Coleridge.

The so-called Romantic Movement in the English Literature of the early nineteenth century, was, first, the result of a tendency to expansion in every conceivable direction. There was delight in the freedom of the open air and of Nature: in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most men who were not fox hunters were devoted to "the stuffy business of living in houses," and passed the greater part of the day in coffee houses and taverns, drinking wine, tea, chocolate, and ceaselessly conversing. The fat Georgian faces of Hume and Gibbon, the early corpulence and early gout are indications of the life led, when they could afford it, by men of letters. "The Return to Nature," in poetry implied a reaction against these habits.

Politically, there was, in connexion with the French Revolution, expansion in the direction of Universal Brotherhood. "Be my Brother or I will cut your throat" (Sois mon frère, ou je te tue) was the motto of extreme philanthropists.

It\'s comin\' yet for a\' that
That man to man the world o\'er
Shall brithers be for a\' that,

wrote Burns while the guillotine was in the making, and the thunder was approaching of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.

These emotions of hope for the near future entered, no less than the love and study of Nature, into the Romantic literature, and the minds of the poets also expanded in theological and[Pg 498] mystical speculation, half German, half in the style of Greek Platonic philosophy.

The sentiment of human unity also turned to the past; history was revivified; mediaeval art was appreciated; chivalry was an ideal—and a very excellent ideal, were human nature capable—of carrying it into practice. Verse was emancipated, all that Goldsmith protested against,—sonnets, blank verse, happy negligence, "anapests"—flourished, and the characteristics of the new age were variously illustrated by men all born within some five years of each other, in the north or the south, William Wordsworth (1770), Walter Scott (1771), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772), Robert Southey (1774), and Charles Lamb (1775), to whom we may add Walter Landor (1775).

Of these the most inspiring influence was probably that of the man who produced the least in bulk of great literature, Coleridge. He was, as it were, the Socrates of the time, the talker. Coleridge was born at the vicarage of Ottery St. Mary, in the Devonshire which Herrick and Keats so much disliked, on 21 October, 1772. His father, the Rev. John Coleridge, was vicar and master of the Grammar School, and for goodness, learning, and ignorance of the world was compared by his son to Fielding\'s Parson Adams. Coleridge describes himself as a dreamy child, useless at games, "timorous, and a tell-tale," "despising most boys of my own age". "You can\'t think how ignorant these boys are!" said Scott, when asked, as a child, why he was not playing with his little neighbours. Like R. L. Stevenson, Coleridge suffered from night fears and visions of fever, born of "The Arabian Nights". He "had seen too many ghosts to believe in them". After the death of his father, who appreciated him, Coleridge went to Christ\'s Hospital in London (1782), and Lamb has described his life, and his early home-sickness at that painfully Spartan academy. Though he revived

by internal light,
The trees, the meadows, and his native stream,

while a schoolboy Coleridge\'s spirits were high; he made friends enough, Charles Lamb being the first; read widely; dipped, like[Pg 499] other curious boys, into the dreams of the post-Christian Neoplatonists,—Iamblichus, the great authority on spiritualism, and Plotinus, so good in parts—and adored, at 17, the Twenty Sonnets of the Rev. Mr. Bowles (1762-1850), afterwards the opponent of Byron in the question "Was Pope a poet?" Bowles, at all events, handed the torch of non-Popeian poetry to Coleridge, who won scholarships and exhibitions that maintained him at Jesus College, Cambridge (1791). Here he met Wordsworth of St. John\'s, already a printed poet, at a meeting of an Essay Society. But Coleridge had not written his essay!

He now fled from Cambridge "to be a dragoon," which did not suit his genius. He returned to Cambridge: visited Oxford in 1794, met Southey of Balliol, and with him made a plan to migrate with kindred souls to the States, and found a pantisocratic society, wherein all should be brothers and equals. Coleridge was as fit to be a farming colonist as Mr. Micawber, and, being just off with one love, he presently engaged himself to another, Miss Sara Fricker, a sister of Southey\'s bride. Coleridge at this time wrote a good deal of verse and described his own hand as "graspless"; his genius as "sloth-jaundiced all," while, elsewhere, he spoke of his "fat vacuity of face," an eighteenth century face, with full lax lips, redeemed by dark intelligent eyes. Coleridge was

Like some bold seer in a trance
Seeing all his own mischance.

