which all the stupid and spiteful prejudices of uninformed and unenlarged minds might congregate: "the Satanic School" was doubtless a eureka in its inventor's eyes. And similarly it was a convenience to some emptier writer, in a mood of less malignity, to say "the Lake School" when he meant the three very diverse writers, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey. There is no harm in the term or only thus much harm that people who knew nothing of the subject, or of the many matters needing to be discriminated as between the three poets, repeated it with that glib assurance which carries a sort of feeble selfapplause, and thereby got to suppose they were critical and clever, and had somehow assessed these writers at no more than their due rating. If, however, we set aside the name of "the Lake School," and speak of Wordsworth singly as "the Lake Poet," or poet of the English lakes, the name is appropriate enough. Scenery, and the impressions of scenery, and the character of peasant life, are all most important elements of his poetry; and, as these are moreover all powerfully localized, and their particular localization determined by his place of well-nigh lifelong residence, the North-English lake-country, he really does correspond to this designation. Only, when we use it, we must still remember that it is no description: it simply defines a matter of fact connected with Wordsworth's life and poetic subject-matter, and leaves his rank and quality untouched. The remainder of Wordsworth's career presents little matter for record beyond what is directly related to his poems. In 1815 he published the White Doe of Rylstone; in 1819 Peter Bell, and also The Waggoner. Peter Bell was the product of long years: just before it came out, a burlesque under the same title, written by John Hamilton Reynolds (author of The Garden of Florence, &c.), was issued to the world, and caused some mystification, and this was followed by Shelley's Peter Bell the Third-which, however, did not appear in print earlier than 1839, many years after the death of its author. Shelley had in early youth admired and reverenced Wordsworth with great fervour: but his sentiments for the protégé of Lord Lonsdale and rhapsodist of the allied sovereigns were by no means alike cordial, nor did he consider Peter Bell at all the right sort of thing to be put forward as a pocm. Wordsworth was somewhat fiercely dealt with by Shelley in Peter Bell the Third; but one cannot exactly pity him, even apart from the question of whether or not he deserved to be thus treated. It were a nice point of casuistry to determine whether there is more of honour or of obloquy in being made the subject of a satirical poem, when the satirist is so stupendous a poetic genius as Shelley. If Justice Shallow represents Sir Thomas Lucy, that obscure country-gentleman has been ridiculed by Shakspeare into an immortality as enduring as that of the dramatist himself-surely not the hardest fate that could befall a simpleton. True, Wordsworth needed no Shelley to give him an enduring name, nor banter as sole passport to remembrance: but, as the Italians say, ben gli stà―he has attained that particular form of association with the godlike Shelley, and any form of association with him involves some compensation. It may here be added that Wordsworth (as we learn from Trelawny's book) thought nothing of Shelley up to the last year or so of that poet's lifepossibly he had heard obscure rumours of Peter Bell the Third and its authorship, and at any rate was wholly unfamiliar with Shelley's works: afterwards he read them, and freely allowed that their writer was the greatest master of harmony among modern poets. In 1820 appeared Wordsworth's Sonnets on the River Duddon; Vaudracour and Julia, and other poems; and Ecclesiastical Sketches; in 1822, his Memorials of a Tour on the Continent (recently undertaken in company with his wife and sister), and Description of the Scenery of the Lakes in the North of England, with Illustrative Remarks on the Scenery of the Alps. In April 1845, on the decease of Southey, he was appointed Poet Laureate-a post in which, as his living successor Tennyson says, he "uttered nothing base." He died at Rydal Mount on the 23d of April 1850, beloved and honoured, and, by a large and then increasing number of zealots, regarded as not only the greatest poet of the age, but as almost an inspired medium of communication of large divine truths to men. Upon many poets of his own and later days his influence has been apparent: but perhaps it is a prose-writer, Ruskin, who, preaching Wordsworth with conviction and fervency, has most availed to reimpart, diffuse, and fertilize, his teachings. Wordsworth was a tall, large, strong man, with a face in which one could discern intellect if one attended to it, but which one was not much tempted towards attending to. Casual inspection would have set him down as an ordinary prosaic-looking person enough-a middle-class man, of active country-habits, unpretentious and inconspicuous bearing, and regulated life. Careless rather than otherwise in dress, he was on the whole pleasant and courteous in company: De Quincey seems to have gone too far in saying that Wordsworth was austere and unsocial, and would not take any good-natured little trouble, such as carrying a lady's parasol on occasion. It may, however, be true that he was not to be called a practically self-denying or generous man; but neither was he a money-seeker. He was temperate, without fastidiousness or punctilio; at one time (or it may be very generally) only a waterdrinker. He had undoubtedly a high opinion of his own powers and performances; and not only this, but also a habit of self-study and self-concentration which kept him talking a great deal about himself, and very faintly interested in other men, achievements, or endeavours, in the literary world. He often wrote at night; but his usual habit was to dictate rather than write with his own hand. As regards what has been called his "political tergiversation," candid men at the present day are probably mostly agreed in thinking that the charge cannot be maintained in any very positive or damnatory sense. Wordsworth, by the nature of his mind, was not a politician at all—not a man of system or theory in governmental or social matters. He was a man of deep sympathy with virtue, and with all that makes our kind sensitive with and harmonious to the finest influences of Nature. In his youth the French Revolution had opened out prospects of glorious developments in this direction, which afterwards he considered, whether fairly or faint-heartedly, to have been belied, perverted, and fallacious—indeed disastrous. The natural consequence was that he retired more and more from a sphere of thought-the political-with which he had very small natural affinity; left politics to take their own course and form around him, with a degree