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their variety of subject, related to one leading idea—the marriage of
the soul of man to the external universe, whose “spousal hymn” the
poet chants. They constitute together the spiritual body of his mind,
exhibiting it as it grew into beautiful and melodious form through
thirty years of intense contemplation. To a person who has studied
his works with sufficient care to obtain a conception of the author’s
personality, every little lyric is alive with his spirit, and is organically
connected with the long narrative and didactive poems. This body of
verse is, we think, a new creation in literature, differing from others
not only in degree but in kind—an organism, having its own interior
laws, growing from one central principle, and differing from Spenser
and Milton as a swan does from an eagle, or a rose from a lily.
We need hardly say that the central power and principle of this
organic body of verse is Wordsworth himself. He is at its heart and
circumference, and through all its veins and arteries, as the vivifying
and organizing force—coloring every thing with his peculiar
individuality, representing man and nature through the medium of
his own original and originating genius, and creating, as it were, a
new world of forms and beings, idealized from hints given by the
actual appearances of things. This world is not so various as that of
Shakspeare or Scott, nor so supernatural as that of Milton, but it is
still Wordsworth’s world, a world conceived by himself, and in which
he lived and moved and had his being. A true criticism of his works,
therefore, would be a biography of his mind, exhibiting the vital
processes of its growth, and indicating the necessary connection
between its gradual interior development and the imaginative forms
in which it was expressed. This we cannot pretend to do, having
neither the insight nor the materials for such a task, and we shall be
content with attempting a faint outline of his mental character, with
especial reference to those qualities which dwelt near the heart of
his being, and which seem to have been woven into the texture of
his mind at birth.
Wordsworth was born in April, 1770, of parents sufficiently rich to
give him the advantages of the usual school and collegiate education
of English youth. He early manifested a love for study, but it may be
inferred that his studies were such as mostly ministered to the
imagination, from the fact that he displayed, from his earliest years,
a passion for poetry, and never seems to have had a thought of
choosing a profession. At the university of Cambridge he appears to
have studied the classics with the divining eye and assimilating mind
of a poet, and if he did not attain the first position as a classical
scholar, he certainly drank in beyond all his fellows the spirit of the
great writers of Greece and Rome. In a mind so observing, studious,
thoughtful, imaginative and steadfast as his, whose power consisted
more in concentration of view than rapidity of movement, the
images of classical poetry must have been firmly held and lovingly
contemplated; and to his collegiate culture we doubtless owe the
exquisite poems of Dion and Laodamia, the grand interpretative,
uplifting mythological passage in The Excursion, and the general
felicity of his classical allusions and images throughout his works. He
probably wrote much as well as meditated deeply at college, but
very few of his juvenile pieces have been preserved, and those
which are seem little more than exercises in expression. On leaving
college he appears to have formed the determination of educating
his poetical faculty by a communion with the forms of nature, as
others study law and theology. He resided for some time in the west
of England, and at about the age of twenty, made the tour of
France, Italy, Switzerland and Germany, traveling, like our friend
Bayard Taylor, mostly on foot, diving into forests, lingering by lakes,
penetrating into the cottages of Italian peasants and rude German
boors, and alternating the whole by a residence in the great
European cities. This seems to have occupied nearly two years of his
life; its immediate, but not its only result, was the publication of his
“Descriptive Sketches in Verse,” indicating accurate observation
rather than shaping imagination, and undistinguished by any marked
peculiarities of thought or diction. We next hear of him at Bristol, the
companion of Coleridge and Southey, and discussing with those
eager and daring spirits the essential falsehood of current poetry as
a representation of nature. The sensible conclusion of all three was
this—that the worn-out epithets and images then in vogue among
the rhymers, were meaningless; that poetry was to be sought in
nature and man; and that the language of poetry was not a tinsel
rhetoric, but an impassioned utterance of thoughts and emotions
awakened by a direct contact of the mind with the objects it
described. Of these propositions, the last was one of primary
importance, and in a mind so grave, deep and contemplative as
Wordsworth’s, with an instinctive ambition to be one of “Nature’s
Privy Council,” and dive into the secrets of those visible forms which
had ever thrilled his soul with a vague and aching rapture, the mere
critical opinion passed into a motive and an inspiration.
“The Lyrical Ballads,” published in 1798, and to which Southey
and Coleridge contributed, were the first poems which indicated
Wordsworth’s peculiar powers and passions, and gave the first hints
of his poetical philosophy, and the first startling shock to the tastes
of the day. They were mostly written at Allfoxden, near the Bristol
Channel, in one of the deepest solitudes in England, amid woods,
glens, streams, and hills. Here Wordsworth had retired with his
sister; and Coleridge was only five miles distant at Stowey. Cottle
relates some amusing anecdotes of the ignorance of the country
people, in regard to them, and to poets and lovers of the
picturesque generally. Southey, Coleridge and his wife, Lamb, and
the two Wedgewoods, visited Wordsworth in his retirement, and the
whole company used to wander about the woods, and by the sea, to
the great wonder of all the honest people they met. As they were
often out at night, it was supposed they led a dissolute life; and it is
said that there are respectable people in Bristol who believe now
that Mrs. Coleridge and Miss Wordsworth were disreputable women,
from a remembrance of the scandalous tattle circulating then. Cottle
asserts that Wordsworth was driven from the place by the suspicions
which his habits provoked, being refused a continuance of his lease
of the Allfoxden house by the ignoramus who had the letting of it,
on the ground that he was a criminal in the disguise of an idler. One
of the villagers said, “that he had seen him wander about at night
and look rather strangely at the moon! And then he roamed over the
hills like a partridge.” Another testified “he had heard him mutter, as
he walked, in some outlandish brogue, that nobody could
understand.” This last, we suppose, is the rustic version of the poet’s
own statement—
 “He murmurs near the running brooks
A music sweeter than their own.”

