inspiration had well-nigh run dry. In 1843 he reluctantly accepted the Laureateship. He died on the 23d of April, 1850, —

With heart as calm as lakes that sleep
In frosty moonlight glistening,

Or mountain torrents, where they creep
Along a channel smooth and deep

To their own far-off murmurs listening.

Coleridge, DeQuincey, Scott, Southey, Lamb, Dr. Thomas

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

LIFE AND TIMES. Those who have the courage to read all the verse that Wordsworth wrote will find it in the splendid 11-vol. edition of Professor William Knight (Paterson). Vols. ix.-xi. contain the Life. Opinions will always differ widely as to whether it is possible to make an interesting biography out of Wordsworth's uneventful and self-centred existence, but there can hardly be two opinions as to the dulness of Myer's Wordsworth (E. M. L.). The nature of Calvert's Wordsworth, A Biographic Esthetic Study, is sufficiently indicated by noting that the author considers The Idiot Boy an 'incomparable artistic feat.'

Coleridge: Biographia Literaria; Cap. iv. xiv. xvii.-xx. xxii. A much better exposition of Wordsworth's poetic philosophy than the poet was able to give himself; does not fail to point out what Wordsworth could never see,— -the characteristic defects in his verse.

De Quincey: Autobiography, from 1803 to 1808; Cap. iii.-v. (The Lake Poets.) These are chiefly personal reminiscences; the unsympathetic might call them small-beer chronicles. They leave us with the impression that Wordsworth's personality was decidedly unlovely. Essay on Wordsworth's Poetry. Examines (briefly) Wordsworth's' theory of Poetic Diction and the philosophy of The Excursion;' calls attention to the penetration of Wordsworth's vision, and the depth of his sympathy with The Permanent in human nature.

Lowell: Among My Books, Second Series; Wordsworth. About half this Essay is biographical; the other half does not spare 'the historian of Wordsworthshire,' yet declares that his 'better utterances have the bare sincerity, the absolute abstraction from time and place, the immunity from decay that belong to the grand simplicity of the Bible.'

Stephen: Hours in a Library, Vol. iii. This is an elaborate and eulogistic exposition of that Wordsworthian philosophy which (Mr. Matthew Arnold takes pains to assure us), 'so far at least as it may put on the form and habit of ‘a scientific system of thought,' and the more it puts them on,' is an illusion. Matthew Arnold: Essays in Criticism, Second Series; Wordsworth. In this Essay the most distinguished disciple of Wordsworth gives up about four-fifths of his master's verse as of little permanent value, but presents us with the other one-fifth as a 'great and ample body of powerful work' that will rank him superior to all modern poets save Dante, Shakespeare, Molière, Milton and Goethe. French and German critics find it hard to treat this dictum with

seriousness, but it appeals strongly to the insularism and conservatism of the English mind.

Courthope: The Liberal Movement in English Literature, Essay iii. (Wordsworth's Theory of Poetry). Shows that Wordsworth's best poems are written on principles that are directly opposed to the theories laid down in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.

Those who desire more Wordsworthian Criticism should consult J. S. Mill's Autobiography, Cap. v.; Sharp's Studies in Poetry and Philosophy; John Morley's Studies in Literature; Whipple's Essays and Reviews, Vol. i.

TO A HIGHLAND GIRL.

The person and the place herein idealized are thus described by Dorothy Wordsworth in her Tour of a Journey in Scotland: August 28, 1803. 'The landing was as pretty a sight as ever I saw. The bay, which had been so quiet two days before, was all in motion with small waves, while the swollen waterfall roared in our ears. The boat came steadily up, being pressed almost to the water's edge by the weight of its cargo; perhaps twenty people landed, one after another. The women were dressed in all the colors of the rainbow, and with their scarlet cardinals, the tartan plaids of the men and Scotch bonnets made a gay appearance. There was a joyous bustle surrounding the boat, which even imparted something of the same character to the waterfall in its tumult, and the restless grey waves; the young men laughed and shouted, the lassies laughed and the elder folk seemed to be in a bustle to be away. The hospitality we had met with at the two cottages and Mr. MacFarlane's gave us very favorable impressions on this our first entrance into the Highlands, and at this day the innocent merriment of the girls, with their kindness to us, and the beautiful face and figure of the elder, come to my mind whenever I think of the ferry-house and waterfall of Loch Lomond, and I never think of the two girls but the whole image of that romantic spot is before me, a living image as it will be to my dying day.' Clough's delightful poem, The Bothie of Tober-NaVuolich, is an epic treatment of a subject similar to this.

TO A SKYLARK.

Wordsworth classed this beautiful lyric among his Poems of the Fancy, — why, it is difficult to see. Its quality is more akin to that of Shelley's Ode to a Skylark than to that of Keats' Ode to a Nightingale. See notes on the former poem.

TO THE CUCKOO.

See remarks, in the Biography, on Wordsworth's boyhood. Of the lines,

Shall I call thee Bird

Or but a wandering Voice?

Wordsworth has given the following exposition: 'This concise interrogation characterizes the seeming ubiquity of the voice of the cuckoo, and dispossesses the creature of a corporeal existence; the imagination being tempted to this

exertion of her power by a consciousness in the memory that the cuckoo is almost perpetually heard throughout the season of spring, but seldom becomes an object of sight.' — Wordsworth's Prose Works, edited by Grosart, ii. 137.

TINTERN ABBEY.

This is the last poem in the first edition of The Lyrical Ballads (1798). Wordsworth classed it among his Poems of the Imagination. Matthew Arnold declares that the author's categories are ingenious but far-fetched, and the result of his employment of them is unsatisfactory.' The critic accordingly places this composition among the Reflective and Elegiac Poems.

