From Blackwood's Magazine.

A CENTURY OF GREAT POETS, FROM 1750 DOWNWARDS.

NO. IIL-WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

garments, which his generation pronounced to be out of fashion, from the grave of the old poets almost unawares, and with the old fashion had returned to No character could possibly be more old nature - - nature ever young and ever unlike that of the gentle, timid, sorrowful, fresh as the source of his inspiration. and lonely Cowper, than is the austere He had done it without knowing what he and dignified form lonely, too, but after did, timidly, apologetically, never sure a different kind - which comes next after that the fresh landscape and sweet natural him, by natural descent and development, scenes he loved might not be quite inin the splendid roll of English poets. And ferior to the moral subjects which he ought it is not in our power to point out any to have been treating while his truant moment of contact or apparent influence soul went off, in spite of himself, to the of one upon the other. Wordsworth, so far grateful woods and dewy fields. He was as we are aware, never even speaks of his doubtful; but his successor was more than predecessor -never acknowledges either certain - he was dogmatically confident, admiration of or help from him. Yet it is that nature was not only a lawful teacher, safe to say, that without Cowper Words- but the supreme and only guide. Cowper worth could scarcely have been. The leap made the needful beginning, the thousand from Twickenham to Grasmere direct is too deprecating apologies to outraged art and great for human faculties. Cowper had not an unprepared public. Wordsworth placed created a new school or style, but he had himself on a serene and patient throne, aoted upon the very air of England as above both art and public, and waited some subtle natural influence of which without doubt till they should come to his we know nothing as the warm ripple feet who would never bow to them. Thus, of some Gulf-stream, the chill breath of as in almost all intellectual revolutions, some wandering iceberg, acts upon the the first step was made in uncertainty and atmosphere we breathe. Probably the doubt; the second, with confidence and young poets whose fame began with the daring. Cowper laid the foundations of new-born century were not even aware the structure, and another came and built that the brightened and more bracing on it, scarce knowing, not caring, what mental air, the higher firmament, the was beneath. The work of the one rose clearer sky, meant Cowper, or meant any- naturally out of the other, greater than thing but the ever-mysterious, ever-sim- the other, of higher range and infinitely ple course of nature. Yet it is our con- superior power; but yet, as Scripture has viction that "The Task" had so far affect-it, not to be made perfect without the ed all the possibilities of composition in other, any more than the writers of the England, that already "The Excursion" full revelation could he perfected without had become likely, if not inevitable. The laws of natural progress and inheritance had come into operation, independent of any consciousness on the part of the inheritor. Wordsworth was affected as a child is affected by the character of his father, whom he has never seen, nor even had any mental intercourse with, as be- predecessor may be much explained by tween soul and soul. He received his gift darkling, warm from the hands which had held it, without knowing, or apparently much caring, whose hands these were.

the prophets who had prophesied in darkness, not knowing, but by snatches, what the real importance and significance of their burden was.

It may be said, however, here, that the absence of all consciousness on Wordsworth's part of the work of his immediate

the fact that Wordsworth himself was little moved or influenced at any time by books. He is perhaps a unique example of mental character in this respect. HimBut these were the hands which had self possessed of the highest literary taken up again the old heritage of English genius, he was indifferent to literature. poetry-the mantle of Milton, if not his This, of course, is not to say that he was power. Cowper had lifted those singing-unmoved by existing poetry; on the con

trary, he confesses to being "by strong to have afforded a most fit training to this entrancement overcome,"

"When I have held a volume in my hand, Poor earthly casket of immortal verse, Shakespeare or Milton, labourers divine!"

But such entrancement does not seem to have been much more than the inevitable homage which is forced from every man who permits himself to come into contact with the great singers of the world. Wordsworth did not seek such contact, nor require it. He was indifferent to books; they were not even his constant companions, much less his masters. His mind was formed and moulded by other influences. He developed alone, like a tree fed by the dews of heaven, and strengthened by its sunshine, unaware of either pedigree or husbandry. He was without father or mother in his own consciousness, like that mysterious priest in the darkness of the patriarchal ages to whom the father of the faithful himself did homage. But no man can stand thus apart, except in his own consciousness. The laws of descent and inheritance are nowhere more stamped than in the line of genius, where every man receives something from the past to be handed on to the future; becoming in himself at once the heir of all the glorious ages and the father of our kings to be.

son of the mountains. It is for we presume it still exists, and that no marauding commissioners or school board have yet laid irreverent hands upon the poet's cradle a foundation of the sixteenth century, planted in a village in the vale of Esthwaite, in the heart of the lake district, surrounded by mountain-peaks, and possessing a little lake of its own. The boys boarded in the cottages about in Spartan simplicity, and such freedom as only the English schoolboy knows. They learned little so far as lessons go, but trained themselves under Nature's stern but kindly rule to bear cold and heat and fatigue, and to do and dare under pressure of all the inducements held out to them by the crags and lakes and wild fells around them. Of this primitive existence Wordsworth gives us a fine and animated picture. He shows himself to us, a boy full of the courage and restlessness of his age, taking his share in all that caine. He was one of those who "hung above the raven's nest by knots of grass and half-inch fissures in the slippery rock"- he rode "in uncouth race" with his companions, and held his place among them when summer came, and

"Our fortune was on bright half-holidays To sweep along the plain of Windermere With rival ours."

