In order to understand the next passage I shall quote, I must remind you of the way in which the ancient Pagans represented the same feeling. Most persons here, either through the originals, if they are acquainted with them, or through the translations, which in these times have multiplied, will remember how the ancient Pagan poets loved to represent some anecdote of a huntsman or shepherd, who, in passing through a wood and plucking some herb, or cutting down some branch, has started to see drops of human blood issue from it, or at hearing a human voice proclaiming that he had done injury to some imprisoned human life in that tree. their feelings of the deep sacredness of that life that there is in Nature. Now It was so that the ancients expressed let us see how Wordsworth expresses this. As usual, and as we might have expected, he brings it before us by a simple anecdote of his childhood, when he went out nutting. He tells us how, in early boyhood, he went out to seek for nuts, and came to a hazel-tree set far in the thicket of a wood, which never had been entered by the profane steps of boyhood before-as he expresses it, "A virgin scene." white nuts hanging from the branches, and with exquisite fidelity to nature, He describes how he eyed with delight the clusters of he tells us how he sat upon a bank and dallied with the promised feast, as we dally with a letter long expected, and containing correspondence much loved, because we know it is our own. and on seeing all the ravage and desolation he had caused by his intrusion, At last the boy rose, tore down the boughs, there came over him a feeling of deep remorse.

And unless I now

Confound my present feelings with the past;
Ere from the mutilated bower I turned
Exulting, rich beyond the wealth of kings,

I felt a sense of pain when I beheld

The silent trees, and saw the intruding sky.

Then, dearest maiden, move along these shades
In gentleness of heart; with gentle hand
Touch-for there is a spirit in the wood.

I preface the third illustration that I shall offer, by a remark reminding you that these scenes of Nature become, as it were, a possession of the memory. The value of having felt Nature in her loveliness or in her grandeur is not in the pleasure and intense enjoyment that was then and there experienced, but in this fact, that we have thenceforward gained something that will not be put aside; a remembrance that will form a great part of our future life. Now all of us-any man who has seen the Alps, or who has seen an American hurricane-can understand this so far as Nature's grandeur is concerned; but Wordsworth, as usual, shows us how our daily life and most ordinary being is made up of such recollections; and, as usual, he selects a very simple anecdote to illustrate this. occurred to him when, on a journey with his sister on the Lake of Ullswater, It is taken from a circumstance that they came upon a scene which, perhaps, few but himself would have observed. The margin of the lake was fringed for a long distance with golden daffodils,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

And then, after describing this in very simple language, these lines occur:

The waves beside them danced; but they
Outdid the sparkling waves in glee;

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed-and gazed-but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought :

For oft, when on my conch I lie,

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye,
Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Now I will give you a specimen of shallow criticism. In a well-known 66 Review for the current quarter there is a review of Wordsworth: and among other passages there is one in which the reviewer, with a flippancy which characterizes the whole of the article, remarks that the passage which has just been read is nothing more than a versified version of a certain entry in Miss Wordsworth's journal. How stands the fact? It is unquestionably true that there was an entry in Miss Wordsworth's journal, written in very striking prose, of the same sight which her brother and herself had seen; is quite true that the first two stanzas and the greater part of the third were it nothing more than Miss Wordsworth's very beautiful prose put into very beautiful verse. So far, then, if you strike off the last stanza and the two lines of the stanza preceding it, you have nothing more than a versified version of the entry in Miss Wordsworth's journal; but then the last stanza contains the very idea of all, towards which all tended, and without which the piece would not have been poetry at all. What would you think of a man who denied to Shakspeare the praise of originality, on the ground that his plays were chiefly constructed from some ancient chronicler, Holingshed, for example, or taken from the plot of some old play, and that in every play he had incorporated some hundred lines of the old play? What has Shakspeare added? Only the genius; he has only added the breath and life which made the dry bones of the skeleton live. What has Wordsworth added? He has added nothing except the poetry; nothing but the thought, the one lovely thought, which redeems the whole.

Now I have quoted the passages you have heard, in order to call your attention to the subtle perception and the exquisite delicacy which is in them. I have reminded you of the difficulty I encounter in bringing them before a public audience. In reading Wordsworth the sensation is as the sensation of the pure-water drinker, whose palate is so refined that he can distinguish between rill and rill, river and river, fountain and fountain, as compared with the obtuser sensation of him who has destroyed the delicacy of his palate by grosser libations, and who can distinguish no difference between water and water, because to him all pure things are equally insipid. It is like listening to the mysterious music in the conch sea-shell, which is so delicate and refined that we are uncertain whether it is the music and sound of the shell, or merely the pulses throbbing in our own ear; it is like watching the quivering rays of fleeting light that shoot up to heaven as we are looking at the sunset; so fine, so exquisitely touching is the sense of feeling, that we doubt whether it is reality we are gazing upon at all, or whether it is not merely an image created by the power and the trembling of our own inner imagination.