Coleridge tells us that Wordsworth's object, in the Poems of 1798, was '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 attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonder 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.'

Had Wordsworth never pushed his poetical theories beyond this safe and desirable point, he would have spared the world many thousands of verses, his critics much grief and his friends many apologies.

But Tintern Abbey needs no apology: me judice, it attains almost perfectly the object which Coleridge has described; it answers perfectly to the author's definition of good poetry as 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling.'

35-49. It must have been of some such lines as these that John Stuart Mill was thinking when he wrote (Autobiography, Cap. v.): 'From them [Wordsworth's poems] I seemed to learn what would be the perennial source of happiness, when all the greater evils of life should have been removed. And I felt myself at once better and happier as I came under their influence. There have certainly been, even in our own age, greater poets than Wordsworth; but poetry of deeper and loftier feeling could not have done for me at that time what his did. I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this, not only without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in the common feelings and common destiny of human beings. At the conclusion of the Poems came the famous Ode, falsely called Platonic, 'Intimations of Immortality' in which, along with more than his usual sweetness of melody and rhythm, and along with the two passages of grand imagery but bad philosophy so often quoted, I found that he too had had similar experience to mine. I long continued to value Wordsworth less according to his intrinsic merits, than by the measure of what he had done for me. Compared with the greatest poets, he may be said to be the poet of unpoetical natures, possessed

of quiet and contemplative tastes. But unpoetical natures are precisely those which require poetic cultivation. This cultivation Wordsworth is much more fitted to give, than poets who are intrinsically far more poets than he.'

65-83. 'The forces that made Wordsworth a poet were far different from those conscious reasonings on Man and Society, of which he gives an account in the Prelude: his inspiration sprang from mysterious sources which, as he shows us in the first book of his curious metrical autobiography, had been unconsciously pouring images into his mind from earliest childhood.' Courthope: The Liberal Movement in English Literature; Essay iii.

93-102. In his old age Wordsworth became a High Churchman and a Tory. With what curious feelings must he have read this confession of the Pantheistic faith of his youth! Byron might have written these lines; his own belief in Pantheism is not more unmistakably nor more beautifully expressed:

My altars are the mountains and the ocean,

Earth, air, stars—all that springs from the great Whole
Who hath produced, and will receive the soul.

Don Juan, iii. 54.

121-133. Such sentiment as this, unintelligible to many, was undoubtedly religious truth to Wordsworth. Professor C. C. Everett suggests as explanation of the joy we receive in the contemplation of Nature: 1) our more or less conscious recognition of the freedom of the life of Nature; 2) the identity of our lives with that of Nature; 3) the fulness of the life of Nature; 4) its divinity; 5) its prefiguration of a perfection which we have not yet attained.'

LAODAMIA.

Protesilaus was a Thessalian chief in the army of Agamemnon. While the Grecian fleet lay wind-bound at Aulis, the oracle declared that victory in the coming contest should rest with that side which should lose the first warrior. Protesilaus resolved to sacrifice himself for his country. When the fleet reached Troy, he was the first to leap ashore and the first to meet death from the sword of Hector.

When Laodamia, the wife of Protesilaus, heard of his death, she besought the gods to grant her once more sight of her husband. At this point in the story Wordsworth's poem begins.

1 For the ingenious and beautiful argument by which this explanation is sup. ported, see Everett's Poetry, Comedy and Duty, Cap. I. For a very different view of Nature, see J. S. Mill's Essay entitled Nature.

65-66. Parcæ. See note on 'Fury,' Lycidas, 75.

See note on this word in L'Allegro, 3.

Stygian.

79-84. Alcestis. See Notes on Childe Harold, Canto iv. Stanza xvi.

Medea; Aeson: Cl. Myths, § 145-146.

115-120. Aulis. For the story of Iphigenia in Aulis, see Cl. Myths, p. 288; Tennyson's Dream of Fair Women, 101-120.

158-163. Wordsworth changed this stanza twice, each time for the worse. The version on p. 202 is his latest and is therefore given there; the second reading is :

By no weak pity might the Gods be moved;
She who thus perished, not without the crime
Of lovers that in reason's spite have loved,
Was doomed to wear out her appointed time,
Apart from happy Ghosts—that gather flowers
Of blissful quiet mid unfading bowers.

The original reading is:

Ah, judge her gently who so deeply loved!
Her, who in reason's spite, yet without crime,
Was in a trance of passion thus removed;
Delivered from the galling yoke of time
And those frail elements to gather flowers
Of blissful quiet mid unfading bowers.

During the years 1814-1816 Wordsworth made a deep study of Vergil; the effects of this ennobling discipline are perceptible in the lofty tone and (at times) majestic diction of Laodamia. —- With whatever fatuity Wordsworth may have clung to his theory 'that there neither is nor can be any essential difference between the language of prose and [of] metrical composition,' his practice, and that of all great poets, show there is a decided difference. No man can employ the language of the peasantry (to this reductio ad absurdum was Wordsworth driven in defending his theory) and write a poem like Laodamia; - a poem that ranks not unworthily with the creations of that

Wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man.

ODE ON THE INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY. "Even the "intimations" of the famous Ode, those corner-stones of the supposed philosophic system of Wordsworth, the idea of the high instincts and affections coming out in childhood, testifying of a divine home recently left, and fading away as our life proceeds, this idea, of undeniable beauty as a play of fancy, has itself not the character of poetic truth of the best kind; it has no real solidity. The instinct of delight in Nature and her beauty had no doubt extraordinary strength in Wordsworth himself as a child. But to say that universally this instinct is mighty in childhood, and tends to die away afterwards, is to say