The "Prelude" is an unfinished poem on the growth of the author's own mind. It is a posthumous poem, though projected in his twenty-ninth year. The existence of this work in manuscript, its lofty pretension and great magnitude, had long been known to the public. Jeffrey is said to have made himself very merry in computing the probable dimension of the poem. De Quincey had read it and praised it. All that is publishable has now been published; and though so vast, it is only a fragment. It is a faithful record of the individual experience of a man of genius, and may be regarded at once as his earliest production and his latest legacy to the world. The long poem is not always the great poem. What is richest and best in Wordsworth may not, I think, be found either in the "Excursion," or in the " Prelude." Coleridge thus defines a true poem: "It should give us as much pleasure as possible in a short space." Undoubtedly "Tintern Abbey" and the "Ode on Immortality" will live long after the Excursion" is forgotten, and the "Prelude " "dead as Cæsar." Only "a thing of beauty is a joy forever!" In his magnificent "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" Wordsworth is seen at his very best.

"Though inland far we be

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,"-

and can respond to every line of this exquisite poem.

To sum up this review of Wordsworth's poetry, it may be said that his characteristic power is that of raising the smallest things in Nature into sublimity, and immortalizing them by the force of sentiment, as he has done with that primrose by the river's brim. His passion for Nature," says De Quincey, "was a necessity, like that of the mul

berry leaf to the silkworm. From the truth of his love his knowledge grew; whilst most others, being merely hypocrites in their love, have turned out mere charlatans in their knowledge. If we accept Dampier, and some few professional naturalists, he first, and he last, has looked at Nature with an eye that will neither be dazzled from without nor cheated by preconceptions from within. He, first of all, has given the true key-note of the sentiment belonging to her grand pageantry." Describing the shifting pomp of an evening sky-scene, it is, moralizes the poet,

"Meek Nature's evening comment on the shows,

the fuming vanities of Earth!"

Critics allow Wordsworth little fancy, no wit, little or no humor; an austere purity of language, both grammatically and logically; a perfect harmony between word and thought; originality and sinewy strength of diction, peculiarly exhibited in single lines and paragraphs; perfect fidelity to Nature in his images and descriptions; meditative but not moving pathos, in the contemplation of his own and man's nature; great occasional elegance, combined with peculiar and frequent rusticity and baldness of allusion; style natural and severe; versification sonorous and expressive; imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word.

"Let me," said Wordsworth, "be a teacher, or nothing." A teacher he was, and (with the exceptions of Milton and Cowper) the intensest and most pure-minded, as he was the most unique, of our English poets, - Nature's great High-Priest who has entered into her Holy of Holies as no preceding poet had ever done; an undaunted literary reformer, who under general unpopularity, and a weight of opprobrium that would have crushed a weaker man,

worked steadily on in his mountain retirement, giving voice to whatever things "the Spirit said unto him write!" One who met Wordsworth at Rydal Mount in the later years of his life thus concisely described to me his appearance: said my friend, "He was a sacred-looking man." Death, stiller and sterner than poetry, has now folded him into his embrace, beyond

"... the fretful stir

Unprofitable, and the fever of the world."

Behind him he has left a rich epitaph in the memory of his private virtues. It has, I know, been said of him "that he stood aside from his time, hearing the tumult afar off;" and some one inclined to contemn the mild precepts of this rural moralist, who lifted up his life as a distant beacon-fire among his valleys, "piping a simple song to thinking hearts," rather than listening in crowded cities to the wild heavings of the great heart of humanity, has derisively compared his morality to the achievements of that celebrated French sea-captain,

"Who fled full soon

On the first of June,

But bade the rest keep fighting."

Yet Wordsworth was not a man of timid virtue, neither had his experience lain altogether out of the road of temptation. A young man in Paris during the heat of the first Revolution must have seen something of the thick of the struggle and conflict of existence. There are poets of life and action who must necessarily come near enough to the sins, sufferings, and follies of their brother men to get through experience that "fellow-feeling that makes us wondrous kind" to the prevailing infirmities of our race. On the other hand, there are poets of retirement and reflection. Wordsworth, among the vales of Gras

mere, on the summit of Rydal Mount, or plunging into the thick woods at noonday, kept "perpetual honeymoon with Nature." In this love, that through life haunted him like a passion, lies the source of his strength. It left him untouched by the artificial and mechanical tastes of his age, colored his thoughts, gave originality to his conceptions, and hallowed the whole man with·

"The consecration and the poet's dream."

Honored be the poet who brought poetry back to her own sweet self; who turned the public taste from pompous inanity to truth and simplicity, standing ever first and foremost by the forlorn hope, a sturdy and steadfast champion of truth and Nature! The battle well done, serenely upon Rydal Mount the victor wore his laureate crown; and evermore

"It shall be greener from the brows

Of him who uttered nothing base."

"Though dead, he yet speaketh." Hear him:

"... Nature never did betray

The heart that loved her."

A

CHAPTER XV.

COLERIDGE AND SOUTHEY.

POET of quite another calibre was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the friend and associate of Wordsworth, and his most enthusiastic admirer. The logician, metaphysician, critic, and rich, imaginative poet were in this remarkable man most singularly united.

Coleridge was a native of Devonshire, and born in 1772, at Ottery-St.-Mary, of which parish his father was vicar. The principal part of the poet's education was received at Christ's Hospital, a school originally intended by Edward VI. as a foundation for poor orphan children born in London, but which afterward extended its benefits to the middle classes as well as the lower, and where some of the first writers and scholars of England have been educated. Here he had Charles Lamb for a school-fellow, and formed for him that friendship which death alone was permanently to interrupt.

Coleridge has described himself as being from eight to fourteen "a playless day-dreamer." The child is father of the man, and such a dreamer he was to the end of his life. A stranger whom he had accidentally met one day, on the streets of London, was struck with his conversation, and made him free of a circulating library. He read greedily through the catalogue, folios and all. "At fourteen," says his biographer, "he had, like Gibbon, a stock of erudition that might have puzzled a doctor, and a de