Wordsworth became Poet Laureate in succession to Southey in 1843. He wrote nothing after 1846; one of his latest poems in 1845 is constant to his early modes of thought and style:

So fair, so sweet, withal so sensitive,
Would that the little flowers were born to live
Conscious of half the pleasure which they give.
That to this mountain-daisy's self were known
The beauty of its star-shaped shadow thrown
On the smooth surface of this naked stone.

He died on St George's Day 1850; the Prelude was published a few months later. One book of the Recluse-that is, the first book of what was to have been the first part-was left in manuscript; it was printed in 1888.

Wordsworth claims for himself a mission to interpret Nature. He found himself 'a dedicated spirit' (early one morning on his way home from a dancing party; Prelude, Book IV.); he was more definitely and intensely conscious of his mission than any poet has ever been, more even than Milton. For Milton's ambition had always something of the school, something formal or abstract, in it; he was to compete with the old masters of heroic verse, to win the prize of Epic or Tragedy. Wordsworth took his start from reality; he had something to say which had been specially revealed to him in the accidents of his life. His poetical task was to find expression for this acquired and always increasing knowledge of his. Milton, with equal confidence in his vocation, was less certain about his themes. But this is saying little; for Wordsworth's security in the value of his own experience goes beyond all possibility of comparison and calculation.

It is not easy to determine or explain what Wordsworth meant by Nature; or rather it is easy to explain prosaically in such a way as to leave the result unprofitable. It may be turned from poetry into metaphysics; it is so translated, sometimes, by Wordsworth himself. But the essence of Wordsworth's theory is poetical, not distinctly philosophical, though it touches on philosophy. Where it is most philosophical, it is a belief in imagination, sometimes called the Imaginative Will, as a power of interpreting the world-not altering reality, nor remoulding the scheme of things, but reading it truly. It is this faculty that gets beyond ordinary trivial, partial, disconnected perceptions, and finds the solemn life of the universe astir in every moment of experience. Through imagination Wordsworth attains something like a mystical vision of the whole world as a living thing, every fragment of the world alive with the life of the whole. But this is hardly what is distinctive of his poetry, for such visions have come to many, without the accomplishment of verse, sometimes in opposition to all poetry. Also a formal theory of this sort is not protected against base uses; it may become, as Blake says of general ideas, the refuge of the

scoundrel and the hypocrite; it may be imitated without conviction or insight. Poetry cannot be reduced to ideas; and Wordsworth is not to be judged by the theories that may be abstracted from his poems.

Wordsworth separates himself, explicitly, from the eighteenth-century pursuit of the beauties of Nature: Even in pleasure pleased

Unworthily, disliking here and there
Liking, by rules of mimic art transferred

To things above all art

though the Picturesque, as studied, for example, by Gilpin, was some part of his education. He liked to notice and recollect aspects of scenery, facts of Nature, hitherto unused in art. But this kind of observation, never without interest for Wordsworth, and proved, as has been seen already, in his latest poem, was always a subordinate part of his work. Closeness to reality, 'with his eye on the subject,' was consistently his aim; but his study of Nature involved more than observation, Nature was more than the object of perception; Nature 'full of danger and desire' could be rendered poetically only by enthusiastic imagination. The Picturesque might be taken coolly and examined technically, but Wordsworth's point of view is generally different. His didactic expo

sition no doubt often seemed to be much the same thing as had been customary for a generation or two before him with students of Nature, but his imagination was original and his own, and he knew that it derived its strength 'from worlds not quickened by the sun :' the poetic vision was idle, was nothing at all, without the poetic impulse. Even in the more didactic of his writings, and even apart from his poetical work altogether, as in the tract on the Convention of Cintra, he declares himself for passionate imagination as the guide of life; he speaks of 'the dignity and intensity of human desires ;' imagination is not theoretic, it is 'imaginative will.' Though he has come to be with many readers the poet of meditation above all things, this was not what his youth desired. His poetry is 'a creature of a fiery heart,' and is not fit reading for the dispassionate understanding.

Wordsworth's policy has some resemblance to what is commonly called Realism, in its inclusion of subjects beneath the conventional dignity of art. But Realism, as that is generally understood, works in a cool temper, making intelligent notes, without affection. This was not Wordsworth's way. He does not fix upon common or mean things with a calm determination to make them interesting, to force them into the mould of his poetry. This is what he often appeared to be doing, and this irritated his fastidious readers. They thought that they were being held down by the uncourtly poet and compelled to look at disgusting objects-duffel cloaks, wash-tubs, polygamic potters, and so forth, according to the familiar catalogue which was repeated in various

might keep some of its old devices; 'deadly tube, for example, in the Recluse, means 'gun,' and the game of Noughts and Crosses, in the Prelude, is 'strife too humble to be named in verse.' But besides the correction of false rhetoric, about which there was no real difference of opinion among his contemporaries, Wordsworth had a theory of his own, which went somewhat further, and emphatically recommended the use of colloquial language, 'a selection of the language really spoken by men.'

