logy of the study of Literature in our Universities.

The Lectures on Wordsworth and Browning are not Essays. Addressed first to students whom it was my province to introduce to the study of these poets, they are still intended for a corresponding class of readers.

I have selected the poetry of Wordsworth and of Browning, as parallel illustrations of the operation of the Contemplative and the Penetrative Imagination of our century. The points of affinity in their contrasted genius are suggestive of the influence on art of modern reflection and analysis. These have given to both poets an apposite originality of method and subject.

The idealizing faculty of each is, as it were, turned in upon itself. The artist is not content to present his creation : he must at the same time analyze and

present the very act of creation. A subtle consciousness has usurped the place of instinct.

"The light that never was, on sea or land,"

had, though itself unseen, glorified the vision of Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton. In Wordsworth we find it for the first time the subject of the poet's song. On Lear and Macbeth we look, as we look on Nature. In reading The Ring and the Book we are brought into the laboratory, and are constrained to admire the chemist's skill.

In the poetry of Wordsworth and of Browning transcendentalism is frequently mingled with, rather than fused in, the barest realism. Each poet seems to take a self-conscious pride in his power of drawing gold out of the most refractory ore. Their creation of fiction out of facts is in constant danger

of being artificial. It is difficult to recall the tact, directness, and spontaneity of the past. In style, as in conception, we find in both a remarkable inequality. Their inspiration is broken by level reaches of prose. In each poet we recognize the preacher; the philosopher-nay, the optimist-of his generation.

But the essential value as well as originality of both poets lie in the fact, that they have revealed 'worlds unrealized' in which we move about '— the one,

"Deep in the general heart of men,"

the other, hidden beneath

"This multifarious mass of words and deeds,"