Germany with Coleridge, where the Prelude was begun, he took a small cottage at Grasmere, and there in 1805-6 finished the Prelude, not published till 1850. Another set of the Lyrical Ballads appeared in 1802, and in 1814 his philosophical poem, the Excursion. From that time till his death he produced from his home at Rydal Mount a great succession of poems. WORDSWORTH AND NATURE.-The Prelude is the history of Wordsworth's poetical growth from a child till 1806. It reveals him as the poet of Nature and of Man. His view of Nature was entirely different from that which up to his time the poets had held. They had believed that the visible universe was dead matter set in motion like a machine and regulated by fixed laws. Wordsworth, on the contrary, said that it was alive. There is a soul, he said, in all the worlds; an active principle subsists' in Nature. This soul of Nature was entirely distinct from the mind of man, and acted upon it. It had powers of its own, desires, feelings, and thought of its own, and by these it gave education, impulses, comfort, and joy to the man who opened his heart to receive them. The human mind receiving these impressions, reflected on them and added to them its own thoughts and feelings, and that union of the mind of man to the mind in Nature then took place which Wordsworth thought the true end of the pre-arranged harmony he conceived between Nature and Humanity. This is the idea which runs through all his poetry, and one thing especially followed from it, that he was the first who loved Nature with a personal love. He could do that because he did not mix up Nature with his own mind, nor make her the reflection of himself, nor look upon her as dead matter. She was a person to him, distinct from himself, and therefore capable of being loved as a man loves a woman. He could brood on her character, her ways, her words, her life, as he did on those of his wife or sister. Hence arose his minute and loving observation of her and his passionate description of all her forms. There was nothing, from the daisy's 'starshaped shadow on the naked stone' to the vast landscape seen at sunrise from the mountain top, that he did not describe, that he has not made us love. WORDSWORTH AND MAN.-We have seen the vivid interest that Wordsworth took in the new ideas about man as they were shown in the French Revolution. But even before that he relates in the Prelude how he had been led through his love of Nature to honor Man. The shepherds of the Lake hills, the dalesmen, had been seen by him as part of the wild scenery in which he lived, and he mixed up their life with the grandeur of Nature and came to honor them as part of her being. The love of Nature led him to the love of Man. It was exactly the reverse order to that of the previous poets. At Cambridge and afterwards in the crowd of London and in his first tour on the Continent, he received new impressions of the vast world of Man, but Nature still remained the first. It was only during his life in France and in the excitement of the new theories and their activity that he was swept away from Nature, and found himself thinking of Man as distinct from her, and first in importance. But the hopes he had formed from the Revolution broke down. All his dreams about a new life of man were made vile when France gave up liberty for Napoleon; and he was left without love of Nature or care for Man. It was then that his sister Dorothy, herself worthy of mention in a history of literature, led him back to his early love of Nature and restored his mind. Living quietly at Grasmere, he sought in the simple lives of the dalesmen round him for the foundations of a truer view of mankind than the theories of the Revolution afforded. And in thinking and writing of the common duties and faith, kindnesses and truth of lowly men, he found in Man once more 'an object of delight, Of pure imagination and of love.' With that he recovered also his interest in the larger movements of mankind. His love of liberty and hatred of oppression revived. He saw in Napoleon the enemy of man. A whole series of sonnets followed the events on the Continent. One recorded his horror at the attack on the Swiss, another mourned the fate of Venice, another the fate of Toussaint the negro chief, others celebrated the struggle of Hofer and the Tyrolese, others the struggle of Spain. Two thanksgiving odes rejoiced in the overthrow of the oppressor at Waterloo. He became conservative in his old age, but his interest in social and national movements did not decay. He wrote on Education, the Poor Laws, and other subjects. When almost seventy he took the side of the Carbonari, and sympathized with the Italian struggle. He was truly a poet of Mankind. But his chief work was done in his own country and among his own folk; and he was the first who threw around the lives of homely men and women the glory and sweetness of song, and taught us to know the brotherhood of all men in a more beautiful way than the wild way of the Revolution. He lies asleep now among the people he loved, in the green churchyard of Grasmere, by the side of the stream of Rothay, in a place as quiet as his life. Few spots on earth are more sacred than his grave. Criticism must needs confess that much of his work is