
 tribute ; he is reluctant to have to do with super- 
 natural occurrences or with supernatural morality. 
 To love and to be strong, this is the fulfilling 
 of the law, for beast and man. And if the 
 forces of Nature are hard and pitiless servants 
 of her command, force for force tljey may 
 be matched, and, though not resisted, yet sub- 
 dued to itself by a power as stern as they, the 
 < secret power of the soul. Shall the stars keep 
 ^ their courses, and shall man not keep his faith ? 
 The moral nature of man is not exhibited by 
 Wordsworth in direct conflict with the hard laws 
 of the material universe. The hardness of 
 
HUMANITY 191 
 
 these laws gives to Man his most magnificent 
 opportunities, and tests the highest of his resources j 
 he is a worker in iron. The poet neithg^ebels 
 nor protests against Fate, and it is this, perhaps, 
 which leads a critic, ah-eady quoted, to deSny to him 
 " the sense of Fate — of the inexorable sequences of 
 things, of the terrible chain that so often binds 
 an awful end to some slight and trivial begin- 
 ning." If Wordsworth had anticipated such an 
 objection he could not have undermined it and 
 shattered it more completely than by writing the 
 White Doe of Rylstone, or the Fate of the Nortons. 
 In that poem he summons all the powers of grief 
 and anguish to do their worst on a single devoted 
 soul. They spring to deliver their assault suddenly, 
 out of a midsummer of peace and happiness. The 
 emblematic banner, fashioned by Emily Norton at 
 her father's command, becomes an instrument of 
 her direst woe. The hammer-blows of Fate 
 follow one another in quick succession ; none is 
 spared and none softened. "Everything," says 
 Wordsworth, " that is attempted by the principal 
 personages in ' The White Doe ' fails, so far as 
 its object is external and substantial. So far as it 
 is moral and spiritual it succeeds." But what an 
 awe-inspiring majesty of courage it is that faces 
 such a success ! The inevitable doom that falls on 
 Richard Norton and his sons is foreseen and fore- 
 told to Emily by her brother Francis, who bids her 
 
192 WORDSWORTH 
 
 take comfort in the thought that she is permitted 
 to go with him to meet it, her eyes unblinded and 
 her heart undeluded : — 
 
 Hope nothing, I repeat, for we 
 Are doomed to perish utterly : 
 'Tis meet that thou with me divide 
 The thought while I am by thy side, 
 Acknowledging a grace in this, 
 A comfort in the dark abyss. 
 • * ■ • ■ 
 
 Weep, if that aid thee ; but depend 
 Upon no aid of outward friend 5 
 Espouse thy doom at once, and cleave 
 To fortitude without reprieve. 
 
 And when the doom has fallen, when the 
 father and the sons who fought with him have 
 been tried for treason and have suffered an igno- 
 minious death, when Francis, the last and dearest 
 of her brothers, attempting to bring the banner 
 back to Bolton Abbey, has been overtaken and 
 slain, and Emily is left alone with her fate, what 
 shelter does the poet, unflinching to the end, pro- 
 vide for her ? 
 
 What mighty forest in its gloom 
 
 Enfolds her ? — is a rifted tomb 
 
 Within the wilderness her seat ? 
 
 Some island which the wild waves beat — 
 
 Is that the Suiferer's last retreat ? 
 
 Or some aspiring rock, that shrouds 
 
 Its perilous front in mists and clouds ? 
 
HUMANITY 193 
 
 High-climbing rock, low sunless dale, 
 Sea, desert, what do these avail ? 
 Oh take her anguish and her fears 
 Into a deep recess of years ! 
 
 She acts out her part ; she suffers, and is strong 
 and worthy of the grace of God ; and so, even in 
 life, is sainted, raised by the force of sorrow itself 
 beyond the reach of any further disturbance of the 
 soul: — 
 
 The mighty sorrow hath been borne, 
 
 And she is thoroughly forlorn : 
 
 Her soul doth in itself stand fast, 
 
 Sustained by memory of the past 
 
 And strength of Reason ; held above 
 
 The infirmities of mortal love ; 
 
 Undaunted, lofty, calm, and stable, 
 
 And awfully impenetrable. 
 
 There is no lack here of the sense of Fate. 
 That the poet should thus address himself calmly 
 to scale these dizzy cliiFs of anguish, where the 
 mortal senses reel, might almost seem too pre- 
 sumptuous an attempt for the powers of the human 
 imagination. Wordsworth would never have dared '' 
 it had not his own feelings on the death of his 
 brother John given him guidance in the ascent. 
 And the White Doe, which wanders through the 
 poem, a gracious presence, is the embodiment of 
 the comfort that he found in the continued gentle 
 breathings of Nature and in the deep well-springs 
 of his own soul.^. 
 
194 WORDSWORTH 
 
 The Character of the Happy Warrior owes some- 
 thing to the same Inspiration, and is of a like temper. 
 The warrior, by his profession, is brought into daily 
 contact with the grimmest of facts and laws ; it is 
 his duty to make them subservient to the law for 
 which he stands. He is one 
 
 Who, doomed to go in company with Pain, 
 And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train ! 
 Turns his necessity to glorious gain ; 
 In face of these doth exercise a power 
 Which is our human nature's highest dower ; 
 Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves 
 Of their bad influence, and their good receives : 
 By objects, which might force the soul to abate 
 Her feeling, rendered more compassionate ; 
 Is placable — because occasions rise 
 So often that demand such sacrifice ; 
 More skilful in self-knowledge, even more pure. 
 As tempted more ; more able to endure. 
 As more exposed to suffering and distress ; 
 Thence, also, more alive to tenderness. 
 
 It was a strange fortune, some think, that made 
 Wordsworth the best Laureate of the warrior. 
 So fixed is the misconception of his character and of 
 his poetry that the very existence of this, his great 
 tribute to the noblest of professions, is held to 
 require explanation. But, in truth, had he followed 
 his early leanings and taken the Army for his 
 calling, he would have been an incomparable 
 soldier. The Whitf Doe is a warrior poem ; 
 
HUMANITY 195 
 
 greater, perhaps, than the poem explicitly de- 
 voted to the ideal soldier, as the virtues that it 
 enshrines are rarer and more difficult. The 
 Happy Warrior is not compelled throughout the 
 whole of a long life to " stand and wait " ; the crisis 
 of action brings him the consummation of his 
 happiness. He is a gentle and generous spirit, 
 
 Whose powers shed round him in the common strife, 
 
 Or mild concerns of ordinary life, 
 
 A constant influence, a peculiar grace ; 
 
 But who, if he be called upon to face 
 
 Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined 
 
 Great issues, good or bad for human kind, 
 
 Is happy as a Lover ; and attired 
 
 With sudden brightness, like a Man inspired ; 
 
 And through the heat of conflict keeps the law 
 
 In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw. 
 