Others, however, took a different view of his habits, as little

flattering to his morals as the other view to his sense. One wiseacre
remarked confidently, “I know what he is. We have all met him
tramping away toward the sea. Would any man in his senses take all
that trouble to look at a parcel of water? I think he carries on a snug
business in the smuggling line, and, in these journeys, is on the
lookout for some wet cargo.” Another, carrying out this bright idea,
added, “I know he has got a private still in his cellar; for I once
passed his house at a little better than a hundred yards distance,
and I could smell the spirits as plain as an ashen faggot at
Christmas.” But the charge which probably had the most weight in
those times was the last. “I know,” said one, “that he is surely a
desperd French Jacobin; for he is so silent and dark that no one ever
heard him say one word about politics.” The result of all these
various rumors and scandals was the removal of Wordsworth from
the village. It is curious that, with such an experience of English
country-people, Wordsworth should never have looked at them
dramatically, and represented them as vulgar and prejudiced human
beings as well as immortal souls. It proves that humor did not enter
at all into the constitution of his nature; that man interested him
more than men; and that his spiritual affections, connecting
humanity constantly with its divine origin, shed over the simplest
villager a light and atmosphere not of earth.
While the ludicrous tattle to which we have referred was
sounding all around him, he was meditating Peter Bell and the
Lyrical Ballads, in the depths of the Allfoxden woods, and
consecrating the rustics who were scandalizing him. The great Poet
of the Poor, who has made the peasant a grander object of
contemplation than the peer, and who saw through vulgar externals
and humble occupations to the inmost soul of the man, had
sufficient provocations to be the satirist of those he idealized.
In these Lyrical Ballads, and in the poems written at the same
period of their publication, we perceive both the greatness and the
limitations of Wordsworth, the vital and the mechanical elements in
his poetry. As far as his theory of poetic diction was unimaginative,
as far as its application was willful, it became a mere matter of the
understanding, productive of little else than shocks to taste and the
poetic sense, and indicating the perversity of a powerful intellect,
pushing preconceived theories to the violation of ideal laws, rather
than the rapt inspiration of the bard, flooding common words and
objects with new life and divine meanings. It is useless to say that
the passages to which we object would not provoke a smile if read
in the spirit of the author. They are ludicrous in themselves, and
would have made the author himself laugh had he possessed a
moderate sense of the humorous. But the gravest objection against
them is, that they do not harmonize with the poems in which they
appear—are not vitally connected with them, but stand as
excrescences plastered on them—and instantly suggest the theorizer
expressing his scorn of an opposite vice of expression, by
deliberately substituting for affected elegance a simplicity just as full
of affectation. Wordsworth’s true simplicity, the simplicity which was
the natural vehicle of his grand and solemn thoughts, the simplicity
which came from writing close to the truth of things, and making the
word rise out of the idea conceived like Venus from the sea, cannot
be too much commended; but in respect to his false simplicity, his
simplicity for the sake of being simple, we can only say that it has
given some point to the sarcasm, “that Chaucer writes like a child,
but Wordsworth childishly.” These objectionable passages, however,
are very few; they stand apart from his works and apart from what
was essential in him; and they are to be pardoned, as we pardon the
occasional caprices of other great poets.
Another objection to the Lyrical Ballads, and to Wordsworth’s
poems generally, is an objection which relates to his noblest
creations. He never appears to have thoroughly realized that other
men were not Wordsworths, and accordingly he not infrequently
violates the law of expression—which we take to be the expression
of a man to others, not the expression of a man to himself. He
speaks, as it were, too much to his own ear, and having associated
certain words with subtle thoughts and moods peculiar to himself, he
does not seem aware that the words may not of themselves convey
his meaning to minds differently constituted, and accustomed to
take the expressions at their lexicon value. In this he differs from
Coleridge, whose words and music have more instantaneous power
in evoking the mood addressed, and thread with more force and
certainty all the mental labyrinths of other minds, and act with a
tingling and inevitable touch on the finest nerves of spiritual
perception. The Ancient Mariner and Christobel almost create the
moods in which they are to be read, and surprise the reader with a
revelation of the strange and preternatural elements lying far back in
his own consciousness. Wordsworth has much of this wondrous
wizard power, but it operates with less direct energy, and is not felt
in all its witchery until we have thought into his mind, become
enveloped in its atmosphere, and been initiated into the “suggestive
sorcery” of his language. Then, it appears to us, he is even more
satisfying than Coleridge, moving, as he does, in the transcendental
region of thought with a calmer and more assured step, and giving
evidence of having steadily gazed on those spiritual realities which
Coleridge seems to have casually seen by flashes of lightning. His
language consequently is more temperate, as befits a man observing
objects familiar to his mind by frequent contemplation; but, to
common readers, it would be more effective if it had the suddenness
and startling energy coming from the first bright vision of
supernatural objects. As it is, however, his style proves that his mind
had grown up to those heights of contemplation to which the mind
of Coleridge only occasionally darted, under the winged impulses of
imagination; and therefore Wordsworth gives more serene and
permanent delight, more “sober certainty of waking bliss,” than
Coleridge, however much the latter may excel in instantaneousness
of effect.
The originality of the Lyrical Ballads consisted not so much in an
accurate observation of nature as in an absolute communion with
her, and interpretation of the spirit of her forms. They combine in a
remarkable degree ecstasy with reflection, and are marvelously
refined both in their perception of the life of nature and the subtle
workings of human affections. Those elusive emotions which flit
dimly before ordinary imaginations and then instantly disappear,
Wordsworth arrests and embodies; and the remotest shades of
feeling and thought, which play on the vanishing edges of
conception, he connects with familiar objects, and brings home to
our common contemplations. In the sphere of the affections he is
confessedly great. The still, simple, searching pathos of “We are
Seven,” the mysterious, tragic interest gathered around “The Thorn,”
and the evanescent touch of an elusive mood in “The Anecdote for
Fathers,” indicate a vision into the finest elements of emotion. The
poems entitled, “Expostulation and Reply,” “The Tables Turned,”
“Lines Written in Early Spring,” “To My Sister,” and several others,
referring to this period of 1798, evince many of the peculiar qualities
of his philosophy, and combine depth of insight with a most exquisite
simplicity of phrase. The following extracts contain hints of his whole
system of thought, expressing that belief in the life of nature, and
the mode by which that life is communicated to the mind, which
reappear, variously modified, throughout his writings:
Nor less I deem that there are Powers
Which of themselves our minds impress;
That we can feel this mind of ours
Is a wise passiveness.

