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From Blackwood's Magazine.

A CENTURY OF GREAT POETS, FROM 1750 DOWNWARDS.

NO. III- WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

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garments, which his generation pronounced to be out of fashion, from the grave of the old poets almost unawares, and with the old fashion had returned to old nature nature ever young and ever fresh as the source of his inspiration. He had done it without knowing what he did, timidly, apologetically, never sure that the fresh landscape and sweet natural scenes he loved might not be quite inferior to the moral subjects which he ought to have been treating while his truant soul went off, in spite of himself, to the grateful woods and dewy fields. He was doubtful; but his successor was more than certain - he was dogmatically confident, that nature was not only a lawful teacher, but the supreme and only guide. Cowper made the needful beginning, the thousand deprecating apologies to outraged art and an unprepared public. Wordsworth placed himself on a serene and patient throne, above both art and public, and waited without doubt till they should come to his feet who would never bow to them. Thus, as in almost all intellectual revolutions, the first step was made in uncertainty and doubt; the second, with confidence and daring. Cowper laid the foundations of the structure, and another came and built

No character could possibly be more unlike that of the gentle, timid, sorrowful, and lonely Cowper, than is the austere and dignified form — lonely, too, but after a different kind which comes next after him, by natural descent and development, in the splendid roll of English poets. And it is not in our power to point out any moment of contact or apparent influence of one upon the other. Wordsworth, so far as we are aware, never even speaks of his predecessor - never acknowledges either admiration of or help from him. Yet it is safe to say, that without Cowper Wordsworth could scarcely have been. The leap from Twickenham to Grasmere direct is too great for human faculties. Cowper had not created a new school or style, but he had acted upon the very air of England as some subtle natural influence of which we know nothing- as the warm ripple of some Gulf-stream, the chill breath of some wandering iceberg, acts upon the atmosphere we breathe. Probably the young poets whose fame began with the new-born century were not even aware that the brightened and more bracing on it, scarce knowing, not caring, what mental air, the higher firmament, the clearer sky, meant Cowper, or meant anything but the ever-mysterious, ever-simple course of nature. Yet it is our conviction that "The Task" had so far affected all the possibilities of composition in England, that already "The Excursion" had become likely, if not inevitable. The laws of natural progress and inheritance had come into operation, independent of any consciousness on the part of the inheritor. Wordsworth was affected as a child is affected by the character of his father, whom he has never seen, nor even had any mental intercourse with, as between soul and soul. He received his gift darkling, warm from the hands which had held it, without knowing, or apparently much caring, whose hands these were.

But these were the hands which had taken up again the old heritage of English poetry the mantle of Milton, if not his power. Cowper had lifted those singing

was beneath. The work of the one rose naturally out of the other, greater than the other, of higher range and infinitely superior power; but yet, as Scripture has it, not to be made perfect without the other, any more than the writers of the full revelation could he perfected without the prophets who had prophesied in darkness, not knowing, but by snatches, what the real importance and significance of their burden was.

It may be said, however, here, that the absence of all consciousness on Wordsworth's part of the work of his immediate predecessor may be much explained by the fact that Wordsworth himself was little moved or influenced at any time by books. He is perhaps a unique example of mental character in this respect. Himself possessed of the highest literary genius, he was indifferent to literature. This, of course, is not to say that he was unmoved by existing poetry; on the con

trary, he confesses to being "by strong to have afforded a most fit training to this entrancement overcome,"

"When I have held a volume in my hand, Poor earthly casket of immortal verse, Shakespeare or Milton, labourers divine!"

But such entrancement does not seem to have been much more than the inevitable homage which is forced from every man who permits himself to come into contact with the great singers of the world. Wordsworth did not seek such contact, nor require it. He was indifferent to books; they were not even his constant companions, much less his masters. His mind was formed and moulded by other influences. He developed alone, like a tree fed by the dews of heaven, and strengthened by its sunshine, unaware of either pedigree or husbandry. He was without father or mother in his own consciousness, like that mysterious priest in the darkness of the patriarchal ages to whom the father of the faithful himself did homage. But no man can stand thus apart, except in his own consciousness. The laws of descent and inheritance are nowhere more stamped than in the line of genius, where every man receives something from the past to be handed on to the future; becoming in himself at once the heir of all the glorious ages and the father of our kings to be.

