From the great Nature that exists in works
Of mighty Poets. Visionary power
Attends the motions of the viewless winds,
Embodied in the mystery of words:

There darkness makes abode, and all the host
Of shadowy things work endless changes-there,
As in a mansion like their proper home,
Even forms and substances are circumfused
By that transparent veil with light divine,
And, through the turnings intricate of verse,
Present themselves as objects recognised
In flashes, and with glory not their own.

CHAPTER VIII

WORDSWORTH; SHELLEY; BYRON

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH was born at Cocker

mouth on 7th April, 1770, in the midst of the Lake Country he loved so well and so faithfully painted in his verse. He lived among its scenery from childhood to old age, and its peculiar spirit penetrated, with an impelling vitality, the whole body of his poetry. The spirit of Nature that fills the work of Wordsworth is of one type, and its consistent prevalence binds that work into a unity of its own. Even the first volume of the "Lyrical Ballads," written in Somersetshire, is deeply influenced by the Lake landscape amidst which he spent his youth. Even among the Alps the impressions he records are coloured by the dominant tone of the North-country landscape.

This unity of feeling, derived from one type of scenery, is one of the living interests of his poetry; and it was supported by a philosophic conception of Nature which was interwoven with it, and which also remained constant to the close of his life. These two elements took various forms, as year succeeded year, but every new form was contained in their inner unity. The organ developed new functions, but itself remained the same. All he saw and felt and heard

was but a stream

That flowed into a kindred stream—a gale
Confederate with the current of the soul.

There was a power in this man, so mastered was his soul by a passion for unity, to make every impression a servant of the main aim his art desired.

The roots of this oneness of feeling with regard to nature and of the philosophic conception of Nature he fitted to it, were set, unconsciously to himself, in his boyhood; and he describes, with retrospective pleasure, how, through all his school life at Hawkshead, they intertwined themselves into the ground of his soul. In 1787 he went to Cambridge, and this change of life only sent him back to feel, with renewed power, this interpenetration of himself with the wild Nature of his home.

But he did not remain absorbed in this alone. In 1791 he left Cambridge and voyaged on the Continent. He was then caught up into the first uplifted joy of the French Revolution, and a new element was added to his nature the impassionating element of humanity. The forceful impression of its vastness had already in London come upon him; the universal community of its joys, sorrows and hopes, of its conscience and affections, had settled into his soul in the great city. We may imagine, but scarcely realise, how, with this new and huge conception in his soul, it was widened, deepened, multiplied, intensified, varied and set on fire by his stay in France, where the whole of humanity was working like a sea. There humanity became as great a power in his soul as Nature had been. He lived for a year in that huge hurricane of human passion and barely escaped with his life to England. But he carried with him the ideas of the Revolution, and, owing partly to them and partly to the love he had of the simple manhood of the shepherds and statesmen among whom he was born and educated, and of whom indeed.

he was always one, he kept close to those original and simple elements of human nature which are common to all; recorded them in verse, and never, even when he became old and conservative, lost the power of receiving from them his best and strongest impressions.

This unity of feeling with regard to man is also one of the vital interests of his poetry; and its growth and development were throughout conterminous with his feeling for Nature.

In 1793 he published his first volume of poems, but they are not remarkable, or at least their originality is so far behind that of his second volume, that they scarcely count in any estimate we may make of him. In London, where he was for a time, afterwards in Dorsetshire, he grew steadily in inward and silent power; and when he came to Alfoxden in the Quantocks of Somersetshire, he was ready for the impulse he received from the friendship of Coleridge. That friendship kindled all the materials, which had been accumulated in his soul, into flame; impelled into form all the ideas he had conceived with regard to the method and the province of poetry; and he broke into novel creation. The result was the publication in 1798 of the first volume of the "Lyrical Ballads." After a winter in Germany, at Goslar, he returned, like the dove to the Ark, to his Northern country, where his heart was at home; settled down at Grasmere to a simple life of poverty and production; resolved on making the writing of poetry the art of his whole life; published the second volume of the "Lyrical Ballads" in 1800, completed the "Prelude" in 1805, published two more volumes of poetry in 1807, and sent forth the "Excursion" in 1814. The rest of his

life was lived in the same country, in consistent unworldliness, retaining, to the very end, his enjoyment of Nature; and when he was not influenced by the natural conservatism which grows with regard to their own country, like moss on an old appletree, around so many Englishmen as they get old, he was almost as vivid in his sympathies for liberty and fraternity as he had been when he was young. Some of his latest poems were written in behalf of the struggle for freedom in Italy. He has left us an immortal name, and a work which will not die as long as the human heart loves its kind, as long as it is moved by the beauty of the world, and the spirit that abides in both. Take him for all in all, there is no poet since Milton whose life-work has so great a range of weight and influence, whose spirit will endure so steadily, and mould so firmly and so tenderly the lives of men. And though as a poet and artist he is inferior to Milton; as a power in the general heart of man, he is greater than Milton. Of course, in saying this, I am making no comparison between Milton and Wordsworth as between poet and poet. Milton is in the first class, among the imperial poets of the world, Wordsworth is nearer to our hearts than Milton, closer to our common humanity. We are, with Milton, among the mountainous realms of human nature. But with Wordsworth, we walk at ease among its lowly vales, in its sweet and common meadows where the children play and lovers walk and men and women sorrow and endure and rejoice. Again, Milton was the last of a great race of poets and the last representative of a great manner, but Wordsworth is the foremost of

1 See the "Verses to the Clouds" written on the footroad between Rydal and Grasmere in 1842, when he was 72 years old. See also "Airey Force Valley."