 The two poems have much in common ; the virtue 
 of the soldier, as of the lady, lies not in opposing 
 ruthless necessity, but in accepting it, and aiming 
 at a victory that may be won when " prayers for 
 this cause or for that " have been abandoned. 
 AndMn both poems the happiness of clear vision, 
 which enables man to be still the giver, not the 
 stunned victim of a theft, is set high among human 
 privileges^ 
 
 The Ode to Duty, written earlier than these two 
 poems, is in some sort an induction to them. It 
 is in eternal law that humanity finds consolation 
 
196 WORDSWORTH 
 
 and support, and life and joy. From early child- 
 hood Wordsworth, as he tells in the Prelude, had 
 chiefly esteemed that love and that beauty which 
 have in them an element of severity and terror. 
 He returned to them, after a holiday of genial 
 impulse, to find them greater and more command- 
 ing than before. The beauty that he reveals, 
 more fully than other poets, is the beauty of the 
 rocks ; on this unshaken ground all graces that are 
 not illusion must build. Flowers, and laughter, 
 and fragrance — aU that plays on the surface and 
 fades in the air — are the oflTspring of the same 
 unalterable law which disciplines the stars in their 
 squadrons, and which, in human hearts, is the law 
 of sanity and order, of faith and of peace. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 ILLUMINATION 
 
 Nature and human life, then, together make up a ^ 
 book of wonder and power, composed in a strange ^ 
 language, unlike the speech that men use for the 
 business of life, and written in unknown characters. 
 The book has never been read, but glimpses of ^ 
 its meaning are obtainable by those who pore over it 
 lovingly and long, and who do not despise small aids , 
 and chance suggestions towards its interpretation. 
 The poet makes it the business of his life to read 
 at least some part of it ; and we have seen him at , 
 work, trying this way and that, gazing at the 
 pages so fixedly that he stamps them, down to the 
 minutest detail, on his memory, testing likely 
 theories of the cipher, listening with rapt attention 
 to the casual comments of those innocent and idle 
 spirits who, seeking no hidden meaning, find no 
 difficulty in the book, but turn over its pages for 
 pure delight, and notice, from time to time, 
 features of the script that have escaped the eye of 
 
 197 
 
198 WORDSWORTH 
 
 more methodical observers. The last resource of 
 fthe poet still remains to him. The little that he 
 has been able to read comes to him not as the con- 
 clusion of a laboured and triumphant series of 
 syllogisms, but in sudden flashes of intelligence, 
 often lost before they can be directed to the dark 
 places. Whence are these lights that spring up 
 in the mind and flicker and die ? Does the mind 
 hold the secret after all, and has it bewildered 
 itself chiefly by too servile an attention to outward 
 things.? It was to answer these questions that 
 Wordsworth turned his gaze inward and attempted 
 to explore the recesses of his own mind. 
 
 This was held by himself to be, and was indeed, 
 the most significant part of his work. He found 
 the mind vast and immeasurable and shadowy ; 
 beyond the empyrean it was there, and it stretched 
 under the lowest reaches of the abyss. This sens e 
 ^f infinity filled him with awe :— 
 
 Not Chaos, not 
 The darkest pit of lowest Erebus, 
 Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out 
 By help of dreams — can breed such fear and awe 
 As fall upon us often when we look 
 Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man — 
 My haunt, and the main region of my song. 
 
 i His own mind, the mind of Man, contained all 
 [^things in itself, if only it could be explored. To 
 
ILLUMINATION 199 
 
 acquaint himself with " the individual Mind that 
 keeps her own inviolate retirement" became the 
 great purpose of his quest. Success in this quest 
 is the true marriage of Cupid and Psyche, figured 
 in the loveliest fable of the Ancients ; all the inter- 
 mediate wanderings of the soul are tasks and trials 
 imposed by the jealousy of divorcing powers. 
 
 Without other apparatus than introspection and 
 the observation of his fellows, Wordsworth became 
 a psychologist. He concerned himself especially, 
 as we have seen, with those moments of suddenly 
 awakened feeling when something comes to the 
 mind in a flash. There is a regular and customary^ 
 perspective imposed by the mind uponjhejmcld 
 nf r.hjprtc pprrf;iYP(j_ But thcsB objccts, whether 
 they be sensations, or perceptions, or emotions, do 1 
 not invariably submit to the imposition. They , 'i 
 assert their independence in movements that defy 
 control. The humblest of them, on no assignable 
 provocation, will put on the demeanour of a 
 tyrant. In social relations it is familiar to every- 
 one how a word or a gesture of no particular 
 import will sometimes recur to the mind with as 
 much insistence and self-importance as if it were 
 the sentence or the nod of a presiding judge. And ' 
 so with the feelings ; they will not accept their 
 ceremonial status ; they break loose from their 
 allotted places and subvert the natural order of (• 
 expectation : — ^ 
 
200 WORDSWORTH 
 
 f ^ I drew my bride, beneath the moon, 
 ^\, y Across my threshold ; happy hour ! 
 
 (j'^ But, ah, the walk that afternoon, 
 
 We saw the water-flags in flower ! 
 
 To Wordsworth these insurgent movements seemed 
 
 worth the watching, for they give a clue to what 
 
 is in progress in the depths below. It is this that 
 
 he intends when he speaks of presenting ordinary 
 
 things to the mind in an unusual aspect, and of 
 
 making the incidents and situations of common 
 
 life interesting by tracing in them "the primary 
 
 laws of our nature : chiefly, as far as regards the 
 
 manner in which we associate ideas in a state of 
 
 ' excitement." In the unprepared and unforeseen 
 
 jjf illumination of the dark recesses, which comes and 
 
 _ is gone, he found the genesis of poetry. 
 
 The inexplicable and almost incredible quick- 
 ness of movement which is produced in the mind by 
 the presence of a strong emotion seemed favourable 
 to these appearances. Yet he gave no unique or 
 remarkable importance, in this regard, to the 
 passion of love. Other poets, without number, 
 have sung the praises of love the revealer : — 
 
 Love wakes men, once a lifetime each ; 
 They lift their heavy lids, and look ; 
 And, lo, what one sweet page can teach 
 They read with joy, then shut the book. 
 
 The obvious explanation that Wordsworth, like 
 
ILLUMINATION 201 
 
 Francis Bacon, and unlike Bacon's greater con- 
 temporary, held love to be a weak passion, is tt 
 untrue. Rather he held it to be too strong and ' ^ 
 disorderly, too little intellectual in its quickening 
 power, to be trusted as an illuminant. In thej 
 story of Vaudracour and Julia he tells how the 
 world was transformed for Vaudracour in the 
 rapture of his love : — 
 
 Earth breathed in one great presence of the spring ; 
 Life turned the meanest of her implements, 
 Before his eyes, to price above all gold ; 
 The house she dwelt in was a sainted shrine ; 
 Her chamber-window did surpass in glory 
 The portals of the dawn ; all paradise 
 Could, by the simple opening of a door. 
 Let itself in upon him. 
 
 Yet this change is regarded as a blessed deceit, 
 the work of fancy sporting desperately with minds, 
 and is valued by Wordsworth only as 
 
 an earnest given 
 By ready nature for a life of love, 
 For endless constancy, and placid truth. 
 
 He passes lightly, therefore, over the raptures of 
 the pair, a theme the like of which, as he observes, 
 has been treated by many other poets, and devotes 
 his single love-tale to the tragic miseries and long 
 pitiful endurance of the separated lovers. The 
 same view of the passion of love gives its calm 
 
202 WORDSWORTH 
 
 strength and beauty to the poem of Laodamia. 
 Under the influence of this passion, according to 
 Wordsworth, men's minds are enslaved to the 
 high purposes of Nature ; the transports of the 
 / lover have none of the revealing virtue of those 
 disinterested moments which teach us 
 
 to what point, and how, 
 The mind is lord and master — outward sense 
 The obedient servant of her will. 
 
 Many of his poems owe their origin to a 
 curious study of these significant moments when 
 the mind, acting spontaneously and without fore- 
 / thought, reads new values into life and experience. 
 It woidd be tedious to attempt exhaustive illustra- 
 tion. Without these self-directing movements of 
 the mind, which take a man at unawares and leave 
 him in the position of an amazed watcher, the 
 huddled chaos of experience would have no power 
 save to confuse and deaden the receptive faculties. 
 Curiously and intently Wordsworth watched the 
 rise of unexplained impulses and feelings in his 
 own mind and in the minds of others. In Star- 
 Gazers he describes the small crowd gathered in 
 Leicester Square round a showman who, for a 
 small fee, shows them the moon through his 
 telescope. One after another they pay their money 
 and look, and then go away slack and dejected, as 
 if they felt no satisfaction from the thing they have 
 
ILLUMINATION 203 
 
 seen. What, thinks the poet as he watches them, can 
 be the meaning of this feeling of disappointment ? 
 They had been eager enough to see, each im- 
 patiently and enviously waiting for his turn. Is 
 the instrument a poor one ? Is the moon, more 
 exactly seen, less delightful than the earth ? Is no 
 joy possible in a thing that does not interest the 
 affections ? Are the demands of the imagina- 
 tion insatiable.? Is it the return from the long 
 journey out of herself that saddens the soul with 
 a sense of her narrow bounds ? Have the 
 spectators, perhaps, souls incapable of rising to 
 the majesty of the spectacle ? Or, lastly, is this a 
 sight which casts down human pride and solemnises 
 the mind with earnest thought and a grave and 
 deep happiness ? So the poet passes from ques- 
 tion to question, sure only that if he could read 
 these minds aright he would learn something more 
 of human nature and human destiny. 
 