——

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!

He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,

Our minds and hearts to bless—
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things—
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;

Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

——

I heard a thousand blended notes,

While in a grove I sat reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

——

Through primrose tufts in that sweet bower,

The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
 And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

——

There is a blessing in the air

Which seems a sense of joy to yield
To the bare trees, and mountains bare,
And grass in the green field.

——

One moment now may give us more

Than years of toiling reason:
Our minds shall drink at every pore
The spirit of the season.

Some silent laws our hearts will wake,

Which they shall long obey:
We for the year to come may take
Our temper from to-day.
But the most remarkable poem written at this period of
Wordsworth’s life, is that on Tintern Abbey, “Lines Composed on
Revisiting the Banks of the Wye.” We have here that spiritualization
of nature, that mysterious sense of the Being pervading the whole
universe of matter and mind, that feeling of the vital connection
between all the various forms and kinds of creation, and that
marriage of the soul of man with the visible universe, which
constitute the depth and the charm of Wordsworth’s “divine
philosophy.” After describing the landscape which he now revisits, he
proceeds to develop the influence it has exerted on his spirit:
 These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me,
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration; feelings, too,
Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,
As have no slight and trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man’s life,
His little nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened; that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,
Until the breath of this corporeal frame,
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul;
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

He then proceeds to describe the passionate fascination which

nature exerted over his youth, and the change which had come over
him by a deeper and more thoughtful communion with her spirit.
When we consider that Wordsworth, at this time, was only twenty-
eight, and that even the motions described in the first part of our
extract had no existence in contemporary poetry, we can form some
idea of his giant leap in advance of his age, as indicated by the
unspeakable beauty and novelty of the concluding portion. Our
readers will notice that although the style becomes almost
transfigured by the intense and brooding imagination which
permeates it, the diction is still as simple as prose:
 I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colors and their forms, were then to me
An appetite, a feeling, and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye. That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn, nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something still 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 living things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear—both what they half create
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the muse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

It is this “sense sublime of something still more deeply

interfused,” that gives to a well-known passage in the concluding
portion of the poem its particular significance:
 Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy; for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.

