view: "Poetry has been as serious a thing to me as life itself; and life has been a very serious thing. I never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for the hour of the poet." From such a view of poetry and life, we cannot wonder at the moral purpose found in all her writing.

Mrs. Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793-1835), whose maiden name was Browne, has written poems that are extensively read. Her subjects find a ready admission to the hearts of all classes. The style is graceful, but presenting, as Scott said, "too many flowers for the fruit." There is little intellectual or emotional force about her poetry, and the greater part of it will soon be forgotten. A few of the smaller pieces will perhaps remain as English gems, such as The Graves of a Household, and the Homes of England.

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE LAKE SCHOOL-WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE AND SOUTHEY

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

"Him who uttered nothing base."-Alfred Tennyson.

"I do not know a man more to be venerated for uprightness of heart and lofti. ness of genius."-Walter Scott.

"To feel for the first time a communion with his mind, is to discover loftier faculties in our own."--Thomas N. Talfourd.

"Whatever the world may think of me or of my poetry is now of little consequence; but one thing is a comfort of my old age, that none of my works written since the days of my early youth, contains a line which I should wish to blot out because it panders to the baser passions of our nature. This is a comfort to me; I can do no mischief by my works when I am gone."- William Wordsworth.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), the founder of the so-called Lake School of poetry, was born at Cockermouth, in the north of England (294-300). He was left an orphan very early in life. In his ninth year he was sent to a school at Hawkshead, in the most picturesque district of Lancashire, where his love for the beauties of creation was rapidly developed. After taking his degree at Cambridge in 1791, he went to France, and eagerly embraced the ideas of the wildest champions of liberty in that country. His political sentiments, however, became gradually modified, till in later life they settled down into steady conservatism in all questions of church and state. In 1793 he published two little poems, An Evening Walk, and Descriptive Sketches. Their metre and language are of the school of Pope; but they are the work of a promising pupil, and not of a master. In the following year he completed the story of Salisbury Plain, or, Guilt and Sorrow. In regard to time it is separated from the Descriptive Sketches by a span, but in merit they are parted by a gulf. He had ceased to write in the

train of Pope; and composed in the stanza of his later favorite, Spenser. There is an exquisite simplicity and polish in the language. In his twenty-sixth year, just as he was finding it necessary to enter some regular business for the purpose of earning a livelihood, he found himself placed in what was affluence to him, by receiving a legacy of £900, with the request that he would devote himself to literary work. Thoughts of the law, and attempts to earn money by writing for newspapers were abandoned. He settled with his sister in a quiet country place in Somersetshire, and began his long devotion to the muse. His second experiment was the tragedy of The Borderers, a work considered as an unqualified failure when it first appeared. In 1797 Coleridge went to live in the neighborhood, and formed a close friendship with Wordsworth and his sister. The following year they started on a tour in Germany. To furnish funds for the journey they published a volume together, entitled Lyrical Ballads. The first poem was Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, and the other pieces were by Wordsworth. Of these, three or four were in Wordsworth's finest manner; but they did not save his name from ridicule and censure.

Returning to England, Wordsworth and his sister settled at Grasmere, in the Lake District. Coleridge and Southey resided near them. From this fact they came to be spoken of as the Lake School. The name, originally applied contemptuously, came to be the distinguishing title of these friends. Wordsworth now set himself to work to inculcate his peculiar views of poetry. Not disheartened by the unpopularity of his first attempt, he promptly issued a new edition of Lyrical Ballads, adding thirty-seven pieces to the original collection. At this time he was working on a biographical poem, The Prelude, published a half century after its composition.