 Often it is his own mind that he surprises at\ 
 its work of bringing order into experience, and, \ 
 under the influence of some obscure emotion, 
 selecting among a thousand objects indifferently 
 presented. These preferences, he holds, are not 
 caprices of the idle fancy ; they are portents and 
 remimscencesr^Tn Wo sbhiiets "he d^fiBes himself 
 ^^SXcinng a wide expanse of the sea, sprinkled all 
 over with ships. One ship among them engages 
 all his attention : — 
 
204 WORDSWORTH 
 
 This Ship was nought to me, nor I to her, 
 Yet I pursued her with a Lover's look ; 
 This Ship to all the rest did I prefer : 
 When will she turn, and whither ? 
 
 What land or haven is she bound for as she puts 
 forth thus in fresh and joyous array ? And then 
 there crosses his mind a foreboding of 
 
 doubt, and something dark. 
 Of the old Sea some reverential fear. 
 
 He offers no argument, but is content to record 
 the feeling as simply as it arose in his mind. 
 
 '^ These vigils of contemplation were the chief 
 sources of his poetry. They were familiar to him 
 
 V from boyhood, yln a letter written to Coleridge's 
 periodical, the Friend\ he describes how the reason 
 works by thought through feeling, and, to illustrate 
 his point, narrates an experience of childhood : — 
 
 There never perhaps existed a school-boy who, 
 having, when he retired to rest, carelessly blown out his 
 candle, and having chanced to notice, as he lay upon his 
 bed in the ensuing darkness, the sullen light which had 
 survived the extinguished flame, did not, at some time or 
 other, watch that light as if his mind were bound to it 
 by a spell. It fades and revives, gathers to a point, 
 seems as if it would go out in a moment, again recovers 
 its strength, nay, becomes brighter than before ; it con- 
 tinues to shine with an endurance which, in its apparent 
 weakness, is a mystery ; it protracts its existence so long, 
 clinging to the power which supports it, that the observer, 
 
ILLUMINATION 205 
 
 who had lain down in his bed so easy-minded, becomes 
 sad and melancholy ; his sympathies are touched ; it is 
 to him an intimation and an image of departing human 
 life; the thought comes nearer to him; it is the life of 
 a venerated parent, of a beloved brother or sister, or of 
 an aged domestic, who are gone to the grave, or' whose 
 destiny it soon may be thus to linger, thus to hang upon 
 the last point of mortal existence, thus finally to depart 
 and be seen no more. This is nature teaching seriously j 
 and sweetly through the affections, melting the heart,! 
 and, through that instinct of tenderness, developing the j 
 understanding. 
 
 Another of these " strange fits of passion " is 
 described in the poems inspired by Lucy ; the 
 immediate occasion is not a dying candle, but the 
 setting of the moon. The lover is riding in the 
 evening to visit his love, and as he approaches her 
 cottage the moon that lights him to it sinks in 
 appearance nearer and nearer to the cottage roof. 
 
 My horse moved on ; hoof after hoof 
 He raised, and never stopped : 
 When down beneath the cottage roof, 
 At once, the bright moon dropped. 
 
 What fond and wayward thoughts will slide 
 
 Into a Lover's head ! 
 
 " O mercy ! " to myself I cried, 
 
 " If Lucy should be dead ! " 
 
 But this, some one may say, is superstition, 
 although it is superstition only half seriously held. 
 
2o6 WORDSWORTH 
 
 There could not be a greater mistake. Words- 
 worth is the least superstitious of poets. In his 
 exploration of the world of the mind he found this 
 strong tendency to interpret events by the light of 
 the emotions. He did not believe that the inter- 
 pretation was necessarily or usually valid. He 
 believed in the existence of the tendency, and held 
 that its very existence is a fact to be reckoned 
 with. He was far now from the pedantic rational- 
 ism of Godwin. All that he had seen in what is 
 called the known world had been revealed to him 
 by his emotions-— by admiration, and fear, and 
 hope, and love. ^In these emotions he found the 
 secret and spring of man's life — that is, of his 
 existence. When, therefore, they arise mysteriously 
 in the mind he was not prepared to call them idle 
 and unmeaning because no rational cause, as the 
 phrase goes, was assignable to them, j His wide 
 imagination, which refused to recognise the arbitrary 
 boundary set between Nature and Man, sought for 
 correspondences everywhere. The stars are kept 
 in their places by the law of duty ; the humblest 
 fears and hopes of man tenant the same universe 
 as the stars, and move to the same music. He 
 did not transgress the modesty of human science 
 or poorly and fantastically tether symbolic mean- 
 ings to individual objects. He invented no lan- 
 guage of flowers. A flower, in its place, as it 
 grew, was more to him than any symbol ; it was 
 
ILLUMINATION 207 
 
 a part of the eternal order, and, if it could be 
 understood, a key to the whole. As he expresses 
 it in the Primrose of the Rock : — 
 
 The flowers, still faithful to the stems, 
 
 Their fellowship renew ; 
 The stems are faithful to the root. 
 
 That worketh out of view ; 
 And to the rock the root adheres 
 
 In every fibre true. 
 
 Close clings to earth the living rock. 
 Though threatening still to fall ; 
 
 The earth is constant to her sphere ; 
 And God upholds them all : 
 
 So blooms this lonely Plant, nor dreads 
 Her annual funeral. 
 
 Running through all Wordsworth's poetry this 
 is the deepest strain. While he limits himself 
 to expressing a sense of the unbroken chain 
 that binds the least things to the greatest in the 
 outward world, he may be called philosophical. 
 When he goes farther, and finds in the instincts 
 and presentiments and impulses of the heart 
 "and mind of man "movements that obey the same 
 law, low-breathed messages_/rom a hidden jource, / 
 he is called mystical . Neither does he violate 
 science here ; he pins his faith to no parti- \ 
 cular code, but he refuses to isolate and neglect 
 one whole world of experience only because it 
 cannot be exactly interpreted, and, by certain " busy j 
 
2o8 WORDSWORTH 
 
 foes to good," has been used as a refuge and 
 warrant for their baser thoughts and cravings, 
 [ It is this deep imaginative sense of unity in 
 \ things, of real correspondences and connections 
 nvorking throughout the universe of perception and 
 /thought, which gives profundity to Wordsworth's 
 I treatment of Nature. His imagination is essentially 
 scientific, and quite unlike the fancy that decorates 
 and falsifies fact to gratify an idle mind with a 
 I sense of neatness and ingenuity. The witty poets 
 of an earlier generation found " emblems " every- 
 where in Nature, each with its exact application to 
 the moral life of man. These emblems have 
 always been serviceable to the preacher, who brings 
 his truth ready-made, and seeks in Nature for 
 incidents and objects to supply ingenious parallels. 
 It is the cleverness of the application which is really 
 esteemed, and moralists very early discovered that 
 little or nothing is lost if the illustrative statements 
 be untrue. The phoenix and the unicorn can be 
 employed for purposes of edification as readily as 
 the lion and the lamb. But one who goes to 
 Nature humbly, as Wordsworth went, to learn new 
 lessons from her, not to seek a factitious support for 
 his own dogma, cares only for the fact, and finds 
 ■^ no value in these logical (Aversions. Parables from 
 Nature are rarely used by Wordsworth ; his verse 
 
 is dedicate to Nature's self, 
 And things that teach as Nature teaches. 
 