of acquiescence on his own part which in creased from the conventionally respectful to the cheerfully compliant ; and retreated into his own world of ideas and contemplations, at once less agitated and more spacious and aboriginal. It cannot rightly be said that he ever gave up or shirked his interest in humble life as such, or the broad humanity of his feelings and conceptions. Had he been pointed out by nature for a politician, indeed, it must have been averred that he turned tail, and patched up a suspicious truce, if not a positive alliance, with the enemy: but he was not so pointed out, and therefore candour calls upon us to test his conduct by a different standard. For his contemporaries, such as Shelley, this may have been next to impossible: for us now it is both possible and obligatory. But the fact certainly lessens our warmth of liking for Wordsworth. It is also, I think, true that a certain crust of "Respectability," perceptible even in the youthful Wordsworth, continued to increase upon him unpleasantly, and to clog and warp the clear and pure contours of his mind. He was certainly, and in a high sense, the poet of Men in Humble Life but Respectability intervened, and obstructed his becoming either the poet of Man in his fullest dimensions, natural in mode of life, unsophisticated by circumstances, uncramped by scruples -or else, like Burns, the genuine outspoken voice of the peasant, with the peasant's full heart, liberal nature, free tongue, and patent faults. Wordsworth as a poet is in a certain sense easy, but in a deeper sense difficult, to appraise: the very ease of criticising him constitutes part of the difficulty. Some points to be stated regarding him are so plain, and moreover so damaging, that one feels embarrassed in fitting them in to the general framework, and explaining in scanty space how lofty as a whole is the honour to be accorded to the poet. The best preparation for reading his works is his own preface to the Lyrical Ballads, with the other prose matter annexed to it; the best criticism whereby to revise one's impressions derived immediately from perusal of the poems is that given by Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria. From the former of these two sources of information, the reader will note that Wordsworth regards all good poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings;" insists much on pleasure as a necessary element of all poetry, and even of all knowledge of whatsoever kind; and opines that, in works of imagination or sentiment, whether written in prose or in verse, the language assimilates in proportion to the intrinsic value of the feelings and ideas embodied. In Coleridge's criticism it is propounded that the power of giving a novel enforcement and significance to old truths is Wordsworth's predominant characteristic. Without following further in detail the observations, paramount as they are in value for our purpose, of Wordsworth himself and of his illustrious friend Coleridge, I shall here submit the few points which occur to myself as apposite in closing these remarks. The essence of Wordsworth's mind in poetry is contemplative imagination; imagination direct, extensive, and sympathetic, but so far contemplative as to interfere very gravely with its working impressiveness. The Americans have a habit of saying that so-and-so is or is not a "magnetic " man: they have often, for instance, said this latter of President Grant. Whether based or not on true notions in physiology, this is a very available laconism, and may serve us here: Wordsworth was not a magnetic man, and is consequently not a magnetic poet. Not that he is incapable of magnetism: he is at times wonderfully charged with it, and produces an impression as sudden, as acute, and as profound, as almost any poet that could be named. Further than this, there are some natures, peculiarly analogous to his own, which find him very frequently or even generally magnetic; and any readers who value and enter into poetry are likely to think Wordsworth, on prolonged and repeated reading, far more magnetic than they had at first supposed. Still the fact remains that, with all his imagination, all his intimate knowledge of Nature, all his deep and pure feeling, all his command of poetic resource, he is not, in the large sense, a fascinating or attractive writer. His contemplativeness, combined with what was called above his "respectability," is mainly in fault. He has himself pondered too much what he wants to say, what he means to say, why he wants and means it, whether it is right to want and mean it, and how to say it. In fact, he is too conscientious and too little instinctive for a poet. Simple he often is, even to baldness-the extreme of this is one of his leading defects; sympathetic he most assuredly is in passages or entire compositions continually recurring throughout his volumes; spontaneous he both seems and is very often, according to his own standard of spontaneity. But even simplicity, and the sympathetic and spontaneous qualities, do not quite suffice for his purpose with the reader : there is too much background for them (if one may use the phrase) -they come out of a nature at once too passively receptive, and too self-conscious of the process of reception and of after reproduction. He is a meditative and intensive poet-as such admirable, perhaps unequalled: but, if people will not accept that in full of all poetic demands, there is nothing to compel them to do so, and Wordsworth has no more to give them. I shall not dwell here on some express blemishes which are nevertheless very truly stated and very banefully operative-such as occasional triviality, more frequent bathos, and prosing lengthiness more frequent still. The upshot of these objections is that Wordsworth has bad defects, which are specially annoying inasmuch as they are specially anti-poetic. After all this has been allowed for and acknowledged, and after we have even excluded altogether in our minds the poems or passages open to such a censure, the residue remains, and constitutes Wordsworth a most true poet-indeed, a very exalted and a great one; with emotion to move us, purity and simplicity to charm, imagination to upraise, and beauties of art to delight; but wanting certain dramatic and impulsive qualities, without which the relation between a poet and his reader remains, however genuine, a not quite final and complete relation. The Prodigal Son said to his Father" Make me as one of thy hired servants." If we transfer this conception from the region of morals or religion to that of poetry, and imagine the poetic son of Father Apollo, overwhelmed with the privileges and heights of sonship, petitioning his parent to be "as one of his hired servants," and taken at his word, we have a tolerable image of Wordsworth. He is a son of Apollo; he works with exquisite humility, and at the same time with a lofty filial |