He left Cambridge without a degree, married on the prospects of his poetry; started a weekly serial, "The Watchman," and (1796) published "Poems". Some of them were written at school; many of them are full of Gray\'s allegorical figures, one, "Religious Musings" in blank verse, is on the Nativity and the evils of Society, others are imitative of Bowles, an "Ode to a Young Jackass," is reminiscent of Sterne\'s donkey. Perhaps some stanzas named "Lewti, or the Circassian Love-chaunt" alone suggest the essential qualities of Coleridge.

In 1796-1797, Coleridge took a cottage at Stowey: "The Light shall stream to a far distance from the taper in my cottage[Pg 500] window". He was busy with an unfinished poem on Jeanne d\'Arc, in blank verse (fragments appear in "The Destiny of Nations"). He represented her as seeing her Saints first when of the age of 20, to which she never attained: her eyebrows were "wildly haired". The Voices, in Coleridge, spoke to Jeanne about the Pacific Ocean, the Protoplast, Leviathan, and kindred matters, not much in her way. Jeanne has suffered as much at the hands of poets as from her French judges. Lamb induced Coleridge to abandon these absurdities.

In midsummer, 1797, Coleridge met Wordsworth and his "exquisite sister," Dorothy, who paid a visit to Stowey, and settled near him. A play, "Osorio," was not accepted for the stage: the two poets formed various projects of collaboration, one resulted in "The Ancient Mariner" (March, 1798) the quintessence of romance. In 1798 Coleridge met and carried captive Hazlitt, who later broke his bonds with a glee and fury unworthy of him. By this time, according to Hazlitt, Coleridge had made experiments in opium, of which the bondage was never broken.

In 1798 the famous volume, "Lyrical Ballads," by Coleridge and Wordsworth, challenged the world with Wordsworth\'s "Idiot Boy" and "Tintern Abbey," examples of the opposite poles of his genius; with "The Ancient Mariner," among other things. In 1798-1799 Coleridge was studying in Germany, absorbing philosophies: in 1800 he removed with his family to Greta Hall near Keswick, or to Windermere, while the Wordsworths were at Grasmere; hence the name of the Lake Poets.

Coleridge was now working at the second part of the never-to-be-finished "Christabel," begun at Stowey. Sir John Stoddart read or repeated some stanzas of "Christabel" to Scott, who followed the metres of Coleridge in "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805). Coleridge (who did not publish "Christabel," and the extraordinary fragment composed in sleep "Kubla Khan," with "The Pains of Sleep," till 1816) was not unjustifiably annoyed by the anticipation, of his metre, which was not new, but was first used by Coleridge in romantic poetry. Scott seems to have been quite unconscious of sin.

Despite the large number of Coleridge\'s poems, it is generally[Pg 501] confessed that only "The Ancient Mariner," "Christabel," "Kubla Khan," "Love,"

All thoughts, all passions, all delights,

"Youth and Age" (1822-1832), "Time, Real and Imaginary," with "Dejection" (an ode, 1802), and parts of "France" (an ode, 1798) represent that in the poet which was absolutely his, and his alone. The vision, supernaturally clear, the music, the glow, the strange beauty, are present in these poems, things inimitable and unequalled. Coleridge was always a "teacher" and had been a Unitarian preacher: his early poems are constantly didactic, but, in his poems which live, there is no "lesson" (unless we regard "The Ancient Mariner" as a tract for the prevention of cruelty to animals). The great poems appear to have been given to him in flashes of vision, as "Kubla Khan" certainly was given in sleep, and broken by the arrival of "a person from Porlock" on business. It is fairly apparent that "Christabel" had its germ in a brief vision of the meeting of the innocent heroine with a being beautiful and horrible,

I guess,\'twas frightful there to see
A lady so richly clad as she—
Beautiful exceedingly.

We may even conjecture at the close of the vision, a thing so grotesque as well as terrible, that the poem could never find a conclusion.

It is not clear that Coleridge\'s poems had much effect on those of younger contemporaries. Without Coleridge, Shelley would have written as he did write; if anything by Keats is influenced by Coleridge it is "La Belle Dame sans Merci". To Scott, Coleridge gave only the idea of the metre of "Christabel". In close intimacy Coleridge and Wordsworth stimulated each other. In other respects Coleridge\'s critical and philosophical ideas welled from him in lectures, orally delivered; his Shakespearean criticism was of the highest merit in spiritual appreciation. In "The Friend," an unsuccessful and unexhilarating periodical; in his "Biographia Literaria" (1817-1818) which is not so biographical or so literary as it is reflective, and critical of Hartley\'s[Pg 502] philosophy and Wordsworth\'s poems, he is too discursive to be easily read; and the systematic works on philosophy about which he dreamed and talked were never produced.

