poet; four to his university career and his first continental travels; two to a brief residence in London after quitting Cambridge, and to a retrospect of his intellectual being and progress up to that time. The next three books record his residence in France, partly at Paris, but principally in the Loire, during the eventful period of the king's flight and capture, and the deadly struggle of the Girondins with Robes pierre. The three remaining books treat of the detrimental effects of artificial life upon imagination and taste, and of the healing process of nature in regenerating them, by bracing the intellectual nerves, and restoring the inner eye and power of intuition for the mysteries and the microcosm of external and human nature. In the fourteenth book - The Conclusion

the reconcilement and restoration have been effected, and the basis of the poetic life is at length built upon broad and perdurable foundations.

Be

Such is the general outline of the Prelude. Its component parts its tone and impasto, to borrow a painter's phrase, are at least equal to the best of Wordsworth's earlier published works, and, in our opinion at least, superior to all of them, except his best lyrical ballads, his best sonnets, and his Ode to Immortality. Reynolds's earlier pictures possess a vigour and truth of colouring which are not always found in his later efforts. He went astray after a theory. Wordsworth, in like manner, by a perverse crotchet about diction, shackled the strength and freedom of his more mature works. cause English poetry, since the age of Charles the Second, had been overrun by gaudy exotics, none but indigenous words "the language of rustic life"-should be admitted, if he adhered to his theory, into his parterre. Fortunately his practice and his maxims were generally at variance, or instead of Peter Bell, the Waggoner, and the sonnets, the world might have been cumbered with a repetition of Ambrose Philipps's pastorals. His imagination and his taste were too potent and pure for the laws he would have imposed upon them. They broke the new cords; they burst the green wyths; they triumphed by disobedience; and while professing to speak in the language of common life, they attained to

"the large utterance of the early gods."

In

In the Prelude, however, as well as in Wordsworth's poetry generally, there are peculiar and characteristic defects. There is an occasional laxity of phrase, there is a want of precision in form, and there is an absence of deep and vital sympathy with men, their works and ways. Wordsworth in many of his sonnets, as well as in the poem now before us, represents himself as roused and enkindled in no ordinary degree by the dawn and earlier movements of the French revolution; and in the Excursion, under the character of the Solitary, he transcribes his own sensations at that momentous epoch. Yet in each of these cases he utters the sentiments of the philosopher rather than the citizen; of the Lucretian spectator more than of one himself caught and impelled by the heaving and boiling billows. His lyric emotion is brief; his speculative contemplation is infinite; he evinces awakened curiosity rather than spiritual fellowship. Shelley's poetry, especially in his "Prometheus" and "Revolt of Islam," we seem, as it were, to be confronted by that yawning and roaring furnace into which the opinions and institutions of the past were being hurled. In Wordsworth's most excited mood we have rather the reflexion of the flame than the authentic or derivative fire itself. Its heat and glare pass to us through some less pervious and colder lens. In Shelley again-we are contrasting not his poetry but his idiosyncrasy with that of Wordsworth-we encounter in its full vigour the erotic element of poetry, the absence of which in Wordsworth is so remarkable, that of all poets of equal rank and power in other respects, he, and he alone, may be said to have dispensed with it altogether. The sensuous element was omitted in his composition. His sympathies are absorbed by the magnificence and the mystery of external nature, or by the vigour and freshness of the human soul when under immediate contact with nature's elemental forms and influences. Neither was there ever any poet of his degree less dramatic than Wordsworth. All the life in his ballads, in his narrative poems, in his Excursion, is the reflex of his own being. The actors in his scenes are severe, aloof, stately,

and uniform; grand in their isolation, dignified in their sorrows. They are not creatures of the market or the haven, of the senate or the forum. His lovers do not whisper under moonlit balconies; his heroes are not the heroes of war or the tournament. To this exemption or defect in his mind may be ascribed, in some measure, the tardy reception of his earlier poetry. It was not merely that its unadorned diction proved insipid to palates long vitiated by a conventional phraseology. It was not merely that his occasional negligence of structure seemed bald and shapeless to eyes accustomed to the elaborate architecture of Pope and Gray. But even the more imaginative and indulgent portion of his audience perceived a want of one of the prime aliments of poetic inspiration, at least in Christian literature. Wordsworth therefore, in consequence of this want, was enforced beyond any poet on record to create and discipline the sympathies of his readers before he could receive his merited "Plaudite." His Prelude reveals the secrets of his idiosyncrasy, and in the growth of his mind and his early circumstances, we discover many of the conditions which his works require and presuppose in the readers of them.

