in the long life vouchsafed to him (1770-1850), extended to about eighty thousand lines. His finest poems were written in his second period, from Lyrical Ballads to The Excursion, 1798-1814. His genius seemed to harden as he grew older, and his gaze to fix itself more firmly on the concrete symbols of the realities which he had sought in his more impassioned years. His faculty was not less spiritual, but he relaxed to some extent his hold on the spirit-essence immanent in material forms. Thus, sonnet-sequences on the River Duddon and on ecclesiastical history occupied him in 1820 and 1822; memorials of tours began to multiply, and, in 1835, he finally completed, with additions, his prose Guide to the Lake District. In 1847 he wrote the Ode on the installation of the Prince Consort as Chancellor of Cambridge University-his only public performance in virtue of his office as Poet-Laureate, which he accepted on Southey's death in 1843 and bequeathed to Alfred Tennyson in 1850. The true, the excellent Wordsworth was the poet of the earlier years and of the indirect language', as it is called. He owed something to the work of his predecessors, Collins and Gray; but the fitful glimpses of blue, revealed up and down their poems, broaden and deepen at last to the greater poet's enthusiastic vision, till the whole heaven is opened to his faithful and patient gaze, and earth is brighter in its light. He created a new mode of interpretation, applying the transcendental method to the commonplaces of life and experience. He brought a larger tract of the unknown within the compass of human understanding. The fringe of darkness receded. Thoughts and feelings, neglected or ignored, were irradiated and liberated. Joy, like the light of Genesis, was spread upon the face of the deep,joy, reasoned and functional, justifying God to man: I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy All thinking things, all objects of all thought, Moreover, he found and perfected what he terms 'the language of the sense', the expression which reaches out beyond the meaning of its words into the region of suggestion and association and surprises us by its familiar strangeness. A French writer of this age, Joseph Joubert (1754-1824), has left on record his difficulty in enduing ethereal ideas with corporeal language. 'I cannot build a house for my ideas', he says. The true science of metaphysics consists not in rendering abstract that which is sensible, but in rendering sensible that which is abstract; apparent, that which is hidden; imaginable, if so may be, that which is only intelligible; and intelligible, finally, that which an ordinary attention fails to seize'. It is for the sake of this supreme appeal from darkness to light, from appearance to reality, from the inductive to the imaginative reason, that men go back to Words worth; for none save him, or, rather, none before him, had solved this difficulty of language, and reached, in literature, the goal of metaphysics. There were Other One word must be added in conclusion. problems which Wordsworth left untouched, problems of religion, of industry, socialism, democracy, and so forth. To these, and to those who dealt with them, other chapters will refer. But this section will not have been too long if it succeed in initiating readers—no lower aim is adequate-into the poetic method of Wordsworth. His resources were increased during the century by conclusions from other spheres of knowledge, but already in 1798 he had unlocked secrets of nature hardly guessed at hitherto. He surpassed all his contemporaries in what, for want of a better term, may clumsily be called intuitional constructiveness. His greatness needs no foil, but it is interesting to compare his work with that of Samuel Rogers, or Robert Southey, or Thomas Campbell, or Thomas Moore, all of whom likewise lived through the French Revolution into the reign of Queen Victoria. Southey (1774-1843), who was Coleridge's brotherin-law, formed a third with Coleridge and Wordsworth in many of their conclaves, especially in the earlier period, and settled with them in the Lake District. Surviving the idealism of his youth, he accepted a pension from the Crown, and declined the honour of a baronetcy. His chief poems were romantic and adventurous, in the more obvious sense, and later in Poets. life he became a frequent contributor to The Quarterly and an industrious compiler of biographies and histories. Rogers (1763-1855) belonged by taste to an earlier generation, and his Pleasures of Memory (1792) need not detain us here. He was a banker by trade, and a kindly host in middle life to younger men. The Pleasures of Hope by Campbell (1777-1844) was composed in a similar vein, though Campbell, who is buried in Westminster Abbey, has other titles to esteem, both as a literary man by his Specimens of the British Poets (1819) and in public life as an advocate for the establishment of the University of London. Moore (1779-1852), the youngest of the group, was a kind of satellite to Byron's sun, and may more fitly be considered in connection with the trio, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, who, unlike the poets of the first period, were joined by the common fate of a short life. Not one of the elder four had the strength of purpose, the tenacious idealism, of Wordsworth, who rose from the slough of despond and the disillusion of the hopes of the revolutionaries to the faith of a higher revelation, founded on nature, not on man. To him alone in his age, and only to one other after him, may his own words be applied (from the Fourth Book of The Excursion): he was one, In whom persuasion and belief Had ripened into faith, and faith become Though bound to earth by ties of pity and love, § 6. ESSAYISTS AND CRITICS. i. IN passing from the poets to the critics, the passage is assisted by two facts, first, that several writers filled both parts, and, secondly, that, without set purpose, they worked towards common ends. and Thus Coleridge, as we saw, wrote his own literary Criticism biography as well as The Ancient Mariner, Christabel creation. and Kubla Khan. Wordsworth defended in his prefaces the principles which he displayed in his poems. Southey, Campbell and others wrote in prose as well as verse; and, generally, we may say that criticism and creation went together in this age. Indeed, looking a little deeper, we may say that no strict boundaryline was drawn between the critics and the poets. They glided into one another. of Poesy as well as immortal poems. Landor and Lamb, the critics, were poets at the same time. Matthew Arnold's definition helps us if poetry is, in a sense, 'a criticism of life', it is only the conditions which are varied to make a critic or a poet. This conclusion, if tenable, is important, for, though the art of criticism at that time was neither systematic nor methodical, it should exhibit, if our proposition is correct, a creative Shelley wrote a Defence |