His life, after his visit to Italy and Malta in 1804-1806, was desultory; his friendship with the Wordsworths was interrupted; Lamb, always true to him, could describe him as "a damaged Archangel"; Hazlitt, furious with Coleridge\'s later conservatism, insulted his "Christabel" in the "Edinburgh Review": and declared that the praises given to it by Scott and Byron were inspired by desire of praise from Coleridge. From 1816 to his death in 1834 Coleridge lived quietly and more happily with Mr. Gillman at Hampstead, much visited by people who hoped to be instructed as well as charmed by his conversation, or rather by his monologues.

In 1820 Keats met him and walked two miles with him. "He broached a thousand things—nightingales, poetry—on poetical sensation—metaphysics, different genera and species of dreams—a dream accompanied by a sense of touch, a dream related—first and second consciousness—the difference explained between will and volition—so say metaphysicians from a want of smoking" (that is detecting) "the second consciousness—monsters—the Kraken—mermaids, Southey believed in them—Southey\'s belief too much diluted—a ghost story!"

"The second consciousness" may be the "subconsciousness" or "subliminal self" of modern psychologists. "He is a kind good soul," says the sardonic Carlyle, "full of religion and affection, and poetry and animal magnetism." Scott met "this extraordinary man" at dinner. Coleridge (after dinner) lectured on the Samothracian Mysteries as the origin of all fairy tales; and on the "Iliad" as a miscellany contributed to by many authors during a century. "Zounds, I never was so bethumped with words."

Walter Scott.

Sir Walter Scott, descended from the Harden branch of the great clan that had kept the Marches through centuries of English wars, was born in Edinburgh on 15 August, 1771. Neither from his[Pg 503] father (the father of Allan Fairford, in "Redgauntlet") nor from his mother, of another Border clan, the Rutherfords, can he be supposed to have drawn his genius, though Mrs. Scott appreciated literature. In early childhood a mysterious malady inflicted on him a life-long lameness, in contrast with his great physical strength, and his preference for the profession of arms. His early childhood was passed in the heart of the Borders, at Smailholme tower, overlooking Tweed, Teviot, and the scenes of a hundred battles. The old ballads were his earliest reading, and tales of Prince Charles\'s war, told by veterans of the Forty-five, his great delight. At school he flashed from end to end of the form, rising by his general information, and falling by his indifference to grammar. He was an omnivorous reader, forgetting nothing, a teller of tales, a roamer on foot through the country-side, and he left the High School of Edinburgh, quite Greekless, for the University,—where he learned no Greek. But of Latin, including mediaeval Latin, he had enough for his purposes (his quotations show indifference to quantity and metre); and French, Italian, and German he acquired for the purpose of reading their poetry and romances. His native appreciation of verse astonished people in his childhood; love of the past was his dominant passion; and in nature the historical memories of places were even more to him than natural beauty.

After the customary training in his father\'s office, he was called to the Scottish Bar, enjoying little practice, but making friends in every rank, and enduring a disappointment in love, by which his heart, though fairly mended by his marriage in 1797, to a Miss Charpentier, was broken but not embittered.

His earliest published verses were translations from German ballads, including the famous "Lenore" of Bürger, and he published a translation of the "G?tz von Berlichingen" of Goethe. These essays attracted little attention: more was paid to such imitations of the old ballads as "Glenfinlas," and "Cadzow," and "The Eve of St. John," abounding in poetic spirit, though not archaic in diction.

He obtained a long-deferred reversion of a place as Clerk in the Parliament House, and the Sheriffship of Selkirkshire (the Forest of Ettrick) where in summer he resided, first at Ashestiel[Pg 504] on Tweed, the centre of the beauties and legends of the Border. In yearly raids into almost roadless Liddesdale, he learned to know the Dandie Dinmonts, and collected the traditions, and the ballads of "The Border Minstrelsy," of which the first edition, with copious historical and antiquarian notes, was published in 1802.

