jects," printed among the Poems of Childhood, he sings, in passionate fondness, of what nature was to him and had done for him:

Wisdom and spirit of the universe!

Thou soul, that art the eternity of thought!
... not in vain,

By day or starlight, thus from my first dawn
Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me
The passions that build up our human soul
. . purifying thus

The elements of feeling and of thought

happy time

It was indeed for all of us; for me

It was a time of rapture.

It was this union in verse, as in his personality, of feeling and thought, expressing itself in a kind of mental emotiveness or fervid reflection, that he aimed to illustrate as the very ideal of poetic art.

To exemplify by reference and citation the way in which Wordsworth embodied this principle would take us fairly through the content of his published verse. A brief and general survey must suffice, with here and there a confirming quotation. In his Poems of Childhood and Juvenile Pieces, as they are called, we note such selections as "We are Seven," a sweet lyric of childlike innocence and faith; "The Longest Day," "An Evening Walk," in which the country-loving Wordsworth dwells upon the scenes of his youth among the English lakes; and "Descriptive Sketches," in which he recalls his tour among the Alps, and takes occasion to descant upon the

glories of mountain scenery, the free and happy life of the mountaineers, and the blessings of civil liberty:

Were there below a spot of holy ground

Where from distress a refuge might be found,
And solitude prepare the soul for heaven;
Sure, nature's God that spot to man had given
Where falls the purple morning far and wide
In flakes of light upon the mountain side.

So, in the Poems of Imagination, where the contemplative feature might not be expected to appear, we see it in such titles as "The Pass of Kirkstone,” "Evening Ode," and "Lines on Tintern Abbey." It is in this last poem that, on revisiting the banks of the Wye, he recalls the old scenes and experiences that he once enjoyed:

Feelings, too,

Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,

As have no slight or trivial influence

On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.

And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods

And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth, of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear-both what they half create,

And what perceive; well pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

This subjective study of objective things, this mutual exercise of the inner eye of the soul and the outer eye of sense, is one of the pleasing marvels of Wordsworth's verse. Whatever he sees or wherever he goes these "meditations of the heart” are the most natural expression of his personality, and hence it is that in his so-called descriptive poetry there is not only a thoughtful but an emotive element, a genuine lyric impulse and impression. In the examples entitled Poems of Sentiment and Reflection we would naturally look for numerous instances of the lyric of meditation. In fact, the selections may be cited almost without exception. Such are "Character of the Happy Warrior," "The Wishing-gate, ""The Fountain," "Remembrance of Collins," "The Two April Mornings," "September," and the "Ode to Duty."

Stern daughter of the voice of God . . .

Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
And the most ancient heavens, through
Thee, are fresh and strong.

The closing stanza runs as follows:

To humbler functions, awful power,
I call thee; I myself commend
Unto thy guidance from this hour;
O, let my weakness have an end;

Give unto me, made lowly wise,

The spirit of self-sacrifice;

The confidence of reason give;

And in the light of truth thy bondman let me live.

The closing line of each verse, being the iambic pentameter of the Spenserian stanza, adds to the essential beauty of the sentiment and the meter.

If we turn to the sonnets of Wordsworth, we note some of the choicest examples of the reflective lyric, whether in the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty, those To the River Duddon, or the Miscellaneous Sonnets. The first of these collections is especially interesting, as commemorating the early life of Britain and Saxon England. Such are "Monastery of Old Bangor," "Paulinus," " Alfred," "The Norman Conquest," and many others, all pondering on the old life of saints and monks and the struggles of the early Christians, some of them in their protest against the sins of the clergy reading like passages from the pen of Langelande and Milton, while others, in a peaceful and pensive spirit, speak of God and truth and love and human hopes. Thus, in "Places of Worship," we read:

As star that shines dependent upon star

Is to the sky while we look up and love;

As to the deep, fair ships which, though they move,
Seem fixed, to eyes that watch them from afar;
As to the sandy desert fountains are,

With palm groves shaded at wide intervals,
Whose fruit around the sunburnt native falls,
Of roving tired or desultory war-

Such to this British Isle her Christian fanes,

Each linked to each for kindred services;

Her spires, her steeple towers with glittering vanes
Far-kenned, her chapels lurking among trees,
Where a few villagers on bended knees

Find solace which a busy world disdains.

So, in the Sonnets to Liberty, we have some of the finest lyric outbursts in English, stanzas in which Wordsworth strongly reminds us of Milton, his tribute to whom is perhaps the best and the best known of all:

Milton thou shouldst be living at this hour;
England hath need of thee.

So, the sonnet beginning:

Great men have been among us; hands that penned
And tongues that uttered wisdom.

So, the lyrics dedicated to "Toussaint L'Ouverture" and " Hoffer are of the same impassioned order, the poet, in not a few instances, sharply rebuking his country for her moral supineness and positive national sins.

The sonnets To the River Duddon are in Wordsworth's happiest vein, full of his genuine love for the sights and sounds of nature, as he sings:

O mountain stream! the shepherd and his cot
Are privileged inmates of deep solitude.

The closing sonnet of the collection is character-
istic in its quiet and impressive meditativeness:
I thought of thee, my partner and my guide,
As being past away. Vain sympathies !
For, backward, Duddon, as I cast my eyes,
I see what was, and is, and will abide;

Still glides the stream, and shall forever glide;