invite and charm us toward the Infinite, we are ashamed of our too easy discomfiture: "Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come "O joy! that in our embers Is something that doth live, What was so fugitive! The thought of our past years in me doth breed For that which is most worthy to be blest; "But for those first affections, Those shadowy recollections, Are yet a fountain light of all our day, Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor, Nor all that is at enmity with joy, Can utterly abolish or destroy! Hence in a season of calm weather Though inland far we be, Our souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither, Can, in a moment travel thither, And see the children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.” These verses belong to an ode that should never be forgotten when we reckon up the higher reaches of the poetic tides of this generation. I am disposed to think that all of us, as we grow older, come into larger and fuller appreciation of the wonderful intuitions of this poet and of his marvellous grasp of all the subtler meanings in Nature's aspects. Certainly those lines composed above Tintern Abbey, do not offer food for babes. Only older ones know that "Nature never did betray The heart that loves her; 'tis her privilege, With quietness and beauty, and so feed Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb So, too, in the Excursion, whose mention we perhaps dwelt upon too lightly-that grand Wordsworthian mating of man with Nature is always shining through the poet's purpose, and gleaming along his lines: a deep and radical purpose it is; all else sways to it; all else is dwarfed and made small in the comparison. Hence, poor Mary Lamb is half-justified in her outcry that under its dominance a poor dweller in town has hardly "a soul to be saved."* Grand, surely, are many of his utterances, morally and intellectually, and carrying richest adornments of poesy to their livery; immortal-yes; yet not favorites for these many generations too encumbered; sheathed about with tamer things, that will not let the sword of his intent gleam with a vital keenness and poignancy. Always the great lesson which the stars and the mountains and rolling rivers sing-sing in his lines; but buttressed with over-much building up of supporting and flanking words. Always the grand appeal to man's moral nature and instincts is imminent; always the verse radiant with the be See Lamb's Letters, cited in Knight, vol. ii., p. 235. guiling lights which he has set to burn upon the hills and in the skies; but, too often, even the sunset glories pall, and weary with their overpainting and golden suffusions of language. If one is tempted to go back to the contemporary criticism of the Excursion, he should temper the matter-of-fact admeasurement and antipathies of Jeffrey in the Edinburgh, with the kindlier and more feeling discourse of Charles Lamb in the Quarterly (1814). And of this latter, it is to be remembered that its warm unction and earnestness were very much abated by editorial jugglery. Lamb never forgave Gifford for putting "his d—d shoemaker phraseology instead of mine;" and in an explanatory letter to Wordsworth he tells him that many passages are cut out altogether, and "what is left is of course the worse for their having been there," and in a wonderful figure continues, “the eyes are pulled out, and the bleeding sockets are left." Personal History. Wordsworth was a Cumberland man by birth, and from the very first opened his young eyes III.-22 upon such scenes as lay along the Derwent. His father was an attorney-at-law and agent for the Lonsdale estates; nor does the poet fail to assure us in his autobiographic notes — with a pride that is only half veiled- of the gentle blood that flowed in his mother's veins. But the family purse was not plethoric; and when Wordsworth was only his father dying, fourteen - it was through the kindness of his uncles that he had his "innings" at Trinity College, Cambridge, and felt his poetic pulses stirred by the memory of such old Cambridge men as Milton, and Waller, and Gray. The flat meadows bordering the Cam were doubtless tame to his Cumberland eyes, nor do University memories count for much in irradiating his future work; perhaps the brightest gleam that comes from those cloistered sources upon his verse is that which is reflected from the wondrous vaulted ceiling of King's College Chapel : "That branching roof Self-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells Where light and shade repose, where music dwells, Lingering and wandering on as loth to die." |