A LECTURE ON WORDSWORTH.

[Delivered, in May 1878, at Cockermouth; to the "Cumberland Association for the Promotion of Literature and Science ;" and at Cork, to the "Ladies' Association for the Promotion of the Higher Education of Women."]

So much has been said about the genius and poetic mission of Wordsworth, and said so well,—that I daresay some of you, who live in his birthplace, may think that the subject is exhausted. After the criticisms of Coleridge and De Quincey, of Sir Henry Taylor, of Brimley, Clough, Robertson, Lowell, and above all of Mr. Stopford Brooke, and the late and the present Professors of Poetry at Oxford, there seems little need to say more.

And yet, there is no possibility of exhausting Wordsworth, any more than of exhausting Plato. When the time comes for the world to feel that the last word has been said about the great idealist of antiquity, men may perhaps think that Wordsworth also is exhausted. Plato, it is true, moves in a sphere, and speaks in a dialect, that is philosophically more profound; but he never soars into a more ethereal region. He does not interpret Nature or human Life more adequately, nor does the student of his works breathe a more untroubled air, than that in which Wordsworth lived and had his being.

In order to a just appreciation of this poet two things are necessary. First, we must mark the growth and development, in his own mind, of a new attitude towards Nature, and Man in relation to nature, as this is disclosed in his autobiographical poem, The Prelude,―by far the greatest work of its kind ever contributed to literature. Secondly, we must ascertain the relation in which he stood to the poetical literature of England in the immediately preceding age, and what new elements he introduced into it, by his twofold interpretation of Nature and Man.

[I omit the earlier paragraphs of the Lecture, which dealt exclusively with the first of these two pointsthe life and individuality of the poet-since that has been often and ably unfolded: and I pass to the second of the questions raised in the preceding sentence.]

I have now to ask, What was it that Wordsworth did for literature and for the world, as no poet before him had done, and no one need attempt to do again? What, in other words, were the distinctive elements of his genius and his power, constituting him a teacher for all time? It is a large question, and one to which many lectures might be devoted.

It is to him, beyond question, that we mainly owe the nineteenth century renaissance, in the poetical literature of England. The so-called poets of the eighteenth century were simply "men of letters." They had various accomplishments, and great general ability; but their thoughts were expressed in prose, or in mere metrical diction, which, in the low ebb tide of creative imagination, passed current as poetry, without being so. Towards the close of the century, however, there was a reaction, and a quickening of

mind, which took shape in many different directions. One of its most prominent signs was a rise in the poetical temperature. This may be traced mainly to two great European influences; to the growth of modern German philosophy, and to the social and political forces that culminated in the French Revolution. In Germany, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, and Jean Paul, were all the product of this movement. A new way of looking both at Nature and Society had. been inaugurated by Rousseau, and our insular mind ―never long unaffected by the great pulse of European thought-caught the contagion, and responded sympathetically in many ways, carrying forward the stream of tendency, to new and original issues. Amongst the poets, in whom we trace the working of the new spirit, themselves influenced from very diverse quarters, were Cowper, Crabbe, and Burns. All the greater poets, though in part the product of their age, are more conspicuously its formative and inspiring spirits. In them, the intellectual and esthetic energy of a period finds one of its most characteristic expressions. And in the group of illustrious men, who created the poetical literature of England, towards the close of last century, and during the first quarter of this,— Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats, with many others of lesser note, we find a sudden outcome of energy long repressed: as, in this district of yours, after a tardy spring, one week of genial weather will sometimes liberate the imprisoned life of Nature, and cause it to burst suddenly into leaf and bloom.

Of this brotherhood of poets (which in originality and genius far excelled the earlier constellation of the Elizabethan era) Wordsworth was, beyond all question, the leader. In him, the creative impulse, and the new

attitude towards nature and man, assumed features altogether unique; and he may therefore be taken as their most prominent literary representative in England.

Accurately to measure his genius, however, either as to its positive amount or special quality, Wordsworth must be compared both with his predecessors and his contemporaries. Few things are more interesting than to contrast his work in detail with that of those earlier writers from whom the whole new movement was a reaction, and with that of those who were borne forward along with him on the rising tide of the renaissance, bringing out succinctly the precise points of difference. Take only two.

Comparing him with Pope, you find in Wordsworth a frankness and directness, the absence of all roundabout or artificial ways of dealing with and describing things. He spoke and he wrote, because he felt, and as he felt; therefore clearly, freshly, adequately. He did not describe what all men saw, but what the majority failed to see, only because their inward eye' had not been trained to see it. Their mind had never awakened to perceive, nor their heart to feel, the significance of the simplest things; and so, in reading Wordsworth, many became aware for the first time that they

had faculties

Which they had never used; that thought with them Was in its infancy.

They felt as if a new sense had been given to them, or a power, higher than sense, had suddenly arisen from obscure and shadowy recesses. As Keats wrote,

when he first looked into Chapman's Homer

Then felt I as some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken.

Comparing him again with Byron, you find in Wordsworth a healthful radiance, the supreme note of naturalness. His serenity was due to a clear-eyed freshness of perception, and-what is often denied to him his objectivity of mind. He is never morbid, or hollow, or cynical; while to those who craved excitement he had nothing to offer. As he wrote in the poem of Hart-leap Well:

The moving accident is not my trade,

To freeze the blood I have no ready arts;
'Tis my delight alone, in summer shade,
To pipe a simple song for thinking hearts.

He could not have wailed out his own sorrows to the world in a misanthropic manner, even supposing him to have felt that 'vanity of vanities' was the last word of the wise, in reference to earthly good. To carry, like Byron, through Europe,

The pageant of a bleeding heart,

was impossible to Wordsworth; both, because his heart never bled like Byron's

the holy forms

Of young imagination kept it pure ;

and also, because he would have scorned to parade his misery. One element in his greatness was, that with open soul he felt the spirit of the age, which took him out of himself, in the first instance, to nature. He saw that Nature had a revelation to impart which man ought, in a wise passiveness,' to receive. This he perceived very early, and may be said to have absorbed the idea within a spirit singularly pliant, and open to such influence. It gradually consolidated and matured,the form changing, but the