ENGLISH VERSE IMPRESSIONS BY WILLIAM STEBBING HON. FELLOW OF WORCESTER COLLEGE, OXFORD HENRY FROWDE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON, EDINBURGH, GLASGOW NEW YORK, TORONTO, MELBOURNE, BOMBAY BY THE SAME AUTHOR THREE ESSAYS: Posthumous Fame, Tolera- TRUTHS OR TRUISMS (Part I). 8vo. 4s. net; CONTENTS: The Dead Hand-Necessary Nuisances-How to TRUTHS OR TRUISMS (Part II). 8vo. 4s. net; CONTENTS: Vices we could spare-Our great Prose Poem- FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 1770-1850 AN Evangelist among the heathen for thirty years. Supreme Pontiff for twenty. What is he now? No student of literature can doubt what he was. In the history of learning Crusades are no novelties. The close of the eighteenth and earlier part of the nineteenth centuries had a monopoly of crusading in poetry. Goethe and Schiller in Germany; de Musset, Victor Hugo, with the Romanticists, in France; Wordsworth, at the head of the Lake School, in England, sang and fought, sang to fight. Elizabethan poets waged no wars; they were discoverers without being, in the realm of fancy, buccaneers, as some of them were on the Spanish Main. These others were invaders of established kingdoms, as were the Israelites of Canaan. Of all the combatant poets Wordsworth had set himself the hardest task, and won the most signal victory. His hand was against every man. In the rude battle he did not shun to wound a natural ally—a forerunner, like Cowper, in the onslaught upon poetic diction, an observer of rural life, like Thomson! A fanatic doubtlessat once of wide views, and narrow; but it was he who, though in the panoply of a Captain, fighting for the most part alone, taught how to replace poetic phrases and commonplaces by poetic ideas clothed in plain, pre English, with rhythm to match. Above all, it is to him. |