Which, in his tuneful course, the wind draws forth

From rocks, woods, caverns, heaths, and dashing shores ;
And well those lofty brethren bear their part
In the wild concert-chiefly when the storm
Rides high; then all the upper air they fill
With roaring sound, that ceases not to flow,
Like smoke, along the level of the blast,
In mighty current; theirs, too, is the song
Of stream and headlong flood that seldom fails;
And, in the grim and breathless hour of noon,
Methinks that I have heard them echo back
The thunder's greeting. Nor have Nature's laws
Left them ungifted with a power to yield
Music of finer tone; a harmony

So do I call it, though it be the hand

Of silence, though there be no voice ;-the clouds,
The mist, the shadows, light of golden suns,
Motions of moonlight, all come thither-touch,
And have an answer-thither come, and shape
A language not unwelcome to sick hearts
And idle spirits :-there the sun himself,
At the calm close of summer's longest day,
Rests his substantial orb ;-between those heights
And on the top of either pinnacle,

More keenly than elsewhere in night's blue vault,

Sparkle the stars, as of their station proud.
Thoughts are not busier in the mind of man
Than the mute agents stirring there :-alone
Here do I sit and watch."

The deep underlying thought of all this belief in the love and intercommunion of all things-the thought which makes Nature, in this conception of her, divine-was that this endless interchange of life and joy was in reality, not the type of, but actually, the never-ceasing self-reciprocation of God. He divides Himself into a myriad forms, and lives in each distinctly, and makes His own ineffable society and enjoyment by living with Himself from form to form, by loving Himself, and by self-communion

through infinitely varied activity and beauty and sacrifice, giving and receiving Himself for ever in the universe. And yet, though I say self in these sentences, it is because we must so express it, in order to get the idea. There is no Self in our sense of the word in God, none except the consciousness of perfect Being: and we can best express what that consciousness of Being is by saying that it is for ever the unspeakable delight of everlasting thought unremittingly passing into creative activity, in which that which we call self is so lost as never to be known.

This is the idea of Life in Nature, which Wordsworth has given to the world. It fills the heart of his readers; it makes of Nature a new thing to them; it makes the commonest walk in the woods a delight, a teaching, a society; it fills the world with life and energy and joy; it uplifts us sometimes when alone among the hills-when Nature is in one of her wild moods, and her life most intelligent and most eager, into a kindred ecstasy in which we long to be borne away with wind and cloud to join the mighty stream of rejoicing Life. So was it once at least with Wordsworth: and with this I close.

"Oh! what a joy it were, in vigorous health,

To have a body (this our vital frame

With shrinking sensibility endued,

And all the nice regards of flesh and blood) *
And to the elements surrender it

As if it were a spirit !-How divine,
The liberty, for frail, for mortal man,
To roam at large among unpeopled glens
And mountainous retirements, only trod
By devious footsteps; regions consecrate
To oldest time! and, reckless of the storm
That keeps the raven quiet in her nest,
Be as a presence or a motion-one

Among the many there; and while the mists
Flying, and rainy vapours, call out shapes
And phantoms from the crags and solid earth
As fast as a musician scatters sounds

Out of an instrument; and while the streams
(As at a first creation and in haste
To exercise their untried faculties)
Descending from the region of the clouds,
And starting from the hollows of the earth
More multitudinous every moment, rend
Their way before them-what a joy to roam
An equal among mightiest energies;
And haply sometimes with articulate voice,
Amid the deafening tumult, scarcely heard
By him that utters it, exclaim aloud,
"Rage on ye elements! let moon and stars
Their aspects lend, and mingle in their turn
With this commotion (ruinous though it be)
From day to night, from night to day, prolonged!"

LECTURE VI.

In my last lecture I spoke of the meaning Wordsworth had for the term "Nature," of his conception of Nature as having a life of her own and of the characteristics of that life, its endless joy, central peace, and how all its forms, each having their own life, were knit together by unselfish love. But these are terms which are true of humanity also; we can say that human nature is capable of joy and peace and love, and Wordsworth does say that we see in Nature similar passions to our own. But though he thought them similar, he did not think them identical; he drew a clear distinction between them, between the life in Nature and that in Man. On this distinction I must now enlarge, in order that I may come to that part of my subject which treats of the education that Nature gives to man; a thought that pervades the whole of Wordsworth's poetry.

There are poets who impute to Nature their own moods and feelings, as when Tennyson makes the larkspur listen for Maud's footstep, or when Coleridge, giving to natural things the power of man, makes the Wind an actor or a poet. This is what Ruskin calls the "pathetic fallacy;' and a few instances, such as the phrase "forlorn cascades,'

where the lonely water-fall seems to him abandoned by the world because he feels himself forlorn, exist in Wordsworth; but he always means to distinguish clearly between his own feelings and those which he believes belong to things outside himself. The Me and the not-Me are not the same. It is not the poet who makes Nature this or that by giving himself to her; it is she who builds up part of his being by communicating herself to him. It is not that the sea is in this or that special mood, because he is in it, or that the birds sing of certain things of which he is thinking, but that the sea has its own moods, and that the birds sing their own emotions:

The birds around me hopped and played

Their thoughts I cannot measure :

He does not define their thoughts: he is only certain that they do think, and have pleasure and pain of their

own:

But the least motion that they made

It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

It is the same thing with flowers and rocks and clouds; he could not express their kind of existence, but he was certain of its being a feeling existence :

And 'tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

He is, of course, obliged to use the same terms as ye use about our thinking and feeling, when he speaks of the life which natural things live, but he does not identify their thoughts and feelings with ours. They are similar to ours but they differ from ours, being conditioned by the different material through which they work, in a much

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