ee ee 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."1 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 converted 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 political 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 industrial 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 be dazzled, not strengthened, by this newly acquired sovereignty; that man might come to trust more in material resources than in moral power; that mechanical progress might be pursued in a degree out of proportion to the real needs of society; that the rage for wealth might convert wealth into the source of a new slavery; that arts and inventions might forget human virtue; that the old domestic morals of the land and its simple manners might suffer an irreparable loss. Our century has shown that there were grounds for both his hopes and his fears. The advocates of great political changes in England during the earlier years of the century were in the main spokesmen of the mechanical and industrial movement. A middleclass plutocracy did not excite Wordsworth's highest admiration. He loved the people; he entered into their private joys and sorrows; but he did not believe that either they or the lower middle class were qualified for political power, nor did he think that the possession of political power would add to the worth and happiness of their lives. And so he strenuously opposed the Reform Bill of 1832. He looked upon the Church as a great national institution for the spiritual education and spiritual sustenance of the people. He believed that the extension of the franchise to Roman Catholics would inevitably lead to the disestablishment of the Church, first in Ireland, afterwards in England. And therefore he resisted Catholic Emancipation. He did so, not in a spirit of intolerant bigotry, but, as he held, in the interests of the people, and in accordance with the logic of the English constitution. At a later time he was guilty of what to some persons will appear even a more flagrant act of hostility to the modern spirit he set himself against the introduction of railways into the district of the English Lakes. But Wordsworth was not a belated prophet hurling anathemas against the steam-engine. Weighing the mischief against the prom ised gains, he concluded that the particular project of the Kendal and Windermere Railway would, if carried out, damage one of the most precious possessions of beauty still remaining to the British people, and he refused to be deluded by what he terms a false utilitarian lure. The mechanical and materialistic tendencies of the time were to some extent met and held in check, at least with minds of a certain type, by what has been called the transcendental movement in thought, and at a subsequent date by the movement in the Church of England which had Oxford for its centre. With both of these Wordsworth was in sympathy with the transcendental movement in his youth, with the High Church movement in his more advanced years. The former was in part a recoil from the turbid atheism, the abstract deism, and the dry orthodoxy of the eighteenth century. An emotional fervour had been infused into religion and philosophy; God and nature and man seemed to draw near and to confer one with the other. In his highest imaginative moments Wordsworth became aware of a Presence in external nature and in the mind of man which he could not call other than divine : ९९ A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, The forms and motions of external things, tumult and peace, the darkness and the light, were for him "characters of the great Apocalypse." In the law of conscience he recognized God's most intimate presence in the soul." When with growing years he became better acquainted with suffering, trial, and human infirmity, he came to value more than he did at first all those aids to the spiritual in man which are afforded by institutions, customs, ceremonies, places, rites, ordinances, about which our best feelings have gathered and |