all, it will be found that the pleasure excited arises from the simple association, in a beautiful metrical form, of objects that naturally affect the feelings, and that this pleasure diminishes in proportion as the poet intrudes his personality upon the reader, and endeavors to eke out the tenuity of his subject by analysis and reflec tion. In "Lucy Gray" the narrative is of the most direct kind; there is no sort of And thus continuing, she said, "I had a son, who many a day main for me. "The bird and cage they both were his : mental analysis employed; the exquisite If aught which he had owned might still recharm of the workmanship comes from the simple description of pathetic objects, and the admirable and unexpected turns of the ballad style in which the story is told. In "The Idle Shepherd Boys " the real beauty of the poem consists in the delightful landscape presented to the imagination in the first three stanzas, particularly the third:— Along the river's stony marge The sand-lark chants a joyous song; The thrush is busy in the wood, And carols loud and strong. A thousand lambs are on the rocks, Those boys with their green coronal; That plaintive cry which up the hill There is no analysis here; nothing but a musical combination of images that produce immediate pleasure in the mind and heart: such incidents as the narrative contains are redeemed from meanness only by falling in naturally with the beautiful pastoral scene called up before the imagination; and, even as it is, several stanzas are so prosaically expressed as to jar on the effect of the melodious opening. But take "The Sailor's Mother," and it will be seen that the occasional flatness of expression, which mars the completeness of "The Idle Shepherd Boys," prevails from the first line to the last with the exception perhaps of the second stanza. One morning (raw it was and wet, A woman in the road I met, Not old, though something past her prime; The ancient spirit is not dead; When last he sailed he left the bird behind, his mind. "He to a fellow-lodger's care Had left it to be watched and fed, I found it when my son was dead; I suppose that there is scarcely any one largely acquainted with poetry who would not say, on first reading it, that there was an incongruity between the matter of this poem and the metrical form in which it is expressed. But, "Hold, hold!" we may imagine Wordsworth to reply; "you are wrong to judge in this way; for, if you think about the poem, you will see that the simple incident it records puts you upon a train of the most suggestive reflection respecting the unseen spiritual world and the nature of the affections. The imagination has, therefore, discharged its functions properly. As I say in Peter Bell,' another poem of the same kind: — The dragon's wing, the magic ring "And that the imagination has this creative power of 'conferring additional properties upon an object, or abstracting from it some of those which it actually Old times, thought I, are breathing there; possesses,' I can prove to you by the Proud was I that my country bred Such strength, a dignity so fair: She begged an alms like one in poor estate; language which poets use. For instance, take the use of the word 'hang'in poetry: Preface to the edition of 1815. "In all these passages it is obvious that the quality of hanging does not really inhere in the object, but is conferred on it by the imagination, which I have, therefore, properly employed analytically, though in a different direction, to suggest a train of feeling connected with the incident of the sailor's mother. And as to your com plaint that there is an incongruity between the nature of the thought and the mode of its expression, that arises from the false ideas of poetical diction which you have derived from your study of the poets. True, I might have said what I had to say in prose, but why should I be condemned for attempting to add to such description the charm which, by the consent of all nations, is acknowledged to exist in metri. cal language? | missing all the other deities of Paganism the Muse should have been retained by common consent, for, in sober reality, writing good verses seems to depend upon something separate from the volition of the author. I sometimes think my fingers set up for themselves, independent of my head; for twenty times I have begun a thing on a certain plan, and never in my life adhered to it (in a work of imagination, that is) for half an hour together. This is a vivid description of the workwhich Byron so often declares in his let ing of the "estro or "afflatus," without ters that he cannot write well in metre; of that "Eros" which, Plato tells us in the imagination of the poet. Nor is it the first "Symposium," seizes and inflames the act of poetical conception alone which is performed in this manner; in all the imag inative arts the form of the work produced is largely determined by fortune and inof the painters