The famous False Alarm of invasion of 1803, described in "The Antiquary," sent him on a ride of a hundred miles, to Dalkeith, the house of his chief, the Duke of Buccleuch, and the trysting-place of the Borderers. A command of the Duchess suggested a ballad on a tradition of a goblin page; parts of Coleridge\'s unpublished "Christabel," which he had heard recited, gave the model of the irregular octosyllabic verse, and in 1805 the result, "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," made Scott by far the most popular of poets. "The Lay" was the most spontaneous, and in many ways the best, of his romances in verse. "Marmion" (1808) more studied, more tragical, and fortunate in the magnificent canto on the battle of Flodden: and "The Lady of the Lake" (1810), with its blending of Highland and Lowland characters and scenes in the reign of James V. (about 1535) only confirmed his popularity and success. "Rokeby" (1812) was, despite its excellent songs, and a highly Byronic outlaw preceding Byron, less favourably received; and "The Lord of the Isles" (1815), on the adventures of Bruce, a subject long meditated, was not saved by its battle of Bannockburn, a fight only inferior to the Flodden of "Marmion". Byron, with his modern romance and his living celebrity, had defeated the historical Muse; and Scott did not put forth his strength in "Harold the Dauntless" and "The Bridal of Triermain".

He was the best judge of his own poetry, written "for young people of spirit," he said, though he did not allow his own young people to read it; a deprivation which they took very unconcernedly. It is not to Scott\'s poetry, except in some of his lyrics, that we look for deep reflection on human destinies, or for delicate subtlety of phrase,

All the charm of all the Muses
Often flowering in a lonely word.

His reflections he kept to himself; he told his story in his galloping[Pg 505] "light horseman" style of verse; he made the dead past live again; he repeopled with their dreams the roofless towers of the Borders, the Highland caves and bothies, the deserted palaces and castles, whose last native king was then dying, a priest, in Rome. His verses, read aloud to Wellington\'s men in Spain, inspirited them in the charge, as they awoke among all men what had long been slumbering, the love of poetry. Scott, like Yama, the first of men who died, "opened a pathway unto many": inclined men to give an ear to verse. He set Byron the model for his popular versified tales of Oriental adventure; and he was unceasing in recommending the poetry, so unlike his own, of Wordsworth, and in applauding Byron with unfeigned generosity; while his devotion to the old English drama displays itself in quotations in his prose, and in imitations, improvised chapter-headings, in his novels. From his first translations of ballads, to the snatches sung by Madge Wildfire, the song of "Proud Maisie," and the ringing lyric of "Bonnie Dundee," he first awoke and then kept vigilant the spirit of ancient popular minstrelsy.

In short his poetry was such as came to a man of his genius, during his "grand gallops among the hills, while he was thinking of \'Marmion\'". His laxities in form are, indeed, less glaring than those of Byron, but, from the first, were conspicuous to himself and to his critics. His appeal to names of hill and loch and sea-strait, rivers and burns and towers and glens, makes half of his charm in the ears of those to whom the places are dear and familiar. He was "the latest minstrel," the Homer, the creative and unifying successor of many nameless men who left great verse unto a little clan. Above all he was a narrator, at story-teller, a creator of characters, a Humorist, and his essential genius, his dramatic gift, his knowledge of the past and the present, found its true vehicle in the prose of his novels.

Scott\'s career falls naturally into two parts: first from the "Minstrelsy" (1802) to "The Lord of the Isles" (1815), and next from "Waverley" (1814) to the authors death in 1832. But in the earlier years were sown the seeds of disaster; Scott had, before 1813, been entangled in financial troubles, owing to his[Pg 506] association with the printing and publishing affairs of his old friends, James and John Ballantyne. Despite his common sense, Scott was sanguine and unpractical as a publisher; his enterprises were dominated by preferences, personal or antiquarian; his hospitality and his tastes were expensive, and his associates were not the men to control and direct him; or even to keep the commercial books of the concern. In fact shipwreck, once at least, seemed inevitable, before Scott struck a vein of fairy gold in prose romance.

