454 THE LANGUAGE OF WORDSWORTH. the wanderings of an old pedler, are among the themes chosen by Wordsworth for the utterance of his poetic soul. As of old the Puritans had done in political and domestic life, the Lakists went too far in their disdain for the conventional ornaments and subjects of poetry. But their theory, a healthful one, based on sound principles, made an impression on the British mind deeper and more lasting than many think. Like that ozone or electrified oxygen in the natural air, upon which, say chemists, our health and spirits depend, its subtle influence is ever stealing through the atmosphere of our national thought, quickening the scattered germs of a truer and purer poetic philosophy than has yet prevailed. As all advocates of a new theory are apt to do, Wordsworth ran at first into an almost ridiculous extreme of simplicity, both in the selection of his subjects and his treatment of them. His ballads, on their first publication, raised a perfect storm of disdainful laughter among the critics of the day,-laughter which he heard serenely, conscious that he was right in the main, and that time alone was needed to insure the triumph of his views. But here it must be remembered, that the language in which his highest thoughts found their fitting expression is not by any means a common-place language. When telling the tale of Johnny Foy, the idiot who stayed out all night, he may properly enough descend to humble strains like these : "And now she's at the doctor's door, His glimmering eyes that peep and doze! And one hand rubs his old night-cap." But when higher themes attract his pen, as, for example, in that noble simile, among the finest our poetry contains,— "I have seen A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract WORDSWORTH'S EARLY LIFE. Brightened with joy; for, murmuring from within, To his belief, the monitor expressed Mysterious union with its native sea: Is to the ear of Faith," 455 his style is elevated far above the level of our common speech, as a poetic style must always be, that takes its tone and colour from the lofty thoughts which it embodies. Wordsworth, an attorney's son, was born on the 7th of April 1770, at Cockermouth in Cumberland. Both father and mother died while he was yet a boy; and when his school education was considered, by the uncle under whose guardianship he passed, to be sufficiently advanced, he was sent in 1787 to St. John's College, Cambridge. There, during the four years of his undergraduate course, he read a good deal, studied Italian, wrote poetry, and, when the welcomed vacations released him from what he considered to be an irksome and narrow course of study, went upon various tours—that in the autumn of 1790 being directed to France and Switzerland, although the tempest of Revolution was then raging with great fury. In the following year, having graduated, he went again to France, with a soul on fire in her cause. he stayed for fifteen months, and there he might have perished by the guillotine in the growing ardour of his sympathy for the Girondists, had not his return to England in 1792 changed the current of his life. There His friends wished him to enter the Church; but he was born to be a poet and nothing else. The love of poetry was the grand passion of his heart, gaining strength as the flame of republicanism wasted and died with the coming of maturer years. In 1793 appeared a modest book of descriptive verse, 1793 containing two poems in the heroic couplet, entitled An A.D. Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches of walks among the Alps. This maiden appearance of the poet Wordsworth revealed to thinking minds the rise of a new star, destined to shed a brilliant lustre on the land. Coleridge, a kindred spirit, was especially struck with the merit of the work. 456 WORDSWORTH SETTLES BY THE LAKES. The need of earning a livelihood had turned the young poet's thoughts to the law and the career of a journalist, when, happily for the literature of the nineteenth century, the kindness of Calvert, a dying friend, who left him £900 and a pressing request that he would devote himself to poetry, marked out another future for the man of twenty-five. Settling down in Somersetshire with his sister, he wrote Salisbury Plain and a tragedy called The Borderers, and soon afterwards made the acquaintance of Coleridge. When the latter took up house at Nether Stowey, his new friend, in order to be near him, removed to Alfoxden, three miles off; and they lived thus in constant association with each other. A volume called Lyrical Ballads appeared in 1798, containing twenty-three pieces, the first being the "Ancient Mariner," and the rest poems by Wordsworth. It fell all but dead from the press. After a tour in Germany, Wordsworth settled with his sister in a cottage at Grasmere, among those hills whose blue peaks had bounded the world of his childhood. There he resided for nine years, during which his marriage and the commencement of his great philosophical poem, of which we have but two instalments, were the