all the loveliness, for example, mirrored in a countryside, may enter into human consciousness unconditionally, and mould the very features of the initiate. In such lines as the following, the maiden has become as surely part of nature as the words that describe the rivulets have the motion of the stream:

The stars of midnight shall be dear

To her; and she shall lean her ear

In many a secret place

Where rivulets dance their wayward round,

And beauty born of murmuring sound

Shall pass into her face.

44

It is the idea of nature, of which the phenomenal world is only the transient form, that, playing perpetually upon human sensibility, can so transform the matter of life. Man can thus drink of life at the source without intoxication, and complete his oneness with the creative spirit that pervades with its own divine vitality" both the "forest-tree" and humanity itself, without transgressing the universal concord which is as intense an aim of life as that of self-expression. So only is man's mind proved unconquerable by time, change, or apparent disappointment, because it is made one with the creative mind itself. Of all such it may be said as of the child of one of his most famous sonnets:

Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year;
And worshipp'st at the Temple's inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not.

For Wordsworth's study of nature in her small

workings no less than his wonder at her moments of monumental beauty, convinced him of the existence of an originating spirit, a vast prototype of the human mind, of which the phenomenal world was the expression. "It appeared to me," he says,

The type

Of a majestic intellect, its acts

And its possessions, what it has and craves,
What in itself it is, and would become.
There I beheld the emblem of a mind
That feeds upon infinity, that broods
Over the dark abyss, intent to hear
Its voice issuing forth to silent light
In one continuous stream; a mind sustained
By recognitions of transcendent power,
In sense conducting to ideal form,

In soul of more than mortal privilege.

To him, therefore, God was the great poet of existence, the absolute symbol of both human intellect and instinct, the infinite creative being whose medium was the universe, and whose desire after more perfect expression never failed, but renewed itself from moment to moment, and generation to generation.

It was, then, Wordsworth's distinction to reconcile, instead of confusing, the actual and the ideal, the phenomenal and the eternal. He was no idle dreamer or impatient visionary. He would neither solace himself with abstractions, nor accept the easy vicious creed of ingenious naturalism. He knew that physical nature, with its impulses and desires, its fiery sensuousness, its cruelty and its cunning, was the soil

upon which all purified life must grow, if it is not to degenerate into the sterile offspring of mechanical mind. The physical and the rational were in him supremely fused, until instinct was transformed into mystical intuition. And so natural decay, and transient misfortune, the worldly spectacle of pain and folly, were impotent to crush his faith. Death itself was only an expression of active and beneficent life, a reason rather for confidence and exultation than for sorrow. As he wrote when he heard of the expected death of Mr. Fox:

A power is passing from the earth
To breathless Nature's dark abyss;
But when the great and good depart
What is it more than this-

That Man, who is from God sent forth,

Doth yet again to God returns

Such ebb and flow must ever be,

Then wherefore should we mourn?

Wordsworth believed in the innocence, not of nature or of man, but of life. It was for man to make of himself an instrument through which the creative music might sound at its truest and most potent, to see that the world of his own sensuous and intellectual being, no less than that of men at large, should be one in which the constructive spirit was everywhere alive, in which instinct could taste an uncloying exultation, being purged of every destructive, possessive or dominating desire; and in which thought, tamed of its pride, together with

affection and human kindness, were rather natural unlegalised attitudes than the result of prescribed conduct or conventional morality: a world which the sense of universal kinship bathed in genial sunshine, and quickened with the perpetual joy of spring. This vision was Wordsworth's. It lacked in its purest expressions nothing in ardency, even in intoxication; but it also submitted to the conditions of this earth and the dimensions under which we live. His enthusiasm was enriched, but also chastened, by truth. To some, Wordsworth's humility as a man seems to degrade his sovereignty as a poet. Yet Wordsworth learnt that the true sovereign in poetry, as in life, is the servant of his State, not the tyrant: that an Earthly Paradise is not to be gained either by natural or supernatural anarchy, but by inspired reason, sifting all material things, and shaping out of them the living beauty which haunts with ideal suggestion each visionary mind. It was as profitless to create spirit without body, as body without spirit; the idea and the fact needed each other, whether in nature or in man, and none could safely live in the radiance of ideal beauty who did not understand the hard logic of the material world. Life therefore imposed a double obligation, neither part of which could be disregarded:

Let good men feel the soul of nature,

And see things as they are.

CHAPTER VIII

THE STRICKEN YEARS

Our religions and moralities have been trimmed to flatter us, till they are all emasculate and sentimentalised, and only please and weaken. Truth is of a rougher strain. In the harsh face of life faith can read a bracing gospel.-R. L. STEVENSON.

I

It is easier to admit than to explain the spiritual nostalgia which modern taste detects so generally in Victorian literature. Many, possibly fearing infection, have preferred to dismiss the disease in summary terms rather than diagnose its intricate and particular causes. To-day, however, our criticism, if searching, should be free from the irritation of either envy or fear. Viewed generally, the Victorian age is apt to suggest a sultry, undulating plain, ignorant of either bright sunshine or unbroken cloud, with its solemnity undisturbed by lightning or its complacence by the threat of a gathering storm. Yet to assail this complacency with cynicism or irony is only to accept the condition and deplore it. It is not to understand either it or ourselves the better, which alone justifies the criticism of one age by another. Yet we are equally liable to miss the truth of an age, if, as some critics have done, we prove