To suppose that Wordsworth's was a mild, gentle, tranquil nature, moved by no deep and strong passions, is a vulgar error. He felt ardently and profoundly. But mere passion did not dominate him and carry him away. His emotions were illuminated by thought and were brought into harmony with conscience; they did not whirl him out of his course, but bore him onward with a continuous impulse in his true orbit. No poet attains to clearer altitudes of illuminated joy than Wordsworth, and, because he is borne thither by no unworthy desire, he finds repose upon the heights; yet at the heart of his calm there is a quickening passion. Few poets have more truly represented an arid anguish of the heart; but as his genius and moral nature matured he chose rather to exhibit sorrow in its strengthening and purifying power. He has not often rendered into verse the passion of lovers; but the group of poems connected with "Lucy" give expression to profound and tender feeling; and Wordsworth himself declared that he deliberately turned away from this common theme of poets because he feared, so deeply did it move him, that he could not keep the treatment within due bounds. The dramatic power which enables a poet to enter, as Shakespeare did, into a world of what we may call abnormal or perverted passions, hatred, revenge, jealousy, pride, the lust of power, the rage for pleasure, Wordsworth did not possess. But he could interpret unerringly and in all their fulness some of the strongest emotions belonging to the best parts of our humanity: the parental passion, as in "Michael," and "The Affliction of Margaret "; fraternal affection, as in The Brothers"; wedded love, as in the verses beginning "O dearer far than life and light are dear"; the loyalty of friendship, as in the sonnet, "The Pine of Monte Mario"; the ardour of religion, as in the sonnets suggested by King's College, Cambridge. And in the

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breadth and energy of his political feeling, as the "Poems Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty" amply prove, he may be placed by the side of Milton. It is, indeed, Wordsworth's strength in his total being which masks the power of passion in him. If his capacity for reflection had been less, if his conscience had not been ever in command, if his will had not been so steadfast, and if all of these had not been brought into harmonious and consentaneous operation, the force of the impulses that moved his heart would be more immediately felt.

Wordsworth distinguished between the Fancy and the Imagination the one a faculty chiefly occupied in aggregating and associating, the other in modifying and creating. The inferior faculty he possessed, but in no extraordinary degree; his highest self appears in work of the imagination. With some poets the imagination deserts reality; they create an ideal world from slight hints and suggestions of the actual world which suffice to quicken into activity their genius for invention. Wordsworth's imaginaItion rather discovers the ideal within the real. It modifies the appearance of things so as to bring out more adequately their inward life and being. It illuminates the world with "a light that never was, on sea or land”; but this light is a truth of the human spirit, which reveals, as nothing else can, the meaning of the phenomena around us. It creates a region of beauty, wonder, joy for those who can enter there; but this is not a region of illusion; on entering it, we only come into possession of our rightful heritage. For him no opposition can exist between imagination and reason; they operate together in the search for the truth of things. A poet whose genius is simply lyrical sings upon the impulse of the moment. The actual occasion of many of Wordsworth's poems was separated by a considerable interval of time from the hour of creation. What had been

begotten of joy was afterwards brought forth by meditation. He recollected emotion in tranquillity, and revived it in a purer form. The dross of circumstances had been refined, and thought had nourished feeling before the poet's work came to the light. The ideal had gradually evolved itself from reality.

Memory and hope are fellow-workers in Wordsworth's poetry. At the basis of what he has written lay the cheerful faith, the optimism, of his age, but modified by individual reflection. He looked forward, though in no violent revolutionary spirit, to a great destiny for mankind; he viewed the world as a high-school for the education of the individual mind; much of his poetry is occupied with the subject of the loss and the recovery of faith, hope, imaginative power, wisdom, joy; he believed, moreover, in the immortality of the human soul. But some whose temper is optimistic think scornfully of the past, and some aspirants towards a higher future life belittle the present. Wordsworth did neither. He reverenced the past; he had a sense of the continuity of human existence, both social and individual. He regarded the days of his own life, with all the modifications which sorrow and experience and deepening reflection brought, as "bound each to each by natural piety." And, in like manner, he felt that the life of a nation is a growing unity; that the old order is not to be lightly cast aside; that tradition and prescription are a precious heritage; that new institutions must grow out of those received from our fathers. The man of genius whose gaze is wholly turned to the future runs the risk of advocating freedom at the expense of order; he who lives wholly in the past may forget the expanding life of society, and become the champion of a traditional order which is incompatible with the growth of freedom. Examples of both dangers may be found in some of Wordsworth's contemporaries. Among them he

appears as a reconciler.

He knows the worth of freedom both for the individual life and for nations; but he finds the truest freedom in willing obedience to the highest law.

It cannot be said that Wordsworth, like the poets who can project themselves out of themselves in epic and dramatic work, is a poet for all readers. What is characteristic of him is the synthesis between external things and his own mind and his own mood. He draws things towards himself and meets them half way; what he writes is never purely objective. And hence he selects his audience; to enter into his work we'must have something of the Wordsworthian mind and temper. We could hardly say of any one whom Shakespeare or Homer left untouched that he had a true feeling for poetry. But many genuine lovers of the poetry of Shakespeare and Homer are unmoved by that of Wordsworth; they cannot remain at the Wordsworthian standpoint, or they cannot advance towards things along the line by which he advances, and fail to reach that midway resting-place where the Wordsworthian synthesis is effected. They speak of him as an egoist; and if it be egoism never wholly to escape from one's own personality and one's own peculiar manner of regarding objects, they are right.

In disinterested intellectual curiosity Wordsworth was deficient. He could not yield himself to what did not somehow bear upon his moral nature. He was not a discursive reader; he was not deeply interested in the study of minds of a type wholly different from his own. Within a certain range he was a great critic, but as a critic he was profound rather than broad. He had little care for the scientific movement of his time; he was repelled by Goethe; he undervalued Byron; he loved and honored Scott personally, but it may be questioned whether he ever felt aright Scott's power as an interpreter of human life. The

limitation of Wordsworth's intellectual interests was to a certain extent a source of strength; it saved him from many distractions; but one who is an exclusive disciple of Wordsworth incurs some risk of narrowness. It is wise at times to descend from the mountain-height, to quit the pastoral valley, and to fare forth into the world and wave of men.

He was deficient in one of the most liberalising gifts of mind- a sense of humour. At rare times in his poetry, as in some passages of "Peter Bell" and some passages of "The Idiot Boy," Wordsworth shows an inclination for frolic; it is the frolic of good spirits in one habitually grave, and he cannot caper lightly and gracefully. His writings in all their extent hardly show more of humour than this. He did not observe, or did not think fit to record, the details of the social comedy so freely provided for our entertainment; and having attained to his own solution of the problems of our existence, he had no feeling for those ironies and incongruities of human life which give rise to the finest kind of humour, those which are presented, for instance, so genially and so pathetically by Cervantes. He reverenced our nature, and could have no sympathy with such cruel and bitter laughter as that of Swift. At one time he attempted translations from Juvenal; but the laughter of indignation against vice and folly was not Wordsworth's mode of expressing ethical feeling. He teaches us many things; but he does not teach us how to laugh wisely and kindly. We cannot find a place for Falstaff in the scenes of "The Excursion"; and a world which excludes Falstaff is not the whole wide world; but we have excellent companions in the Pastor, the Solitary and the philosophic Pedlar; they teach us to think and to love; and thought and love should help us to laugh. If Wordsworth's seriousness of moral temper needs to be