ILLUMINATION 209 
 
 When he takes an illustration from the life of 
 Nature, the facts are exactly observed, and are 
 used to point a moral of a subtle kind. Thus, in 
 the Fifth Book of the Prelude, praising the happy 
 freedom which allowed him in youth to read any 
 books that pleased his appetite, he takes a moral 
 from the farmyard : — 
 
 Behold the parent hen among her brood. 
 
 Though fledged and feathered, and well pleased to part 
 
 And straggle from her presence, still a brood. 
 
 And she herself from the maternal bond 
 
 Still undischarged ; yet doth she little more 
 
 Than move with them in tenderness and love, 
 
 A centre to the circle vyhich they make ; 
 
 And now and then, alike from need of theirs 
 
 And call of her own natural appetites. 
 
 She scratches, ransacks up the earth for food. 
 
 Which they partake at pleasure. 
 
 This approaches near to homiletic, yet it is some- 
 thing more than a mere illustration ; it Is a study 
 of an educational method warranted by Nature. 
 A parallel with more of beauty and profundity 
 occurs in the Twelfth Book, where he sends man 
 to school to the winds and the streams, the waves 
 and the woods : — 
 
 Ye motions of delight, that haunt the sides 
 Of the green hills ; ye breezes and soft airs, 
 Whose subtle intercourse with breathing flowers. 
 Feelingly watched, might teach Man's haughty race 
 How without injury to take, to give 
 P 
 
2IO WORDSWORTH 
 
 Without ofFence ; ye who, as if to show 
 
 The wondrous influence of power gently used, 
 
 Bend the complying heads of lordly pines, 
 
 And, with a touch, shift the stupendous clouds 
 
 Through the whole compass of the sky ; ye brooks. 
 
 Muttering along the stones, a busy noise 
 
 By day, a quiet sound in silent night ; 
 
 Ye waves, that out of the great deep steal forth 
 
 In a calm hour to kiss the pebbly shore. 
 
 Not mute, and then retire, fearing no storm ; 
 
 And you, ye groves, whose ministry it is 
 
 To interpose the covert of your shades. 
 
 Even as a sleep, between the heart of man 
 
 And outward troubles, between man himself, 
 
 Not seldom, and his own uneasy heart : 
 
 Oh ! that I had a music and a voice 
 
 Harmonious as your own, that I might tell 
 
 What ye have done for me. 
 
 This contains the whole doctrine of Wordsworth 
 on the lessons of Nature ; if it is didactic, it teaches 
 not by forced parallel but byj)ercdyed identity. 
 Man — to instance only the lesson from the winds 
 — is not the sole giver ; there are gifts, greater than 
 any in his power, given daily without ofFence, and 
 taken without injury. His gifts, too, if he covdd 
 put off the little selfish attitudes of a conscious 
 benefactor, might be as free and as joyful as the 
 living air. 
 
 The distinction between the Fancy and the 
 Imagination, so often set forth by Coleridge, is 
 admirably exemplified by Wordsworth, He never 
 
ILLUMINATION 211 
 
 confuses the two faculties, never passes unwittingly 
 from the one form of energy to the other. The 
 human mind is playful, and will not be denied its 
 sportive indulgences. Yet Fancy claims a com- 
 paratively small share in his works ; " Nature's 
 secondary grace," as he calls it, — 
 
 The charm more superficial that attends 
 
 Her works, as they present to Fancy's choice 
 
 Apt illustrations of the moral world. 
 
 Caught at a glance, or traced with curious pain, — 
 
 is barely touched upon in his greater poems, and 
 never without the clearest indication of its trivial 
 origin and office. 
 
 As might be expected, it follows from this that 
 the moral reflections which conclude some of 
 Wordsworth's shorter poems are quite unlike the 
 stale, trite aphorisms of the didactic school of 
 poetry. Wordsworth's morals, so to call them,^ 
 are discoveries made by a vital sympathy which 
 searches deep into the heart of things. They 
 must be pondered long to be understood. In 
 Simon Lee the profuse thankfulness of the old man 
 for the slight service that was rendered to him 
 moves the poet to this reflection — 
 
 I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds 
 With coldness still returning ; 
 Alas ! the gratitude of men 
 Hath oftener left me mourning. 
 
212 WORDSWORTH 
 
 In the Small Celandine the fate of the flower 
 sets the poet thinking on the kindred human 
 lot:— 
 
 O Man, that from thy fair and shining youth 
 Age might but take the things Youth needed not ! 
 
 Matthew, the village schoolmaster, describes 
 how, after the death of his daughter, he met a 
 beautiful child " as happy as a wave that dances on 
 the sea," and felt joy in the sight, followed by a 
 pang of reflection : — 
 
 There came from me a sigh of pain 
 Which I could ill confine ; 
 I looked at her, and looked again : 
 And did not wish her mine ! 
 
 And the same profound teacher moralises thus, in 
 the poem called the Fountain, on the life of 
 man : — 
 
 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. 
 
 These are the reflections of one who has studied 
 
 the mind of man as reverently and patiently as 
 
 ^ the scientific observer studies the works of Nature. 
 
ILLUMINATION 213 
 
 They are strange and surprising, as all discoveries ' 
 are surprising, and are expressed with no homiletic^ 
 intent, b ut in a sp irit of won Her anH g^p. It is 
 not from the shallows swept by a thousand nets 
 that these mysterious findings come ; they tell of a 
 depth " where fathom-line could never touch the 
 ground," a depth where also there is life. 
 
 Whoever, then, desires to read Wordswortly' 
 aright must not look for proverbs, or maxims, 01 
 any of those condensed and generalised statements 
 whereby mankind seeks to preserve experience in l 
 a form suitable for practical application. NorrQ 
 must he look for a second sense. (This poet is a) 
 true visionary, and deals not in allegories or) 
 dreams^ The allegory is useful only for a schemej 
 of thought which recognises two worlds, both known, 
 and connected by certain curious likenesses and 
 analogies. But what of the mass of sense-impres- 
 sions and feelings which work upon the mind and 
 heart and yet cannot be harnessed to metaphor, 
 or ranged in symmetrical pairs with the aspirations 
 of the soul of man } Have these no inherent 
 significance and value? It is the mark of the 
 mystic that he never desp^ises sense, never uses 
 it as a means to an end, a stepping-stone to be 
 spurned when he has raised himself higher. Hd 
 does not look beyond this world, but gazes intently "\ 
 on what is"pi-1esehlSid" to him, and, if hi^- quest 'fatl;K 
 looks still hearer and closer. In the earth under i~ 
 
214 WORDSWORTH 
 
 his boot-soles, in the garments that cling closest to 
 him, and, if not there, in the beatings of his heart, 
 he tries to find the secret. Heaven is not for him 
 a far place, nor eternity a long time. Here or 
 nowherev^now or never, the soul of all things is to 
 be found. 
 
 <" Wordsworth has some wonderfully vivid descrip- 
 tions of the dreams that came to him, waking or 
 asleep. In the Fifth Book of the Prelude he 
 narrates the dream of the Bedouin Arab, mounted 
 on a dromedary, who showed him two books. 
 One of them, which the Arab said was Euclid's 
 Elements, was indeed a stone, but was accepted by 
 the dreamer, as impossible things are accepted in 
 dreams, for a book. The other, a thing of more 
 worth, was a shell, delicate in shape and resplen- 
 dent in colour, which the Arab bade him hold to 
 his ear. He obeyed, and heard a loud prophecy 
 of the destruction of the world. Then the Arab 
 rode away over the desert, taking the books with 
 him, to bury them. The dreamer followed, and 
 begged in vain to be allowed to accompany him. 
 As he pursues, they are chased by a deluge of the 
 waters of the deep flowing in upon them, and the 
 dreamer awakes. It is easy to detect in this 
 dream a transformation of Wordsworth's waking 
 thoughts concerning Science and Poetry. A 
 similar origin may be assigned to the waking 
 dream, or reverie, which came to him on Salisbury 
 
ILLUMINATION li^ 
 
 Plain, when he seemed to see a company of long- 
 bearded Druids ministering at a flaming altar and 
 sacrificing cages full of living men. The past, 
 as he conceived it, was embodied before his eyes 
 by the intentness of his meditative energy. 
 