In Wordsworth’s use of the word nature, it must always be borne

in mind that he means, to use his own phrase,

The Original of human art,

Heaven-prompted Nature.

This poem enables us to understand the process by which so

peculiar a nature as Wordsworth’s grew up into its spiritual stature.
It was by placing his mind in direct contact with natural objects,
passively receiving their impressions in the still hours of
contemplation, and bringing his own soul into such sweet relations
to the soul of nature as to “see into the life of things;” or, as he
expresses it, in another connection, “his soul had sight” of those
spiritual realities, of which visible forms and hues are but the
embodiment and symbolical language. Nature to him was therefore
always alive, spiritually as well as visibly existing; and he felt the
correspondence between his own life and her life, from perceiving
that one spirit penetrated both. Not only did he perceive this, but he
mastered the secret alphabet by which man converses with nature,
and to his soul she spoke an audible language. Indeed, his mind’s
ear was even more acute than his mind’s eye; and no poet has
excelled him in the subtle perception of the most remote relations of
tone. Often, when he is on the peaks of spiritual contemplation, he
hears voices when he cannot see shapes, and mutters mystically of
his whereabouts in words which suggest rather than embody
meaning. He grew in spiritual strength and height by assimilating the
life of nature, as bodies grow by assimilating her grosser elements;
and this process was little disturbed by communion with other
minds, either through books or society. He took nothing at second-
hand; and his nature is therefore not the nature of Homer, or Dante,
or Shakspeare, or Milton, or Scott, but essentially the nature of
Wordsworth, the nature which he saw with his own eyes, and
shaped with his own imagination. His humanity sprung from this
insight, for not until he became impressed with the spirit of nature,
and divined its perfect adaptation to nourish and elevate the human
mind, did he perceive the worth and dignity of man. Then simple
humanity assumed in his mind a mysterious grandeur, and humble
life was spiritualized by his consecrating and affectionate
imagination. He might then say, with something of a proud content,

The moving accident is not my trade;

To freeze the blood I have no ready arts;
’Tis my delight alone in summer shade,
To pipe a simple song for thinking hearts.

The passages in which this thoughtful humanity and far-sighted

spiritual vision appear in beautiful union, are too numerous for
quotation, or even for reference. We will give but two, and extract
them as hints of his spiritual biography and the growth of his mind:
 Love he had found in huts where poor men lie;
His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.

—-

But who is He with modest looks,

And clad in homely russet brown?
He murmurs near the running brooks
A music sweeter than their own.

He is retired as noontide dew,

Or fountain in a noonday grove;
And you must love him, ’ere to you
He will seem worthy of your love.

The outward shows of sky and earth,

Of hill and valley, he had viewed;
And impulses of deeper birth
Had come to him in solitude.

In common things that round us lie

Some random truths he can impart—
The harvest of a quiet eye
That sleeps and broods on his own heart.

We shall give but one more extract; illustrative of the moral

wisdom which the poetic recluse had drank in from Nature, and
incorporated with his own character. It was written at the age of
twenty-five:
 If thou be one whose heart the holy forms
Of young imagination have kept pure,
Stranger! henceforth be warned; and know that pride,
Howe’er disguised in its own majesty,
Is littleness; that he who feels contempt
For any living thing, hath faculties
Which he has never used; that thought with him
Is in its infancy. The man whose eye
Is ever on himself doth look on one,
The least of Nature’s works, one who might move
The wise man to that scorn which wisdom holds
Unlawful, ever. O be wiser, Thou!
Instructed that true knowledge leads to love;
True dignity abides with him alone
Who, in the silent hour of inward thought,
Can still suspect, and still revere himself,
In lowliness of heart.

We have dwelt thus long on Wordsworth’s first characteristic

publication, because it expresses so well the nature of his own mind,
and because it gave an original impulse to poetical literature. These
Lyrical Ballads were published in the summer of 1798, and though
they attracted no general attention corresponding to their original
merit, they exercised great influence upon all the young minds who
were afterward to influence the age. In September, 1798, in
company with Coleridge, he visited Germany, and on his return he
settled at Grasmere, in Westmoreland; a spot so well known to all
readers of his poetry, and where he continued to reside for fifteen
years. In 1803 he married a Miss Mary Hutchinson, of Penrith.
Neither was wealthy, their joint income being but £100 a year. Of his
wife we know little, except that she was of small stature and gentle
manners, and was loved by her husband with that still, deep
devotion characteristic of his affections. He refers to her, in a poem
written in his old age, as