A debt of £8500 due to his father at the time of his death, was paid to the poet in 1802. This increase of his fortune enabled him to marry. In 1807 he published two new volumes of Poems, containing the Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle, and many more of his choicest pieces. Here appeared his first sonnets, and several of them are still ranked among his happiest efforts. Wordsworth's next publication was in prose. His indignation arose at the grasping tyranny of Napoleon; and in 1809 he put forth a pamphlet against the Convention of Cintra. The sentiments were spirit

stirring, but the manner of conveying them was not, and his protest passed unheeded. His great work, The Excursion, appeared in 1814. This is a fragment of a projected great moral epic, discuss-` ing and solving the mightiest questions concerning God, nature, and man, our moral constitution, our duties, and our hopes. Its dramatic interest is exceedingly small; its structure is very faulty; and the characters represented in it are devoid of life and probability. On the other hand, so sublime are the subjects discussed, so lofty is their tone, and so deep a glow of humanity is perceptible throughout, that no honest reader can study this grand composition without ever-increasing reverence and delight.

The White Doe of Rylstone, published in 1815, is Wordsworth's only narrative poem of any length. The incidents are of a simple and mournful kind. Peter Bell was published in 1819, and was received with a shout of ridicule. The poet stated in the dedication that the work had been completed twenty years, and that he had continued correcting it in the interval to render it worthy of a permanent place in our national literature. It is meant to be serious, and is certainly not facetious, but there is so much farcical absurdity of detail and language that the mind is revolted. Between 1830 and 1840 the flood which floated him into favor rose to its height. Scott and Byron had in succession entranced the world. They had now withdrawn, and no third king arose to demand homage. It was in the lull that the less thrilling notes of the Lake bard obtained a hearing. It was during this time that he published his Ecclesiastical Sonnets and Yarrow Revisited; and in 1842 he brought forth a complete collection of his poems. His fame was now firmly established. On the death of Southey in 1843 he was made Poet Laureate. He died on April 23, 1850, when he had just completed his eightieth year.

The poetry of Wordsworth has passed through two phases of criticism; in the first his defects were chiefly noted, and in the second his merits. We have arrived at the third era, when the majority of readers are just to both. A fair estimate of Wordsworth's poetry is given by an acute writer in the Quarterly Review :* "It is constantly asserted that he effected a reform in the language of poetry, that he found the public bigoted to a vicious and flow

*Vol. XCII., p. 233, seq.

ery diction, which seemed to mean a great deal and really meant nothing, and that he led them back to sense and simplicity. The claim appears to us to be a fanciful assumption, refuted by the facts of literary history. Feebler poetasters were no doubt read when Wordsworth began to write than would now command an audience, however small; but they had no real hold upon the public, and Cowper was the only popular bard of the day. His masculine and unadorned English was relished in every cultivated circle in the land, and Wordsworth was the child and not the father of a reaction, which, after all, has been greatly exaggerated. Goldsmith was the most celebrated of Cowper's immediate predecessors, and it will not be pretended that The Deserted Village and The Traveller are among the specimens of inane phraseology. Burns had died before Wordsworth had attracted notice. The wonderful Peasant's performances were admired by none more than by Wordsworth himself: were they not already far more popular than the Lakepoet's have ever been-or ever will be? Whatever

influence Wordsworth may have exercised on poetic style, be it great or small, was by deviating in practice from the principles of composition for which he contended. Both his theory, and the poems which illustrate it, continue to this hour to be all but universally condemned. He resolved to write as the lower orders talked; and though where the poor are the speakers it would be in accordance with strict dramatic propriety, the system would not be tolerated in serious poetry. Wordsworth's rule did not stop at the wording of dialogues. He maintained that the colloquial language of rustics was the most philosophical and enduring which the dictionary affords, and the fittest for verse of every description.

When his finest verse is brought to the test of his principle, they agree no better than light and darkness. Here is his way of describing the effects of the pealing organ in King's College Chapel, with its 'self-poised roof, scooped into ten thousand cells :'

But from the arms of silence-list! O list

The music bursteth into second life;

The notes luxuriate, every stone is kissed

With sound, or ghost of sound, in mazy strife!'

This is to write like a splendid poet, but it is not to write as rustics talk. A second canon laid down by Wordsworth was, that poetic diction is, or ought to be, in all respects the same with the