I will pass on now, in the second place, to consider the life of Wordsworth, so far as it may be considered to have affected his poetry. We all know that Wordsworth was remarkable for certain theories of poetry, which in his time, when they first appeared, were considered new, heterodox, heretical. On a future occasion I hope to examine these; at present I am bound to endeavor to investigate the question, how far Wordsworth's life and Wordsworth's character may be supposed to have formed, or, at all events, modified, these conclusions.

Now, first of all, I will remark that Wordsworth's was a life of contemplation, not of action, and therein differed from Arnold's of Rugby. Arnold of Rugby is the type of English action; Wordsworth is the type of English thought. If you look at the portraits of the two men, you will distinguish this difference: In one there is concentrativeness, energy, proclaimed; in

the eye of the other there is vacancy, dreaminess.

The life of Wordsworth In these days it is the fashion to talk of the digni

was the life of a recluse. ty of work as the one sole aim and end of human life, and foremost in proclaiming this as a great truth we find Thomas Carlyle. Every man who pretends in any degree to have studied the manifold tendencies of this age will be familiar with the writings of Carlyle, and there can be no man who has studied them who does not recollect the vivid and eloquent passage in which Carlyle speaks of the sacredness of work. word is passing almost into cant among the disciples of Carlyle; and even Now it appears to me that this with Carlyle himself in these Latter-day pamphlets, in which he speaks of every thing and every one not engaged in present work, as if the sooner they were out of this work-a-day world the better. that as the vocation of some is naturally work, so the vocation, the heavenIn opposition to this, I believe born vocation of others, is naturally contemplation.

In very early times human life was divided into seven parts, whereof six were given to work and one to rest, and both of these were maintained equally sacred-sacred work and sacred rest; and it is not uprooting that great principle, but carrying it out in its spirit, to say that, as of the seven parts of human life the majority belonged to work, so should a fraction be dedicated to rest; that though it is true of the majority that the life-law is work, yet it is also true that there is a fraction to whom by nature the life-law is the law of contemplation. But let no one suppose that contemplation, in the Wordsworthian sense of the word, is listlessness or inaction. There is a sweat of the brain and a sweat of the heart, be well assured-working-men especially-as much as there is a sweat of the brow; and contemplation, in Wordsworth's sense of the word, is the dedicating a life to the hard and severe inner work of brain; it is the retiring from the world, in order to fit the spirit to do its work.

Let us understand what this work was which Wordsworth proposed to himself. At the period when Wordsworth came upon the stage, there were two great tendencies-and, in some respects, evil tendencies-which civilization and modern society were beginning to develop. The first of these was the accumulation of wealth; the second was the division of labor.

I am not going to speak of the accumulation of wealth as a fanatic. I know some who say, with reference to wealth and capital, that wealth is a necessary ingredient in the production of things, of which labor is the other ingredient, and without which labor will be altogether useless. I know that no nation has ever risen to greatness without accumulated capital; and yet, notwithstanding this, there is a crisis in the history of nations-and a dangerous crisis it is-when the aristocracy of birth has been succeeded by the aristocracy of wealth; and a great historian tells us, that no nation has ever yet reached that crisis without having already begun its downward progress towards deterioration.

There are chiefly, I believe, three influences counteractive of that great danger-accumulated wealth. The first is religion, the second is hereditary rank, and the third is the influence of men of contemplative lives. The first is religion, of which, as belonging to another place, for the sake of reverence, I will not speak here. The second counteracting influence to accumulated wealth is hereditary rank. to speak highly of rank, much less before the members of an Athenæum or It is not generally the fashion in the present day of a Working-man's Institute; it is the fashion, rather, to speak of our common humanity, and to deprecate rank; and good and right it is that common humanity should be dignified, and elevated far above the distinction of convention and all the arbitrary and artificial differences of class; and yet, after all this, in an age when it certainly is not the fashion to speak well of hereditary rank, it is well for us all to remember the advantages that have ac

crued to us in the past from that hereditary rank. I will say that rank is a power in itself more spiritual, because less tangible, than the power of wealth. The man who commands others by the extent of his broad acres, or by the number of his bales of cotton, rules them by a power more degrading and more earthly than he who rules them simply by the prestige of long hereditary claims.