She who dwells with me, whom I have loved

With such communion, that no place on earth
Can ever be a solitude to me.
 Between 1803 and 1807, when a second volume of Lyrical
Ballads was published, he wrote many of the most beautiful and
sublime poems in his whole works. To this period belong “The
Memorials of a Tour in Scotland,” (1803,) containing “The Solitary
Reaper,” “The Highland Girl,” “Ellen Irwin,” “Rob Roy’s Grave,” and
other exquisite and glowing impersonations—his grand sonnets
dedicated to “National Independence and Liberty”—“The Horn of
Egremont Castle,” “Heart-Leap Well,” “Character of a Happy Warrior,”
“A Poet’s Epitaph,” “Vandracour and Julia,” the “Ode to Duty,” and,
above all, the sublime “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from
the Recollections of Childhood,” which appears not to have been
struck off at one beat, but to have been composed at various
periods between the years 1803 and 1806.
There are no events, in the common acceptation of the term, in
Wordsworth’s life after the period of his marriage, except the
publication of his various works, and the pertinacious war waged
against them by the influential critics. Though his means were at
first limited, he soon, through the friendship of the Earl of Lonsdale,
received the appointment of Distributor of Stamps for the counties of
Westmoreland and Cumberland, a sinecure office, the duties of
which were done by clerks, but which seems to have given him an
income sufficient for his wants. In 1809 he published a prose work
on the “Convention of Cintra,” which, though designed as a popular
appeal in favor of the oppressed Spaniards, was little read at the
time, and is now forgotten. Southey, whose mind was on fire with
sympathy for the Spanish cause, says of this pamphlet, in a letter to
Scott—“Wordsworth’s pamphlet will fail of producing any general
effect, because the sentences are long and involved; and his friend,
De Quincey, who corrected the press, has rendered them more
obscure by an unsound system of punctuation. This fault will
outweigh all its merits. The public never can like any thing which
they feel it difficult to understand. . . . I impute Wordsworth’s want
of perspicuity to two causes—his admiration of Milton’s prose, and
his habit of dictating instead of writing: if he were his own scribe his
eye would tell him where to stop.”
 But the great work to which Wordsworth was devoting the best
years of his life, was his long philosophical poem of “The Recluse,”
designed to give an account of the growth of his own mind, and to
develop all the peculiarities, poetical, ethical and religious, of his
system of thought. A large portion of this remains unpublished, but
the second part was issued in quarto, in 1814, under the title of
“The Excursion,” and was immediately lighted upon by all the wit-
snappers and critics of the old school, and mercilessly “probed,
vexed and criticised.” Jeffrey, who began his celebrated review of it
in the Edinburgh with the sentence, “This will never do,” was
successful in ridiculing some of its weak points, but made the
mistake of stigmatizing its sublimest passages as “unintelligible
ravings.” The choice of a pedler as the hero of a philosophical poem,
though it was based on facts coming within the author’s knowledge,
was a violation of ideal laws, because it had not sufficient general
truth to justify the selection. A pedler may be a poet, moralist and
metaphysician, but such examples are for biography rather than
poetry, and indicate singularity more than originality in the poet who
chooses them. Allowing for this error, substracting some puerile
lines, and protesting against the tendency to diffusion in the style,
“The Excursion” still remains as a noble work, rich in description, in
narrative, in sentiment, fancy and imagination, and replete with
some of the highest and rarest attributes of poetry. To one who has
been an attentive reader of it, grand and inspiring passages crowd
into the memory at the mere mention of its title. It is, more perhaps
than any other of Wordsworth’s works, enveloped in the atmosphere
of his soul, and vital with his individual life; and in all sympathetic
minds, in all minds formed to feel its solemn thoughts and holy
raptures, it feeds

“A calm, a beautiful, and silent fire.”

“The Excursion” was followed, in 1815, by the “White Doe of

Rylstone,” a narrative poem, which Jeffrey said deserved the
distinction of being the worst poem ever printed in a quarto volume,
and which appears to us one of the very best. We do not believe the
“White Doe” is much read, and its exceeding beauty, subtle grace,
and profound significance, are not perceived in a hasty perusal. It is
instinct with the most refined and ethereal imagination, and could
have risen from the depths of no mind in which moral beauty had
not been organized into moral character. Its tenderness, tempered
by “thoughts whose sternness makes them sweet,” pierces into the
very core of the heart. The purpose of the poem is to exhibit
suffering as a purifier of character, and the ministry of sympathies,

“Aloft ascending, and descending quite

Even unto inferior kinds,”

in allaying suffering; and this is done by a story sufficiently

interesting of itself to engage the attention, apart from its indwelling
soul of holiness. In the representation of the Nortons we have the
best specimens of Wordsworth’s power of characterization, a power
in which he is generally deficient, but which he here exhibits with
almost dramatic force and objectiveness.
“Peter Bell” and “The Wagoner,” which appeared in 1819, were
executed in a spirit very different from that which animates the
“White Doe.” They were originally written to illustrate a system, and
seem to have been published, at this period, to furnish the enemies
of Wordsworth some plausible excuse for attacking his growing
reputation. “Peter Bell” was conceived and composed as far back as
1798, and though it exhibits much power and refinement of
imagination, the treatment of the story is essentially ludicrous. But
still it contains passages of description which are eminently
Wordsworthian, and which the most accomplished of Wordsworth’s
defamers never equaled. With what depth, delicacy, sweetness and
simplicity are the following verses, for instance, conceived and
expressed:
 He roved among the vales and streams,
In the green wood and hollow dell;
They were his dwellings night and day,—
But nature ne’er could find the way
Into the heart of Peter Bell.

