She is dead,

The light extinguished of her lonely hut,
The hut itself abandoned to decay,

And she forgotten in the quiet grave.

He shuns all dramatic developments that are not inherent in the event itself. When the old man lost his only son,

Among the rocks

He went, and still looked up to sun and cloud,
And listened to the wind; and, as before,
Performed all kinds of labour for his sheep,
And for the land, his small inheritance.

And the consolation sought is sought in no special or personal alleviations, but in the processes of

eternal Law:

There is a comfort in the strength of love;
"Twill make a thing endurable, which else
Would overset the brain, or break the heart.

There is a comfort also, slow and dearly purchased, in

the calm oblivious tendencies

Of Nature, 'mid her plants, and weeds, and flowers,
And silent overgrowings,

whereby she reclaims humanity from its restless dream and blends it with herself.

A comparison of Wordsworth's greater poems with those which Tennyson wrote under his immediate influence must not be used to depreciate the younger poet. Tennyson was un

I

happy in yielding too easily to that overmastering influence. His right masters were Coleridge and Keats, and his best work does not disgrace them. So that if Enoch Arden be set for a moment beside Michael or the tale of Margaret, it is only for the sake of just proportion, as a man of ordinary stature may be introduced into a picture to give some idea of the sheer height of the cliffs that tower above him.

There are few, even of Wordsworth's poems, that maintain themselves throughout at the elevation of these two. But everywhere, when his deepest and sincerest feelings are touched, his language answers to them, and becomes simpler, more matter-of-fact, a bare transcript of experience, without commentary. It may be in a description of Peter Bell's journeys on foot

through Yorkshire dales,

Among the rocks and winding scars;

Where deep and low the hamlets lie
Beneath their little patch of sky

And little lot of stars.

Or it may be in a Complaint, "suggested by a change in the manner of a friend":

There is a change—and I am poor;
Your love hath been, not long ago,
A fountain at my fond heart's door,
Whose only business was to flow;
And flow it did not taking heed
Of its own bounty, or my need.

Where the feeling deepens he avoids even simple metaphors like this, that he may bring his words as close as possible to the actual experience.

And now the vexed question of diction may be taken up once more, with better hope. Wordsworth's devotion to the mere fact, his fixed and jealous gaze on truth, brought him into difficulties and dangers unlike those which beset poets who indulge the imagination with a freer course. The mere fact said everything to him; the dates on a tombstone spoke eloquently; and a parish register, without addition, touched the spring of sympathy and tears. But the mere fact, which says everything, comes perilously near also to saying nothing. A parish register is not in itself a poem; and the poet who aims at a similar economy of matter, while he avoids all the flowery enticements that allure weaker feet, is likely enough to fall out of poetry on the other side. There is scant foothold for him in these bare places. He must plant his steps, one by one, with unremitting skill and care; a single error of judgment will precipitate him into bathos. And here Wordsworth found that language, the instrument of poetry, which had played other poets false, was not true to him; that words were deceitful, clumsy, unmanageable, and tricky. He speaks, in his theoretical prefaces, of the

misuse of language, of distorted expressions and adulterated phraseology, as if to get rid of these things once for all required only an act of common honesty; as if the disease were of a recent and easily assignable origin, and could be stamped out by the self-denial of poets. He was to find out later that his quarrel with the corruptions of language was a quarrel with language itself, and that when men do not speak the truth it is as often because they cannot as because they will not. The thing to be expressed, even at its simplest, is far beyond the limited compass of the instrument, and, save by partial indications, can no more be interpreted in words than a symphony can be rendered upon the flute. A confession of the inadequacy of language for the communication of the poet's thoughts and feelings interrupts the Prelude and the Excursion again and again. The "heroic argument" of the might of souls, and of their inner workings while yet they are new to the world, is propounded in the Third Book of the Prelude, but is soon set aside, for

in the main

It lies far hidden from the reach of words.

The men who are best framed for contemplation, whose life is nourished on the feelings that are also the life of poetry, are often mute and incapable of imparting their experience :—

Theirs is the language of the heavens, the power,
The thought, the image, and the silent joy:

Words are but under-agents in their souls;

When they are grasping with their greatest strength,
They do not breathe among them.

And the wonders of mountain and lake defy the powers of the most accomplished speech: :—

Such beauty, varying in the light

Of living nature, cannot be portrayed
By words, nor by the pencil's silent skill;
But is the property of him alone

Who hath beheld it, noted it with care,

And in his mind recorded it with love!

Man, therefore, cannot speak the truth, which is beyond him and above him. When he attempts it he must needs use the words that have been put into his mouth by others, and use them very much as he has been taught to use them. And words were not invented at first, and are very imperfectly adapted at best, for the severer purposes of truth. They bear upon them all the weaknesses of their origin, and all the maims inflicted by the prejudices and fanaticisms of generations of their employers. They perpetuate the memory or prolong the life of many noble forms of human extravagance, and they are the monuments of many splendid virtues. But with all their abilities and dignities they are seldom well fitted for the quiet and accurate statement of the thing that is. In short, they are