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title, because, he says, it suggests biscuits. These bad habits of the mind are not easily conquered, and they are the despair of poets. Wordsworth, who, more than other poets, was careful for the chastity of the imagination, asks his readers to try to conquer them, to endeavour to look steadily at the subject, as he has looked at it. Being himself little versed in the small traffic of social intercourse and the paltry entanglements of commonplace association, he was surprised and puzzled to find that by merely naming the subject of his contemplation he had raised a horde of false issues. Both his friends and the critics, who were not his friends, were against him. His confidence in himself wavered, and he did what originally he had refused to do-he made alterations in his text on the advice of others, though his understanding was not convinced. Some of these alterations have happily disappeared from the definitive edition; others remain. Thus the poem on Gipsies originally ended with these two lines—

The silent Heavens have goings-on;

The stars have tasks-but these have none.

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To some mind or other the word "goings-on" suggested flippant associations, and the lines were altered thus—

Life which the very stars reprove
As on their silent tasks they move!

Not only is the most telling word suppressed; there is a more fundamental change, typical of many changes made by Wordsworth when he had lost touch with his original impressions. The bare contrast of the earlier poem is moralised. The strangeness of the simple impression is lost for the sake of a most impotent didactic application. The poet, after a day of crowded and changeful experience under the open sky, returns to find the group of gypsies sitting as before round their campfire. The winds are blowing and the clouds moving, so that the little knot of human beings seems the only stationary thing in nature. The restless joy of the poet, his fellow-feeling with the mighty activities of Nature, breaks out in a single

remonstrance

Oh better wrong and strife,

Better vain deeds and evil than such life!

Even this he changed when his sensibilities had been crusted over and his appetite for explicit moral teaching increased by the passage of years. In the edition of 1820 these lines read

Oh better wrong and strife

(By nature transient) than such torpid life!

The change introduces an argument-and a bad argument. Evil-doing is preferred to torpor because it is less permanent in its nature and effects a statement which might very readily be

challenged. The whole passage illustrates, as well as another, the difficulties that confronted Wordsworth in the attempt to mend his own work. He lost sympathy in his later life with his earlier mystical intuitions. He desired, in his decline, to give the age the moral lessons that it asked. And the maxims of practical morality, if they are to be warranted, not by the moral sense of the community, but by the sudden impulses of imagination that come to a poet as he gazes on the open sky, are driven to seek help from fantastic argu

ments.

The famous case of the Blind Highland Boy shows Wordsworth once more troubled and puzzled by the advice of his friends, and attempting to remedy a misunderstanding of the workings of his imagination by a change in his machinery and diction. The blind boy, it is well known, put forth on Loch Leven in the first craft he could find

A Household Tub, like one of those
Which women use to wash their clothes,
This carried the blind Boy.

The enormity of the rhyme justified protest. And then came Coleridge with his green turtle-shell, recommended as a substitute for the washing-tub on the ground of its "romantic uncommonness." Coleridge himself would, on doubt, as he said, have used the turtle-shell. Before he had done

with it he would probably have launched it on Alph, the sacred river, for a voyage of strange adventure. The tub, which was good enough for the blind boy, was good enough for Wordsworth. But he listened and yielded, and, at the expense of nine laborious stanzas, he got the shell into Scotland, and put it within reach of his hero. Mean

time the movement of the poem is retarded, and the careless triumph of the child is less convincing from the forethought necessary for the carrying out of his scheme to navigate the shell. We may be thankful that a regard for the dictates of prudential morality did not cause the poet to omit this other stanza from his later editions—

And let him, let him go his way,
Alone, and innocent, and gay!
For, if good Angels love to wait
On the forlorn unfortunate,

This Child will take no harm.

If the aged poet's attention had been called to the possible influence of this verse as an exhortation to culpable negligence, there is far too much reason to think that he would have tinkered it or suppressed it.

All these much-discussed audacities of the work of his prime-these "tubs" and "goings-on" are not, therefore, to be treated as faults of diction. They are of a piece with the simple and fervid quality of his mind. His error, if error it be, lies

in the little care he takes to put the reader at his own point of view. He asks to be heard as if his were the first descriptions of a new-found world. An ordinary reader must have fair warning if he is to divest himself of all literary predispositions, put his books behind him, and begin again from the beginning. Nevertheless, for Wordsworth's purpose, and in relation to his chosen subjects, the diction that he used was the best diction; indeed, in many cases, the only diction possible.

Faults of diction he has, but they are not these. While passion holds him, while he is moved or exalted, his language keeps its naked intensity. But when his own feeling flags and there is ground to be covered he is a bad traveller on the flat. The plain words of common life no longer satisfy him, for the glow has gone out of them. Sometimes he makes what he can of them; and there are no more prosy passages in English verse than some of those where Wordsworth has an explanation to interpolate, a mechanical junction to effect, or a narrative to carry on to the next place where reflection may rest and brood. In these passages, while he is simple, he is often feeble and talkative. But sometimes, on the other hand, the lack of vitality consciously oppresses him, and he endeavours to make it good by forced decoration and fancy. At such times he produces samples of false poetic diction as vapid as any

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