In vain, through every changeful year,

Did Nature lead him as before;
A primrose by the river’s brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.

——

At noon, when by the forest’s edge

He lay beneath the branches high,
The soft blue sky did never melt
Into his heart; he never felt
The witchery of the soft blue sky.

On a fair prospect some have looked

And felt, as I have heard them say,
As if the moving time had been
A thing as steadfast as the scene
On which they gazed themselves away.

——

There was a hardness in his cheek,

There was a hardness in his eye,
As if the man had fixed his face,
In many a solitary place,
Against the wind and open sky.

“The Wagoner,” is altogether unworthy of Wordsworth’s genius. It

is an attempt of a poet without humor to be gay and jocular, and
very dismal gayety it is. But even this poem is not to be dismissed
without a reference to its one exquisite passage—that in which he
describes the obligation upon him to write it:
 Nor is it I who play the part,
But a shy spirit in my heart,
That comes and goes—will sometimes leap
From hiding-places ten year’s deep;
Or haunts me with familiar face,
Returning, like a ghost unlaid,
Until the debt I owe be paid.

The next volume of Wordsworth was a series of sonnets, under

the general title of “The River Duddon,” published in 1820, and
singularly pure in style and fresh in conception. This was followed, in
1821, by “Itinerary Sonnets,” chronicling a journey to the Continent;
“Ecclesiastical Sonnets,” in 1822, celebrating events and characters
in the history of the English church; and “Yarrow Revisited, and
other Poems,” in 1834. In old age he still preserved his young love
for nature, and lost none of his power of interpreting her teachings.
In a poem entitled “Devotional Incitements,” written at the age of
sixty-two, and distinguished for the delicate keenness of its insight,
no less than its lyric rapture, it will be perceived that natural objects
were still visible and audible to his heart and imagination. “Where,”
he exclaims,
Where will they stop, those breathing powers,
The spirits of the new-born flowers?
They wander with the breeze, they wind
Where’er the streams a passage find;
Up from their native ground they rise
In mute aërial harmonies;
From humble violet—modest thyme—
Exhaled, the essential odors climb,
As if no space below the sky
Their subtle flight could satisfy:
Heaven will not tax our thoughts with pride—
If like ambition be their guide.

Roused by the kindliest of May-showers,

The spirit quickener of the flowers,
That with moist virtue softly cleaves
The buds, and freshens the young leaves,
The birds pour forth their souls in notes
Of rapture from a thousand throats—
Here checked by too impetuous haste,
While there the music runs to waste,
With bounty more and more enlarged
Till the whole air is overcharged.
Give ear, O man, to their appeal,
And thirst for no inferior zeal,
Thou, who canst think as well as feel.

——

Alas! the sanctities combined

By art to unsensualize the mind,
Decay and languish; or, as creeds
And humors change, are spurned like weeds:
And priests are from their altars thrust;
Temples are leveled with the dust;
And solemn rites and awful forms
Founder amid fanatic storms,
Yet evermore, through years renewed
In undisturbed vicissitude,
Of seasons balancing their flight
On the swift wings of day and night,
Kind Nature keeps a heavenly door
Wide open for the scattered Poor,
 Where flower-breathed incense to the skies
Is wafted in mute harmonies;
And ground fresh cloven by the plough
Is fragrant with a humbler vow;
Where birds and brooks from leafy dells
Chime forth unwearied canticles,
And vapors magnify and spread
The glory of the sun’s bright head—
Still constant in her worship, still
Conforming to the eternal Will,
Whether men sow or reap the fields
Divine monition Nature yields,
That not by bread alone we live,
Or what a hand of flesh can give;
That every day should leave some part
Free for a sabbath of the heart.
On the death of Southey, Wordsworth was appointed Poet
Laureate. The latter years of his life were passed in undisturbed
serenity, and he appears to have retained his faculties to the last.
His old age, like his youth and mature manhood, illustrated the truth
of his poetic teachings, and proves that poetry had taught him the
true theory of life. One cannot contemplate him during the last ten
years of his existence, without being forcibly impressed with his own
doctrine regarding the lover of nature:

Thy thoughts and feelings shall not die,

Nor leave thee when old age is nigh
A melancholy slave;
But an old age serene and bright,
And lovely as a Lapland night,
Shall lead thee to thy grave.

