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it and then again being swept aside by some burst of feeling. With age the one stiffened from a conscious intelligent delight in the subjective sense into a strong moralizing element, the other from a light check to a tight rein, an effectual damper. The tendency to philosophize changes often to mere metaphysical speculation, and the self-restraint becomes stubbornness which absolutely refuses to allow the imagination to play; and so we get the immense volume of matter which can scarcely be called poetry. This is the case to a, certain extent in the Prelude, but chiefly in the Excursion and in most of Wordsworth's later poems. Then, again, the former element becomes a sensitive, beautiful perception and imagination, and the later element controls this that it may not go too far, but express itself to the best advantage and with the most power; and it is when this occurs that we get such wonderfully beautiful, strong, ennobling poems as "The Intimations of Immortality," "The Highland Reaper," "Sonnet on Westminster Bridge," etc. When we turn to consider the subjects about which he chose to write, and the subject-matter or material which he chose to use in expounding or presenting those subjects, there is by no means such a chance to catch his romantic or classic element as there was in the case of his treatment of them, yet even here a little investigation discovers at least very prominent tendencies in the two directions. Wordsworth in his choice of subjects also was a revolutionist. He leaves the school of Pope and Dryden, discards wit and satire as rubbish utterly unworthy of him; following in the steps of Burns as far as they lead, he then sets out for himself and, traversing regions which his predecessor had not explored, he finds for himself a new field, before untouched, and cultivates that thoroughly. Chaucer and Spenser, especially, treated of objects in nature-the daffodil, the daisy, etc.—as did innumerable other lyric poets in the centuries before Wordsworth. Even Pope has his nature sketches, but he peoples Windsor forest with fauns and satyrs. But did any of them write of nature the entity, the manifestations of a universal, the teacher of man? Did they devote themselves to that field and consider even the most insignificant objects therein? Wordsworth, however, did not want a new subject merely because it was new. He must have a subject

worthy of the most profound thought. What subject could he have chosen better suited to this purpose than nature, and nature in her relation to man? Pope has his "Essay on Man"; Wordsworth his immortality ode. So intense is his interest in the greatest matters of life that he leaves his particular field and writes on "liberty," and we have the wonderful "Liberty Sonnets."

His was a profoundly inquiring spirit. Yet he does not in any considerable degree write of nature in her wilder moods. The mountains and the sea are conspicuously absent from his poetry. We see but little of the storm. It is the cloud of a summer day, not the heavy, black rain cloud. It would seem that here is another indication of self-restraint. He refrains from nature as expressed in her extravagant moods. He loves simplicity. These factors are shown in his refusal to use supernatural machinery. He scorns as unworthy of thought the superficial gnomes and fairies of Pope, those delicate creatures which come and go in their own way quite naturally; nor will he use the weird, terrible spirits of Coleridge or the wildly pleasing creations of Keats. We can explain Peter Bell in the same way. In this field his love for the simple goes to the extreme; and he chooses Peter Bell and the ass for his characters. He treats them in his subjective way, and not giving sufficient grounds for the emotion appealed to produces a most ludicrous effect.

In choice of subject, then, as in treatment, Wordsworth exhibits certain definite romantic and classical elements. How is it in regard to style? He was a master of language, and made it bend to his will and serve his purpose, and so we should find that his style, meaning thereby his art and style in the broadest significance of those terms, simply follows his treatment, and that practically the same elements are present in both. In the first place Wordsworth utterly discards the stiff, conventional heroic couplet and that stilted, unnatural style known as poetic diction. He framed his own theory of poetic diction and took up the position that poetry must be practically prose in meter. For the heroic couplet Wordsworth substitutes the sonnet-that typically romantic form the ballad, with whose growth the romantic movement was definitely connected, and blank verse; but most of all a verse

