his feelings, influenced his mind and character. In the midst of boyish games the beauty and stillness of Nature would sink into his heart and hold him like a dream. Hitherto she had sought him, and not he her—sought him in the shocks of mild surprise, in chance collisions and quaint accidents. Now he passes from a timorous sense of the life of Nature, and from animal delight in her companionship, to a love which is based on a mutual understanding, a love which banishes fear and purifies pleasure, breathing in their place more elevated moods, and inspiring higher ideals. She no longer interrupts his sports with some incidental charm, subduing his 'vulgar joy' with solemn imagery; but he woos her with the persistency of a lover. He strives to read the meaning of each of her varying moods, to collect the different shades of character which each change of expression designated, to apprehend the inner spirit of every spot, to seize the invisible thing, the type, the heart of every scene. She occupies the first, and not a secondary, place in his affections. And these shadowy feelings grow distinct as the unconscious sense expands into a conscious realisation. As the mirror enlarges which everywhere reflects humanity; as the intercommunion becomes daily more intimate, and the harmony more sympathetic; as the impressions which emanated from particular scenes or aspects become living existences, responding with fuller answer to his deepening emotions; as the images of his own creation find their ready counterpart in the symbols of inanimate forms, and draw from them the life they gave, two results are produced. In the first place he grasps the idea of Nature as a breathing whole, an organic being with whom he can hold converse. She presents herself to his mind as a system, interpenetrated by law, in her unity as well as in her diversity; and he recognises a soul of Nature animating by its will the myriad forms of the universe, which draw their life from the same all-comprehending source. And in the second place he perceives the reciprocal influence that his mind exercises over Nature; through her he learns to know his own faculties; he sees that he is both a creator and a receiver, working in alliance with the works which he beholds, adding intensity and solemnity to their immediate effects. An auxiliar light' from his mind bestows new splendour on the setting sun, a deeper music to the songs of birds or the melodies of brooks, an intenser blackness to the midnight storm.

Day by day his loving intercourse grows more intimate; mind and Nature co-operate; each gives and receives some

thing. The forms of the inanimate world answer to and awaken the images of the soul, and these in turn go forth from himself to evolve fresh harmonies in Nature. aspects he became

'as sensitive as waters are

To the sky's influence in a kindred mood
Of passion; was obedient as a lute

That waits upon the touches of the wind.'

To all her

In his intercourse with Nature he has preserved the glory of his child's delight in all its freshness; the unconscious instinct has passed into the conscious love. He seeks what before came unsought; his blind faith becomes Argus-eyed, yet loses none of its warmth. And the action and reaction, as of living beings upon each other, kindle the fire of natural religion. He acknowledges the moral lessons that he gathered in communion with Nature. She had taught him, before he consciously realised the fact, her independence and repose, aroused his wonder and reverence, sharpened his instinct of worship. Through her he knew his own faculties; she developed his conscience, trained his imagination, elevated his soul with a sense of sublimity, and kindled it with the upward strivings of a noble restlessness. Hers was the gift that his youth was pure, content with modest 'pleasures,' removed from little enmities and low desires; ' hers too the gift of more than Roman confidence,' the faith · That fails not, in all sorrow my support, The blessings of my life; the gift is yours,

Ye winds and sounding cataracts! 'tis yours,

Ye mountains! thine, O Nature! Thou hast fed
My lofty speculations; and in thee,

From this uneasy heart of ours, I find
A never failing principle of joy
And purest passion.'

Thus Wordsworth through boyish impressions passed without a break from instinct to conviction, from intuition to perception, from apprehension to comprehension, from unreflective gladness to conscious love for Nature as a living separate being. On the other hand, it was mainly the French Revolution which added a human-heartedness to this love, and gave it an ethical value. So powerful was the effect of that movement that it revolutionised Wordsworth's view of life. Hitherto Nature was all in all to him; but the world in which he lived was exclusively his own; the riches he discovered were his private store, his individual possession. The time was at hand when the selfish love of Nature was

dethroned from its sovereignty, and made way for the broader enthusiasm of humanity. Yet here, too, Nature was his earliest teacher. His first ideal of man was unconsciously modelled on the homeliness, simplicity, freedom, and independence of the shepherds of his native mountains. Their traditions were associated with many of Nature's shrines; their figures served as foregrounds to her pictures, and upon their characters she seemed to bestow some of her own sanctities. The instinctive ideal once rooted in his sturdy mind survived the contact of reality both at Cambridge and in London. It grew up among the primitive instincts of his soul, associated with the recollections of childhood, drawing its strength from the genial faith,' the 'natural piety' of youth. And as his love of Nature passed from instinct to reasoning love, so his faith in humanity grew from intuition into conviction. Looking, as he did, for universal things in the inanimate world, and scanning the common countenance of earth and sky for vestiges of the first Paradise, he had seen the unity of Nature in the midst of her variety. So now in the common attributes of humanity he found the elemental unity, the universal mould. His instinct was sanctioned by reason. As nature's unity was represented in one living soul, so also the universal brotherhood of man sprang from a universal fatherhood. He saw the golden side of the shield. He clung to his confidence in human potentialities for good, and round his pastoral ideal of human innocence collected the new hopes which were nourished by his deepening sense of the brotherhood of nations and of individuals.

