magnificent lines composed by Coleridge after his brother-bard had finished the recitation of his poem on the "Growth of an Individual Mind."

That prophetic lay,

Wherein (high theme by thee first sung aright)
Of the foundations, and the building up
Of a Human Spirit, thou hast dared to tell
What may be told, to the understanding mind
Revealable.

Of moments awful,

Now in thy inner life, and now abroad,

When power streamed from thee, and thy soul received
The light reflected, as a light bestowed.

It was the movements of nature in tempest and in calm that had kindled alike the rapturous mood and the despondent mood described in "Resolution and Independence"; and if the poet subsequently recognised in the "decrepit" man before him, bent double by age, a "stately" monitor "from some far region sent," it was because he gazed on that feeble form with that creative eye which he had ever bent upon Nature, and because he had received from both alike "the light reflected" of his own intelligence, as “a light bestowed."

It is not without cause that I have insisted on the passion of Wordsworth's poetry. It has been admired for its wisdom, and doubtless it is wise; for its purity, and nothing can be more pure; for its truthfulness to Nature, and it is ever true to her; but if it had possessed these merits alone and unmixed with passion, it would have lacked what is essentially characteristic of it.

Remove from Wordsworth's meditative poetry

the element of passion-not the passion which obscures and destroys, but that "unconsuming fire of light" which kindles into a more radiant distinctness all that it touches-and much of it would sink into the merely didactic, that is to say, the prosaic. Doubtless, in the large mass of Wordsworth's meditative poetry not a few passages are to be found which scarcely claim to be poetical; but these are palpably distinct from the body of his philosophical poetry. There is no great poet without his unpoetical passages. Such passages in Wordsworth proceed from the circumstance that, though a great poet, he was not a poet only; he was a moral and political thinker also; and if a particular thought possessed in his estimate a serious ethical value, he did not reject it merely because it made little for his poetry. It was to him a link in a chain of consecutive thought, or it held a necessary, though not an exalted, place in some theme which, while not unconnected with poetic truth, had yet closer relations with the wellbeing of his country. Nor is this all: Wordsworth more strongly than almost any other poet insists upon the vital character of true poetry; but he knew also that no poetry can uniformly maintain its highest level, and that to descend to a lower is never so pardonable as when that descent is made in order to bring forgotten truths into practical application. He wrote for the weal of man; otherwise he would not have written "as a true man who long had served the Muse."

The essentially poetic character which belongs to

Wordsworth's philosophical strain is by nothing more shown than by the contrast in which it stands to his exceptional passages of a merely didactic character. In them he drops nearly to the level of writers such as Cowper, who in their day did excellent service, both literary and moral, but who were not great poets. It is in reference to them only that one can accept the allegation that Wordsworth has no "style." In them the metre also becomes relaxed, or else becomes monotonous from a singular reason-viz. because the pauses are varied too frequently to produce the massive effects of metrical variety. The ear is no more de

lighted by the mere metrical contrast between line and line than the eye is charmed by the alternations of black and white squares on a chess-board. That variety which carries with it a musical significance is produced by the contrast between whole metrical periods or paragraphs, each excellent, but different one from another; the stream of harmony now winding in long smooth curves, now circling in eddies, now breaking in falls, but every portion wafting along it a separate song. In Wordsworth's didactic passages, and sometimes in others of a merely narrative character, the diction suffers as much as the metre, now becoming prosaic and now failing to be strong. Such passages never substitute false attraction for real merit. They at once indicate their lack of inspiration. The admission is one which truth requires; but it is also one which Wordsworth can afford. Aliquando dormitat. It is in the case of the greatest poets that we most

vividly feel the difference between the inspired and the uninspired portion of their work. In Wordsworth we recognise the higher inspiration, no less in his philosophical than in his most familiar verse. It is marked by everything; by the more condensed and weightier diction, never artificial, never pretentious, but simple, expressive, and majestic; by the metre, no longer vague or purposeless, but advancing with "the certain step of man," or the musing step of the great thinker; and by that closer interpenetration of thought, of emotion, and of imagination, which means passion.

There are very various forms of poetic passion, and its least obvious are sometimes its noblest. Of this we find examples in such poems as "The Happy Warrior," and "Lines left on a seat in a Yew Tree." That personal passion does not characterise these poems is true; but that they rest upon an under-swelling intellectual and imaginative passion, and thence derive their power of exciting the reader's emotion, will become apparent at once to every one who compares them with those "moralising" passages of inferior poets, which rather record convictions long since attained, than embody thoughts quickened during the ardour of composition. In this sense the "Ode to Duty" is impassioned, and no less the "Ode against Jacobinism," for such it might well be entitled, which begins

Who rises on the banks of Seine?

These poems are doubtless chiefly characterised by

their wisdom; but they will seem unimpassioned only to those for whom passion is a feeble thing with a small range. When Milton defines poetry as that which must be "simple, sensuous, and impassioned," it is probably to this intellectual passion that he refers, as contradistinguished from the self-possessed serenity with which the intellect works in prose compositions, rather than to passion as a vehement appeal to the personal sympathies. Passion in the latter sense is rarely to be found in his own poetry; while passion in the former sense eminently characterises the greater part of Paradise Lost, and the nobler passages in Paradise Regained. His sonnet on the "Piedmontese Massacre" is the most impassioned of his minor poems, far more so than either of those two personal poems, the sonnet on his "Blindness," or that on his "Deceased Wife," yet its passion is wholly of a moral and political order. Passion of the same order constitutes the surpassing merit not only of many, but of most of Wordsworth's "Sonnets dedicated to Liberty." To have sustained such passion in its elevation through a series of more than seventy sonnets-for to these trumpet-peals we cannot apply his own line on Milton's

Soul-animating strains, alas too few— required a genius ardent in an extraordinary degree. In these poems its ardours derive their sustenance exclusively from the aliment of ethical contemplation. In the sonnet to Toussaint L'Ouverture, passion rises into exultation