preserved at Florence, a spiration. I remember among the studies rough design of (I think) Parmigianino, in which the artist, desiring to represent the image of terror on a man's face, has left on the paper three or four unsuccessful attempts, showing that he only attained idea that he had conceived. Milton, we by degrees the expression of the exact know, had originally resolved to cast" Paradise Lost" into the form of a drama. Nor can anything be more suggestive than the account which Lockhart gives of the growth of "The Lay of the Last Min strel: To this, however, the reader may reply confidently: "Your reasoning, no doubt, is very fine and ingenious, but the matter is one not for argument but for perception. If the association of ideas is so strongly rooted in my mind that no exercise of your imagination is able to overcome the repugnance I feel at finding a subject which seems to me naturally prosaic Sir John Stoddart's casual recitation, a year treated in _metre ; while, on the other hand, or two before, of Coleridge's unpublished you are often able to produce the highest "Christabel," had fixed the music of that pleasure in my mind by your metrical noble fragment in his memory; and it occurs treatment of more imaginative subjects; to him that by throwing the story of Gilpin and if, besides, this latter is evidently the Horner into somewhat of a similar cadence, way in which all great standard poets pro- metrical romance as would serve to connect he might produce such an echo of the later duce pleasure, is it not possible that on his "Conclusion" of the primitive Sir Tristram this occasion you have been employing with his imitations of the popular ballad in your imagination improperly?" Words-"The Grey Brother" and "Eve of St. John." worth seems to have thought that a poet could always write poetically by the mere exercise of his will. But the evidence of the greatest creative poetry proves that the imagination must, in the first place, be overmastered and possessed by an impulse from without, and Scott describes universal experience in the following passage of one of his letters: A single scene of feudal festivity in the hall of Branksome, disturbed by some pranks of a nondescript goblin, was probably all that he contemplated; but his accidental confinement in the midst of a volunteer camp gave him leisure to meditate his theme to the sound of a bugle; and suddenly there flashes on him the idea of extending his simple outline, so as to embrace a vivid panorama of that old border life of war and tumult, and all earnest passions, with which his researches on the "Minstrelsy " had by degrees fed his imagination, until every the minutest feature had been taken home and realized with unconscious intenseness of symI have endeavored in the above passage to con-pathy; so that he had won for himself in the dense the argument of Wordsworth's prefaces to the past another world, hardly less complete or editions of his poems published in 1805 and 1815. familiar than the present. Erskine of Crans Nobody knows that has not tried the feverish trade of poetry, how much it depends upon mood and whim: I don't wonder that in dis toun suggests that he would do well to divide the poem into cantos, and prefix to each of them a motto explanatory of the action, after the fashion of Spenser in "The Faery Queen." He pauses for a moment, and the happiest conception of the framework of a picturesque narrative that ever occurred to any poet-one that Homer might have envied the creation of the ancient harper starts to life. By such steps did "The Lay of the Last Minstrel " grow out of the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border." When the imagination is in this exhilarating atmosphere, as it requires some larger and bolder means of expression than is afforded to it by prose, it seizes on metre as naturally as a bird takes to the air, and employs the vivid metaphorical forms of language which led Wordsworth into his fallacious views about its methods of analysis and transmutation. Unless a man's imagination is inspired from without, and his design is conceived when the mind is in that excited state, he will do wrong to choose metre as his instrument of expression. Hence it is that so much of Wordsworth's verse seems to be written in violation of the laws of poetical art. In "The Excursion," for instance, though it is full of the most noble incidental passages, evidently written under the influence of direct inspiration, yet, as the design of the whole poem is certainly formed by a process of cool meditation, we are constantly haunted by a sense that we are in an atmosphere unfavorable to the movement of metre. I have opened "The Excursion" at random, and I light at once on the following passage:— To an exalted pitch (the self-same cause It is plain that these thoughts would be much more fittingly expressed in prose than they are in verse. Nor is this simply because