 The virtue of such dreams and apparitions is 
 derived from those fuller activities of the waking 
 mind which dreams reflect and distort. Words - 
 worth's true visions, far more solemn and movingi « 
 than these, occurred j^^^mentslQEIE]g]^wougEE"~ 
 feeling , and presented to him, without falsification, 
 things as~jthey" arei ^^^^^Tiere" are "certain vital 
 memories, as he explains m the Prelude, which shape ,, 
 our lives, we scarce know how, and become a partj- 
 of us, usurping the office of the soul. They bring ^ 
 power with them, and communicate it, so that the 
 soul, while she cleaves to them in her low and 
 faint moods, can raise and revive herself by their 
 aid. They seem to come to us fi-om without , yet 
 t hey are, in truth, the creatures of the soul , her 
 children, loyal to her, and watchful of herwelfare. 
 Two~ortHese"^eTuIIy described by Wordsworth 
 in the Twelfth Book of the Prelude, and they 
 must be given in his own language. 
 
 One Christmas-time, 
 
 r' 
 
 On the glad eve of its dear holidays, 
 Feverish, and tired, and restless, I went forth 
 Into the fields, impatient for the sight 
 Of those led palfreys that should bear us home ; 
 
lib WORDSWORTH 
 
 My brothers and myself. There rose a Crag, 
 
 That, from the meeting-point of two highway* 
 
 Ascending, overlooked them both, far stretched ; 
 
 Thither, uncertain on which road to fix 
 
 My expectation, thither I repaired. 
 
 Scout-like, and gained the summit ; 'twas a day 
 
 Tempestuous, dark, and wild, and on the grass 
 
 I sate half-sheltered by a naked wall ; 
 
 Upon my right hand couched a single sheep, 
 
 Upon my left a blasted hawthorn stood ; 
 
 With those companions at my side, I watched. 
 
 Straining my eyes intensely, as the mist 
 
 Gave intermitting prospect of the copse 
 
 And plain beneath. Ere we to school returned,-— 
 
 That dreary time, — ere we had been ten days 
 
 Sojourners in my father's house, he died ; 
 
 And I and my three brothers, orphans then. 
 
 Followed his body to the grave. The event. 
 
 With all the sorrow that it brought, appeared 
 
 A chastisement ; and when I called to mind 
 
 That day so lately past, when from the crag 
 
 I looked in such anxiety of hope ; 
 
 With trite reflections of morality. 
 
 Yet in the deepest passion, I bowed low 
 
 To God, Who thus corrected my desires ; 
 
 And, afterwards, the wind and sleety rain. 
 
 And all the business of the elements. 
 
 The single sheep, and the one blasted tree, 
 
 And the bleak music from that old stone wall. 
 
 The noise of wood and water, and the mist 
 
 That on the line of each of those two roads 
 
 Advanced in such indisputable shapes ; 
 
 All these were kindred spectacles and sounds 
 
 To which I oft repaired, and thence would drink. 
 
 As at a fountain. 
 
ILLUMINATION 217 
 
 The revelation made to the pure in heart does 
 not fulfil their desires ; it corrects them. Words- 
 worth, who prayed for *' more wise desires," found 
 comfort in the sternness of God's ministers, the 
 wind, and the rain, and the mist, and solitude, and 
 sorrow, and death. He sought none of those 
 sheltered Paradises which the weaker mind of man 
 builds as an asylum for its defeated cravings — 
 Paradises of indulgence and relaxation ; he knew 
 that there is no comfort in weakness. Only those 
 who have tasted an exquisite joy, said Keats, can 
 feel the power of sadness. Only those who have 
 opened their eyes on the world as it is, and have 
 put away selfish longings that they may see the 
 clearer, can feel the radiance of happiness. But it 
 is idle to try to express Wordsworth's teaching in 
 sentences like these ; it is the power of seeing 
 and feeling that he quickens. Here is his other 
 
 vision : — 
 
 I remember well, 
 That once, while yet my inexperienced hand 
 Could scarcely hold a bridle, with proud hopes 
 I mounted, and we journeyed towards the hills : 
 An ancient servant of my father's house 
 Was with me, my encourager and guide : 
 We had not travelled long, ere some mischance 
 Disjoined me from my comrade ; and, through fear 
 Dismounting^ down the rough and stony moor 
 I led my horse, and, stumbling on, at length 
 Came to a bottom, where in former times 
 A murderer had been hung in iron chains. 
 
21 8 WORDSWORTH 
 
 The gibbet-mast had mouldered down, the bones 
 
 And iron case were gone ; but on the turf, 
 
 Hard by, soon after that fell deed was wrought. 
 
 Some unknown hand had carved the murderer's name. 
 
 The monumental letters were inscribed 
 
 In times long past ; but still, from year to year 
 
 By superstition of the neighbourhood, 
 
 The grass is cleared away, and to this hour 
 
 The characters are fresh and visible : 
 
 A casual glance had shown them, and I fled. 
 
 Faltering and faint, and ignorant of the road ; 
 
 Then, reascending the bare common, saw 
 
 A naked pool that lay beneath the hills. 
 
 The beacon on the summit, and, more near, 
 
 A girl, who bore a pitcher on her head. 
 
 And seemed with difficult steps to force her way 
 
 Against the blowing wind. It was, in truth. 
 
 An ordinary sight ; but I should need 
 
 Colours and words that are unknown to man. 
 
 To paint the visionary dreariness 
 
 Which, while I looked all round for my lost guide, 
 
 Invested moorland waste and naked pool. 
 
 The beacon crowning the lone eminence. 
 
 The female and her garments vexed and tossed 
 
 By the strong wind. When, in the blessed hours 
 
 Of early love, the loved one at my side, 
 
 I roamed, in daily presence of this scene. 
 
 Upon the naked pool and dreary crags, 
 
 And on the melancholy beacon, fell 
 
 A spirit of pleasure and youth's golden gleam ; 
 
 And think ye not with radiance more sublime 
 
 For these remembrances, and for the power 
 
 They had left behind ? 
 
 There is nothing like this to be had from any 
 
ILLUMINATION 219 
 
 poet but Wordsworth. Other poets have touched 
 the hidden springs of suggestion casually, while 
 they were intent on the more ordinary purposes of 
 narration or discourse. He alone made of them 
 his instrument. The old distinctions drawn and, 
 boundaries marked between Nature and Manl 
 between the World and the Mind, seem to fade! 
 into insignificance before a gaze that pierces like 
 his. Vis ion is hi s greatest gift, and because, 
 when the interpreter Kas'rhade'ah'eiid, it is only 
 from the works of the poet himself that he may 
 hope for vindication, yet another of these great 
 passages shall be quoted — from theSecond Book of 
 the Excursion. The Solitary, visited in his moun- 
 tain retreat "By "the Wanderer and the Poet, tells 
 them the story of the old man whose humble 
 funeral procession they had seen moving along the 
 valley below. He was dependent on charity for 
 his livelihood, asking alms from the cottagers, and 
 rendering them in return some small services by 
 catde-tending and gathering fuel from the mountain 
 side. He had gone to the moors to get peat 
 when he was overtaken by a storm, and did not 
 return. Search was made, and he was found 
 sheltering himself under the wall of a ruined 
 chapel, faint and unable to move. He was 
 carried down to the cottage, where, three weeks 
 later, he died. The Solitary, who accompanied 
 the search party, tells of the sight they saw 
 
220 WORDSWORTH 
 
 on their homeward journey^when the ,,mists 
 broke : — 
 
 So was he lifted gently from the ground, 
 
 And with their freight homeward the shepherds moved 
 
 Through the dull mist, I following — when a step, 
 
 A single step, that freed me from the skirts 
 
 Of the blind vapour, opened to my view 
 
 Glory beyond all glory ever seen 
 
 By waking sense or by the dreaming soul ! 
 
