relieved, we find such a relief in his poetry through his delight in beauty. He speaks in one of his sonnets of "the mighty ravishment of spring," and some of that vernal rapture lives in his own verse.

III. WORDSWORTH IN RELATION TO HIS AGE.

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WORDSWORTH's originality as a poet does not consist in detachment from his age; his poetry embodies some of the leading tendencies of his time, but in passing through his mind these were purified and ennobled. The years of his early manhood were those of the great Revolutionary upheaval in France, and Wordsworth was for a time an ardent partisan on the side of the Revolution. What remained to him of that early faith after the historical development of the movement in France had alienated his sympathies? The answer to this question has been so well given by Dr Edward Caird that little need be added to his statement. Of the so-called return to nature" in the second half of the eighteenth century, a new feeling for the wilder and grander aspects of natural beauty in the visible world was a part. Rousseau, a prophet of the Revolution, had given eloquent. utterance to this feeling. Wordsworth, endowed as he was with the finest sensibility of eye and ear and possessing a poet's imagination, was peculiarly well fitted to express this sentiment. He dealt with it not in a vague rhetorical way, but with all the advantages derived from exact observation, and a close, imaginative study of the facts of the external world. And because his temper was one of sanity, he did not, in the manner of some other writers inspired by the Revolution, set up at least in his maturer work opposition between nature and human society. Half of

any

Byron's feeling for external nature lies in his recoil, sometimes rather rhetorical than real, from man and the conditions of humanity. Wordsworth, on the contrary, sees man in connection with external nature, and interprets in his poetry their spiritual interaction and coöperation.

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A second note of the Revolutionary epoch is expressed by the word "simplification." This also had its exponent in Rousseau, while in English literature it found a voice through Cowper, Day (the author of Sandford and Merton ") and other writers. It was a return to nature" from luxury, convention, ceremonial, the artificial life of courts and cities. "God made the country," said Cowper, "and man made the town." The life of the peasant was supposed to be more favorable for the true development of manhood than the life of the courtier. The Revolution did homage to man as man, and professed to strip off and despise the accidental trappings of our humanity. Dangers, however, accompanied this cry for "simplification"- the danger of sentimentality, the danger of extravagance, the danger of one-sided bitterEach of these is abundantly illustrated by the literature of the time. Wordsworth began, not with declamations against luxury, but by simplifying his own life with a view to accomplishing his proper work; "plain living and high thinking" became his rule; and therefore he could not be a sentimentalist. His strong good sense preserved him from such extravagances and crude experiments as make certain passages in the life of Thomas Day read like scenes from a comedy. He did not plead for a recovery of barbarism; simple as was his manner of living in Dove Cottage, he and his sister enjoyed the cultured delights of the mind; Spenser and Ariosto, Dante and Shakespeare were their companions; they desired to build up, not to pull down; and so they were free from bitterness. When Wordsworth's early faith in the French Revolution was lost, he did not lose his

ness.

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sense of the dignity of plain manhood; rather he realized this more fully, as it passed from the form of an abstract doctrine to that of a concrete experience. He could discern all that makes our human nature venerable in a leech gatherer or a pedlar; but neither of these appears in his verse as an indignant champion of the rights of man. "Humble and rustic life,” he tells us, was generally chosen" for the matter of his poetry, "because in that condition the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are under less restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings exist in a state of greater simplicity, and consequently may be more accurately contemplated and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings, and, from the necessary character of rural occupations, are more easily comprehended, and are more durable; and, lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature."

Wordsworth's deep sense of the worth of native manhood carries with it, almost of necessity, a faith and hope in the future destiny of man. But the over-sanguine optimism of the Revolutionary period, which looked forward to a terrestrial Paradise, to be attained as soon as the last throne should be cast down and the last church demolished, was not Wordsworth's creed, or was not his creed for long. He did not expect, or he soon ceased to expect, that the millenium was about to arrive as the result of any new political form or political combination; but a conviction grew upon him that the whole frame of things is essentially good, and that there is a power in nature to breathe grandeur, even if not happiness, as he says, "upon the very humblest face of human life." It was not that he shut his eyes to the evil or sorrow

of the world; he saw these, and looked at them unflinchingly; but he seemed also to see through and beyond them, and to discover light as the cause of the shadow; and as he advanced in years his philosophic faith was strengthened by a faith distinctively Christian. "He can stand in the shadow of death and pain, ruin and failure, with a sympathy that is almost painful in its quiet intensity; yet the sense of *something far more deeply interfused' which makes our noisy years seem moments in the being of the eternal silence'; the faith in the omnipotence of love and man's unconquerable mind' is never destroyed or even weakened in him. The contemplation of evil and pain always ends with him, by an inevitable recoil, in an inspired expression of his faith in the good which transmutes and transfigures it, as clouds are changed into manifestations of the sunlight they strive to hide." And such convictions as these, while they necessarily tended to check extravagant hopes of any sudden advent of an age of gold, did not lessen his interest in whatever he believed might really tend to ameliorate the condition of society, influences for good with which he trusted that his own work as a poet might in its degree coöperate.

The war of England against the French Republic for a time caused a painful division in Woodsworth's feelings, and checked his sympathies with his native land. The defence of European liberty against the Napoleonic tyranny con verted him into an English patriot. The struggle in Spain, which seemed to Wordsworth to be the uprising of a wronged and indignant people against their oppressors, not a war of monarchs or of dynasties, aroused his most passionate interest; his thoughts and feelings can be read in the politica sonnets and in the pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra The true strength of a nation, as he believed, resides not in

1 E. Caird.

material resources, not in mechanical arrangements, not in the power of armies, not in natural advantages of frontier or mountain and flood, but in its moral temper, in the soul. And when at length Napoleon was overthrown, Wordsworth looked upon the victory not primarily as a military achievement, bnt as the triumph of moral forces.

The English people, he thought, had been tried and had stood the test. English institutions had undergone a prolonged strain, and they had borne it well. His attachment to the constitution, to the church, to all that is inherited and traditional, had grown strong, and he had come to regard with distrust some of those tendencies of his own day that made for change. Living among a peasantry who, compared with the shifting population of great cities, might be named aristocratic, and whose best feelings were bound up with permanent objects and interests, he feared the inroad of new forces which might disturb and confuse their hearts and lives. He rejoiced in the advance of modern science in so far as science served the cause of order in things intellectual; in so far as it furnished guidance and support to the power of the mind when faring forth on its explorations; in so far as the knowledge which it attained could be made subservient to moral or spiritual purposes. He distrusted science when it chained the spirit of man to merely material things, when it converted a human being into a mere lens for microscopic observation, when it resulted in mere accumulation of external details, or when its conjectures and hypotheses seemed to give the lie to truths of , the conscience and the heart. Great mechanical and indusA trial progress was a feature of the time. Wordsworth could exult in every proof of intellectual mastery exercised over the blind elements, in the imparting of something almost like a soul to brute matter, in the growing dominion of man over the powers of nature. But he feared that man might