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son of the mountains. It is for we pre-
sume it still exists, and that no marauding
commissioners or school board have yet
laid irreverent hands upon the poet's cra-
dle a foundation of the sixteenth cen-
tury, planted in a village in the vale of
Esthwaite, in the heart of the lake district,
surrounded by mountain-peaks, and pos-
sessing a little lake of its own.
The boys
boarded in the cottages about in Spartan
simplicity, and such freedom as only the
English schoolboy knows. They learned
little so far as lessons go, but trained
themselves under Nature's stern but kindly
rule to bear cold and heat and fatigue, and
to do and dare under pressure of all the
inducements held out to them by the crags
and lakes and wild fells around them.
Of this primitive existence Wordsworth
gives us a fine and animated picture. He
shows himself to us, a boy full of the
courage and restlessness of his age, taking
his share in all that came. He was one
of those who "hung above the raven's
nest by knots of grass and half-inch fissures
in the slippery rock"- he rode "in un-
couth race with his companions, and held
his place among them when summer came,
and

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"Our fortune was on bright half-holidays

To sweep along the plain of Windermere
With rival oars."

The early career of Wordsworth is one of curious independence and apparent sepThe reader will recollect the beautiful aration from the ordinary influences that description of skating which occurs in the affect mental growth. He seems, like same poem, and in which one seems to feel Cowper, to have lost both his parents at a the sharp cutting of the frosty air-the very early age; his mother when he was orange sunset dying away, the blue darkbut eight, and his father when he was in ness full of stars, and the lively glimmer his fourteenth year. He was born in 1770 of the cottage-windows, "visible for many at Cockermouth, of an old and respect- ja mile," which invited, but in vain, the able family, with all the advantages and joyous boys to the fireside and supper disadvantages of "good connections,” - which awaited them. In all these sports abundance of friends to advise and find the poet seems to have taken his full share. fault, but none apparently with absolute authority over him, or sufficiently interested in him to afford him a permanent home. In the partial autobiography contained in "The Prelude," his school, and the "grey-haired dame" with whom be lived there, bulk much more largely than any kindred household. Hawkshead, a kind of humble Eton, would indeed seem

"We were a noisy crew," he says, with the half-smile, half-sigh, of a man recalling the brightest period of his life. But beside this bright natural picture runs one more delicate and as true. It is, perhaps, too much to take the descriptions in "The Prelude ". a mature man's reflective view of his own childhood, and all the influences which formed it -as an actual picture of

the far less conscious processes which were greatest wonder of all. This mixture of going on in the mind of the boy. Yet infinite, vague, visionary sensibility, and

there is a certain ethereal perfume of poetic childhood in the narrative which proves its authenticity. The boy lifts the cottage-latch,

"Ere one smoke-wreath had risen From human dwelling, or the vernal thrush Was audible;"

the riotous unthinking existence of a schoolboy, is the great charm of "The Prelude " a poem which probably never will be popular, but which, in many ways, stands alone in literature. The poet's biographer gives, with perhaps a wise judg ment, nothing but the facts of his early life its real history he is allowed to tell himself.