 The appearance, instantaneously disclosed. 
 
 Was of a mighty city — boldly say 
 
 A wilderness of building, sinking far 
 
 And self-withdrawn into a boundless depth, 
 
 Far sinking into splendour — ^without end ! 
 
 Fabric it seemed of diamond and of gold. 
 
 With alabaster domes, and silver spires, 
 
 And blazing terrace upon terrace, high 
 
 Uplifted J here, serene pavilions bright, 
 
 In avenues disposed ; there, towers begirt 
 
 With battlements that on their restless fronts 
 
 Bore stars — illumination of all gems ! 
 
 By earthly nature had the effect been wrought 
 
 Upon the dark materials of the storm 
 
 Now pacified ; on them, and on the coves 
 
 And mountain-steeps and summits, whereunto 
 
 The vapours had receded, taking there 
 
 Their station under a cerulean sky. 
 
 Oh, 'twas an unimaginable sight ! 
 
 Clouds, mists, streams, watery rocks and emerald turf, 
 
 Clouds of all tincture, rocks and sapphire sky. 
 
 Confused, commingled, mutually inflamed. 
 
 Molten together, and composing thus. 
 
 Each lost in each, that marvellous array 
 
 Of temple, palace, citadel, and huge 
 
ILLUMINATION 221 
 
 Fantastic pomp of structure without name, 
 
 In fleecy folds voluminous, enwrapped. 
 
 Right in the midst, where interspace appeared 
 
 Of open court, an object like a throne 
 
 Under a shining canopy of state 
 
 Stood fixed ; and fixed resemblances were seen 
 
 To implements of ordinary use, 
 
 But vast in size, in substance glorified ; 
 
 Such as by Hebrew Prophets were beheld 
 
 In vision — forms uncouth of mightiest power 
 
 For admiration and mysterious awe. 
 j This little Vale, a dwelling-place of Man, 
 i Lay low beneath my feet ; 'twas visible — 
 • I saw not, but I felt that it was there. 
 
 That which I saw was the revealed abode 
 
 Of Spirits in Baifitude :' my heart 
 
 Swelled in my breast — ' I have been dead,' I cried, 
 
 ' And now I live f Oh ! wherefore do I live ? ' 
 
 Apd with that pang I prayed to be no more ! — 
 
 J-But I forget our Charge, as utterly 
 
 I then forgot him : — there I stood and gazed : 
 
 |The apparition faded not away, 
 
 .And I descended. 
 
 The vision having been described, in time and 
 place exacdy as it appeared, Wordsworth resumes 
 the interrupted story of the old man. ^hat is 
 the connection between these heavenly splendours 
 and the old man's last day on the mountains t\ An 
 author studious of effect would have hinted at an 
 application, or directed the feelings to a conclusion. 
 It would have been easy to find in this ethereal 
 revelation a promise of glory and immortality to 
 
222 WORDSWORTH 
 
 man ; as easy to use it for purposes of contrast, to 
 show that Nature in her high workings is indifferent 
 to the mortal destiny of man. Wordsworth, never 
 greater than when he is most restrained, seeks no 
 such effect ; it is enough for him that these things 
 occurred ; the old man was carried down to the 
 cottage to die, while the light of the sun wrought 
 this glorious transformation on the vapours and 
 ^[^bcks of the mountains. The effect on the feelings 
 
 J j of the reader is thus the work, not of the moralist 
 A or commentator, but o L Nature hersel f. The fate 
 \f humanity is set in a larger world ; the lonely 
 pauper, the little vale that is a dwelling-place of 
 man, are almost forgotten, while these inexplicable 
 wonders shape themselves overhead. "Another 
 race hath been, and other palms are won." So, in 
 an Eastern city, the few humble mourners who 
 are carrying one of its poorest inhabitants to the 
 grave might issue from an obscure and narrow 
 lane to find the highways thronged and resplendent 
 for the progress of a King, and, as they stand and 
 gaze, might feel perhaps that he whom they are 
 burying was no pauper after all, but a citizen of a 
 mighty Empire. 
 
 The same grave and high consolation inspires 
 
 j;^oo\the Lines composed by Wordsworth at Grasmere, 
 in the evening after a stormy day, when the death 
 of Fox was hourly expected. The wind and 
 the rain had ceased, yet the whole valley was 
 
ILLUMINATION 223 
 
 roaring like the sea with the noise of the streams 
 in flood, while a star above the mountain -top 
 seemed to listen quietly to the tumult. As he 
 walked the lonely road his depression was lifted, 
 and comfort slid into his heart : — 
 
 A Power Is passing from the earth 
 To breathless Nature's dark abyss; 
 But when the great and good depart 
 What is it more than this — 
 
 That Man, who is from God sent forth. 
 Must yet again to God return ? — 
 Such ebb and flow must ever be, 
 Then wherefore should we mourn i 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 Poetry and Religion, which Wordsworth often 
 compared, have many points in common. When 
 a great poet appears, the history of the process 
 whereby his work comes to be appreciated and 
 
 -accepted is singularly like the early history of 
 any one of the religions of mankind that sprang 
 from single Founders. The prophet at first is 
 reviled, or despised, or merely neglected. Then 
 he finds disciples, who, though they understand 
 his teaching but imperfectly and see his vision 
 but obscurely, yet in their partial understand- 
 ing and partial insight are strong enough 
 to move the world. But the original impulse 
 
 ' weakens as it spreads ; the living passion is 
 petrified in codes and creeds ; the revelation 
 becomes a commonplace ; and so the religion that 
 began in vision ends in orthodoxy. When once 
 it has reached this stage new dangers beset it, 
 for now its general acceptance attracts men to 
 
 224 
 
CONCLUSION 225 
 
 profess it for ends of their own, which, whether 
 they be laudable or base, bear little or no re- 
 semblance to the aims of the Founder. Much of 
 his startling doctrine is explained away, or pared 
 down, or assimilated to the verdicts of common- 
 sense. The cry of revolt from the old order 
 becomes the watchword of authority under a new 
 order which in all essential respects differs but 
 little from the old. 
 
 The history of the appreciation of any great"" 
 poet exhibits itself, therefore, like the history of 
 religion, in a series of revivals. From time to/ 
 time, one man here and another there reads the 
 classic page sincerely and simply, neglecting the 
 commentators, and finds in it novelty and power. 
 He puts aside the critical books which, as Words- 
 worth said. 
 
 Effeminately level down the truth 
 
 To certain general notions, for the sake 
 
 Of being understood at once, 
 
 and attempts to enter into closer sympathy of 
 mind and heart with the first author. A new 
 meaning shines for him in the old threadbare 
 texts, and he begins to understand that a poet is 
 not a purveyor to established tastes but a shaping 
 and compelling force, a light thrown on the dark 
 places of changeful human experience. 
 
 There are, no doubt, easier ways of reading 
 9. 
 