The early career of Wordsworth is one of curious independence and apparent sepThe reader will recollect the beautiful aration from the ordinary influences that description of skating which occurs in the affect mental growth. He seems, like same poem, and in which one seems to feel Cowper, to have lost both his parents at a the sharp cutting of the frosty air-the very early age; his mother when he was orange sunset dying away, the blue darkbut eight, and his father when he was in ness full of stars, and the lively glimmer his fourteenth year. He was born in 1770 of the cottage-windows, "visible for many at Cockermouth, of an old and respect-ja mile," which invited, but in vain, the able family, with all the advantages and joyous boys to the fireside and supper disadvantages of "good connections," which awaited them. In all these sports abundance of friends to advise and find the poet seems to have taken his full share. fault, but none apparently with absolute authority over him, or sufficiently interested in him to afford him a permanent home. In the partial autobiography contained in "The Prelude," his school, and the " grey-haired dame" with whom be lived there, bulk much more largely than any kindred household. Hawkshead, a kind of humble Eton, would indeed seem

"We were a noisy crew," he says, with tho half-smile, half-sigh, of a man recalling the brightest period of his life. But beside this bright natural picture runs one more delicate and as true. It is, perhaps, too much to take the descriptions in "The Prelude " a mature man's reflective view of his own childhood, and all the influences which formed it- as an actual picture of

the far less conscious processes which were greatest wonder of all. This mixture of
going on in the mind of the boy. Yet infinite, vague, visionary sensibility, and
there is a certain ethereal perfume of po-
etic childhood in the narrative which
proves its authenticity. The boy lifts the
cottage-latch,

"Ere one smoke-wreath had risen From human dwelling, or the vernal thrush Was audible;"

and betakes himself to "some jutting emi-
nence overlooking the half-visible lake,
to watch the dawn stealing over the vale.
He wanders through the woods at night,
and feels himself "a trouble to the peace
that dwelt among them." He turns back
with trembling oars" "when the great
shadow of a distant peak" obtrudes itself
between him and the stars, feeling “a dim
and undetermined sense of unknown
modes of being." Thus he moves a two-
fold creature, attended even in the noisi-
est of sports by that visionary self, which
ponders and dreams. The world breathes
mysterious about him—the veil of its
marvels keeps ever trembling as if about
to rise. The strange confusion of wonder
and joy which possesses the brain of a
gifted child, the elation which has no
cause, the incomprehensible inspiration
which tingles through him, the sense of
novelty and mystery, of sadness and de-
light, which broods over everything, sweet,
penetrating, and indefinite, has never been
so delicately nor so fully painted as in
“The Prelude." Such a child goes about
the world wrapped in a delicious mist of
tender wonderment and gladness, some-
thing that is sweeter and more subtle
than music murmuring in his ears - the
very silence round him rustling as with
wings of the unseen -the tiniest flowers
claiming kindred, blooming as it were for
him alone. Everything is a surprise to
him, and yet everything is familiar. He
has no words to express the exquisite
consciousness of existence, the mysterious
and awful, and sometimes oppressive, sense
of his own individuality-his union with,
yet absolute separation from, the dumb,
dim, incomprehensible, beautiful universe
which surrounds him. Thus Wordsworth
felt, unknowing what it meant, the world
a wonder round him, and himself the

the riotous unthinking existence of a schoolboy, is the great charm of "The Prelude " a poem which probably never will be popular, but which, in many ways, stands alone in literature. The poet's biographer gives, with perhaps a wise judgment, nothing but the facts of his early life its real history he is allowed to tell himself.

