He appearance as depicted by the poets, he early became an acute critic of the sincere or conventional type. quickly detected a false ring in the poems imposed upon the world under the name of Ossian, and is almost the only poet of his generation who shows no sign whatever of having imitated Macpherson. "From what I saw with my own eyes," he says of the latter's work, "I knew that the imagery was spurious. In Nature everything is distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute independent singleness." In Macpherson it is exactly the reverse; "everything (that is not stolen) is in this manner defined, insulated, dislocated, deadened,-yet nothing distinct." "" 1 Since the matter of Wordsworth's poems was not a soil in which it could thrive, his love of artifice concentrated itself entirely upon form. It was only by a gradual process, in consequence of a slowly-reasoned conviction and by means of a strenuous effort of will, that he brought himself to write poetry which was sparingly ornamented, or, indeed, intentionally unadorned. And even then the part played by the will was not always sufficiently concealed to give a natural appearance to the simplicity. Such is the result of every violent reaction against a besetting sin. At twenty years of age, or thereabouts, Wordsworth wrote in a style which was perhaps more perverse and distorted than that of any other poet of his generation. With all his sincerity of imagination, and his desire to paint the nature which his ardent eyes have seen, he subjects both style and metre to the strongest torture in making them the vehicle of his actual sensations. And although these deformities may at times be set down to the awkwardness of a novice, they usually proceed from the ideal of poetic diction which young Wordsworth sets before him. Evidently it was not the most fantastic passages with which he was at first least satisfied. That the state of literature and the prevailing standard of taste are to some extent responsible for the corrupt style of the Evening Walk and the Sketches admits of no doubt. Wordsworth's fondness for poetry dates from the 1 Poetry as a Study, Prose Works, ii. p. 122. years during which the art reached its lowest ebb in England. Twice five years," he tells us, Or less I might have seen, when first my mind His father laid the foundations of this taste when he made him learn by heart long passages from Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. But like most schoolboys in every age, he was not at first greatly enamoured of these old masters. It has been well remarked by Coleridge that "the great works of past ages seem to a young man things of another race, in respect to which his faculties must remain passive and submiss, even as to the stars and mountains." It is the productions of his contemporaries that stimulate him, and provoke his imitation. It was so in Wordsworth's case. But the works of those who, for various reasons, are considered to have been his immediate predecessors in the same path, had not yet appeared when the Hawkshead schoolboy had already formed his early taste. The latest productions must have been slow to reach Hawkshead, and in all probability he left school before becoming acquainted with Crabbe's Village and William Blake's Poetical Sketches (1783), Cowper's Task (1785), and the first collection of poems. published by Burns (1787). Not one of these poets was to exercise an appreciable influence upon him for some time to come; not even Burns, "whose light," Wordsworth nevertheless assures us, he "hailed when first it shone," and from whom he learnt in youth How verse may build a princely throne On humble truth.3 It certainly never occurred to him, either in his school days a Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ch. i. 1 The Prelude, v. 553-558. 3 At the grave of Burns, 31-36. or later during his student life, that these poems, written in dialect, whatever their sincerity and intensity of feeling, could be regarded as models worthy of imitation. It was the same with the poems of Burns as with Bishop Percy's collection of old English ballads. This collection had been in existence for many years, and was doubtless not unknown to Wordsworth in his boyhood, yet it did not enter into his head to turn to these ballads in search of the true style, simple and direct, until he had reached the threshold of maturity; up to that time he no more thought of drawing inspiration from them than from the ditties of his nurse. Instead of these innovators, whose works were either unknown to him or rejected by him as too unpretentious, he therefore read such of the poets who belonged to the middle of the eighteenth century as fell into his hands. His first thrill of poetic delight came to him while reading some pompous verses by Elizabeth Carter, a writer of the school of Pope and a friend of Johnson. Artless as it was, his admiration of her stately and ponderous ode did not disappear without leaving an effect behind it. The ear for rhythm in poetry is developed more quickly than a discerning taste in style, and quite independently of it. 1 It was doubtless through a lapse of memory that Wordsworth referred these verses to an Ode to Spring. Mrs Carter (1718-1806) only wrote three odes at all corresponding to the description given by Wordsworth. These are the Ode to Melancholy (1739), the Ode to Wisdom (1749), and the Ode to Miss Hall (1749). The most popular of these pieces, the Ode to Wisdom, which was quoted by Richardson in his novel of Clarissa Harlowe, contains the two following stanzas, which will give an idea of Mrs Carter's style, and of the rhythm of which the young poet was so fond : The solitary Bird of Night Thro' the pale shades now wings his flight, And quits the time-shook tow'r : Where, shelter'd from the blaze of day, In philosophic gloom he lay, Beneath his ivy bow'r. With joy I hear the solemn sound, And sighing gales repeat: Fav'rite of Pallas! I attend, At Wisdom's awful seat. Wordsworth always retained a fondness for the rhythm of the six-lined stanza which charmed him in Mrs Carter's poem, and frequently employed it himself. Surely this must have been one of the pieces which Wordsworth, in company with a chosen comrade, would recite in the open air among the hills, when the dawn was gilding their summits with yellow light. For the better part Of two delightful hours we strolled along If the objects of his love and admiration were very often false and extravagantly high-flown, "yet," he said Yet was there surely then no vulgar power Of human life.2 But the literary training he had undergone at school, by recommending as models those among the poets of that age who paid the most attention to correctness of form, restrained him for some time from giving way to his partiality for an involved and singular style. A proof of this may be found in the verses which he wrote at the age of fifteen in honour of the second centenary of his school.3 Ideas, composition, and everything else in this poem, belong of course to a recognised type. In accordance with the orthodox fashion, Wordsworth has a vision. Genius of education rises before his imagination, and inspires him with a panegyric on the founder of the school, and on the Protestant religion which, under the guidance of philosophy, had dispersed the dark shades of monkish 1 In Ruth, Three years she grew, The Wishing gate, etc. The 2 The Prelude, V., 558-583. 3 Dowden's edition, vol. v., pp. 173-6. smile. superstition. To-day some of his solemn phrases raise a This is what he makes of the simple statement that the school has been in existence for two centuries: And has the Sun his flaming chariot driven Beneath yon roof began her heavenly reign? (ll. 1-4) But, upon the whole, the language is for the most part simple and the versification easy. As yet the schoolboy has come into contact only with the purest models of classical poetry. A few borrowed expressions betray the fact that he has prepared himself for the work by reading Pope and Goldsmith. But if, instead of dealing with a prescribed subject, he attempts to put his own personal thoughts into words, then he finds a difficulty in expressing himself. When he wishes to interpret the sensations he feels in the presence of nature, he forsakes the poets who deal with moral duties for those of the descriptive school. But before we can understand the significance of this change in his ideal, we must understand what were the two great currents of English poetry in the eighteenth century, and acquire some knowledge of their principal characteristics. II The more important of these, that from which the poetry of this epoch derives both its most characteristic feature and its name, is unquestionably the one which was either formed or followed by Pope and Addison, Johnson and Goldsmith. At the very time when Wordsworth was reciting his earliest verses this movement was being continued in the didactic poems of Cowper (1782), and in the works of two poets then famous, though now forgotten, William Hayley, the friend of Cowper and the author of the Triumphs of Temper (1781), and John Langhorne, the author of The Country Justice (1774-1777), who, in point |