226 WORDSWORTH 
 
 than this. By the discrimination of a trained 
 taste the most striking beauties of a volume of 
 poems may be selected, and by the aid of a wide 
 comparative learning they may be illustrated and 
 annotated. But much of this work can be done 
 by one who is half asleep, deaf to the music and 
 impervious to the influence of the poet himself. 
 
 r Something of the freshness of emotion that went 
 to the first making of the poem, something of 
 the excitement, the glee, the passion, must be 
 
 ? shared by the intending critic ; if he is to under- 
 stand what the poet meant, he must feel as the 
 
 \j poet felt. 
 
 f In this attempt to foUow Wordsworth we 
 have watched him making his way along the 
 precipitous edge which is the boundary of thought. 
 rWe have seen him, in his effort to grapple with 
 the mystery of the common things of life, trying 
 all new ways — breaking with literary tradition, 
 with social usage, with language itself, lest they 
 should encumber his further progress. He 
 attained to a clearer and truer view of life than 
 is granted to most poets, and he paid the price 
 of this great happiness in a great and incurable 
 solitude of spirit. The seer is always solit ary ; 
 and, for good or for evil, it remains true that to 
 reach Wordsworth's height of contemplation, to 
 taste the pure sources of the solace that he found, 
 and to be glad with his gladness, a man must cut 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 227 
 
 himself o£F from not a few of the pleasures that 
 come to the dusty, kindly traffickers in the 
 valley. There are souls who would refuse vision 
 on these terms ; would shut their eyes to truth 
 rather than separate themselves from their fellows 
 by that airy, impassable barrier which a difference 
 of faculty creates. Human sympathy, full and 
 mutual, is what they hold by ; they would rather 
 forego faith than let it for an instant seem to 
 cast a shadow upon charity. Perhaps something 
 of this was felt by Wordsworth in his later years ; , 
 he grew tolerant with the tolerance of age, and 
 relapsed into the modes of thought and speech 
 that he found in the society around him. But it j 
 is not the Wordsworth of the early years of 
 Queen Victoria, the Churchman and Tory, whose * 
 companionship enlightens and befriends the later 
 reader, it is the strong and daring pioneer of a 
 younger day. He failed, it must be admitted, i 
 in many of the things that he attempted ; failed 
 more signally and obviously than other great poets 
 who have made a more prudent estimate of human 
 powers and have chosen a task to match their 
 strength. He pressed onward to a point where j 
 speech fails and drops into silence, where thought 
 is bafHed, and turns back upon its own footsteps. 
 But it is a good discipline to follow that intense 
 and fervid spirit, as far as may be, to the heights 
 that denied him access. There is a certain degra- 
 
228 WORDSWORTH 
 
 dation and pallor which falls on the soul amid " the 
 dreary intercourse of daily life," the heat that is 
 generated by small differences, the poison that is 
 brewed by small suspicions, the burden that is 
 imposed by small cares. To escape from these 
 things into a world of romance is to flee them, 
 and to be defeated by them. Sanity holds hard 
 by the fact, and knows that to turn away from it 
 
 1- is to play the recreant. Here was a poet who 
 faced the fact, and against whom the fact did not 
 prevail. To know him is to learn courage ; to 
 walk with him is to feel the visitings of a larger, 
 
 L^purer air, and the peace of an unfathomable sky. 
 
INDEX 
 
 A Cimplamt, 114 
 
 A Slumber did my Spirit seal, quoted, 
 
 III 
 Affliction of Margaret, The, 35 
 Alfoxden, 69-72, 130, 137, 176 
 Among all Lovely Things my ttove had 
 
 been, 149-150 
 Ancient Mariner, The, 23, 71, 72, 74, 
 
 71, 78, 81 i quoted, 79 
 Anecdote fir Fathers, 168 
 Angel in the House, Coventry Pat- 
 
 more's, quoted, 200 
 Animals and Wordsworth, 142-143, 
 
 162-163, '9° 
 Arabian Nights, The, 30 
 Aristotle, 12-13 
 Arnold, Matthew, 97 
 Asa, King, 13 
 Aylma's Field, 112 
 
 Bacon, Francis, 201 
 
 Beaumont, Lady, 118, 159 
 
 Beaupuis, Michael, 51 
 
 Beggar, The Old Cumberland, 1S4 
 
 Beggars, 169-170 
 
 Biografhia Literaria, 24, 88-89, '7^> 
 
 175 ; quoted, 72, 73 
 Blind Highland Boy, The, loo-ioi 
 Borderers, The, 21, 54, 58 5 quoted, 55 
 Brook, Sonnet to the (1815), 136 
 Browning, Robert, 21, 118, 146, 185 
 Burns, Robert, 49 
 Byron, Lord, 96 
 
 Calvert, Raisley, 21 
 Cambridge, 19, 20, 30, 46 
 Campbell, T. Dykes, 84 
 
 Canace, the Princess, 41 
 Candle, dying, 204 
 Celandine, The Small, 177, 212 
 Character of the Happy Warrior, 194- 
 
 195 
 
 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 41, 123 
 Children, 162, 163-171 
 Christabel, 23, 71, 72 
 Churchyard among the Mountains, 
 
 59 
 
 City life, 37, 186-187 
 
 Classical School of Poetry, 89-90 
 
 Claudio, 152 
 
 Cockermouth, 19 
 
 Coleridge, Hartley, 163 5 poem ad- 
 dressed to, S3 
 Samuel Taylor, 19, 21, 23, 67-85, 
 88, 89, 92, 100, 122, 151, 
 172-175, 181, 204 
 
 Composed upon an Evening of Extra- 
 ordinary Splendour and Beauty, 
 
 19 
 Corot, J. B., 36 
 Cottle, Joseph, 68 
 Cotton, Charles, 93 
 Crabbe, George, 7 
 Cuckoo, To the, 166 
 Cupid and Psyche, Fable of, 199 
 
 DaiFodils, 149, 188 
 Daisy, To the, 150 
 Davenant, Sir William, 7 
 Dejection : An Ode, 84 
 Democracy, 181 
 Democratic leaders, 55 
 
 society, 46 
 Descriptive Sketches, 20 
 
 229 
 
230 
 
 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Don Sluixote, 30 
 
 Dora, 112 
 
 Dove Cottage, 181 
 
 Dreams, described in Prelude, 214- 
 
 215 
 Duff, Ode to, 195 
 
 Ecko, The Mountain, 166 
 Kducation of Nature, 139 
 Edward JL, Marlowe's, 173 
 Elegiac Stanssas, 107-109 
 "Emblems," 208 
 Emotion, its value as an illuminant, 
 
 163, 173, 199, 202, 204, 205, 
 
 215 
 Enoci Arden, 112 
 Epitaphs, Essay on, 94-95 
 Evening ff^alk. An, 20 
 Evil, problem of, 140-147 
 Excursion, The, 8, 17, 18, 34, 48, 67, 
 
 103, 105,116,121,131,135, 
 
 15s. "89, 219 ; quoted, 59, 
 
 66, 67, 113, 117, 121, 148, 
 
 152-153, 220-221 
 Expostulation and Reply, i^a^ quoted, 
 
 61. 137 
 
 Fate, sense of, 191 
 
 Fenwicic, Miss, 27 
 
 Fidelity, 190 
 
 Fielding, Henry, 30 
 
 Fountain, The, 212 
 
 Fox, Lines on his expected death, 222 
 
 France, 20, 22, 47, 48, 56 
 
 France, an Ode, 82 
 
 Franceschini, Count Guido, 146 
 
 Francis, Saint, 129 
 
 French Revolution, 20, 25, 45-59, 
 
 175, 176 
 Friend, The, 94, 204 
 Frost at Midnight, 82-83 
 
 Germany, 24, iii 
 
 Gil Bias, 30 
 
 Gipsies, 98-100 
 
 Glow-worm, 150 
 
 Godwin, William, 57, 58, 59, 206 
 
 Goethe, J. W., 33 
 
 Goldsmith, Oliver, 7 
 
 Grasmere, 177, 181, 222 
 Greelc view of Nature, 136 
 Green Linnet, The, 151 
 
 Hamlet, 145 
 
 Happiness in life, 133, 217 
 Hawkshead, 19, 30 
 Hutchinson, Sarah, 24 
 
 / Travelled ai^ong Unknmim Men, 
 
 quoted, ill 
 Idiot Boy, The, 3, 70, 71, 82, 95-96 
 Imagination and Fancy, 210 
 It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and 
 
 Free, 171 
 
 Jeffrey, Francis, 6-10 
 
 Job, Book of, 141 
 ohnson, Samuel, 19, 168 
 Jonson, Ben, 90 
 Journal, Dorothy Wordsworth's, 169 
 
