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 Excur sion, 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, dedicated 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
Soul-animating strains.”—

"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,
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more."

SPECIMEN OF WORDSWORTH'S VERSE

THOUGHTS ON REVISITING THE WYE

Oh! how oft,

In darkness, and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight, when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart,
How oft in spirit have I turned to thee,

O silvan Wye! thou. wanderer through the woods-
How often has my spirit turned to thee !

And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,

The picture of the mind revives again,

While here I stand, not only with the sense

Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,

Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when, like a roe,
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led; more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then-
The coarser pleasures of my boyish days
And their glad animal movements all gone by-
To me was all in all-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. That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn, nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed,-for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

459

460

SPECIMEN OF WORDSWORTH'S VERSE.

A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods

And mountains, and of all that we behold

From this green earth,-of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they half create
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature, and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

DISTINGUISHED as a descriptive poet by his fine Lays of Ancient Rome, and yet more distinguished as a master of English prose by his Essays and his noble History of England, Macaulay stands prominent among the highest literary names of the nineteenth century. When, amid the Christmas festivities of 1859, a mournful whisper crept into almost every home in the land, telling of his death, there were few hearts so thoroughly engrossed by the pleasures of the passing hour as not to send a thought of affectionate sorrow into that quiet room at Kensington, where the great Historian and Essayist—the only man whom England ever made a lord for the power of his pen-lay mute and still among his cherished books and the half-written sheets of his unfinished volume.

Macaulay was of Scottish lineage, being a descendant of the Macaulays of Lewis in Ross-shire. His grandfather, John, was a Presbyterian minister. His father, Zachary, who spent part of his life in Jamaica, became well known for his exertions in opposition to the hateful slave-trade. At Rothley Temple in Leicestershire, the seat of Zachary's brother-in-law, a rich English merchant and member of Parliament, the future historian was born in 1800, and was named Thomas Babington, after the uncle in whose house he first saw the light.

Young Macaulay's career as a student of Trinity College, Cambridge, was crowned with high honours. Entering in 1818, he