We will now, under the guidance of Wordsworth's own disclosures, proceed to trace the progress and maturity of that imagination, which having at a

very early period banished from his verse all traditional and meretricious ornament, replaced English poetry upon the solid and lofty basis that it occupied under the dynasty commencing with Chaucer and closing with Milton. We say from a very early, but not the earliest period of his writings. For the "Descriptive Sketches," which were afterwards condemned by Wordsworth himself as vicious in their principles of composition, were in the general character of their diction more nearly allied to the style of Goldsmith, and the best portions of Darwin, than to any subsequent productions of the Lake school.

"His soul," he tells us, "had a fair seed time." Fairer indeed had none for the mission it was hereafter to fulfil. Chaucer in the centre of a splendid court and amid the symbols of a gorgeous ritual; Spenser lapped in chivalrous romance and familiar with the stately paladins and ceremonial of the "western Gloriana;" Shakespere "full of dealings with the world," yet shielded from its grosser contacts by the saturnian orb of his compact imagination; or Milton surrounded by scrolls and volumes of all time, and nerved by the stern zealotry of Puritanismhad none of them more befitting training for his vocation than the poet of Helvellyn, Glaramara, and Borrowdale. The Derwent, "fairest of rivers,"

the dalesmen or the legends of village schoolmasters and garrulous dames. Bird-nesting is a part of most boys' education. But few boys would seem to have run more imminent risks, and none certainly have given a graphic description of them than is contained in the following lines,—

more

drinker. It should be added however in justice both to the idol and the victim, that he was in time for evening chapel, "albeit long after the importunate bell had stopped." The reader, whether actually an alumnus or likely to be a visitant of Cambridge, may be glad to learn that "the evangelist St. John" was Wordsworth's patron: that his rooms were in the first of the three Gothic courts which composed the old red-brick college ere Mr. Rickman's stately corridors and supplement had crossed the Cam and rendered the New Court the cynosure of all gownsmen's eyes. Had Wordsworth been a severe student, and ambitious of mathematical distinction, he might have reasonably murmured at the garret assigned him by the Johnian tutors. Near him was the clock of Trinity college with its quarterly mementoes of the lapse of time: beneath him were the college kitchens with their shrilltongued manciples and "humming sound less tuneable than bees:" and hard by was the Trinity organ rolling, at morn and even, its melodious thunder over lawn and court. But of what Cambridge might in those days have taught him, there was little that Wordsworth cared to learn. The roving pupil of Hawkshead grammarschool probably brought with him to the university strong indispositions to the study of fluxions and conic sections, although in after life at least he was a profound admirer of the higher geometry. After the first novelty had worn off, Wordsworth felt what so many intellectual but non-reading men both before and after him have felt at Cambridge-the flatness and unprofitablenesss of University life to all not actually engaged in the strife for college prizes and fellowships. Since

Wordsworth was an undergraduate, indeed, Cambridge has widened its stadium, and latterly has thrown down most of the barriers that excluded from honours all who did not combine the soul of a ready reckoner with the strength of a coach-horse. Still so much remains in the University course either illiberal in spirit or palsying in its effects, that we trust the Royal Commission will inaugurate its inquiries into the studies of the university by pondering upon Wordsworth's experiences as narrated in his Prelude. His confessions are verified by scores of youthful and hopeful spirits in each returning year. The beginning of the race is radiant with hope: apathy arrives ere half the course is over and the goal is a blank. Professor Sedgwick in the last edition of his "Discourse on the Studies of the University," a work in which the comment overlays the text and the chaff buries the wheat-says indeed that Wordsworth, having declined the combat himself, was no fair judge of the system of training or the value of the prize. But if the general effect of Cambridge studies be, as we believe it to be, to deaden the imagination, to enfeeble the intellectual energies, and to create even in active and ingenuous minds a mental, if not a moral, apathy, there must be something rotten in the state of Alma Mater, which if the Commission can discover and remove, it will deserve heartier thanks than were ever paid to "captain or colonel, or knight in arms" for deliverance wrought or victory achieved. We may infer what Wordsworth about the year 1788 thought of the then actual Cambridge by the speculations in which he indulges of what a University might and ought to be :