 Keats, John, 157, 217 
 King Lear, 93, 146 
 
 Lamb, Charles, 81 
 
 Language, its inadequacy, 61, 62, 
 
 115-118, 125-127, 169; its 
 
 use as a weapon, 119 
 Laodamia, zo2 
 Last of the Flock, 92 
 Law, universal, 190, 196, 207 
 Lear, 93, 146 
 
 Leech-gatherer, the, 53, 181-184 
 Letter to a Friend of Robert Bums, 49 
 Life, enigma of, 197-199 
 Life of Dr. Henry More, 148 
 Lines on the expected death of Mr, 
 
 Fox, 222-223 
 Lines ff^ritten in Early Spring, 130 ; 
 
 quoted, 134 
 Loire, 51 
 
 London, 27, 52, 54, 186, 187 
 Love the revealer, 200-202 
 "Lacy," III, 139, 150,205 
 Lyons, 49 
 Lyrical Ballads, 23, 24, 72, 74, 85, 
 
 86, 87, 91-92, 156 
 
 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 147-148 
 
INDEX 
 
 231 
 
 Malherbe, 89, 90 
 
 Man and Nature, 187-1S9, 197-199, 
 
 206-207, 209-210, 219 
 Marlowe, Christopher, 173 
 Mathematical sciences, 57, 59, 214 
 Matthew, 189, 212 
 Measure Jor Measure, 152 
 Memory, its poetic Ainction, 25 
 Michael, 112, 113, 114 
 Mill, John Stuart, 128 
 Millet, J. F., 36 
 Milton,'john, 123 
 Mind ofman, the, 198 
 Moon, the, 72-73, 158, 205 
 Morality and poetry, 128-130, 140 
 "Morals," Wordsworth's, 211-Z13 
 More, Dr. Henry, 148 
 Morley, Right Honourable John, 
 
 131. '34; quoted, 191 
 Mysticism, 40, 61, 94, 100, 122, 
 
 148, 207, 213-214 
 
 Naming of Places, Poems on tie, 174 
 
 Napoleon, 53 
 
 Naturalism, Wordsworth's, 73-81, 
 
 190 
 Nature, 31, 32, 36, 37-42, 48, 65, 
 
 99, no, 124-154, 155, 158, 
 
 175.177.185-191,197,208- 
 
 210 
 Nether Stowey, 69 
 Nightingale and Stock- dove, quoted, 
 
 48 
 Nutting, 137 
 
 Ode on Intimations of Immortality, 
 164, 166, 167 
 
 on the Defarting Tear, 83 
 
 to Duty, 195 
 CEdipus, 146 
 
 Optimism, Wordsworth's, 141-149 
 Othello, 146 
 
 Painting and poetry, 36, 160 
 
 Paris, 49, 53 
 
 Peasantry, 162, 171-185 
 
 Perception, nature of, 158-159 
 
 Pessimism, 145, 146 
 
 Peter Bell, 23, 71, 74. 75-78. 82, 
 
 97. 173. >78. '88 ; quoted, 
 75.76,77.78. 114 
 
 Pifpa Passes, 185 
 
 Platonism, 165 
 
 Pleasure essential to poetry, 49-50 
 
 Poet, the malting of a, 29 j an inter- 
 preter, 64; a seer, 106-109, 
 226 ; definition of a, 157 
 
 Poetic diction, 60, 82, 86-123, 172- 
 
 '75 
 Poetry, definition of, 25, 154 ; an 
 art, 34 J a mode of percep- 
 tion, 61 ; the guardian of 
 language, 122-123 ; as imita- 
 tion, 125 ; as expression, 
 156-157 
 Poetry and Religion, 224-225 
 Poet's Epitaph, A, 96 j quoted, 188 
 Political Justice, The, 58 
 Pope, Alexander, 44, 90, 129 
 Power of Music, quoted, 103 
 Pre-existence, 164 
 Prelude, The, 16, 17, 18, 25, 28, 33, 
 
 37, 38, 48, 51, 58, 62, 70. 
 103, 104, 116, 131, 134, 
 
 137. 156, 'S8. 175. '78. 
 185, 187, 196, 209, 214, 
 215 ; quoted, 32, 33, 37, 40, 
 46, 47. 48, 5'. 54. 58, 62, 
 70, 71, 103, 116, 121, 127, 
 151, 160, 164, 177, 179, 
 180, 186, 208, 215-218, 
 225 
 Primrose of the Rock, The, 207 
 
 Quantock Hills, 23, 72 
 Quietism, Wordsworth's, 138 
 
 Racedown, 21, 68, 176 
 Rainbow, 149 
 Rationalism, 57-59, 206 
 Rawnsley, Canon H. D., 93, 163 
 Recluse, The, 23 ; quoted, 23, 198 
 Reliques, Bishop Percy's, 44 
 Reminiscences of Wordsworth, Canon 
 
 Rawnsley's, 93, 163 
 Resolution and Independence, quoted, 
 
 53, 182.184 
 Rhone, 49 
 Ring and the Book, The, quoted, 118 
 
232 
 
 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Road an academy, the, 176 
 Romanticism, 43-45, 181 
 Rousseau, J. J., 45 
 Ruti, no, 139 
 Rydal Mount, 24 
 
 Schoolmaster, described by Words- 
 worth, 7, 189 
 Science, .147, 153-154, 187, 206, 
 
 207, 208, 214 
 Septemtier massacres, 53 
 Shakespeare, William, 35, 43, 93, 
 
 123, 129, 15a, 157, 201 
 Shelley, P. B., 21, 58 
 Shenstone, William, 7 
 Simon La, 91, 211 
 Society, Wordsworth's attitude to, 
 
 46, 50, 92-93, 118-119, 186- 
 
 187 
 Soldier and Wordsworth, 179 
 Solitary, The, 219 
 Sonnet, Cmtposed near Calais (1802), 
 
 quoted, 48 
 Southey, Robert, 68, 74 
 Sparrow's Nat, The, quoted, 60 
 Spenser, Edmund, 123 
 Squires Tale, Chaucer's, quoted, 41 
 Star-Gazers, 202 
 Strange Jits of passion have I ifiovm, 
 
 quoted, 205 
 Switzerland, 47 
 
 Taiies Turned, Tie, 130 ; quoted, 
 
 131 
 Tarn 0' Sheaiter defended, 49 
 Taylor, Sir Henry, 27 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 3, 21, 112- 
 
 114 
 Thorn, Tie, 71, 82, 92 
 Three Tears she grew, quoted, 139 
 Tintern Abbey, Lines -written a fern 
 
 Miles above, 38, 133, 135, 
 
 158 ; quoted, 39 
 To my Sister, 130, 132 
 Tragedy and happiness, 146 
 T1V0 April Mornings, Tie, quoted, 212 
 
 yaudracour andjftdia, zoi 
 Verse, education in, 31-33 
 Vision, 161, 213-222 
 "Vital memories," 215 
 
 ff^aggoner. Tie, quoted, 26, 79 
 
 Waller, Edmund, 93 
 
 Wanderer, the, 66, 67, 219 
 
 War, the French, 56 
 
 Ward, Richard, 148 
 
 Warrior, Wordsworth's character of, 
 
 194-195 
 Water-ftnol, 103 
 We are Seven, 167-168 
 Wiite Doe of Rylstone, Tie, 9, zg, go, 
 
 191-193, 194 
 Wilson, Professor John, 95 
 Windermere, 178 
 Wit, shunned by Wordsworth, 126, 
 
 208 
 Witi Siips tie sea was sprinkled far 
 
 and nigi, 204 
 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 22, 23, 41, 
 
 59, 60, 65, 169, 170 
 John, 24, 107, 182, 193 
 
 Tew-Trees, quoted, 105 
 
 THE END 
 
 Printed ly R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgli. 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PR5881.R161903 
 
 Wordsworth. 
 
 3 1924 012 970 434