REATLY as Shakespeare was beloved by his contemporaries, it is questionable if any of them had the faintest idea of the position he was one day about to take, by universal acclaim, in the literature of the world. Lord Bacon does not even allude to him; and, beyond the mere presentation of his plays, Shakespeare does not seem to have concerned himself even to provide for their collection or preservation.

So, with resemblance in some things and contrast in others, Wordsworth, the great poet-teacher of the century, although recognised and appreciated from the first by the wise few-men of culture, such as Coleridge, Lamb, Talfourd, Hazlitt, Sir Henry Taylor, Professor Wilson, and Professor Henry Reed-was for long entirely misunderstood, neglected, or condemned and ridiculed, by the authoritative criticism of the day. The poet, however, possessing energy, strength of will, and a small income which enabled him to live in frugal independence, held steadily on his course, keeping the evenly

tenor of his way through evil report and good report, till the world at length came round to his way of thinking. The waves of public opinion still fluctuate a little, but the tide keeps steadily rising, and Wordsworth's place is secure.

Pioneer minds, like the highest peaks of the Alps, first catch the rays of the rising sun, and are lit up, beacon-like, while the lower heights and valleys still for a time remain in gloom. The wisdom of the few leavens the mass, till at length it comes to be endorsed by a consensus of opinion.

Poetry such as Wordsworth's, with its true simplicity, clear depth, natural tenderness, meditative imagination, and genuine spiritual insight, expressed in pure, terse, idiomatic and graceful form-dealing, as it does, with nature and the significance of human life, in their corelation to each other and to the Creator-subserve purposes moral and divine, and therefore cannot be expected to commend themselves at once to the young, or to those of immature mind.

The recognition of such qualities is, of necessity, slow, progressive, and gradual, either in the individual or in the general mind; but, for that reason, all the more sure and lasting.

The height of a Teneriffe, or Goatfell, is not altogether perceived while we rest immediately under its shadow. Only as we recede from the shore, does it seem to rise and rise, till at length it assumes its true dimensions; and so it is with a mind like Wordsworth's in regard to future ages.

Even now, Wordsworth is acknowledged by the first authorities to be one of the chief glories of English poetry, and to have exercised a greater, puier, healthier, and more elevating influence upon the literary thought

currents of the age, than any poet who has appeared in the world since the days of Shakespeare and Milton.

It was his own expectation, as he said, that his writings "will co-operate with the benign tendency in human nature and society, wherever found, and that they will in their degree be efficacious in making men wiser, better, and happier.' Of their mission, he wrote to his friend, Lady Beaumont, in words of absolute and essential truth, that he calmly waited, trusting that, whatever the prejudiced and worldly-minded might then say of them, their future destiny would be, "To console the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight, by making the happy happier, to teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think, and to feel, and, therefore, to become more actively and securely virtuous; this is their office, which I trust they will faithfully perform long after we (that is, all that is mortal of us) are mouldered in our graves." Later in life, when fame had at length laid her tardy garland at his feet, the venerable poet touchingly said to Aubrey de Vere, "It is indeed a deep satisfaction to hope and believe that my poetry will be, while it lasts, a help to the cause of virtue and truth-especially among the young. As for myself, it seems now of little moment how long I may be remembered. When a man pushes off in his little boat into the great seas of infinity and eternity, it surely signifies little how long he is kept in sight by watchers from the shore."

Such language had no tinge of vanity, but evidenced the calm confidence of one who could form a just estimate of the everlasting truth of things. "In the issue between the critic and the poet, the world, long neutral, or rather adverse to the latter, at length sided with him. and will continue permanently to do so.'

Burns, Cowper, and Crabbe before him, casting off artificiality of style, had dared to be natural; but no one had hitherto devoted himself in precisely the same way, to the same extent, or so ardently and continuously, as Wordsworth did, to the loving study of Nature as a whole, with its universal symbolism and correspondencies, and no one had produced such splendid results.

As Swinburne has well said of him, "Meditation and sympathy-not action and passion-were the main strings of his serene and stormless lyre." Indeed, Wordsworth himself plainly tells us :

"The moving accident is not my trade:

To freeze the blood I have no ready arts: "Tis my delight alone in summer shade

To pipe a simple song for thinking hearts."

Investing Nature with spirit-meaning and moral significance of which the human heart possesses the master-key-Wordsworth's poetry is essentially characterised by truth and ideality, sublimity and pathos, depth and delicacy, by unfading freshness and an entire purity. He interpreted the spirit of Nature's universal symbolism with a view to incite to the better performance of "the primal duties," clearly seeing and evolving the beauty which lies in all that is truly natural in human life.

He deliberately chose the simplest and most common natural objects and incidents in the humblest lives, for poetic treatment; because, although hitherto despised, he deemed that, amongst the lowly, truer types of humanity were to be found than in the more sophisticated heroes usually selected for celebration in song. Of "the short and simple annals of the poor" he also wrote in plain,

common language, that any one could understand. When Jeffrey, ridiculing him for so doing, attempted to-write down "The Excursion," in The Edinburgh Review, Southey said to Hogg-"He might as well have tried to crush Skiddaw."

Professor Henry Reed found Wordsworth's poetry to be "a ministry of wisdom and happiness, both in the homely realities of daily life, and in the deepest spiritual recesses of our being.' And Professor William Knight of St. Andrews, the learned and accomplished Secretary of the Wordsworth Society-who is at present editing by far the most complete and best edition of Wordsworth's poems-in his admirable work, entitled The English Lake District as Interpreted in the Poems of Wordsworth, says of his poetry :-"It presents a high ideal of life, elevated alike above the sordid and the capricious, above the trivial, the artificial, and the ignoble. Hence there is no ennui, no tedium vitæ, in Wordsworth. Every one knows his reference in the sonnet to 'plain living and high thinking'; but few have adequately realised the immense serenity, the large divine tranquillity, and the indefinite hopefulness, that breathes through all his writings. In him aspiration blends with contentment; placidity and calm with effort to be other than we are, and with a belief in the endless possibilities of human nature. The 'strength of the hills' is in almost everything he wrote. And there is no influence so good and gracious as Wordsworth's, so directly sanative, to those who have found a relaxation of fibre, from long pondering of the riddle of the painful earth,' the antimonies of our intellectual and moral nature. There is a well-known sense of hopelessness, when one is beaten down before the mysteries of the universe, if these have been wrestled with and found insoluble, and a feeling of