WORDSWORTH'S LINES.

Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea,
Pure as the naked heavens-majestic, free.

311

And also these, on beholding London from Westminster Bridge

Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep;
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God, the very houses seem asleep,
And all that mighty heart is lying still.

All these lines have indeed, in Wordsworth's own words

Many a

and when first read are like a revelation. student of this great man may not himself be an articulate poet, but as he studies he will love true goodness and poetry more and more, become an infinitely happier man, gifted with a higher kind of happiness, and will regard his fellow men with a sweeter reverence and love. Algernon Swinburne, himself a great but imperfect poet, says of him, "The incommunicable, the immitigable might of Wordsworth, when the god has indeed fallen on him, cannot but be felt by all, and can but be felt by any; none can partake and catch it up. There are many men greater than he-there are men much greater; but what he has of greatness is his only. His concentration, his majesty, his pathos, have no parallel: some have gone higher, many lower; none have touched precisely the same point as he." Wordsworth has been laughed at for his simplicity, because his art is so great, and he has concealed it with such care, that many think it is

none at all. Read, for instance, those stanzas called "Lucy," in which the simple pathos looks so like plain prose, and yet is so intense, that when truly felt it causes a desolate agony. Let any one who has lost one dear to him repeat these lines, and ask whether they are not the truest poetry :

She lived unknown; and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be:

But she is in her grave; and oh

The difference to me!

It could have been but the mere madness of personal jealousy that blinded Byron to the transcendent. merit of this great man, from whom, hoping in some other place and time to return to, we must tear ourselves away. But first note this, that the self-consciousness of Wordsworth always makes him regard Poetry as a holy thing, and himself as the lonely priest—ministrant, a servant of God and Nature-apart, holy, and great. With him, at least, Poetry is not an excitement, nor a game, nor a trade-but a service.

The great friend of Wordsworth, and as poet, theologian, thinker, critic, talker, and as having influence on other great men, great writers, theologians, thinkers; by far the most remarkable man in the literary world of the century, was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He, born at Ottery St. Mary, in Devonshire, in 1772, was from eight to fourteen a playless day-dreamer, a helluo librorum, and, at eighteen, had a stock of erudition that would have puzzled a doctor of divinity. Such a boy, full of inquiry, doubt, poetry, could not but have become a great man, had he, with his immense grasp of mind, but possessed determination. But he was born essentially critical, and, in youth, wavering. He fell into

Deism, grew out of it, enlisted as a dragoon, became a Unitarian preacher, and, by sheer force of logical thinking, worked his way until he became the firmest of Trinitarians, the most staunch of Churchmen, opposed to Rome on one side, and to Latitudinarianism on the other. Then he threw himself into literature, lectured upon Shakespeare and other dramatists and poets, translated Schiller-and improved what he translated -wrote philosophical essays-"The Statesman's Manual," "Aids to Reflection," "Biographia Literaria" projected reviews, edited a newspaper, published his poems, and, making but little money with all his immense talent and genius, retired to the house of a friend at Highgate, where, visited and surrounded by those who knew how great he was, he filled the post of an inspired talker until he died. "It had been the lot," said one of his followers, "of no Englishman since the time of Johnson, to have so many and such devoted admirers. Coleridge's thought, erudition, vision, honesty, poetic feeling, reverence, and faith were unsurpassed. There was not a greater mind in England; and that mind was given entirely to Christian philosophy and the service of God. Such immense knowledge and such wisdom, combined with true humility, had hardly been before seen. There could be no motive for his faith, as 'twas then the method of assigning such, for he gained nothing by it but peace of mind in his many illnesses, weaknesses, sins, and troubles; and yet no bishop could have been a more constant, earnest, zealous champion of the Church." But it is of Coleridge's poetry we have to speak. His utterances were but part of his system; like the leaves of the Sibyl, they but scattered forth part

more.

of the fulness, inwardness, warmth, and completeness of his convictions; and his philosophy has been lost to us-save that he himself was the father of a school of earnest and humble thinkers, and will yet beget Of true poets he is one :-he has dared, and known, and doubted— has penetrated into the sanctuary of poetry, and trod the utmost limits of the knowable—and yet dares humbly to write himself a Christian. The example of Coleridge was great, valuable, beyond price, to the young men at the beginning of this century of doubt.

Two other poets-John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley-remain to be spoken of in this hasty generalization. These two are of the poets proper. They sing they know not why, and are rather children of impulse, or, as it is the fashion to call it, inspiration, than of culture, schooling, or endeavour. Both had high aims, neither of them much "moral" feeling, in the ordinary sense; certainly little reverence for religion as it was taught by schools of divinity. Keats, in the sweetest and most unconscious way, brought back to us the feelings of a Pantheist steeped to the lips in Grecian mythology, and by pure genius, although an imperfectly educated boy and a "Cockney," has shown a deeper insight into the old Greek life and Greek faith, than many a learned Fellow of a college. Similarly, he is more penetrated with the spirit of country life—there is more leafiness, greenness, and freshness in his verses—than even in those of poor John Clare, the Northamptonshire ploughman. He is a delicate poet, perfect in his sweetness, though not always in his method. Dying of consumption at Rome, after being deeply hurt, but not, as Byron stated, killed,

by one of those blundering pieces of savage injustice which critics write as if to show their own incompetence, the poet dictated his own epitaph: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water," expressive of his modesty and his disappointed hopes. Posterity has reversed this entirely.

Not marble nor the brazen monuments

Of princes shall outlive my powerful rhyme,

wrote Shakespeare of his own. We may at least say the same of John Keats. The student must read him. He will thereby gain a great insight into other things than poetry.

Of Shelley, as one of the representative men of the age, a few words will not be out of place in closing this chapter. And truly it is difficult to speak of him in adequate terms of praise as a poet, or of pity as a man. The son of an old Sussex baronet, unhappily for himself, he was born a poet in a time of revolution, scepticism, and of sectarian bitterness. He incessantly read and speculated; and, more truly Christian than those about him, looked upon religion as then practised, as hostile to humanity—as calculated to make men enemies, not brothers. At seventeen he made a heroine of Margaret Nicholson, because she had attempted to shoot the king; then issued a syllabus of Hume's free-thinking essays, and challenged the University of Oxford to dispute with him. Being expelled, he married a girl a little younger than himself, and became wretched. Metaphysical, pure in morals, antagonistic to order, he became a poet, with the proviso of being an Atheist. Loving mercy, brotherhood, sweetness, and gentleness, he stood forth as an enemy to Christ, and represented God as an aveng