In his endeavour to comply with this theory there may have been something of bravado, as Coleridge thought; in some of the Lyrical Ballads he had to force himself to write down to his formula. The fallacies were examined and detected by Coleridge in Biographia Literaria; Wordsworth's own practice was easily shown to be inconsistent. But there still remained something unrefuted in the theory, when the worst had been Isaid. It looked at first like a revolutionary levelling of diction, a polemic assertion of the equality of words, a denunciation of the vanity of class distinctions in the vocabulary-ending, like other democratic equalities, in a preference for the lower and a proscription of the nobler orders. But Wordsworth had other motives than a preconceived and wilful sansculottism in his regard for plain language. He wished to get rid of all interference between the poetical object and the mind; the theme as conceived by the poet must tell itself in its own way. The true poetic conception must find its own language, and that language must be such as to convey, not particular fragmentary beauties, but the whole poetic idea, the emotional and imaginative creature of the mind, with no distraction or encumbrance. There is nothing new in this; it is the classical law of expression and right proportion. But few poets have lived in this artistic faith with such constancy as Wordsworth, with such fervent sincerity. After

himself had contrasted Truth and Nature with the 'sleepy bards' and their 'mechanic echoes ;' Goldsmith had attacked 'the pompous epithet, laboured diction, and every other deviation from common-sense, which procures for the poet the applause of the month.' Wordsworth, however, had a meaning of his own in the doctrine of poetical language which he expounded in his Preface of 1800. His argument included at least two distinct positions: first, a commonplace and generally plausible objection to 'poetical diction,' in so far as that was merely a conventional vocabulary, to be learned like grammar by practitioners of verse, and applied as a sort of ornamental plaster to any subject. So far, the spirit of the time was with him. The periphrastic method, so splendid in Darwin's Botanic Garden, was at the end of its course, though Wordsworth himself

1800 he became more magnificent; he went back to the Elizabethans and used more elaborate forms of verse and a richer language, 'armoury of the invincible knights of old.' But this implicit withdrawal of his thesis did not affect his main position except to strengthen it: the conviction, namely, that the poetical idea or view, or whatever it may be called the poetical comprehension of the theme-must determine the expression of it to the minutest point of detail. When the eye is single, the body of poetry is full of light. Further, the poetic vision is not mere vision: poetical insight (which he called imagination) is one with its passionate motive; the demonstration of this is the whole scope and upshot of the Prelude.

He meant to write a great philosophical poem, and he failed to complete his design. Nothing would have contented him in it unless it had included all the poetical meaning of all his works; when finished, it was to be 'a Gothic church' in regard to which his shorter poems were to be chapels and oratories. With all his sense of the value of his work, he underrated these shorter poems, not to speak of the Prelude, which was, as he says, his 'portico.' He did not know that in some of these poems and in some passages of the Prelude, he had gone to the very verge of what is permissible in the use of poetry dealing with the mystery of the world. The tension of mind in the Tintern poem, in part of the Ode on Immortality, in the verses on the Simplon, is near the limits of speech; a little more, and speech and thought would vanish; above these heights of speculation there is no footing for mere humanity. Beyond them poetry can hardly go without turning into something else than poetry. And it is not certain what it may become; it is certain there is danger. If a loftier mode of vision is denied, then what remains is apt to be mere talk about the Universe, no more inspiring than the talk about education noted by Mr Arnold in his essay on Wordsworth.

Not even the philosophical poem which he imagined, and hoped for, could take the place of Wordsworth's actual accomplished work in the smaller chapels and oratories. The variety of his style is not shown in the Recluse as it is, for example, in the poems of 1807; and luckily there is no need to restrict one's self to these two glorious volumes. He had command of many different instruments, and was more sensitive to poetical influences, more humble as a student of old masters, than is commonly supposed. The Yarrow poems are on the beautiful old model :

Sing Erceldoune and Cowdenknowes Where Homes had once commanding. Resolution and Independence is in Milton's stanza -a Spenserian variety-used in the proem of the Nativity ode. The verse of The Green Linnet is borrowed from Drayton's Nymphidia, the form of the Ode to Duty from Gray. His poetry is full of

reminiscences, sometimes acknowledged. Michael and The Brothers, poems that work out his principle of plain language, also justify it by the commanding dignity and pathos of their thought transforming the simple words into sublimity. But the author of Michael could also use, in spite of all his prefaces, the language of the courtly schools -'invested with purpureal gleams.' And no one since Dryden has used the heroic couplet like Wordsworth-with an onward rush, sometimes louder, as in the Expected Invasion; sometimes more varied and musical, as in the Happy Warrior. His poetry of the 'trump and timbrel' is irresistible; no fighting poet, not even Byron, ever struck harder at the enemy than Wordsworth: no political satire ever went home more cleanly and effectively than Wordsworth's conclusion against a certain possible type of Ministry : A servile band

