I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile,
Amid a world how different from this!
Beside a sea that could not cease to smile;
On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss.

These lines, or some of them, have been so frequently quoted apart from their context, that it has become almost a hopeless task to get them understood. The misunderstanding must have come to Wordsworth's notice, for in the edition of 1820 he altered the first stanza thus:

Ah! THEN, if mine had been the Painter's hand,
express what then I saw, and add a gleam

Το

Of lustre, known to neither sea nor land,

But borrowed from the youthful Poet's dream.

This later version removes all misunderstanding. But the poet's readers, intelligibly enough, preferred the earlier version; preferred, indeed, to keep their two lines in an inverted sense, and to misread or neglect the rest of the poem. It is the word "consecration," used, as it would seem, for a dream-like glory, a peace attained by shunning reality, which is chiefly responsible for the misreading. Yet the original version, which is also the final version, may be kept without danger of mistake, if only the poem be read as a whole. The following verses make all clear :

Such, in the fond illusion of my heart,

Such Picture would I at that time have made:

And seen the soul of truth in every part,
A stedfast peace that might not be betrayed.

So once it would have been,-'tis so no more;
I have submitted to a new control:

A power is gone, which nothing can restore;
A deep distress hath humanised my Soul.

Farewell, farewell the heart that lives alone,
Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind!
Such happiness, wherever it be known,

Is to be pitied; for 'tis surely blind.

But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer,
And frequent sights of what is to be borne !
Such sights, or worse, as are before me here.-
Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.

The happiness that is to be pitied is blind happiness, which nourishes itself on its own false fancies. The happiness that is to be coveted is the happiness of fearless vision, "and frequent sights of what is to be borne." And it is by the daylight of truth, not by "the light that never was, on sea or land," that the poet desires to look upon the things of earth. He is strong enough to bear it, and can face a life-long grief without flinching:

This, which I know, I speak with mind serene.

The greatness of Wordsworth's best work derives from this calm and almost terrible strength.

It asks strength to be a seer. To accept all truth of experience, yet to cherish rather than try to deaden the human feelings that attend on the knowledge of such truth-to believe in them, too-is a feat not to be compassed save by the highest courage and the profoundest humility. It was a new courage and a new humility that Wordsworth introduced into the poetic treatment of Nature and of Man. And it was also a new joy; for just because he has dared to the uttermost, and in his heart asks for nothing but what he is to have,

his joy in the pleasures that come his way is pure and gay and whole-hearted, without a drop of bitterness in it. He has put some of his own experience into the story of Ruth :

The engines of her pain, the tools

That shaped her sorrow, rocks and pools,
And airs that gently stir

The vernal leaves-she loved them still

Nor ever taxed them with the ill

Which had been done to her.

;

Wordsworth attained to the simple pleasures and the calm resignation of the poor mad girl with his eyes open and his reason unclouded.

These qualities manifest themselves in his greatest poems, and to return to the immediate subject-they give its inspired simplicity to his style. His strength makes no demonstration; his reserve is so complete as to be almost inex

pressive. There is an indissoluble self-possession, as of the mountains, in the poems of his prime. The four or five poems written in Germany on the unknown Lucy show this quality at its highest. He can say all that he has to say in the form of a brief record of facts.

So in the

Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed.
The bowers where Lucy played;
And thine too is the last green field
That Lucy's eyes surveyed.

So in the even greater poem, almost superhuman in its power of control, where each of the short sentences is half a tragedy :

A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears:

She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;

She neither hears nor sees;

Rolled round in earth's diurnal course

With rocks, and stones, and trees.

It is impossible to speak of the style of such a poem as this; for a style is something habitual,

and here is a unique feat of strength, the achievement of a lifetime. Yet Wordsworth, if he never equalled it again, came near it so often that he has almost earned the right to a definition of his style as a continuous fabric of great imaginative moments. Many suitors of the Muse have tried to draw his bow since the strength and cunning of his own hand failed, and none of them is strong enough. Dora, and Aylmer's Field, and Enoch Arden are moving poems, but they belong to a tamer world, and do not come near to the elemental pathos of the story of Michael and the sheep-fold, or of that other story, which has nothing but the passage of years for its incidents, of Margaret in the wayside cottage. It is wrong, indeed, to call these two works stories; they are the very stuff of first-hand experience, and their reader lives through many more hours than they take in the telling. Tennyson is a story-teller; his directing will makes itself felt throughout; he presides over the destinies of his characters, and imposes his judgments on them and on the reader. When he has brought Enoch Arden to the last harbour he cannot refrain from comment :So past the strong heroic soul away.

And when they buried him the little port

Had seldom seen a costlier funeral.

But Wordsworth is satisfied with the solemnity and weight of the mere event :