and betakes himself to "some jutting eminence" overlooking the half-visible lake, Cambridge does not seem to have had to watch the dawn stealing over the vale. the same genial effect upon him. Here he He wanders through the woods at night, came under a new kind of influence, and and feels himself "a trouble to the peace one to which he was much less suscepthat dwelt among them." He turns back tible. The world of books and of men, with trembling oars "when the great of historic traditions and conventional shadow of a distant peak" obtrudes itself ways, awaited him at the university, and between him and the stars, feeling "a dim the peculiar constitution of his mind made and undetermined sense of unknown him impatient of their sway. He was inmodes of being." Thus he moves a two- different to books; and he was not very fold creature, attended even in the noisi- snsceptible to personal influence, except est of sports by that visionary self, which when the mind which wielded it was in ponders and dreams. The world breathes perfect sympathy with his own. When mysterious about him- the veil of its we add to this, that all his impulses were marvels keeps ever trembling as if about democratic and republican, that he was little to rise. The strange confusion of wonder inclined to yield to authority, and all his life and joy which possesses the brain of a long despised and detested everything that gifted child, the elation which has no he considered conventional, it is not difficult cause, the incomprehensible inspiration to perceive how it was that his college cawhich tingles through him, the sense of reer was neither delightful to himself nor novelty and mystery, of sadness and de- very satisfactory to his friends. His first light, which broods over everything, sweet, vacation carried him back to Hawkshead, penetrating, and indefinite, has never been a forlorn refuge for the lad who had no so delicately nor so fully painted as in natural home to receive him, but yet a "The Prelude." Such a child goes about kindly and tender one. With exuberant the world wrapped in a delicious mist of youthful pleasure he returned to the fatender wonderment and gladness, some- miliar place, to the care of "my old dame, thing that is sweeter and more subtle so kind and motherly," and to the boyish than music murmuring in his ears -the friends and occupations he had left; and very silence round him rustling as with wings of the unseen the tiniest flowers claiming kindred, blooming as it were for him alone. Everything is a surprise to him, and yet everything is familiar. He has no words to express the exquisite consciousness of existence, the mysterious and awful, and sometimes oppressive, sense of his own individuality—his union with, yet absolute separation from, the dumb, dim, incomprehensible, beautiful universe. which surrounds him. Thus Wordsworth felt, unknowing what it meant, the world a wonder round him, and himself the

there is no finer passage in the poem than his description of this return, his mingled pride and shame in his own changed appearance, and the thoughtfulness with which he lay down in the accustomed bed,

"That lowly bed whence I had heard the wind Roar and the rain beat hard; where I so oft Had lain awake on summer nights to watch The moon in splendour couched among the leaves

Of a tall ash, that near our cottage stood,Had watched her with fixed eyes, while to and fro,

pounds in his pocket, escaping from all
cares and discussions, to France, in his
last college vacation; but as the result
has so long justified his undutifulness, the
severest critic can find nothing to say. It
was in July 1789, on the eve of the day
when the unfortunate Louis XVI., with
his winding-sheet already high on his
breast, took the oath of fidelity to the new
constitution, that Wordsworth and his
travelling companion set foot in France.
The country was half-mad with joy and
self-congratulation.
Old things such

old things as oppression and tyranny and
injustice, the Bastille, and those terrible
seignoral rights which had eaten like a
canker into the very heart of the nation

In the dark summit of the waving tree, She rocked with every impulse of the breeze." Here it probably was, though he does not give any positive information on the subject, that Wordsworth learned as a young man to know the "Matthew" who has been made to live forever in three of his most perfect poems. They were not written till years after, but the mere hint of Matthew's existence in this vale, which is not referred to any where except in the poems bearing his name, adds to the interest with which we think of Esthwaite. He, it is clear, must have impressed his character on Wordsworth as no one else ever did; for there is no such sympathetic and tender personal portrait in all the poet's works. The more elaborate pic- were passing away, and everything was tures of "The Excursion" are as gloomy about to become new. Wordsworth sketches in sepia, in comparison with the threw himself into the joy of the awakbright yet touching colour and freshness of ened nation with all his heart; it affected this wonderful miniature. The man, all hu- | him to the very depths of his being, if not man and wayward, stands before us visibly, in the way of absolute sympathy, at least with the smile on his face and the deep of interest, as the grandest exhibition of sadness in his heart; his mirthfulness, human enlightenment and progress tohis social humour, his nnspoken depths of wards the perfect then known. So greatsorrow and wistful loneliness - the pro-ly indeed was he moved by it, that after found imaginative poetry of mind that lies below his quips and jests are all lighted up in one or two suggestive glimpses, which make him to us as a friend we have known. To our own mind, there are none of Wordsworth's short poems which surpass, and few that equal, those entitled "The Fountain" and "The Two April Mornings." Curiously enough a fact which adds to the touching character of the poems- they were written in the chill depths of a German winter, in the lonely little Saxon university town where the poet passed some months of the years 1798 and 1799. His heart must have been sick for home, and dwelling-oh, how tenderly upon the dear old vale, with its lake and its white cottages, when Matthew's fun and sadness, his heart at once light and heavy, came so vividly to the young wanderer's poetic mind.