Cambridge does not seem to have had the same genial effect upon him. Here he came under a new kind of influence, and one to which he was much less susceptible. The world of books and of men, of historic traditions and conventional ways, awaited him at the university, and the peculiar constitution of his mind made him impatient of their sway. He was indifferent to books; and he was not very snsceptible to personal influence, except when the mind which wielded it was in perfect sympathy with his own. When we add to this, that all his impulses were democratic and republican, that he was little inclined to yield to authority, and all his life long despised and detested everything that he considered conventional, it is not difficult to perceive how it was that his college career was neither delightful to himself nor very satisfactory to his friends. His first vacation carried him back to Hawkshead, a forlorn refuge for the lad who had no natural home to receive him, but yet a kindly and tender one. With exuberant youthful pleasure he returned to the familiar place, to the care of "my old dame, so kind and motherly," and to the boyish friends and occupations he had left; and there is no finer passage in the poem than his description of this return, his mingled pride and shame in his own changed appearance, and the thoughtfulness with which he lay down in the accustomed bed,

"That lowly bed whence I had heard the wind Roar and the rain beat hard; where I so oft Had lain awake on summer nights to watch The moon in splendour couched among the leaves

Of a tall ash; that near our cottage stood,
Had watched her with fixed eyes, while to
and fro,

pounds in his pocket, escaping from all
cares and discussions, to France, in his
last college vacation; but as the result
has so long justified his undutifulness, the
severest critic can find nothing to say. It
was in July 1789, on the eve of the day
when the unfortunate Louis XVI., with
his winding-sheet already high on his
breast, took the oath of fidelity to the new
constitution, that Wordsworth and his
travelling companion set foot in France.
The country was half-mad with joy and
self-congratulation.
Old things such

old things as oppression and tyranny and injustice, the Bastille, and those terrible seignoral rights which had eaten like a canker into the very heart of the nation

In the dark summit of the waving tree, She rocked with every impulse of the breeze." Here it probably was, though he does not give any positive information on the subject, that Wordsworth learned as a young man to know the "Matthew" who has been made to live forever in three of his most perfect poems. They were not written till years after, but the mere hint of Matthew's existence in this vale, which is not referred to anywhere except in the poems bearing his name, adds to the interest with which we think of Esthwaite. He, it is clear, must have impressed his character on Wordsworth as no one else ever did; for there is no such sympathetic and tender personal portrait in all the poet's works. The more elaborate pic- ·were passing away, and everything was tures of "The Excursion" are as gloomy about to become new. Wordsworth sketches in sepia, in comparison with the threw himself into the joy of the awakbright yet touching colour and freshness of ened nation with all his heart; it affected this wonderful miniature. The man, all hu- him to the very depths of his being, if not man and wayward, stands before us visibly, in the way of absolute sympathy, at least with the smile on his face and the deep of interest, as the grandest exhibition of sadness in his heart; his mirthfulness, human enlightenment and progress tohis social humour, his unspoken depths of wards the perfect then known. So greatsorrow and wistful loneliness the pro-ly indeed was he moved by it, that after found imaginative poetry of mind that returning to Cambridge to take his degree lies below his quips and jests are all and wandering about for seven months in lighted up in one or two suggestive an objectless way, the excitement of the glimpses, which make him to us as a friend struggle going on across the Channel once we have known. To our own mind, there more attracted him so, that he rushed back are none of Wordsworth's short poems again to France, leaving the prospects and which surpass, and few that equal, those necessities of his life to settle themselves. entitled "The Fountain" and "The Two He alleges that this second journey was in April Mornings." Curiously enough a order to learn French but it is very apfact which adds to the touching character parent that it was the whirl and rush of the poems they were written in the of the revolutionary stream which had chill depths of a German winter, in the sucked him in. lonely little Saxon university town where the poet passed some months of the years 1798 and 1799. His heart must have been sick for home, and dwelling oh, how tenderly upon the dear old vale, with its lake and its white cottages, when Matthew's fun and sadness, his heart at once light and heavy, came so vividly to the young wanderer's poetic mind.

This forms the one chapter in his life which is like nothing before it nor after the one strange youthful fever, of intensest importance to himself at the moment, but entirely episodical, and without effect upon his life. It is curious indeed that, drawn into the immediate circle of this great convulsion as he was made to feel, as it were, the tremor that ran through all the mighty limbs of the nation

Wordsworth was not, he allows, even a creditable student, and he does not seem - he should have been able to drop back to have made a pretence of any anxiety to again into his homely English groove, so please his friends, so far as his studies little altered by the contrast. At the went. He was penniless; and his best same time there are few historical studies hope was to do, what many a virtuous more affecting and instructive than the acyouth has done to work his way to a count given in "The Prelude" of this exfellowship, and from that to a living-de-traordinary chapter in the world's history livering thus his relations and himself and in this young man's life. It brings from the burden of his poverty. But the old well-known picture of the French Wordsworth did not do this.. Had he not Revolution, so often painted and in such been a great poet in embryo, he would different colours, before us in yet one have been indeed a very reprehensible new and original way. Wordsworth had young man, when he set out with twenty thrown himself, with something as near