The predominating characteristic of Wordsworth’s poetry is

thoughtfulness, a thoughtfulness in which every faculty of his mind
and every disposition of his heart meet and mingle; and the result is
an atmosphere of thought, giving a softening charm to all the
objects it surrounds and permeates. This atmosphere is sometimes
sparklingly clear, as if the airs and dews and sunshine of a May
morning had found a home in his imagination; but, in his
philosophical poems, where he penetrates into a region of thought
above the ken of ordinary mortals, this atmosphere is touched by an
ideal radiance which slightly obscures as well as consecrates the
objects seen through it, and occasionally it thickens into mystical
obscurity. No person can thoroughly enjoy Wordsworth who does not
feel the subtle spirit of this atmosphere of thought, as it
communicates an air of freshness and originality even to the
commonplaces of his thinking, and apparels his loftier conceptions in
celestial light—

“The gleam,
The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the poet’s dream.”

The first and grandest exercise, therefore, of his imagination is

the creation of this harmonizing atmosphere, enveloping as it does
the world of his creation with that peculiar light and air, indescribable
but unmistakable, which enable us at once to recognize and to class
a poem by Wordsworth. We do not hesitate to say that, in its
peculiarity, there is nothing identical with it in literature—that it
constitutes an absolutely new kind of poetry, in the Platonic sense of
the word kind. An imagination which thus fuse all the faculties and
emotions into one individuality, so that all the vital products of that
individuality are characterized by unity of effect, is an imagination of
the highest kind. The next question to be considered is the variety
which this unity includes; for Shakspeare himself, the most
comprehensively creative of human beings, never goes beyond the
unity of his individuality, his multifarious variety always answering to
the breadth of his personality. He is like the banyan tree in the
marvelous fertility of his creativeness, and the province of humanity
he covers; but the fertility all comes from one root and trunk, and
indicates simply the greatness of the kind, as compared with other
kinds of trees. The variety in the operation of Wordsworth’s
imagination we will consider first in its emotional, and second in its
intellectual, manifestation—of course, using these words as terms of
distinction, not of division, because when we employ the word
imagination we desire to imply a fusion of the whole nature of the
man into one living power. In the emotional operation of
Wordsworth’s imagination we discern his Sentiment. No term has
been more misused than this, its common acceptation being a weak
affectionateness; and, at best, it is considered as an instinct of the
sensibility, as a simple, indivisible element of humanity. The truth is
that sentiment is a complex thing, the issue of sensibility and
imagination; and without imagination sentiment is impossible. We
often meet excellent and intelligent people, whose affections are
warm, whose judgments are accurate, and whose lives are
irreproachable, but who lack in their religion, morality and affections
an elusive something which is felt to be the grace of character. The
solution of the problem is found in their want of sentiment—in their
want of that attribute by which past scenes and events, and absent
faces, and remote spiritual realities, affect the mind like objects
which are visibly present. Now, without this Sentiment no man can
be a poet, either in feeling or faculty; and Wordsworth has it in a
transcendent degree. In him it is revealed, not only in his idealizing
whatever in nature or life had passed into his memory, but in his
religious feeling and in his creative art. Scenes which he had viewed
years before, he tells us, still

Flash upon that inward eye,

Which is the bliss of solitude.

Thus Sentiment is that operation of imagination which recalls, in a

more vivid light, things absent from the bodily eye, and makes them
act upon the will with more force and inspiration than they originally
exerted in their first passionate or thoughtful perception; and from
its power of extracting the essence and heightening the beauty of
what has passed away from the senses and passed into memory, it
gives the impulse which sends the creative imagination far beyond
the boundaries of actual life into the regions of the ideal, to see
what is most beautiful here
 —Imaged there
In happier beauty; more pellucid streams,
An ampler ether, a diviner air,
And fields invested with purpureal gleams,
Climes, which the sun, who sheds the brightest day
Earth knows, is all unworthy to survey.