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Wordsworth was not, he allows, even a creditable student, and he does not seem to have made a pretence of any anxiety to please his friends, so far as his studies went. He was penniless; and his best hope was to do, what many a virtuous youth has done - to work his way to a fellowship, and from that to a living-delivering thus his relations and himself from the burden of his poverty. But Wordsworth did not do this. Had he not been a great poet in embryo, he would have been indeed a very reprehensible young man, when he set out with twenty

returning to Cambridge to take his degree and wandering about for seven months in an objectless way, the excitement of the struggle going on across the Channel once more attracted him so, that he rushed back again to France, leaving the prospects and necessities of his life to settle themselves. He alleges that this second journey was in order to learn French but it is very apparent that it was the whirl and rush of the revolutionary stream which had sucked him in.

This forms the one chapter in his life which is like nothing before it nor after the one strange youthful fever, of intensest importance to himself at the moment, but entirely episodical, and without effect upon his life. It is curious indeed that, drawn into the immediate circle of this great convulsion as he was made to feel, as it were, the tremor that ran through all the mighty limbs of the nation

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- he should have been able to drop back again into his homely English groove, so little altered by the contrast. At the same time there are few historical studies more affecting and instructive than the account given in “The Prelude" of this extraordinary chapter in the world's history and in this young man's life. It brings the old well-known picture of the French Revolution, so often painted and in such different colours, before us in yet one new and original way. Wordsworth had thrown himself, with something as near

"That spreads its leaves in unmolested peace, While every bush and tree the country through

passion as was possible to him, into that "I looked for something that I could not find, new Gospel of brotherhood and freedom Affecting more emotion than I felt." which turned so many young heads and He is bewildered by his own tranquillity filled so many hearts with hope. Not for which he compares to that of a plant himself only, but as the type of his gener-"glassed in a greenhouse," ation, he sets before us the new revolution, which roused it into passionate excitement, hope, and delight. The Golden Age was coming back, to elevate and change this commonplace world. Genius, goodness, merit, the higher qualities of mind and heart, were to be henceforward the titles of rank, the keys of power, the only real distinctions; and, as a natural consequence, oppression, misery, poverty, crime, and every evil thing, were disappear from the face of a renovated earth.

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

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But to be young was very Heaven! Oh times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!
When Reason seemed the most to assert her
rights,

When most intent on making of herself
A prime enchantress, to assist the work
Which then was going forward in her name.

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And in the region of their peaceful selves; Now was it that both found, the meek and lofty

Did both find helpers to their heart's desire,
And stuff at hand, plastic as they could
wish,--

Were called upon to exercise their skill,
Not in Utopia- subterranean fields,—
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows
where!

But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us - the place, where, in the end,
We find our happiness, or not at all!"

Our space does not allow us to follow in detail the remarkable sketch he gives of his own position and thoughts in the midst of Revolutionary France. His musing attitude, even in the fervour of his sympathy, is very characteristic. He picks up a stone from the dust of the Bastille as a relic, yet confesses that

Is shaking to its roots."

And strangely amid the blaze and carnage
of the time comes his record of his long
walks and talks with his friend Beaupius,
the patriot soldier who afterwards
"Perished fighting in supreme command,
Upon the borders of the unhappy Loire."

When the march of events quickens, we find him again in Paris, not so tranquil, ders about looking for traces of the Sepbut yet musing and pondering as he wantember massacre which had happened just a month before, and gazing upon the scene of that terrible tragedy

"As doth a man Upon a volume whose contents he knows Are memorable, but from him locked up, Being written in a tongue be cannot read." His heart is troubled; he cannot understand the meaning of this bloody interpolation in the tale of freedom. His imagination yields to the terror that broods in the air. When he reaches the high and lonely chamber under the roof where his lodging is, he watches all night trying to read by intervals, unable sleep, thinking he hears a voice cry to the whole city "Sleep no more!" And feeling that the place, "all hushed and silent as it was," had become

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"Unfit for the repose of night, Defenceless as a wood where tigers roam.' Yet notwithstanding this impression of pain and doubt, his conviction of the justice and inevitable success of the cause was unwavering. "From all doubt," he says,

"Or trepidation of the end of things, Far was I as the angels are from guilt." So profound was his faith, that when he returned home and found England excited by discussions about the slave-trade, he dismissed the subject with a certain contempt, feeling that if France and the cause of freedom in her propered, all other questions were settled in this one, and every wrong must be redressed. There is nothing in the poet's life so strange as this plunge of his disciplined and law-lov

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