formed," as the author pathetically explains, "have been incorporated, for the most part," in his "other Publications written subsequently to the Excursion." The materials, that is to say, of the great Gothic Church, to which the Prelude was simply the Antechapel, were found useful for humbler domestic and parochial occasions, and the church was left unbuilt. The Excursion, great work though it be, is not greater than the Prelude, and adds to the Prelude much less of what is characteristic and vital than its bulk would lead the reader to expect. And with the Excursion, Wordsworth's work was done. By strange and hard ways he had been led up to the mount of vision, he had seen through a golden haze all the riches and the beauty of the land that was promised to Poetry, and then the vision faded; "the sudden charm which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset diffuse over a known and familiar landscape," was withdrawn, and he was left gazing on the woods and hills and pastures under the light of common day. Perhaps he hardly knew his loss, but the loss itself is witnessed by the altered tone of his voice. While he spoke only of what he saw, his speech was like the speech of one in a dream, musical, rapt, solemn, uncouth sometimes and stammering, but always intense, convinced, and absorbed in the novelty and wonder of his vision. In his later years he sees less and preaches more; he forages

in his memory for the best of his feelings, he expounds, declaims, argues even; and, save once or twice, as in those lines "Composed upon an Evening of Extraordinary Splendour and Beauty," he does not again see the world illuminated by "the fountain light of all our day." He had been at one with Coleridge in poetic aim, and was at one with him also in poetic fate; in both alike the high tide of inspiration was followed by a long and wandering ebb. Coleridge, we are often told, took opium; but Wordsworth had no pleasant vices, and there is something other than accident in the brief course of a poetry so subtle and so elemental, so much dependent on a lofty tranquillity of mood and on

Sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,

so little dependent on intellectual craftsmanship and labour.

However this may be, the tale of Wordsworth's life, for the purposes of criticism, is the tale of his earlier years. He was born, the son of a country solicitor, at Cockermouth in 1770, fourteen years before the death of Samuel Johnson. His mother and father died during his childhood, and he was educated at the charge of his uncles, who sent him first to Hawkshead Grammar School, and then, at the age of seventeen, to St. John's College, Cambridge. While he was at the University the

French Revolution broke out, without at first attracting much of his interest or sympathy. But two visits to France, of which the first fell during the Summer Vacation of 1790, the second, and longer, after the completion of his course at Cambridge, drew him by degrees into the vortex of French politics. He was hastily recalled to England by his guardians in December 1792, and thereafter he drifted, or seemed to drift, without a practical plan for his life or his livelihood, labouring heavily in a dark sea of thought and passion. Some of his pre-Revolutionary juvenile verse was published by him at the beginning of 1793 in two small volumes, entitled An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, and with their publication Wordsworth put behind him the fluent imitations of his boyhood. It is characteristic of the profundity and tenacity of his nature that he did not allow himself to be driven by the stress of circumstances into a profession, and that he would seek no escape from the miserable thoughts that haunted him until he could wrestle with them and defeat them on their own ground. ground. Events in France were going from bad to worse, all the evil elements of human nature seemed triumphant, and the high morning hopes of those who had sought the happiness and the welfare of mankind had given victims to hate, dupes to fraud, and subjects to tyranny. Yet in the face of this mockery the

promulgators of moral maxims were busy vending their old wares, and Wordsworth, sick at heart and almost desperate, clung to his resolve to recognise no wisdom and no morality that left him without light in these dark places.

The practical problem of a livelihood was the first to be solved. By the bequest of £900 which came to him in 1795 from Raisley Calvert, he was put beyond the reach of penury, and the frugal housekeeping of himself and his sister was supplied for some seven or eight years. Thus, during the crucial period of his poetic production, Wordsworth, like Coleridge, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning, and most other poets who have won to fame, was free from the necessity of earning money. He settled at Racedown in Dorsetshire, where he wrote the Borderers, his single dramatic work; where also he worked out his deliverance from the long nightmare of doubt and horror that had oppressed his spirit. It was by no exploit of the reasoning powers that the deliverance came, but by casting back among the calm and deep memories of his childhood, and by throwing himself out into the simple daily life of the people around him. The grisly drama that was playing itself over and over again in his imagination, the drama of unjust tribunals and dungeons, and implements of death, and the laughter of mad crowds, was blown upon and

dissolved by a breath from the purer world and saner life that he had known and still recognised around him, so that nature and humanity were raised up to testify against their own aberrations. The world of eternal law, of custom, order, mutual service, and affectionate intercourse reasserted itself against the carnival of fever and passion that had run its race in France, and the perspective was changed; the noises of laughter and cursing were swallowed up in the quiet of the fields and the great spaces of the sky.

This hard-won victory was the crisis of Wordsworth's life. From this the best powers of his poetry were derived; the depth of consolation, the austere tenderness, and the strength as of iron that are felt in his greatest works came to him from the same source in experience. Had he lulled himself with opiates, or raised a panicstricken optimistic twitter of protest against the awful facts that he was called upon to reckon with, he would never have attained to his unique position or fulfilled his allotted ministry as a poet.

He was helped by his sister Dorothy, who was of a gentler and more buoyant disposition, and of quicker and more agile perceptions than himself. and by his friend Coleridge, that

capacious soul

Placed on this earth to love and understand.