Before speaking of Scott as a novelist it should be said that he was the most copious, various, and readable of the critics and general writers of his time. His great edition of Dryden, now reinforced by the notes of Mr. Saintsbury, still holds its ground, in despite of the contempt of Leigh Hunt; and his "Life of Swift" is still the most valuable, for the judgment of so sane and generous a mind on the mystery of Swift\'s character and career. Scott\'s many essays, collected from periodicals, mainly from "The Quarterly Review," which he practically founded, are treasures of information and anecdote. His criticism for example in the "Lives of the Novelists" errs most in the direction of generosity. His "Tales of a Grandfather," written for his little grandson, John Lockhart, who died in childhood, combines delightful versions of historic legends of early times with the most impartial treatment of such difficult and disputable periods as the Reformation and the age of the Covenant. Scott had strong sentimental leanings towards Mary Stuart, the Cavaliers, and the Jacobites, but, in writing history for the young, he deliberately corrected his bias. A life of Mary Stuart he refused to write, because his reason was at variance with his feelings. His "Napoleon" was a piece of task-work, executed with cruel rapidity, and, of course, he had not access to many sources of information now open. Of course, too, like any man who had lived through the Napoleonic wars, he was a partisan, in his case of his country\'s party. But he did not carry political partisanship into literature; he had no part (despite ignorant assertions) in the attacks on "the Cockney School"; he tried to tempt Charles Lamb to visit him at Abbotsford; and he seized an opportunity of applauding Mrs. Shelley\'s "Frankenstein" because he believed it to be by Shelley.

[Pg 507]

William Wordsworth.

The contrast between the friends, Coleridge and Wordsworth, was that which poets observe between the South and the North. The child of the soft enervating air of Devonshire, Coleridge, according to his own early diagnosis already quoted, had every other gift, mental and moral, but lacked energy and resolution, his hand was "graspless". Wordsworth, on the contrary (born at Cockermouth, 7 April, 1770) was a child of the North and of the Border, and a grandchild of Dorothy, born Crackanthorp, a member of a family which, in the old Border laws, is named among the Watchers of the Fords, against the Scottish raiders. To a genius as great if not as diversified as Coleridge\'s, Wordsworth united an iron will to be a poet and, as he said, "a teacher,". With the keenest love of universal nature from the mountains and the storms to "the meanest flower that blows," he combined that sense of unity with Nature, and with "something still more deeply interfused," which Coleridge speaks of in a poem (1795) composed before he and Wordsworth became intimate. Says Coleridge

O the one life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a soundlike power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere.

Coleridge adds that when he lies at midday on the side of a hill, his fancies traverse his brain

As wild and various as the random gales
That swell and flutter on this subject lute,

namely an ?olian harp placed in the open window.

Wordsworth, to the same emotions as of a conscious ?olian harp vibrating to the universe, added an invincible resolve to extract the moral out of every vibration, and to register it in verse. In this task he knew no slackness, he was daily observing, daily composing, consequently the mass of his poetry is very great, and very unequally inspired, since "it needs heaven-sent moments for this skill" of the poet, while Wordsworth was busy at all moments.

After a boyhood happily passed, when he was out of school, in[Pg 508] angling, skating, boating, and setting springes for woodcock, Wordsworth went to St. John\'s College, Cambridge, in 1787, taking his bachelor\'s degree in 1791. He was an orphan; his father, a solicitor, had been far from prosperous, and it was perhaps to the generosity of his uncle that he owed the advantage of being allowed to "mew his mighty youth" in what the world calls idleness. He had the same intense consciousness of and reverence for his own genius as Milton and Tennyson possessed: he would be a poet and nothing but a poet, for the position of Stamp Distributor which he later enjoyed was a sinecure. Concerning all his poetic childhood and boyhood, and residence in France (from the end of 1791 to the opening of 1793),

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.
But to be young was very heaven,

down to his "wantoning in wild poesy" with Coleridge (1797), he has told his tale in "The Prelude" (1799-1805).

This extremely long poem in blank verse was regarded by Wordsworth as "subsidiary to the preparation" for "the construction of a literary work that should live". After thus "investigating the origin and progress of his own powers as far as he was acquainted with them," Wordsworth intended to produce "a philosophical Poem... having for its principal subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement". This poem, also in blank verse, was to be called "The Recluse"; whereof only a few hundred lines exist, but "The Excursion" was designed for the second part. "The Recluse," Wordsworth says, was to be a kind of Gothic Cathedral: "The Prelude" is the "antechapel"; and the lyrics, sonnets, and other poems not so large as the antechapel "may be likened to the little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses, ordinarily included in these edifices". These oratories are the most favourite portions of Wordsworth\'s cathedral; and all his poems, long or short, except the tragedy "The Borderers," "have for their principal subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement," but listening with a keen ear to hints and murmurs of the world.

