that within a twelvemonth of their issue his beautiful sextette of "Moxon volumes were lying, thumb-worn, on my desk, in a far-off New England college-room; and that within the month I had wandered up the Valley of the Wye, with his Tintern Abbey pulsing in my thought more stirringly than the ivy-leaves that wrapped the ruin; and that only the week before I had followed lovingly his White Doe of Rylstone along the picturesque borders of Wharfdale, and across the grassy glades of Bolton Priory and among the splintered ledges "Where Rylstone Brook with Wharf is blended.” Poets love to know that they have laid such trail for even the youngest of followers; and though the personal benedictions were missed, I did go around next morning-being Sunday-to the little chapel on the heights of Rydal, where he was to worship; and from my seat saw him enter; knowing him on the instant; tall (to my seeming), erect, yet with step somewhat shaky; his coat closely buttoned; his air serious, and selfpossessed; his features large, mouth almost coarse; hair white as the driven snow, fringing a dome of baldness; an eye with a dreamy expression in it, and seeming to look beyond, and still beyond. He carried, too, his serious air into his share of the service, and made his successive responses of "Good Lord deliver us!" and "Amen!" with an emphasis that rung throughout the little chapel. I trust the reader will excuse these personal reminiscences, which I write down to fix in mind more distinctly the poet, whose work and life we have only space to glance at now, and whose name will close the roll of poets for the present volume. His Poems. There is, and always has been, on the part of too many admirers of Wordsworth a disposition to resent any depreciation or expression of dissent from fullest praise, which has counted against his reputation. We do not like any of us—to be forced into our admiration of this or that poet, and will not be, for long whiles together. There is no bolstering of bad work that will make it permanently sound; so, too, what good things are done whatever opposing sneers or silence may do— will surely, some day or other, be found out. A book or a poem that needs careful and insistent pilotage by critics, into the harbor of a great Fame, will not be so sure of safe anchorage and good holding-ground as one that drifts thither under stress of the unbroken, quiet, resistless tide of a cultivated popular judgment. Wordsworth's place is a very high one; some things he has done are incomparable; some altitudes of thought he has reached range among the Miltonic heights. But he has printed as so many people have— too much. His vanities- which were excellently well developed seem to have made him insen sible to any demerits in his own work and incapable of believing that hand or brain of his could do aught that was not so far above common level as to warrant its acceptance by the world. I think he was conscientious in this; I do not believe that, like many an author, he put before us what he knew or suspected to be inferior, simply because he knew it would be devoured. There was none of that dishonesty in Wordsworth. He religiously believed that even "Peter Bell" and the dreariest lines of the "Idiot Boy" had a mission. If Wordsworth had possessed Browning's sense of humor, he would have withdrawn an eighth of his published works; if he had possessed Hood's sense of humor, I think he would have withdrawn a third. Humor is a great and good shortener. Humor seeks to provoke mirth and ripples of cheery satisfaction, so it shuns length and prosiness. Humor is a charming quality in either preacher or poet; and brevity is one of the best parts of humor; indeed brevity and humor always lock hands. Unfortunately, Wordsworth had no humor. Again, that too free and lax play of language in Wordsworth-that told nothing vital, but only served to tie together, by loose and swaying looplets, the flashing jewels wherein his real genius coruscated and crystallized-not only fatigued us who followed and wanted to follow, but it filled the master's time and books and thought to the neglect of that large entertainment of some systematized purpose-some great, balanced, and concreted scheme of poetic story, which he always hinted at, but never made good. Take that budget of verse which went toward the making of the "Recluse" - how incomplete; how unfinished even in detail; yet splashed up and down with brilliancies of thought and fancy; with here and there noble, statuesque, single figures; like a great antechamber, detaining us with its diverting objects, with interposed, wearisome, official talk-we all the while hoping to fare through to some point where we shall see the grandeur of the house and take in reverently its great proportions, and pay homage to the master. But we never come to those Arcana; we end in waiting; great, fine bursts of song, and of glowing narrative — sun, mountains, and clouds giving us august attendance - but no mapping of a whole, whose scheme is fitly balanced, and whose foundations bear up a completed body and dome, with cross and crown. But though his languors of language, his prosiness, his self-satisfaction do madden one to damnatory speech, yet when his song breaks out at its best-seeming to tie the upper mysterious world to this mundane levelto make steps of melody and of heavenly lift to - |