prosaic in thought, but the form of it is always poetic; that is, the thoughts are expressed in a way prose never would express them. His theory about poetic diction, that it should be the ordinary language men use in strong emotion, may seem to contradict this; but, as Coleridge has shown, Wordsworth did not practice his theory, and where he did the result was not poetry. His style in blank-verse is the likest to Milton's that we possess, but it is more feminine than Milton's. He is like Milton also in this, that he excelled in the Sonnet, which we may say he restored to modern poetry. Along with the rest of all the poets of the time he revived old measures and in vented new. His philosophy of Nature we have explained; his human philosophy, of which the Excursion is the best example, was no deeper than a lofty and grave morality created, in union with an imaginative Christianity. He believed in himself when all the world disbelieved in him, and he has been proved right and the world wrong.” "What was special in Wordsworth was the penetrating power of his perceptions of poetical elements, and his fearless reliance on the simple forces of expression in contrast to the more ornate ones. He had an eye to see these elements where I will not say no one had seen or felt them, but where no one appears to have recognized that he had seen or felt them. He saw that the familiar scene of human life-nature as affecting human life and feeling, and man as the fellow-creature of nature but also separate and beyond it in faculties and destiny—had not yet rendered up even to the mightiest of former poets all that they had in them to touch the human heart. And he accepted it as his mission to open the eyes and widen the thoughts of his countrymen, and to teach them to discern in the humblest and most unexpected forms the presence of what was kindred to what they had long recognized as the highest and greatest. Of all poets who ever wrote, Wordsworth made himself most avowedly the subject of his own thinking. In one way this gives special interest and value to his work. But this habit of perpetual self-study, though it may conduce to wisdom, does not always conduce to life or freedom of movement. It spreads a tone of individuality and apparent egotism, which, though very subtle and undefinable, is yet felt even in some of his most beautiful compositions. We miss the spirit of aloofness and self-forgetfulness, which, whether spontaneous or the result of the highest art, marks the highest types of poetry." -R. W. Church. "It is important to hold fast to this: poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life,-to the question, How to live. Wordsworth deals with life, because he deals with that in which life really consists. Wordsworth deals with it, and his greatness lies in his dealing with it so powerfully. His superiority to other poets is here—he deals with more of life than they do, deals with life, as a whole, more powerfully. Wordsworth's poetry is great, because of the extraordinary power with which he feels the joy offered to us in nature, the joy offered to us in the simple primary affections and duties; and because of the extraordinary power with which, in case after case, he shows us this joy, and renders it so as to make us share it. The source of joy from which he thus draws is the truest and most unfailing source of joy accessible to man. It is also accessible universally. Wordsworth has no style. Every one who has any sense for these things feels the subtle turn, the heightening, which is given to a poet's verse by his genius for style. We can feel it in the 'After life's fitful fever, he sleeps well,' of Shakespeare. Wordsworth was too conversant with Milton not to catch at times his master's manner, and he has fine Miltonic lines; but he has no assured poetic style of his own. Nature herself seems to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power. This arises from the profound sincereness with which Wordsworth feels his subject, and also from the profoundly sincere and natural character of his subject itself. He can and will treat such a subject with nothing but the most plain, first hand, almost austere naturalness. His expression may often be bald, but it is bald as the bare mountain-tops are bald, with a baldness which is full of grandeur."-Matthew Arnold. BIBLIOGRAPHY. WORDSWORTH.-C. Wordsworth's Memoirs of; W. S. and R. J. Austin's Poets-Laureate; De Quincey's Essays; Field's Yesterdays with Authors; H. Giles' Illus. of Genius; Howitt's Homes of Brit. Poets; Lowell's Among my Books, 2d Ser.; Whipple's Characteristics of Men of Genius, his Essays and Reviews, and his Lit. and Life; F. W. Robertson's Lectures and Addresses; J. C. Shairp's Studies in Poetry; Ward's Anthology; M. Arnold's Preface to his Ed. of W.'s Poems; J. Wilson's Essays; Black. Mag., v. 110, 1871; Fort. Rev., Apr., 1874; Macmillan, Nov., 1860, and Aug., 1873; N. A. Rev, v. 100, 1865; Quar. Rev., v. 92, 1853; Temple Bar, Feb., 1872; Ecl. Mag., Apr., 1853; March and Apr., 1865; Oct., 1876; and Jan. and Oct. 1880. LESSON 60. Wordsworth's The Solitary Reaper. Behold her, single in the field, Yon solitary Highland Lass! O listen! for the vale profound No nightingale did ever chant So sweetly to reposing bands |