[Pg 509]

From enthusiasm for the French Revolution, Wordsworth, like Burns, "when haughty Gaul invasion threats," turned gradually to patriotism, as the French armies of emancipation conquered Switzerland, invaded Spain, and menaced England. Now, like Glenbucket at the battle of Sheriffmuir (1715) he prayed "for one hour of Dundee!" This unprincipled change of sides caused Wordsworth\'s poems to be insulted by Hazlitt, and in "The Edinburgh Review". He was constant, indeed, to his sympathy with poverty and toil, detested the factory system, and loved his mountains and lakes not only for the beauty of the clouds, mists, and gleams of sunlight, but because

Labour here preserves
His rosy face, a servant only here
Of the fireside or of the open field,
A Freeman therefore sound and unimpaired
—("The Recluse").

But Wordsworth had not a noble scorn of "militarism"; he sang of Nelson, and "The Happy Warrior," as well as of "The Lesser Celandine," and was attached to the Anglican Establishment; these things were not forgiven to the poetic renegade by Whig critics, or to Coleridge, or to Southey, while Scott, it was admitted, had never turned his coat.

Wordsworth was singularly fortunate in the ideal affection of his sister Dorothy,—whose eye for natural beauty was as keen as his own,—and in his wife, to whom he attributed two lines in "The Daffodils"—

They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude.

Of his friendship with Coleridge, and of their volume "Lyrical Ballads," we have spoken. They contain examples of his theory, first given in the preface of the second edition of "Lyrical Ballads," that "the poet ought to imitate and, as far as is possible, adopt the very language of men... I have taken as much pains to avoid what is usually called poetical diction as others ordinarily take to produce it". But Wordsworth could not, of course, keep up[Pg 510] to his own standard. Asked "What has become of the wild swans?" no mortal could reply

The Dalesmen may have aimed the deadly tube
—("The Recluse").

Thus, in "Lyrical Ballads," in "The Idiot Boy," Wordsworth wrote (and "I never wrote anything with so much glee"):—

And he must post without delay
Across the bridge and through the dale,
And by the church, and o\'er the down,
To bring a Doctor from the town,
Or she will die, old Susan Gale.

Dr. Johnson had anticipated this theory of non-poetic diction in poetry:—

As with my hat upon my head,
I walk\'d along the Strand,
I there did meet another man
With his hat in his hand.

Wordsworth stood courageously—all the more stiffly because he was laughed at—by his theory. In practice he made the poor woman of "The Affliction of Margaret" talk of "the incommunicable sleep" of the dead, here the not ordinary word has a meaning not ordinary.

"The Lyrical Ballads" contained poetry so remote from "The Idiot Boy" as the lines on Tintern Abbey; with

A sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Mens agitat molem: it is the philosophy of Virgil. The consciousness of this unity with nature and of both with that which is divine had been with Wordsworth from his childhood, as he records in "The Prelude" and elsewhere, and this aspect of[Pg 511] his thought even affected Byron, in the last part of "Childe Harold".

Wordsworth\'s life was uneventful. He made tours, very fruitful in poetry, to Scotland (1813, 1814, 1831, 1833); they are dated by "Yarrow Unvisited," "Yarrow Visited," "Yarrow Revisited". The tour of 1831 gave occasion to the noble and tender sonnet "A Trouble not of Clouds, or Weeping Rain," on the departure of the dying Scott for Italy. With this (1831) in our memories we cannot say that save for the ode "Composed on an Evening of Extraordinary Splendour and Beauty," "all Wordsworth\'s good work was done in the decade between 1798 and 1808". His poems of the year 1807 are, no doubt, the least lacking in uniform success. Among them is the ode "On intimations of Immortality". But "The White Doe of Rylstone," published in 1815, and proclaimed by "The Edinburgh Review" to be the very worst poem that ever appeared in quarto, was written in 1807: written in such stress of the spirit that the poet was not punctual to the dinner bell, as he informs us. The poem was an excursion into Scott\'s metres, and one of Scott\'s historic periods, but its intention was purely spiritual, and very unpopular.