chief occurrences. The payment of £8500 by the Earl of Lonsdale, in settlement of a debt due to his father, enabled him at the time of his marriage to look forward with composure to a life undisturbed by the cares of money-getting,—a circumstance of no small importance to the successful cultivation of that calm and thoughtful poetry towards which his native genius was inclined. In 1808 he removed to Allan Bank, and in 1813 to Rydal Mount, both places lying in sight of those sweet 1813 lakes, and under the shadow of those old hills, which have become inseparably associated with his name and memory. At Rydal Mount, "a cottage-like building, almost hidden by a profusion of roses and ivy," from whose grassy lawn a silver gleam of Windermere could be caught to the south, the poet spent the greater half of his life. About the time of his removal to this charming residence, the office of Distributor of Stamps for the county of Westmoreland, the salary of which was £500 a year, A.D. with no very heavy duties attached to it, made a considerable addition to his private means. He owed his appointment to the influence of Lord Lonsdale. 1814 A.D. In the following year he published his noblest poem, The Excursion, which brought him little or no money, and drew down upon him the wrath of the critics, Jeffrey of the "Edinburgh" leading the hostile van. "This will never do," wrote the great Athenian lawyer; but alas for his prophecy! this (i.e., "The Excursion") has been doing ever since, making its way steadily upwards, like a star that climbs into the clear sky above masses of cloud hung upon the horizon, and sheds its mild yet penetrating light with growing power as it climbs. When we examine the structure of this great work-only a fragment, let it be remembered, of a vast moral epic, to be called The Recluse, in which the poet intended to discuss the human soul in all its deepest workings and its loftiest relations--we find no dramatic life, and little human interest; and to this feature of the poem, as well as to the novelty of finding subtle metaphysical reasoning embodied in blank-verse, its original unpopularity must be ascribed. Even still, though yearly widening, the circle of those who read the "Excursion" is small; for it is a poem written only for the thinking few. Those who read poetry as some do, only for the story, will be hipped and desperately bored by the grave musical philosophy of the old Scotch pedler and his friends. Yet it is not all a web of subtle reasoning, for there are rich studies from nature and life scattered plentifully over its more thoughtful ground-work. Coleridge, who was his friend's truest and finest critic, describes the higher efforts of Wordsworth's pen as being characterized by "an austere purity of language, both grammatically and logically." No English poet, who has dealt with lofty themes, is more thoroughly English in both his single words and his turns of expression. The chief remaining works of this great writer are The White Doe of Rylstone (1815), a tragic tale founded on the ruin of a northern family in the Civil War; Peter Bell (1819), a remarkable specimen of the Lakist writings, which he dedicated to 458 WORDSWORTH'S MINOR WORKS. Southey;* Sonnets on the River Duddon; The Waggoner, dedi cated to Charles Lamb; Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, Ecclesiastical Sonnets; Yarrow Revisited, and other Poems; and The Prelude, a fragment of autobiography, describing the growth of a poet's mind, which was not published until the author was dead. In the composition of Sonnets, a poetic form of which he was remarkably fond, he has not been excelled by the finest of the old masters. As he says of Milton, we may say of himself with regard to the sonnet, "In his hand The thing became a trumpet, whence he blew "Wordsworth's sonnet never goes off, as it were, with a clap or repercussion at the close; but is thrown up like a rocket, breaks into light, and falls in a soft shower of brightness." Some of his minor poems, displaying his genius in its simple beauty and unaffected grace, are Ruth, a touching tale of Love and Madness; We are Seven, a glimpse of that higher wisdom which the lips of childhood often speak; the classic Laodamia, clear-lined and graceful as an antique cameo; and those Lines on Revisiting the Wye, of which we quote a part, rich in the calmly eloquent philosophy that formed the golden woof of all he wrote. In 1842 the old man, then past seventy, resigning his public office to his son, received a pension of £300 a year; and in 1843, on the death of Southey, he became poet-laureate. Seven years later, he sank into the grave, dying a few days after the completion of his eightieth year. His remains were laid in the churchyard of Grasmere, by the side of his darling daughter, who had been taken from him three April 23, 1850 A.D. years before. * One of the finest examples of Wordsworth's direct simplicity of expression occurs in the description of Peter's utter want of sympathy with the beauty of Nature,— "A primrose by a river's brim, |