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we have seen, Coleridge in some respects followed the beaten road of romance more nearly than in his earlier effort. And we can hardly be wrong in supposing that it was this rather than its more. elusive qualities that caught the fancy of men like Byron and Scott. However that may be, it is certain that in its unpublished state Christabel made a deep impression upon both these poets, and its influence on the Lay of the Last Minstrel, on a famous passage of Childe Harold, and, in spite of the author's disclaimer, on the opening lines of the Siege of Corinth, is apparent. Franked by such sponsors, Christabel, when at last published (1816), met with a far more cordial reception than its predecessor, though the Edinburgh and the Examiner, perhaps the critics in general, still retained their contemptuous frown. But the hour of Romance was now fully come, and the phantom ship of Coleridge was towed into harbour by the rougher craft of Byron and Scott.

Something of the same hesitation was shown by the public of the day in making up its mind about and Words Wordsworth. The cry of childishness and worth. affected singularity seems to have been an afterthought, largely the invention of Jeffrey, who, however, did not deliver sentence until 1807. At the moment of publication the test-poems seem to have passed without serious challenge. The reviewers and Fox, in his letter of 1801, was substantially at one with them spoke with some benevolence of The Thorn, The Idiot Boy, and even of Goody Blake. On the other hand, the far greater

poems, those which came from the writer's very heart, were left almost entirely without notice-"It is the first mild day of March" and the lines above Tintern ; just as Fox, in the letter referred to, was forced to admit his indifference to Michael and The Brothers. After Jeffrey had spoken the tide turned heavily against Wordsworth, and for many years, though his influence must steadily have grown with the discerning few, his name to the general public was a byword.

And in a certain sense that public deserves our sympathy. For even now the position of Wordsworth Wordsworth's is not altogether easy to determine. So realism. many strands mingle in his genius that it is hard to disentangle them. The vein of realism which appears in the Ballads of 1798 has been sometimes taken for more than it is worth. The truth is that after that year it sinks beneath the surface, and in his later poetry hardly requires to be reckoned with. Moreover, alike in intention and in method, it is something very different from such realism as Crabbe's. The latter is so intent on the misery of life, that he has small attention left. for the nobler qualities it calls out. His eye is fixed so rigidly on the sordid side of man's lot, that he fails to see the light which touches and irradiates it. Hence, in order to drive home the squalor of things, he tends to multiply details, till the imagination, so far from being roused, is fairly stunned by their importunity. He paints one corner of the wood rather than the whole, and he paints that one corner so minutely that the wood can hardly be seen for the

trees. The fault of Wordsworth, on the other hand, is not over-minuteness, but irrelevancy, of detail. His choice of subject, when most ill-judged, is prompted not by love of squalor but by a belief, mistaken enough in some cases, that he had found the secret of touching common things to the finer issues of imaginative interpretation. His "realism," in fact, needs to be fenced round with so many qualifications that, strictly speaking, it cannot be called realism at all.

Again, there is beyond dispute a strain of romance in the genius of Wordsworth. But here, too, it is necessary to distinguish. His romance is His romance. never that of the supernatural; nor, again, is it the romance of stirring incident or adventure. "The moving accident is not my trade" - the whole body of his poetry bears witness to the truth of this confession. And though he had a curious art in suggesting supernatural effects, he is punctilious in avoiding the use of supernatural machinery. Peter Bell and, to take less disputable instances, the opening scene of Guilt and Sorrow and more than one passage in the earlier books of the Prelude, are proof positive how easily he might have surrendered himself to supernatural influences, had not his will been firmly set against it. As it is, such passages stand by themselves in rendering the sense of supernatural awe which has none but purely natural causes to inspire it.

But if the romanticism of Wordsworth does not lie in adventure nor-save with the limitations just indicated in the supernatural; if it does not lie in a

genius for evoking the past nor in the magic which calls before us the men and scenes of distant lands; what direction, it may be asked, is there left for it to seek? The answer is that, though he does not, like Scott, live habitually in the past, and though his imagination does not instinctively turn, as that of Moore and Byron turned, to remote regions, yet there is no poet who, on occasion, has more truly rendered the innermost feeling of the past; there is none, at the rare moments when the impulse took him, who has portrayed so vividly, if not the human passions, at least the natural sights and sounds of a far country. Where shall we find the martial note of the Middle Ages more boldly struck than in the opening passage of the Feast of Brougham Castle? Where the wistful memory of the last struggles of a dying race more faithfully echoed than in the song of the Reaper, mourning

"For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago"?

Again, the "crackling flashes" of the Northern Lights in the Forsaken Indian Woman; the nightingale chanting "to weary bands of travellers" in the oasis of the desert; the cuckoo "breaking the silence of the seas Among the farthest Hebrides"; the white doe gliding through the ivied arch; the "fairy crowds of islands" in the boundless lakes of Canada; the tropical forests of Georgia, and the trailing wreaths of scarlet blossom that "cover a hundred leagues and seem To set the hills on fire"-what are all these but the very essence of romance ? It is true that in most

or all of these poems some turn is ultimately given which, of set purpose, takes off the edge of the romantic impression. But the romance is there, for all that, an element essential to the general effect of the poem, though it may not, and does not, dominate the whole. Nor is it only in the choice of theme or episode for a given poem that the romantic impulse can be traced. It flashes upon us now and again where we should least expect it; in a chance simile or metaphor that has found its way into the most rapt meditations of the poet and betrays the hidden bent of his imagination; in the image of the "pliant harebell swinging in the breeze Of some grey rock," and then torn from its birthplace and "tossed about in whirlwind"; in the line which struck an answering chord in the heart of Lamb, "Calm is all nature, as a resting wheel"; in a score of other instances no less impalpable, but no less unmistakable, than these.

It is in the Prelude (1799-1805) that the romantic strain reveals itself most clearly, and perhaps in its most distinctive form. It is not merely The Prelude. that the spirit of the boyish poet was fed, as he there tells us, on the visions of romance; that he turned by preference, and from the first, to such storehouses of fantasy as the Faerie Queene and the Arabian Nights. Nor is it merely that his whole youth was passed in an atmosphere of adventure; adventure homely enough, no doubt, in its outward semblance, but charged with all the effects that incidents far more recondite could have had upon his spirit. It is all this; but it is much

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