Who have to judge of danger which they fear And honour which they do not understand. This, it is true, is borrowed from Sir Philip Sidney, but the edge is given to it by Wordsworth. The moral of Yarrow Revisited, its pure and reverend grace, gives a new meaning to the old poetic praise of righteousness, 'more beautiful than the morning or the evening star;' the friendship of Wordsworth and Scott is recorded in words that seem to have the whole soul of human goodness and nobility in them:

For busy thoughts the stream flowed on

In foamy agitation,

And slept in many a crystal pool

For quiet contemplation;
No public and no private care

The freeborn mind enthralling,
We made a day of happy hours
Our happy days recalling.

Into a single phrase 'breaking the silence of the seas' he can put the spirit of all the myths about the powers of Winter and Spring: the voice of the Spring triumphing in the very heart of the vast desolation. He has a new mythology of his own, not displayed in large works like Hyperion or Prometheus Unbound, but expressing itself in apparently casual ways. The Ode to Duty is his largest mythological poem, and there the personifying imagination really does its work in one sentence. With his poetical magic he scatters phrases that fill the mind as if they were complete works, like

flaunting Summer when he throws

His soul into the briar rose.

The simplicity of Wordsworth's style is more varied than most poets' opulence; just as the tranquillity of his life, the contemplative quiet of much of his writings, is consistent with a rebellious energy: law and impulse in him were reconciled, but impulse was not degraded or diluted in this harmony of opposite powers. The things that give him most delight are lawless: his heart leaps

up at the humour of the two Thieves. His zest for happiness is unfailing, and he finds it out and blesses it with the same sincerity as wisdom or heroism. In two different ways he has praised the River-once in the morning at Westminster Bridge, and again because he saw a miller and two women dancing at sunset on one of the floating mills. 'Charles Lamb was with me at the time; and I thought it remarkable that I should have to point out to him, an idolatrous Londoner, a sight so interesting as the happy group dancing on the platform.' Nature has more meanings for him even than those of Tintern Abbey, and his poetical mind has regard to many things that are neither solemn nor contemplative. It has not been found necessary here to consider the less interesting parts of his work; it may be observed, however, that the later poems, which are seldom read, include many things like those of 1800 and 1807: one of them, that may be called his last word, written in his seventy-fifth year, has already been quoted.

Wordsworth's prose is not all of one kind, but it is all good. It has given some phrases to literature that have the currency of Milton's, like 'the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge;' and there are others less known, especially in the blazing tract on the Convention of Cintra (1809), as vehement as Burke. He had not lost his power in 1844 when he wrote against the proposed Kendal and Windermere Railway. The Guide to the Lakes is in a different style.

Expostulation and Reply.

'Why, William, on that old grey stone, Thus for the length of half a day,

Why, William, sit you thus alone,

And dream your time away?

Where are your books?- that light bequeathed

To Beings else forlorn and blind!
Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed
From dead men to their kind.

You look round on your Mother Earth,
As if she for no purpose bore you;
As if you were her first-born birth,
And none had lived before you !'
One morning thus, by Esthwaite lake,
When life was sweet, I knew not why,
To me my good friend Matthew spake,
And thus I made reply.

'The eye-it cannot choose but see:
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where'er they be,
Against or with our will.

Nor less I deem that there are Powers
Which of themselves our minds impress;
That we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness.

Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking!

-Then ask not wherefore, here, alone, Conversing as I may,

I sit upon this old grey stone,
And dream my time away.'

(From Lyrical Ballads, 1798.)

The Tables Turned.

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books; Or surely you'll grow double :

Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks; Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun above the mountain's head,

A freshening lustre mellow

Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife :
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher :
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.
She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless-
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect

Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:

We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;

Close up those barren leaves;

Come forth, and bring with you a heart

That watches and receives.

1798.

Lines, composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798.

Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear

These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.-Once again

Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view

These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.

These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye :
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration :-feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened :—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,-
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:

While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

If this

Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft-
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart-
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,

O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods,

How often has my spirit turned to thee !

And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought, With many recognitions dim and faint,

And somewhat of a sad perplexity,

The picture of the mind revives again :
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food

For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all.-I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.-That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts

Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense.
For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

Nor perchance,

If I were not thus taught, should I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:

For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain-winds be free
To blow against thee: and, in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place

For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,

And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance—
If I should be where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence-wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; and that I, so long