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tecture, painting, and sculpture as well, is poetry, and that alone gives the glory to the work. Thus, too, high mountain-peaks, clothed with the pure chaste snow, and turned to glory by the rosy gilding of the sun, are seen afar off, and are beauteous, wondrous, ennobling, and grand, and form indeed the mountain, while we regard not the vast, barren, and heaped-up mass which lies at the foot and in the middle regions.

This, then, is the development of poetry. It amuses people in their wild and rough youth; it teaches them and instructs them; afterwards it inspires and ennobles them in their maturity and age.

In preceding chapters the reader was conducted down to the period when, through Dryden, Pope, Young and William Cowper, English poetry became, not the plaything—as it was in the days of the Restoration -but the priestess; and in the hands of William Wordsworth, the greatest and purest of our metaphysical poets, she assumed something of a grandeur which she had never exhibited before. What that is, Wordsworth himself shall tell. "I have felt," he says,

A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime,
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit which impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Wordsworth was born in 1770, and died in 1850, and during all that long period never appears to have done or thought anything base. Attracted and surprised by the great French Revolution, he and his friends, Southey

and Coleridge, fancied that they recognized in that movement much that was great and noble, and a regeneration of the people. Southey, born in 1774, wrote "Wat Tyler," a tragedy, in which the right of insurrection against tyranny—a right which no one now denies-was plainly enforced. Wordsworth wrote a sonnet on the dungeon where Henry Marten, the regicide, was confined. Coleridge asserted that France had "stamped her strong foot and vowed she would be free." In short, the three young men and their school exhibited such a love of humanity, French democracy, expansion of mind and liberty, that all the old Tory school of England was set against them, and critic after critic spat his spite upon them, calling them the Cockney school, the Lakers, the Lake school, and holding them up to ridicule and hatred. With them, but not of them, were Leigh Hunt (born in 1784), a true poet and a most finished scholar, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats, three poets, finely gifted, delicate, and noble, but of varied methods and powers. On their side in delicacy of conception and in religious feeling were William Lisle, Bowles (born in 1762), George Crabbe, Samuel Rogers, Walter Savage Landor, Thomas Campbell, and others, who have acquired already the position of classics in the English language. While opposed to them in elevation of feeling, in treatment of subject, in knowledge, and in reverence, yet inspired by the same wondrous poetry, were two men of brilliant genius, of piercing power, lofty imaginings, but of far lower aspirations-George Gordon Byron and Thomas Moore. As the contest was before the lady of the tournament, the world, it is needless to say who immediately won. Lord Byron, who wrote love verses, satire, personal and

BYRON-MOORE.

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descriptive poems, tragedy and tragi-comedy, and who pressed his fiery Pegasus into every arena, making him bound and curvet before the public in a most astounding manner, was adjudged to be the first knight, and won not only the crown, whereby he became comet of the season, but, in a very few years, more than £15,000 sterling for his verses. Southey found that his solid and scholarly verse would not pay at all, and retired to write more scholarly and more splendid prose. Shelley won scandal, objurgation, hatred. Coleridge gave the most imaginative poetry to the world it had ever seen since "Comus" and "Queen Mab;" and the world, by the pens of the critics, said he was an incomprehensible madman; so he retired, too, to metaphysics, religion, talk upon every subject in the world. —the finest uninspired talk ever listened to--and to be a pensioner on his friends' kindness. Wordsworth never found poetry pay in his lifetime, though he enjoyed the barren title of "laureate," and retired to the hills of Cumberland, to live alone with nature; while Thomas Moore, familiarly called "Tommy," exhibited his muse in a very free and careless undress, wrote love songs, Persian tales, Irish melodies, translations of Anacreon, ditties for the drawing-room, and erotic stanzas for the after-dinner gatherings of the men of those days, dying in full savour of fame, having been rewarded by the public with at least £30,000 in his long life, for prose and verse. But now the world, having recovered its senses, reverses the base verdict which she gave; and on the most conspicuous pedestals allotted in the Temple of Fame to the men of their day, stand Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley. Wordsworth has the honour of being the poet of

Nature, and living under her habitual sway. “Nature," he says, "never did betray the heart that worshipped her;" and the poet, it is worthy of remark, not only worships the inner worth and truth in man, and in his soul, but also the external forms and manifestations of God's power and goodness, as well as his greatness and wisdom, that are seen in the clouds, the sea, the rocks, the mountains, or the flowers.

To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Beyond this frequent reference to what is noble and pure—a sentiment beyond all praise, and fit accompaniment of the highest genius-the poet felt that he was a priest of the Muse, and spoke out in every way, and on every occasion, against the advancing selfishness and worldliness of the age. He had throughout the deepest religion, and reliance, not so much on himself as on his inspirer, God. Truth, beauty, love, hope, simplicity, were what he sought to bring men back to. A severe student, he polished and arranged his verse, and wrote much; and much of this is prosaic, stilted, and of little worth. But what he does well is equal to any in the language. His ode on the "Intimations of Immortality" is simply the very finest piece of its kind that ever was written or will be written. It is unsurpassed and unsurpassable. His sonnets are almost equal to Milton's—what higher praise could be given? his "Excursion" the finest moral and meditative poem, without a purpose, ever written. He had a curiosa felicitas in single lines that is marvellous. Take those two that we have quoted, and these in his sonnet to Milton

WORDSWORTH'S LINES.

Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea,
Pure as the naked heavens-majestic, free.

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And also these, on beholding London from Westminster Bridge

Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep;
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God, the very houses seem asleep,
And all that mighty heart is lying still.

All these lines have indeed, in Wordsworth's own words

Many a

and when first read are like a revelation. student of this great man may not himself be an articulate poet, but as he studies he will love true goodness and poetry more and more, become an infinitely happier man, gifted with a higher kind of happiness, and will regard his fellow men with a sweeter reverence and love. Algernon Swinburne, himself a great but imperfect poet, says of him, "The incommunicable, the immitigable might of Wordsworth, when the god has indeed fallen on him, cannot but be felt by all, and can but be felt by any; none can partake and catch it up. There are many men greater than he—there are men much greater; but what he has of greatness is his only. His concentration, his majesty, his pathos, have no parallel: some have gone higher, many lower; none have touched precisely the same point as he." Wordsworth has been laughed at for his simplicity, because his art is so great, and he has concealed it with such care, that many think it is