lacks the spontaneity of Shelley's longer lyric to the same ethereal minstrel. Wordsworth wrote his praise of this pilgrim of the sky in both a fourteen and an eighteen-line poem,the latter an unusual variation from what it is the custom to call a sonnet, but this illustrates the freedom from convention which the man who loved discipline so much was willing, nevertheless, to take.

Of all Wordsworth's hundreds of poems the greatest are the Ode on Intimations of Immortality and the Lines Composed above Tintern Abbey, the Ode being the superior of the two. Close to these in greatness come The Affliction of Margaret, The Daffodils, some of the political sonnets, and passages here and there in The Excursion and The Prelude. The work of Wordsworth was too multitudinous to permit more than the merest suggestions concerning it here. One will not read far in his work, it may be remarked, without concluding that the interpretation of romanticism which makes it a convertible term with medievalism is nothing short of absurd. It is his love of nature, and his belief that nature and man are akin, that nature has power to subdue and to solace passionate and suffering man, which have given Wordsworth his influence upon poets and readers who are not poets. This attitude to nature is the universally recognized thing about him. Matthew Arnold has made most of this aspect of Wordsworth's work. Among many other things he said about Wordsworth is the following,

Time may restore us in his course

Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force;
But where will Europe's latter hour

Again find Wordsworth's healing power?

"Wordsworth," says Stopford Brooke, "conceived that nature was alive. It had, he imagined, one living soul which,

entering into flower, stream, or mountain, gave them each a soul of their own. Between this Spirit in nature and the mind of man there was a pre-arranged harmony which enabled nature to communicate its own thought to man, and man to reflect upon them, until an absolute union between them was established." Effect of Natural Objects, Stepping Westward, Stray Pleasures, Brougham Castle, and Resolution and Independence are among the large number of poems that help to give an idea of the poet's attitude to nature. Wordsworth had also much of the affection for animals and children which Coleridge and Blake had. The White Doe of Rylstone and many passages in The Prelude make this more finely evident than some more frequently read, but more trivial poems. Of course, The Solitary Reaper and She was a Phantom of Delight should be given due praise, for from them thousands have found the glow and glory which does really fill the common life of all of us, if we have but eyes to see. No other English poet has had such full and true sympathy, such strong feeling for nature, as had Wordsworth.

To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears

meant to Wordsworth precisely what it said. And so, also, the little poem beginning "She dwelt among the untrodden ways," it meant what it said, to a profoundly thinking as well as feeling man, as much as did his Ode to Duty.

Scott. The Wizard of the North was the appropriate name which was given to Sir Walter Scott. Walter Scott was brought up upon legends and stories and poetic background of all sorts, out of which stands prominently Percy's Reliques, which was a sort of Bible to the writers of the Romantic "revival." He had, however, the careful training which preparation for the

profession of law gives. He was also an inveterate reader of history. That he successfully translated Goetz von Berlichingen from the German of Goethe is evidence that he was a good linguist. He also translated Bürger's Lenore. Furthermore, he gave a goodly amount of time and indefatigable energy to collecting material for a book called Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, which had as much, or nearly as much, effect on later poetry as Percy's Reliques. All this was preparing him for his long narrative poems, and for his novels.

We have suggested that there may be some hesitation as to the correctness of including Sir Walter among the great poets of this period. He himself thought, when Byron became famous, that there was no further use in his attempting to court popularity by the writing of poetry; and it was undoubtedly true that when Coleridge and Wordsworth attained popularity, late in Wordsworth's life, and when Tennyson became the vogue, Scott's power over the masses who read poetry waned very perceptibly. Yet in his own day, from the publication of The Lay of the Last Minstrel until 1832, the year of his death, he was the man of the hour with the reading public. And even yet, though Germany, France, and even America do not read him with the unshaken loyalty with which he was first received abroad, in Great Britain he is supremely loved. It is good that he should be, for in him there was nothing unclean, cheap, low, or morbid. If the above-mentioned poem and The Lady of the Lake have lost something of their former enormous popularity, it has been more because Scott's own novels, Waverley and the rest, have given the English reading public more of the same thing in a form they like better than the poetic form. Rokeby and The Lord of the Isles suffered also because they were overshadowed, not so much by the novels, as by The Lay and The Lady. Marmion was not very acceptable to the critics