were quite unmoved. Having none of the wisdom of imagination, they conceived the great wastes of tragedy to be a kind of fairyland, peopled by Shapes and Presences, who moved to a perpetual accompaniment of tremendous thunder. The external confusion of action that was utterly unimportant in the Elizabethans, because it had behind it a supreme spiritual unity, became in the hands of these men a meaningless end, instead of a riotous symbol.

And in all this our psychologist of the arts might find much to entertain him before beginning to write his treatise, which treatise would be provoked by certain poems that cover, perhaps, sixty pages of these two volumes. The years 1797-98 are curiously memorable ones in the history of poetry. A poet, moving smoothly enough along the appointed ways of his age, 'putting thought into verse' with some creditable success, in those years wrote "The Ancient Mariner' and 'Christabel,' "Frost at Midnight,' with its incomparable

'Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles

Quietly shining to the quiet moon,'

and 'Kubla Khan.' Whatever achievement may be claimed by other poets, none can point to anything more manifestly drawn from a vigorous and enchanted imagination than these poems. Divine caprice has overthrown reason, and, line by line, we meet with adventures that none can foretell, and none can re-conceive. In accounting for the visitation, our æsthetician-psychologist need be distracted by no external circumstance. It has been suggested that Wordsworth's friendship inspired Coleridge to this strange new enthusiasm. It may, indeed, have helped to loose the poet's tongue; but it cannot, in any way, account for the miracle of the word that he was to utter. The best work of Coleridge's later years was a development of his earliest and normal manner and vision, with stray flashes of the wonder that only for one short period attained to clear and sustained expression. In 1817 it broke into one fitful gust in the eleven lines of 'The Knight's Tomb,' and at another date we get:

'So will I build my altar in the fields,

And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be,
And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields
Shall be the incense I will yield to Thee,

Thee only, God; and Thou shalt not despise
Even me, the priest of this poor sacrifice.'

Even at his great period, Coleridge wrote with no certainty of genius. The three or four master

pieces were written at the same time as ineffective songs and pedestrian exercises, as untouched as possible by the heady inspiration of which he had tasted. What is yet stranger, the two moods and faculties may be found at this time in one poem, even in consecutive stanzas. That any poetic perception should be capable of setting these lines in the same poem is sufficiently amazing:

""Tis sweet to hear a brook, 'tis sweet.

To hear the Sabbath-bell,

'Tis sweet to hear them both at once,
Deep in a woody dell.

'So they sat chatting, while bad thoughts
Were troubling Edward's rest;

But soon they heard his hard, quick pants,
And the thumping in his breast.'

But there is, at least, a saving interval between them, whilst the beauty of the second stanza of the following succeeds the ill-shapen doggerel of the first with perfect unconcern:

'And he had passed a restless night,

And was not well in health;
The women sat down by his side,

And talked as 'twere by stealth.

"The Sun peeps through the close thick leaves,

See, dearest Ellen, see!

'Tis in the leaves, a little sun,

No bigger than your ee.'

Coleridge's visitation yielded him a small harvest of exquisite and essential poetry. He came face

to face with song for one glorious season, and then, from time to time, he was vouchsafed a momentary glimpse that enabled his pen to touch the paper with something of the divine expectancy, but no more. Eleven hundred of these pages are as a prodigious monument, built in an outworn fashion, durable but dead. They are interesting to the analyst; they even have some intellectual excitement of their own at intervals; but it is all in verse that never sings or flies because of its own imaginative discovery. And the remaining pages - less than a hundred of them are among the most marvellous treasures of poetry. It is a sheer delight to write down again such things as:

And:

'The harbour-bay was clear as glass,

So smoothly it was strewn!

And on the bay the moonlight lay,
And the shadow of the moon.'

"The thin gray cloud is spread on high,
It covers but not hides the sky.
The moon is behind, and at the full;
And yet she looks both small and dull.
The night is chill, the cloud is gray:
'Tis a month before the month of May,

And the Spring comes slowly up this way.'

After all, the psychologist would but waste his pains. It is not to be explained. We can only watch Coleridge during those two years with ‘admiration,' in Shakespeare's words:

'For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.'

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, the son of an attorney at Cockermouth in Cumberland, was born in 1770. He was educated at the Hawkshead Grammar School, and at Saint John's College, Cambridge, and after ten years of wandering, partly on the Continent, he went to live at Grasmere in the Lake Country, when he was just under thirty. His first home there was Dove Cottage, which has happily been preserved in its original simplicity and beauty under trust as a public property. Here he lived with his sister Dorothy, who remained in the household when he married Mary Hutchinson in 1802. About 1813, when he was appointed to the office of Distributor of Stamps for the County of Westmoreland, he moved to Rydal Mount, also in Grasmere, where he lived until his death in 1850. He was made Poet-Laureate on Southey's death in 1843.

As often happens in the case of poets who live long lives, the figure of Wordsworth that comes most readily to the mind is that of his old age. FitzGerald's 'Daddy Wordsworth' is recalled by the portraits that are generally known, and by the thought of the old poet, mild of aspect, and with eyes a little dulled after a lifetime of brooding