theme, and circumstance which must be admitted often to have laid heavy shackles upon his genius. The Anecdote for Fathers and the Idiot Boy, old Farmer Simpson and Goody Blake-what have these to do with the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," or indeed with any conceivable definition of poetry? But, after all, the worst that can be said against them has been forestalled by Wordsworth himself. "I may have given to things a false importance, I may have sometimes written upon unworthy subjects. . . . My language, too,"-and this he is still more ready to admit-"may frequently have suffered from those arbitrary connections of feelings and ideas with particular words and phrases from which no man can altogether protect himself." This surely is in itself enough to disarm criticism. And, if it be objected by the profane that this did not lead him, until years had passed, to suppress or alter any of the offending passages, the answer is that it would have been well if poets had always shown the same dignity in the face of critics. Wordsworth was right in holding that, "where the understanding of an author is not convinced," such changes cannot be made "without great injury to himself. For his own feelings are his stay and support; and, if he set them aside in one instance, he may be induced to repeat this act till his mind shall lose all confidence in itself, and become utterly debilitated."

And, when all abatement has been made, what a world of imagination is opened by The Thorn, or if

obvious blemishes be held to put that poem out of court, by The Mad Mother, The Forsaken Indian Woman, and We are Seven. When had this note been struck before in English poetry, and when has it been struck since? What other poet has seized with so close a grip the stern tragedy of the countryside, the bond which binds man in his suffering to nature, the force which drives him to seek both balm and poison in the scenes where misery has fallen on his life? The very austerity of the language-though there are passages, especially in The Thorn, where austerity is by no means the dominant quality-is suited, as more ornate language could never have been, to the severity of the theme. This, and not its supposed identity with the language of the "middle and lower classes of society," is its true justification. It is true that, in this respect as in others, the poet has not yet gained absolute mastery of his weapons. It was not until the poems of the two following years that he found himself completely.

Compare the poems written during or after his visit to Germany (1798-99), and we

conscious of the difference. Pastorals. and Ruth (1799), in the

are at once

In Lucy Gray Leech-gatherer

(1802), or the Affliction of Margaret (1804), there is the same austerity of thought and imaginative touch. But the crudeness of the earlier poems, their insistence on outward circumstance, has vanished; and there is a dainty grace of language and of rhythmical movement which is a new thing in the form of Wordsworth's poetry, and which exactly

renders the change that had come over its spirit. His grip of facts is not loosened; his stern presentment of them is hardly softened; but, with diction and rhythm, both are idealised and transformed. The same thing, but with a difference, is true of the three Pastorals (1800), though it must be remembered that one of them, the Story of Margaret,1 was in part composed before the year of the Lyrical Ballads, at the same period as the Yew-tree and Guilt and Sorrow. Written in blank verse, they necessarily differ, both in diction and in rhythmical quality, from the more lyrical pieces to which, in subject, they belong. But nowhere has Wordsworth grasped the tragedy of peasant life more closely, nowhere has he handled it with more poignant fidelity, than here. In the two greatest of these poems, in Margaret and Michael, there are pages, there are single lines, which have gathered into themselves the crushing, speechless sorrow of years.

If the six years following his return from France (1792-98) form the turning-point in the history of Wordsworth's inward growth, it is 1799 Poems of 1799. which is the crucial year in the development of his poetic powers. To that year belong, beside the pieces already mentioned, the Poet's Epitaph and the series of poems concerning the ideal Lucy. And it is in them that, if we except the Tintern lines and one or two of the naturepoems in Lyrical Ballads, his genius first shows itself in its full strength; unshackled by the defiant theory

1 It is to be found in the first book of The Excursion.

of the previous year, untroubled by the breath of realism which that theory had carried in its train. The "sojourn among unknown men," though it has been set down as barren of results, did that inestimable service to the poet. It gave to the life and scenes, among which his spirit never ceased to linger, just that touch of remoteness which, to so brooding a genius as his, was the one thing needful before they could be lifted from the region of bald fact into the golden light of the ideal.

Poems of

nature.

But it is time to return to the third and last group of poems contained in the Lyrical Ballads, the poems of nature. In this field, it need hardly be said, Words worth is at least as original as in his poetry of man. And in this field, as we have seen, he reached his full strength, he found the secret of complete harmony between thought and expression, between form and matter, earlier than in the other. In no poem that he ever wrote is he more true to himself, in none is the correspondence between form and substance more spontaneous and absolute, than in the Lines written above Tintern, and In Early Spring, in Expostulation and Reply, and the companion piece, The Tables Turned; or, finally, in the poem beginning "It is the first mild day of March." Within the next few years these poems may have been equalled. But it is certain they were never surpassed.

What, then, is it that Wordsworth did for the poetry of nature? Wherein lies his strength as the poet of nature? He opened for man a new bodily sense, and

he opened for him a new spiritual sense. And through these two channels-but, in the last resort, the two merge into one-he brought man nearer to nature than any other poet has done, before or since. It is not only that his eye for the "outward shows of sky and earth" was marvellously keen; in this he may have been rivalled, and even excelled, by later poetspoets who, like Coleridge, had trained their vision by his. It is not even that these things came to him charged, merely as outward shows, with a deeper significance than they have borne to others. It is that behind the outward forms of nature he was conscious of an abiding spirit, full of joy itself and an everflowing fountain of joy for the man who, "in a wise passiveness," has schooled himself to "see into the life. of things," for the heart that is willing "to watch and to receive."

It is this "deep power of joy" which Wordsworth found in nature, and which he brought to nature, Wordsworth's that makes his secret and his strength. joy in nature. It is this, as Coleridge saw, that gave "the strong music in his soul" and in the inspired moments of his utterance. And it is just this joy which has remained an impenetrable mystery to so many of his critics, who have persisted in regarding the utterances of such inspired moments as "half playful sallies"; "charming" as "poetry," but, if taken seriously, no better than the

mere

1 See the Ode on Dejection, which was originally addressed to Wordsworth. Hence the allusion at the end to the "little child" (Lucy Gray), afterwards unhappily transferred to Otway.