It is needless to adduce passages to prove the depth and

delicacy of Wordsworth’s sentiment, sanctifying as it does natural
objects and the humblest life, and lending to his religious faith a
mysterious, ineffable beauty and holiness. In our view of the quality
it must necessarily be the limitation of a poet’s creativeness, for the
imagination cannot represent or create objects to which it does not
tend by a sentiment; and Wordsworth, while he has a sentiment for
visible nature, a religious sentiment, a sentiment of humanity, is still
confined to the serious side of things, and has no sentiment of
humor. If he had humor as a sentiment, he, dowered as he is with
imagination, would have it as a creative faculty, for humor is the
intellectual imagination inspired by the sentiment of mirth.
Let us now survey the power and scope of Wordsworth’s
imagination, considered in its intellectual manifestation. Here
nothing bounds its activity but its sentiments. It is descriptive,
pictorial, reflective, shaping, creative, and ecstatic; it can body forth
abstract ideas in sensible imagery; it can organize, as in “The White
Doe,” a whole poem round one central idea; it can make audible in
the melody of words, shades of feeling and thought which elude the
grasp of imagery; it can fuse and diffuse itself at pleasure,
animating, coloring, vitalizing every thing it touches. In description it
approaches near absolute perfection, giving not only the scene as it
lies upon the clear mirror of the perceptive imagination, but
representing it in its life and motion as well as form. The following,
from “The Night Piece,” is one out of a multitude of instances:
 He looks up—the clouds are split
Asunder—and above his head he sees
The clear Moon, and the glory of the heavens.
There, in a black blue vault she sails along,
Followed by multitudes of stars, that, small
And sharp, and bright, along the dark abyss
Drive as she drives.

In the description of the appearance of the White Doe, we have

not only form, hue and motion, but the feeling of wonder that the
fair creature excites, and the rhythm which musically expresses the
supernatural character of the visitant—all embodied in one vivid
picture:

The only voice that you can hear

Is the river murmuring near.
—When soft!—the dusky trees between,
And down the path through the open green,
Where is no living thing to be seen;
And through yon gateway, where is found,
Beneath the arch with ivy bound,
Free entrance to the church-yard ground—
Comes gliding in with lovely gleam,
Comes gliding in serene and slow,
Soft and silent as a dream,
A solitary Doe!
White she is as lily of June,
And beauteous as the silver moon
When out of sight the clouds are driven
And she is left alone in heaven;
Or like a ship, some gentle day,
In sunshine sailing far away,
A glittering ship that hath the plain
Or ocean for her own domain.

In the following we have a mental description, so subtle and so

sweet as to make “the sense of satisfaction ache” with its felicity:
 And she has smiles to earth unknown,
Smiles that, with motion of their own,
Do spread and sink and rise;
That come and go, with endless play,
And ever as they pass away,
Are hidden in her eyes.

This is from the little poem to “Louisa.” It is curious that

Wordsworth, in the octavo edition of his works, published when he
was seventy-seven years old, omits this stanza. It was so refined
that he had probably lost the power to perceive its delicate beauty,
and dismissed it as meaningless.
In describing nature as connected with, and embodied in, human
thoughts and sentiments, Wordsworth’s descriptive power rises with
the complexity of the theme. Thus, in the poem of Ruth, we have an
example of the perversion of her energizing power:
 The wind, the tempest roaring high,
The tumult of a tropic sky,
Might well be dangerous food
For him, a youth to whom was given
So much of earth—so much of heaven,
And such impetuous blood.

Whatever in those climes he found

Irregular in sight or sound,
Did to his mind impart
A kindred impulse, seemed allied
To his own powers, and justified
The workings of his heart.

Nor less, to feed voluptuous thought,

The beauteous forms of nature wrought,
Fair trees and gorgeous flowers;
The breezes their own languor lent;
The stars had feelings, which they sent
Into those favored bowers.

In another poem, we have an opposite and purer representation

of nature’s vital work, in an ideal impersonation which has nothing
like it in the language:

Three years she grew in sun and shower,

Then Nature said, a lovelier flower
On earth was never sown;
This child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make
A lady of my own.

Myself will to my darling be

Both law and impulse; and with me
The girl in rock and plain,
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
Shall feel an overseeing power
To kindle or restrain.
 She shall be sportive as the fawn,
That wild with glee across the lawn,
Or up the mountain springs;
And hers shall be the breathing balm,
And hers the silence and the calm
Of mute insensate things.

The floating clouds their state shall lend

To her; for her the willow bend;
Nor shall she fail to see
Even in the motions of the Storm,
Grace that shall mould the maiden’s form
By silent sympathy.

The stars of midnight shall be dear

To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.

But the most common exercise of Wordsworth’s imagination is

what we may call its meditative action—its still, calm, searching
insight into spiritual truth, and into the spirit of nature. In these,
analysis and reflection become imaginative, and the “more than
reasoning mind” of the poet overleaps the boundaries of positive
knowledge, and, steadying itself on the vanishing points of human
intelligence, scans the “life of things.” In the poems in which
meditation predominates, there is a beautiful union of tender feeling
with austere principles, and this austerity prevents his tenderness
from ever becoming morbid. As his meditative poems more
especially relate to practice, and contain his theory of life, they grow
upon a studious reader’s mind with each new perusal. In them the
Christian virtues and graces are represented in something of their
celestial beauty and power, and the poet’s “vision and faculty divine”
are tasked to the utmost in giving them vivid and melodious
expression. He is not, in this meditative mood, a mere moralizing
dreamer, a vague and puerile rhapsodist, as some have maliciously
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