the substance of them is philosophical and didactic, for so is the substance of the "Essay on Man," and yet the thought in the "Essay on Man" is (for the reason given by Pope, and quoted in my last paper) expressed better in metre than it could be in prose. The reason is, as every one can see, that the writer of the above passage is not in a mood for the expression of thoughts for which metre is * Excursion, book iii. Sometimes when he could find a leisure hour, To slacken in his duty; and at length Is any charm superadded to this narrative by the employment of metre? I imagine that the story told as Mrs. Gaskell, for instance, might have told it in prose, would have been more pathetic, simply from the fact that the artifice would have been less felt. But now compare with this the noble opening stanza in " Laodamia:" With sacrifice before the rising morn lorn Restore him to my sight- great Jove, restore ! have been given in prose? And why How could this passionate invocation could it not? Because the imagination is moving in a world of its own: it is exhilarated by the atmosphere; and it seeks for unusual forms in which to express its enthusiasm. Or take, again, the magnificent lines on "Yew-Trees: There is a Yew-Tree, pride of Lorton Vale, the sea Perhaps at early Cressy or Poitiers. Cui lecta potenter erit res Joined in one solemn and capacious grove; growth Of intertwisted fibres serpentine, Silence and Foresight; Death the Skeleton, These lines, read in the light of his the ory, seem to me to suggest vividly the source of Wordsworth's greatness and weakness as a poet. His formulated creed was that the imaginative mind, by an act of meditation, can make any subject, however trivial, poetical. But his practice proves that a poet only writes poetically when he is under an overmastering external influence, directing his mind to a subject congenial to his powers. The yew-trees that inspired the above noble verses were certainly not such an object "as will be found in every village," nor could any "meditative and feeling mind" have given such splendid utterance to the emotions they excite. No: the forces that made Wordsworth a poet were far different from those conscious reasonings on man and society of which he gives an account in "The Prelude:" his inspiration sprang from mysterious sources which, as he shows us in the first book of his curious metrical autobiography, had been unconsciously pouring images into his mind from his earliest childhood. The religious ideas excited by the unseen life of nature, the sublime outlines of mountain and valley, the blending of wood and water, the changes of light and shadow, the spirit-like movements of birds, the simple manners and passions of the peasantry, mingled so suggestively with the historic monuments of the past, these were the romantic fountains at which other poets had drunk in passing, but to which Wordsworth was constantly returning for deep draughts of inspiration. When he is completely under the direction of his muse he illustrates as happily as any man the truth of Horace's observation, His theory, on the other hand, shows him to have been under the impression that he merely chose to express himself in verse in order to give a certain additional charm to his thought, and that he purposely selected a style of diction approach. ing as nearly as possible to the manner of prose. And, no doubt, this sufficiently describes his case in his uninspired moments, which are frequent enough. But when the afflatus "is upon him it turns his genius naturally into ancient traditional channels of expression, and prompts him, like all great poets, to develop metrical movements which certainly did not originate with himself. His use of the ballad form, for instance, was largely due to the publication of Percy's Ancient Relics;" Bowles had previously revived and popularized the use of the sonnet; Wordsworth's style of writing blank verse is unmistakably his own, but no one can read his lines on "Yew-Trees" without by Milton, while at other times the examperceiving how greatly he was influenced ple of Cowper seems not to have been without its effect. the foundations of poetry in the percep Again, Wordsworth in his theory lays tions of the individual poet. But all his best work is based on universal associa tions, and its merit comes from the beauty of the form in which a general feeling is expressed. If one recalls those poems of his which have taken the deepest root in the national mind, the "Ode on Immorthe Feast of Brougham Castle;" "The tality;" "Lucy Gray;" "The Song at of which "Westminster Bridge" and "It Boy of Windermere; " numerous sonnets, is a beauteous evening calm and free" are types; and such characteristic lines as The light that never was on sea or land, The consecration and the poet's dream; or Love had he found in huts where poor men lie; The silence that is in the starry sky; The sleep that is among the lonely