Thus far Wordsworth's strong independent mind had advanced alone and without a guide. He was but one among the millions to whose inarticulate yearnings the French Revolution gave definite expression. Like Rousseau he felt the unheeded harmonies that link the soul of man to the soul of Nature; like him again, he realised the supreme importance of the primary affections of mankind; like him he returned to the universal attributes, the common elements both of man and Nature, in order to find the Etre Suprême to whom alone he acknowledged obedience. The essential dignity and godlike power of man, as well as the superiority of simple over artificial life, were the chaotic ideas of his mind to which the French Revolution gave shape and meaning. Steeped in the republicanism of Nature, and nurtured in mountain liberty, he despised external differences of rank or wealth, and hated scenes of civilised life because they seemed to him to close the avenues of feeling, and to destroy

the child's heart of love, delight, wonder, and awe. Is it, then, surprising that liberty, equality, and fraternity came to him like a new revelation of the Gospel? It spoke the language of his dear native region,' revived memories of the unchartered liberty of his boyhood, recalled the pastoral virtues of the dalesmen and shepherds. It breathed upon his face with the fresh free air of the Westmoreland hills. Thus it is that his poetry gives the most vivid picture, painted by one who was an actor and not a mere spectator, of that marvellous time when men awakened from a charmed sleep to see

'France standing on the top of golden hours.'

Like many men of his time he believed that he stood between two worlds, the one foot lingering on the ruins of the older age, the other touching the threshold of the new. yet he knew not that though the one might perish, the other was powerless to be born. He saw the future sleeping in the present, the deathlike dream of beauty ready to start to life from the unhewn masses of rugged humanity. From the wreck of the Bastille rose before his excited eyes a golden palace, the appointed seat of equitable law and mild paternal sway.' In the vision of a regenerated world, in the bright haze of the prospect that stretched illimitably before him, he ignored the dark side to the picture. He snatched fresh hope from transitory death, and even rejoiced in the defeats and disasters of England. Like Victor Hugo he saw the wall of the ages shake, totter, crumble, fall; the eternal barrier was rent; through the wide aperture glowed the golden treasures of futurity, a sinless Eden, an earthly Paradise bathed in the sunshine of millennial hope.

Then follows the reaction of bitter disappointment. The Reign of Terror, the war between England and France, the rise of Napoleon, turned enthusiasm to deep despondency. His romantic ideal was shattered. How did he bear the shock? Did it drive him, like Coleridge, to the labyrinth of metaphysical speculation to escape the phantom which had mocked his hopes, the Frankenstein of his own creation that he had unloosed but could not bind? Did it destroy his faith or make him a sceptic as it did Byron? Did it inflame the vehemence of his hope in the Gospel of his youth till he throws, like Shelley, present actualities to the winds? For a time he tells us that his heart lay dead. He ceased to feel, and exercised only his understanding or his observation. He lost his sense of universal humanity, and with it his feel

ing of the living soul of Nature. He analysed, divided, isolated phenomena, and so

'substitutes a universe of death

For that which moves with light and life informed,
Actual, divine and true.'

For the time he lapsed into a mere critic. On the side of Nature he became a superficial observer of outside beauty, an analyst of combinations of colours and proportions; on the side of humanity an abstract theorist, a political philosopher, a speculator on social problems, a constructor of Utopias and Pantisocracies. Like his own Solitary he sighed for the Mississippi or the Susquehannah. He ceased to employ his heart, sat in judgement upon natural scenes, fell under the absolute dominion of the bodily eye. His inner faculties were laid to sleep.

Once more Nature saved him from this thraldom of the senses. His sister Dorothy and the study of abstract science aided him to throw off the burden of his unnatural self. Mathematics and geometry, dealing with truths that are independent of time and space, telling of relations not necessarily connected with weight or quality, restored his sense of the eternal. They taught him again to recognise in the ordered beauty of Nature a simplicity which condemns temporal and visible artificialities. They exhibited real and everlasting laws which reprove the distractions and survive the fluctuations of human life. Under these influences his love renewed its youth as he aspired beyond the seen and visible. He closed the barren leaves of art, and went forth into the inanimate world with a heart that watches and re'ceives.' Once again the breath of heaven stirs a correspondent breeze within his soul; he feels again the intelligent influence which the spirit of the universe exercises upon the mind, hears again the note to which mankind may tune its perplexed variations. And with the revival of his saving intercourse with Nature, he regained his trust and confidence in man. His extravagant hopes assumed more just proportions; his sanguine schemes of regenerating the world were abandoned; abstract rights and theories lost their temporary hold upon his mind; he learned to discover present good in the familiar world around him, and on this to build his hopes of the future.

The French Revolution had humanised his love of Nature; its failure deepened his views of her moral relations to man. First unconsciously, then consciously, Nature had moulded