You all remember how well Sir Walter Scott has described this power as existing more strongly among the Highlanders of Scotland than in any other nation. In the "Fair Maid of Perth," for example, in the contest between the clans, you will remember how every clansman dedicated himself to certain death for the sake of his chieftain, and how a young man, with no wealth, unknown before, nay, having in himself no intrinsic worth or goodness, obtained a loyalty and devotion that royalty itself could scarcely win; a devotion and love that all the wealth of the burghers of Perth never could have purchased; and you feel that so long as there was such a power in Scotland it was impossible that the burghers of Perth, with all their wealth, could obtain undisputed predominancy. So long as this power exists, the power of wealth has something to be thrown in the scale against it; and therefore it is that, with feelings strong on the side of human progress, and with but little reverence for mushroom rank, I am yet free to acknowledge that I feel sometimes a pang when I hear or read of the extinction of great names, gray with the hoar of innumerable ages-sorrow, when I read in paper after paper of the passing of great ancestral estates under the hammer of the auctioneer; and for this reason, that in every such case I feel that there is one more sword gone that would have helped us in the battle which we must all fight against the superstitious idolatry of wealth.

The third counteracting influence is the existence of men of contemplative minds-men of science and philosophy. You may call them useless; but they are men whose vocation elevates them above the existing world, and makes them indifferent to show and splendor, and therefore they can throw their influence and weight in the scale against the aristocracy of wealth. The other evil I have spoken of, I called the division of labor; and here, again, I speak not as a fanatic. Political economists-Adam Smith, for exampletell us that in the fabrication of a pin from ten to eighteen men are required. One cuts the wire, another draws it, a third points it, three are required to make the head, another to polish it, and it is a separate work even to put the pin into the paper. And now we know the advantage of all this.

The political economist tells us that ten such men working together can make in a single day forty or fifty thousand pins, whereas, had they worked separately, they could scarcely have made ten. We all know the advantage of this; we know that a man becomes more expert by directing his whole attention to one particular branch of a trade than by wasting it on many; we know that time is thus saved, which would otherwise be spent in going from one work to another; we know that the inventive faculty is consequently quickened, because a man who is forever considering one subject only is also enabled to occupy his attention with the thought as to how the operation can be most simplified. These are great advantages; yet no man can persuade me that with these advantages there are not also great disadvantages to the inner life of the man so engaged. We get a perfect pin, but we get most imperfect men, for while one man is engaged in polishing the pin, and another is engaged in sharpening it, what have we? We have nothing more in the man than a pin-polisher; we have sacrificed the man to the pin.

In some of the States of Western America, we are told of men who, by the very facts of their position, are compelled to clear their own ground, to sow and reap it with their own hands, to thatch and build their own cottages, and to break and shoe their own horses, and who give a great deal of atten

tion, notwithstanding, to the consideration of great questions, commercial and political. This is, no doubt, an imperfect society, for every thing is incomplete; and yet travellers tell us that there are nowhere such specimens of humanity; that the men have not only large brains and large muscles, but both these joined together. On the one hand, then, we have a more complete society and a less complete individual; on the other hand, we have a more complete individual and a less complete society. This is the disadvantage, this is the high price we must pay for all civilization and progress; in the words of Tennyson, "The individual withers, and the world is more and more. And then life is so divided; we have the dentist and the oculist, but they are only the dentist and the oculist; we have the clergyman and the farmer, but the farmer knows nothing of the clergyman; and is it not a charge brought against the clergy at this very moment, that they are clergymen and nothing more?

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No man felt these two dangers more than Wordsworth felt them; he felt himself called upon to do battle against the evils of his age; he acknowledged that he had received a commission and consecration; he was, as we have already heard, a consecrated spirit ;" and yet he took a fair and just measure of his own powers; he knew well that his work was not to be done on the platform, in the pulpit, or in the senate. and there, amidst the regenerating influences of nature, where all was real, He retired to his own mountains, he tried to discipline his own heart in order that he might be enabled to look calmly and truly on the manifold aspects of human life. tude there came from time to time a calm clear voice, calling his countrymen And from that soliback to simplicity and truth, proclaiming the dignity and the simplicity in feeling of our primitive nature; in opposition to the superstitious idolatry of wealth, proclaiming from time to time that a man's life consists not in the abundance of the things he possesses; in opposition to the danger arising from divided employment and occupations, proclaiming the sanctity of each separate human soul, and asserting, in defiance of the manufacturer, who called men "hands," that every man was not a "hand," but a living soul.

It was in this way that Wordsworth advocated the truth of poetry. He did a great, and high, and holy work, the value of which must not be calculated nor measured by his success, but by its truth. The work Wordsworth did, and I say it in all reverence, was the work which the Baptist did when he came to the pleasure-laden citizens of Jerusalem to work a reformation; it was the work which Milton tried to do, when he raised that clear, calm voice of his to call back his countrymen to simpler manners and to simpler laws. That was what Wordsworth did, or tried to do; and the language in which he had described Milton might with great truth be applied to Wordsworth himself:

Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;

And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.

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.

So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

I will now read to you one or two passages in which Wordsworth shows the power of this life of contemplation. The first I shall

read is one written by Wordsworth soon after the Convention of Cintra. According to Words

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