form of his own invention, based on a combination of three or four tetrameters and one trimeter. He will not be bound by the classicists, but with the true romantic spirit leaves their superficial, high-flown figures and style and their restricted heroic couplet for a natural expression and a free, unhampered verse form. He has not ordinary, complete thoughts to express, but profound and intangible ones. One quality which Wordsworth lacks almost completely, which, indeed, most English writers possess only to a very limited extent but which the true classicists among the ancients had to a very considerable degree, is that sense of form, that perception which shows the poet what is truly needed in his work, which makes his poem definite evolutions, perfect pieces, complete wholes; "so that if you cut them, they will bleed." Gray possessed this. His odes, in particular, have a very definite progress. But this quality is not found in Wordsworth. He lacks in general the classic sense of completeness and proportion. Yet his style has always stood for purity. It is free from all faults of grammar and rhetoric, and his theme speaks for itself without the poet interposing. In Keats's poetry you feel his personality and look at nature through his eyes, and it is the same with Shelley. Not so, however, with Wordsworth. He presents the picture as it is, with no allusions or superfluous images. Is not this another indication of this master mind striving to suppress itself that it may express nature real and actual? It is self-restraint. So with his music. This feature of Wordsworth's poetry is abundant and beautiful; he is not bound down as are the classicists. His music is a beautiful harmony, an accompaniment to his song. It does not push itself forward and call the attention of the reader from the song as with Coleridge, particularly in Christabel; it may have variations, but no one wild or extravagant appeal, as with Shelley, Keats, Byron, or Scott.

Let us compare the first stanzas of Shelley's and Wordsworth's "Skylark." Shelley's:

Hail to thee, blithe spirit,

Bird thou never wert,

That from heaven, or near it,

Pourest thy full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

And Wordsworth's:

Ethereal minstrel, pilgrim of the sky,

Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound?
Or, while the wings aspire, are heart and eye

Both with thy nest upon the dewy ground?
Thy nest which thou canst drop into at will-
Those quivering wings composed, that music still.

The first is joyous, bounding, happy, free; Shelley is up with the lark and delights in and loves the bird. His music expresses this fully. Wordsworth has no less love, but it is of a more meditative cast. It is subjective. Yet it is aspiring, mysterious. Wordsworth holds himself in check; he looks at the bird from the ground, he presents it as it appears from a deeply emotional yet sane standpoint; and his music is calm and even and beautiful. Taking into account these elements of style will greatly assist in accounting for Wordsworth's great defect-baldness or barrenness. With no sense of form to guide him he writes and writes and writes, and with a romanticist's egotism considers it all poetry; and with a check constantly upon his style, and not even classic figures to brighten the way, he naturally falls into the most prosy flatness. But in his best poetry Wordsworth displays sense of form, that saving trait, and this added to a warm imaginative style, made the stronger by purity and charming music, gives us many of those wonderful poems of which the classical "Laodamia" is typical.

We have now seen that Wordsworth, tempered and restrained by classicism, is, nevertheless, essentially romantic in subjectivity, imagination, and spirituality; and we have traced these elements in his treatment, subject-matter, and style. This combination in one man of the noblest qualities of romanticism and classicism produced the greatest poet of his age of poets-William Wordsworth.

Don E. Bridgman.

ART. X.-BIOLOGY AS A SOURCE OF PULPIT

ILLUSTRATION

An open, receptive mind is necessary as never at any previous time in the world, because the men who are working on scholastic problems are better trained and have the best facilities ever afforded, with the result that an enormous number of facts new to science is continually being published, the accumulation of which may mean a different, or even a new, interpretation of the present generalizations. In discussing the manner in which biology serves as a source of pulpit illustration I shall enumerate a few fundamental generalizations with some practical esthetic and ethical phases.

Biology deals with matter in the living state. When a bird or butterfly is killed, it does not lose any weight and the elements which compose the body of the bird or butterfly are always found in nature. If a chemical analysis is made, no new elements are discovered. So we are accustomed to speak of matter in the living state, the study of which is the peculiar province of biology, as contrasted with matter in the nonliving state, the study of which is given over to chemistry and physics. Concerning what constitutes or renders matter living it can be said that, thus far in the observations of men, no one has ever created matter or seen it change from the nonliving state to the living except through the influence of preëxisting living matter. Living matter, as such, can do a number of things that are peculiar to it alone. For example, living matter grows by transforming nonliving matter into the living state, during which transformation certain complicated chemical changes occur which are only known to take place under the influence of living matter. It has been reported that Professor Burke has been able to cause matter to change from the nonliving to the living state through the influence of radium. The results of his studies as reported are as follows: through the action of radium on a substance known as gelatine very small bodies are produced which, he believes, grow and, when they reach a certain size, divide into two equal and equivalent bodies in the same man

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