hills, one is aware immediately that the poet has put into the best possible form of musical words a feeling which had hitherto been lying chaotically indistinct in the heart. Wordsworth's genius moved with a large and expanding power in the midst of a society accustomed to town life, limited, refined, highly artificialized, and exclu sively occupied with the contemplation of its own manners; he extended men's social ideas by showing with unsurpassed power what beautiful, pathetic, and sublime associations were connected with the natural life of their country. Hence, in so far as he was genuinely a poet, the liberalizing influence he exerted on literature was, in the deepest and truest sense, conservative. On the other hand, his solitary habits led him in theory, and often in practice, to principles which, as far as the art of poetry is concerned, may be called thoroughly Jacobinical. Perpetually occupied with the contemplation of his own mind, he forgot that it was said that those who measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves are not wise. Incessant introspection increased his intellectual arrogance and impaired his judgment. He could not ap preciate the genius of others who had written as well of men and society as he had written of external nature; and when Scott sent him his edition of Dryden, he avows in his letter of acknowledgment that he considers the latter to be no poet. Everything, however, that passed into his own mind appeared to him to become possible material for poetry. He never said to himself, “Tais toi, Jean Jacques, on ne t'entend pas;" but imagined that each experience interesting to himself would be of equal interest to the world. This overweening estimate of his own genius caused him to undervalue tradition, and, as far as he could, to obliterate and level the distinctions which the practice of the best poets had created between the style of poetry and prose. Summarized briefly, what I have endeavored to establish in the present and in the preceding papers comes to this. Reason shows that there are certain sub jects as incapable of just expression in metrical language as others are by the arts of painting, sculpture, and music. Experience proves that the sources of all great poetry are to be sought far back in the history, traditions, and religion of a people; and the history of English literature further indicates that the stream of national creative imagination flows from two canons of criticism, which had prevailed through that century, he committed himself in theory, and often in practice, to principles destructive of art. He held that the sources of poetry lay solely in the mind of the poet himself, and that, therefore, the poet's imagination could elevate any subject so as to make it proper for treatment in metrical language. Pushing his theory to its logical conclusion, he maintained, moreover, that, as subjects for poetry could be picked up almost at random, there was no essential distinction between the language of poetry and prose; whereas the practice of all classical po etry points to the fact that, there being certain subjects which cannot be so well expressed in prose as in verse, the poetical diction in which these are clothed follows a law and order peculiar to itself. Of the influence of Wordsworth on contemporary verse I shall hope to say more in a future paper, in which I shall attempt to estimate the prospects of po etry. Meantime it will be sufficient to conclude with expressing my opinion that the doctrine that choice of subject is an unimportant consideration has given an impulse to two contrary movements in the art. On the one hand it has led to a frequent neglect of the laws of poetical form, so that one constantly meets with volumes of verse in which it would seem that the thought might have been much better expressed in prose. On the other hand, it has produced a remarkable reaction. If subject is nothing, form, it is argued, must be everything; and the principle is illustrated in practice by writers possessing great gifts of melodious and fluent expression. The consequence is that modes of metrical diction are in fashion, more arbitrarily opposed to the common usage, and indeed to the common sense, of society than even the style of Darwin, which Wordsworth so cordially detested. WILLIAM JOHN COURTHOPE. From The Sunday Magazine. AT ANY COST. BY EDWARD GARRETT. main sources, the poetry of romance and AUTHOR OF “OCCUPATIONS OF A RETIRED Life,' Wordsworth's the poetry of manners. great and truly conservative achievement consists in his having given to the poetry of romance, the existence of which during the eighteenth century had come to be almost forgotten, a large and surprising development. But in his hatred of the CRUST AND THE CAKE, CHAPTER XVII. ETC. IN THE OPENED DOORS. 99 66 THE THROUGH the day, doctors came and went at Mr. Sandison's summons, but he himself was not visible, and poor Kirsty, |