The "Laodamia" (1814), the meeting of the heroine with the spirit of her lord, the first man slain at Troy, has been highly praised by an excellent judge (Mr. F. W. Myers). But when the Appearance says "thy transports moderate!" we are in touch with the poetic diction of the eighteenth century and far from the inspiration of the Greek "thrice I sprang toward the shadow of my mother dead; thrice she flitted from my hands as a shadow or even as a dream". It is, in fact, true that after 1808, with forty-two years of life and poetry before him, Wordsworth often failed.

Hail, Orient conqueror of gloomy night

is an address to the sun which any follower of Pope might have written ("Ode for the Morning of the General Thanksgiving 1816").

Many of Wordsworth\'s most inspired passages are to be found in the long, lofty, and rather bleak antechapel and nave of "The Prelude" and "The Excursion". But lovers of poetry are most apt to kneel in his chapels and oratories; and to read, with unceasing[Pg 512] delight and gratitude "In the Sweet Shire of Cardigan," "I Heard a Thousand Blended Notes," "There was a Boy, Ye Knew Him Well, Ye Cliffs"; "She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways," "Lucy Gray," "Beggars," "Sweet Highland Girl," "To the Cuckoo," "The Ode to Duty," "The Happy Warrior," and the multitude of sonnets of the highest and most varied excellence, in which his genius, like the follet of Molière, rides his pen and his power comes to its own.

Science or stupidity may some day try to compile the statistics of "inspiration" in poetry. Inspiration cannot easily be defined, but may be described as represented, in a poet\'s work, by the passages in which, according to the common consent of readers, he reaches a level immeasurably higher than that of versified matter in general, and of his own efforts in particular.

In any such calculation the proportion of Wordsworth\'s inspired verse—of verse of the very highest and most singular merit—is far above the proportion in Coleridge. Few readers who may amuse themselves by trying to "place" modern English poets after Milton will give Wordsworth anything lower than the second, while very many will give him the foremost rank. But the amount of his uninspired verse—of verse immeasurably below his best—is enormous, and this, with some other circumstances, accounts for the opposition, the refusal to accept him or take him seriously, which he had to encounter in his long life (7 April, 1770-23 April, 1850).

Another obstacle, to be plain, was the infinite number of occasions in which the little, pronoun "I" occurs in his poetry. Great, beneficent, and unique as was the genius of William Wordsworth when he conceived "The Prelude" as only the beginning of what he wanted to say about himself, and about the universe as mirrored in his own intelligence, it became only too manifest that he was, in an unexampled degree, destitute of humour. Amusing anecdotes are told, by Lockhart, of conversations between Wordsworth and Scott in which Wordsworth\'s poetry was the sole theme, by no means to Sir Walter\'s discontent. On no contemporary but Burns and Coleridge did he bestow his approval: it may be doubted if he had spent half an hour with[Pg 513] Byron\'s, Shelley\'s, and Keats\'s verse. To be sure this self-absorption is a malady most incident to poets!

In later life (1820-1837) Wordsworth visited the Continent, even reaching Italy. In 1839 he received a noble welcome and an honorary degree from Oxford; in 1843, on Southey\'s death, he accepted the Laureateship, which, before Southey\'s appointment, Scott had refused; and on 23 April, 1850, he passed away, leaving to Tennyson the laurels. He wished to teach us wisdom; he did something better, he gave us happiness.

Robert Southey.

The name of Robert Southey (born at Bristol, 12 August, 1774) was always connected with the names of the Lake School of poets, Coleridge and Wordsworth, though his theory and practice in poetry were quite distinct from those of the authors of "Lyrical Ballads". Southey was educated at Westminster, where his troubles began in his editorship of a little paper, "The Flagellant," which was opposed to flogging. On entering Balliol College, Oxford (1792), he declared himself a rebel, wearing his hair long, as becomes men of genius, while women of genius commonly wear their hair short. He also despised his Dons, and, nearly twenty years later, on meeting Shelley, then aged 19, he found in Shelley the counterpart of his undergraduate self. Shelley, however, did not, when at Oxford, contemplate taking Holy Orders. Southey soon abandoned the idea, and, meeting Coleridge at Oxford in June, 1794, devised with him the scheme of a "pantisocratic" community in America.

With Coleridge, Southey wrote "The Fall of Robespierre," and, by himself, an epic in blank verse on Jeanne d\'Arc. Of this boyish effort—ambitious, and, in history, ill-info............