If Wordsworth's bent had been primarily towards prose-writing instead of poetry, he would undoubtedly have overcome his dislike for the mechanical process of committing his thoughts to paper; and the physical discomforts which that process caused him would very likely not have occurred. The latter were very natural in a man who practically lived out of doors and had never been subject to the practice of sedentary habits usual to persons of his position and of his intellectual interests. As is well known, he composed his poems almost wholly in the open air, and wrote the great bulk of them, as well as many of his letters, by the hands of others, his sister, his wife, and other members of his household. Such a method, possible even for poetical composition only when the poet can depend upon the unfailing sympathy of willing amanuenses, would obviously be almost impossible, except under the condition of physical necessity, for the composition of any extensive works in prose.

Wordsworth himself desired that his prose works should be collected and edited after his death-a wish that was not fulfilled till the edition of Dr. Alexander Grosart in 1876. But from the quotations given above it will be obvious that the poet made no claim to a place among the great prose-writers of his country. He devoted far more labour to the workmanship of his poetry than is often supposed ; but he paid little attention to the style of his prose, other than that which every sensible man pays with

the object of conveying his meaning clearly and forcibly to the reader's understanding. The result is instructive in two ways. On the one hand Wordsworth's prose moves, on the whole, with too uniform and ponderous a tread to exercise upon the reader that indefinable but real thing, the charm of style. It does not sparkle, though it very often glows. It retains the interest by its force of thought, but does not stimulate curiosity. There are no unexpected turns, no sudden side-peeps; no relief from the strenuous march of progress towards the goal. There is fine scorn, exalted passion, but none of the lighter sallies of wit and humour. And in the mere structure of sentences and paragraphs there is often a certain labour of effort to be clear which demands a corresponding labour in the reader to catch the meaning. The last of these drawbacks is obviously a mere matter of practice; the others are far more so than many critics would admit. No doubt the root of every quality of an author's style must be in himself; and the strongest roots and most deeply set in Wordsworth's nature were of a serious, strenuous, and self-centred character. But he was by no means devoid of humour; and a greater mastery of the machinery of prose-writing would have freed his mind to move with greater rapidity over his field of thought and with more readiness to receive various and casual impressions, just as a practised walker over his loved hillsides obtains, half-unconsciously, many more

various and casual impressions of beauty than one who is forced to pay constant attention to his footing.

On the other hand, no better instance than Wordsworth's prose could be found of the value of sincerity in writing, in other words of having something which you want to say, and, to use a favourite phrase of his, of writing with your eye on the object.' Wordsworth used prose simply as a means to an end; and nobody need open one of his essays with the mere idle curiosity to see what sort of stuff it is.' But if you are interested in the subject on which he writes, it is safe to say that your interest will be increased by what he writes about it. Of the Essay upon Epitaphs Hartley Coleridge said, 'It shows that if Wordsworth had not been a great poet, he might have been a great prose-writer.' This, I think, is quite true; but at the same time, the Essay upon Epitaphs is the least impressive of his important prose works, is less cogent and original in thought and expression than the Tract on the Convention of Cintra, the Description of the Lake Country, or the Prefaces to the poems. And this inferiority is due to the fact that, as a whole, the essay has not the same practical object as the other works; the thought and the expression are not, except in certain passages, fused into one by the heat of the writer's desire to convince and to persuade.

Wordsworth's writing was, like his character,

absolutely sincere; and his life was devoted to poetry. It follows inevitably that his prose is a poet's prose. In spite of its plain straightforwardness, of the absence of conscious ornament or artifice, of its frequently cumbrous movement, its long argumentation, its constant reference to principles, its laborious care in exposition, and its didactic insistence, one can never lose the feeling that it is a poet's prose. For an illustration we will turn not to the Description of the Lake Country, which in its very subject-matter bears an obvious affinity to one of the commonest functions of poetry, nor one of the Prefaces which deal with poetic principles and may be expected to be tinged with poetic language, but the Tract on the Convention of Cintra. This is how that pamphlet opens:

The Convention, recently concluded by the Generals at the head of the British army in Portugal, is one of the most important events of our time. It would be deemed so in France, if the Ruler of that country could dare to make it public with those merely of its known bearings and dependencies with which the English people are acquainted; it has been deemed so in Spain and Portugal as far as the people of those countries have been permitted to gain, or have gained, a knowledge of it; and what this nation has felt and still feels upon the subject is sufficiently manifest. Wherever the tidings were communicated, they carried agitation along with them-a conflict of sensations in which, though sorrow was predominant, yet, through force of scorn, impatience, hope, and indignation, and through the

universal participation in passions so complex, and the sense of power which this necessarily includedthe whole partook of the energy and activity of congratulation and joy. Not a street, not a public room, not a fireside in the island which was not disturbed as by a local or private trouble; men of all estates, conditions, and tempers were affected apparently in equal degrees. Yet was the event by none received as an open and measurable affliction: it had indeed features bold and intelligible to every one; but there was an under-expression which was strange, dark, and mysterious-and, accordingly as different notions prevailed, or the object was looked at in different points of view, we were astonished like men who are overwhelmed with forewarning-fearful like men who feel themselves to be helpless, and indignant and angry like men who are betrayed. In a word, it would not be too much to say that the tidings of this event did not spread with the commotion of a storm which sweeps visibly over our heads, but like an earthquake which rocks the ground under our feet.

Not more conspicuously in this passage, than on almost every page of Wordsworth's prose, the language is more highly charged with metaphor, recalls a greater number of concrete images, and deals with a wider range of epithets, than is usual with writers of prose who are not also poets.

It is not my purpose in introducing Wordsworth's critical writings to the reader to discuss at full length either their antecedents or the principles which they were intended to uphold. With regard to their antecedents, the Preface to the Lyrical