to feelings that each one possesses exclusively for himself, feelings that one cannot, if one would, communicate to others. There are, as all lovers of Wordsworth's poetry well know, many passages in his writings that seem, ever since we first read them, to be our own special property. Probably each one of us could name a certain year of his life, when his feelings were becoming peculiarly sensitive to the beauty of the external world, and struggling into a higher vitality, when faint gleams of some great glory filled him from time to time with mysterious longings and joys. At such a time it was, probably, that Wordsworth's poems came like the warm breath of spring to burst the bud, and unfold it to the sunto reveal the full glory to his inmost heart. Wordsworth has been to many of us the one writer who, not by the powers of imagination has created for us new worlds and peopled our memory with new forms of grandeur or ethereal loveliness, but who has, as it were, recreated for us this world around us— this world which we are at times, after the thoughtless joys of childhood have passed, apt to look upon as a dreary prison-house; especially when, to use Tennyson's words, "the light is low, the heart is sick, and all the wheels of Being slow," when, to use once more Professor Dowden's words, "the persons we know seem to shrivel up and become wizened and grotesque-the places we have loved transform themselves into ugly little prisons-the ideals for which Р we lived appear absurd patterns, insignificant arabesques, devoid of idea and beauty-our own heart a most impertinent and unprofitable handful of dust." To have shed over our world that new light, of which he loves to speak, "The gleam, The light that never was on sea or land, The consecration, and the poet's dream". for this, I think Wordsworth chiefly claims our gratitude and admiration. And this he does when he interprets nature to us, not by what are generally called imaginative creations, but rather by so placing common objects before us that they shall henceforth not merely be, as so many things and persons are, mere lifeless meaningless stumps and blocks— "Rolled round in earth's diurnal course nor that we should merely revel with an animal delight in these things of the senses, as children or as Circe's swine. In this Wordsworth fulfils our definition of a poet. He reveals to us the real inner meaning of things; and to grasp and set before one this meaning is a creative act of the imagination, for though the object may be a natural common thing, it has been recreated for us. "It is," says Coleridge, and Horace tells us almost the same, "the prime merit of genius, and its most unequivocal mode of manifestation, so to repre sent familiar objects as to awaken in the minds of others a kindred feeling concerning them, and that freshness of sensation which is the constant accompaniment of mental no less than bodily convalescence. . . . In poems, equally as in philosophic disquisitions, genius produces the strongest impressions of novelty whilst it rescues the most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission." And he goes on to make the very just remark, and one that bears constant repetition, that manymost indeed of the truths that are absolutely invaluable to us become perfectly useless because they are accepted so unhesitatingly and universally that we never realize them for ourselves, but they "lie bedridden in the soul side by side with the most despised and exploded errors." To make these things realities to us-these common things, these common people, these common truths,--this is pre-eminently what Wordsworth does. And to receive his teaching each one must commune in his own heart with the poet, and be still. Such is the reason why I feel that any talking or writing about these poems is nearly useless; and I would far rather fill my pages with quotations from the poems themselves. For each one who cares for Wordsworth has appropriated for himself the reality which this passage, that little expression, that epithet, that description of scene, or flower, or star, or cloud, has made his own for ever. And he would resent it as intrusion if I happened to touch that same chord of feeling, whereas if no chord vibrate, all my words will be nonsense. But there are other points besides this to be discussed. There is the life of the man, and we must at least briefly touch on that: there is the question of his language, and the choice of subjects, as well as his ideas about poetry itself, and about the poetic faculties. The lives of Wordsworth and Coleridge were so intertwined that if we know one we know a good deal about the other. You remember that Coleridge was two years younger than our poet, who was therefore born in 1770. His father, John Wordsworth, was law agent to the Earl of Lonsdale, and lived at Cockermouth on the Derwent, in a manorhouse of that family. It was there that William was born-the second of four sons. While at school at Hawkshead in the vale of Esthwaite, within view of Kirkstone Pass and Helvellyn, Wordsworth began that companionship with nature-climbing the crags, wandering through the woods, skating on the lake, and finding society in the cottages of the village folk,-which went far towards forming his character, a character that he kept, in spite of one period of "obscuration of the master vision," to the last. He was left an orphan early in life, and in poor circumstances. Neverthe less he seems to have had enough to take him to the University of Cambridge, where, to the annoyance of his guardian uncles, he devoted most of his time to the English poets, thus throwing away the chance of distinguishing himself in a way that would have secured him means of livelihood. His life at Cambridge, as well as his school-days at Hawkshead, are related with many graphic touches in the "Prelude," which was not published till after his death. In the vacations he would wander through the mountains and by the streams of his beloved northern land, often with his sister Dorothy by his side; and it was at this period that he met with his cousin Mary Hutchinson, whom he so beautifully describes in those well-known verses beginning "She was a phantom of delight," and who afterwards became his wife. During his last summer vacation he and his friend Jones, "a youthful friend, he too a mountaineer," set out for the Alps, and spent their time—a time so valuable to those who are intent on "examinations, when a man is weighed, as in a balance "-in wandering on foot about France, Switzerland, and North Italy. It was indeed enough to make his uncles angry, and Wordsworth himself seems to have felt that he was acting rather imprudently, and deserved their reproaches : "A hardy slight Did such unprecedented course imply |