poems-it is unnecessary to name them-of a lyric grace that forever sings itself in memory, or of a naked classic grandeur that awes and subdues the mind. Only, I cannot see why the purple patches in The Prelude and The Excursion should make us blink the fact that the former would have been better as a whole in prose, and that the latter would have been better not to have been at all. Nor can I see why, to appreciate the melody of The Solitary Reaper, whose voice, like the song of a bird retreating into the forest, draws us on to follow the lure of the world's undiscoverable secret beauty

A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.

Will no one tell me what she sings?—

why we should need to pass through the initiation of Poor Susan's doggerel:

At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears, Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years.

The wonder is that the same poet should have written both poems, and that a critic like Matthew Arnold should have given them equal value in his book of selections.

The poet's temperament and manner of com

position may in part account for these anomalies. One seems to see him starting out with a hard determination to flog his sluggish blood into motion; as he proceeds, he grows into a tense nervous state of expectancy:

My apprehensions come in crowds;
I dread the rustling of the grass;
The very shadows of the clouds
Have power to shake me as they pass:
I question things and do not find
One that will answer to my mind;

And all the world appears unkind.

One can see the haggard search for inspiration in his eyes: "They were fires half burning, half smouldering," said Leigh Hunt, who himself never needed to jog his jaunty muse, "with a sort of acrid fixture of regard, and seated at the further end of two caverns.' Too commonly the fire merely glimmered and smoked to the close; but at times and without warning, most often, one fancies, in moments of extreme lassitude when the will to write had succumbed to the fatigue of the body (or in other happier moments when the will was caught entirely off guard) then suddenly the wayward breath of heaven blew upon him, the flame leaped up clear and warm, and the miracle of perfect verse was wrought. So, at least, one thinks to explain the "inevitableness" of his greater work amid so much of sad mechanic exercise. It is, in

Arnold's image, almost as if Nature at these times took the pen out of his hands and made him her spokesman, in spite of his self-willed consecration.

And for us may be the profit of those golden moments. For with all the talk of these years the world is indeed too much with us, and little we see in nature that is ours. It is a question whether, despite our poetic convention, we have really as keen and single-hearted an enjoyment of the Outworld, to use Henry More's term, as did the generations that preceded Wordsworth. For the most part we are like Alphius of the Latin poem, always about to abandon ourselves to rustic delights, yet still tangled in the toils of the market. And so we may come honestly to this poet as to one who held in his gift the divine medicine of contemplation—

But where will Europe's latter hour

Again find Wordsworth's healing power?

We shall not be true if we speak of his life in nature as a perfect ideal, for such revery as he taught is but a surrender to the ever-intruding sense of the world's defeat, and human fate is something greater than stocks and stones, the stars that control our destiny are higher than the constellation of mountain flowers, and the meaning of mankind is better guessed in the clamour of society or in the still voice of

the heart withdrawn into its own solitude than
in the murmur of the evening wind; but all of
us may drink in fresh courage and renewed
vigour from seasons of wise passiveness. In
this view his reproach is not, like Shelley's,
a question of essential falseness, but of exclu-
sion on the one side and of exaggeration on
the other. His excess may be our balance,
and in his inspiration we may learn to regulate
the gusty, self-wearing passions of the mind:

Ye motions of delight, that haunt the sides
Of the green hills; ye breezes and soft airs,
Whose subtle intercourse with breathing flowers,
Feelingly watched, might teach Man's haughty race
How without injury to take, to give

Without offence; ye who, as if to show

The wondrous influence of power gently used,
Bend the complying heads of lordly pines,

And, with a touch, shift the stupendous clouds
Through the whole compass of the sky; ye brooks,
Muttering along the stones, a busy noise

By day, a quiet sound in silent night;

Ye waves, that out of the great deep steal forth
In a calm hour to kiss the pebbly shore,

Not mute, and then retire, fearing no storm;
And you, ye groves, whose ministry it is
To interpose the covert of your shades,
Even as a sleep, between the heart of man
And outward troubles, between man himself,
Not seldom, and his own uneasy heart:
Oh! that I had a music and a voice
Harmonious as your own, that I might tell
What ye have done for me.

To your Prelude BR XIF

THOMAS HOOD

Ir cannot be thought that a new life of Hood was widely desired, nor does the writing1 of Mr. Walter Jerrold possess that charm of manner which makes us grateful for unnecessary things. Yet, at least, the biography is the result of honest painstaking, and has the solid merit of correcting a few traditional errors and of offering a considerable amount of new material. It is well enough to be assured that the true date of Hood's birth in London was 1799; to have an exact relation of his years in Scotland, 1815-1817, when, according to Mr. Jerrold, his determination was formed to devote himself primarily to literature, rather than to engraving; and to know that his marriage, in 1825, was not in opposition to the wishes of Miss Reynolds's people and brought no bitterness to his amiable heart. It may even be that there is still a sufficient number of admirers of Hood's humour and pathos-among whom, indeed, I count myselfto justify the fuller printing of his mad letters

1 Thomas Hood: His Life and Times. By Walter Jerrold. New York: John Lane Co., 1909.