fane and drunken potter who had committed about all the crimes in the calendar, and is suddenly broken down into penitence by seeing the fidelity of a poor ass to its drowned master, and by accidentally overhearing the preaching of a Methodist minister. The story is not intrinsically improbable, and the successive incidents that worked upon the superstition and fear of Peter are vividly painted. But when Peter is cruelly beating the poor brute to make him rise, Wordsworth has to tell us twice over that all was "still and silent far and near."

Only the ass, with motion dull
Upon the pivot of his skull

Turns round his long left ear.

And when at last the poor creature catches a glimpse of the form of his master drawn out of the water, then we have this terribly famous stanza :

Now-like a tempest-shattered bark,
That overwhelmed and prostrate lies,
And in a moment to the verge
Is lifted of a foaming surge—

Full suddenly the Ass did rise.

We may be sure that if Wordsworth had possessed any sense of humor, such passages as this, with the

maunderings of The Idiot Boy, the infirmities of

Simon Lee

The more he works, the more

Do his weak ankles swell

and a score or more passages in his early poems at which the critics made merry, could never have been written.

CHAPTER V

CHARACTERISTIC MERITS

B

UT, grant all these limitations and deficiencies,

and the fact still remains that those volumes of verse which Wordsworth published in the first fifteen years of the last century must rank with the noblest poetry of our language. And if it is asked what gives this poetry so high value, we may answer, first of all, its moral quality. No other contemporary poet, no other English poet since Milton, has ministered so well to what is highest and purest in human nature. As Emerson said, "He more than any other man has done justice to the divine in us." If we seek for a statement of the distinguishing value of his poems, we can find none better than that given by Wordsworth himself in his oft-quoted letter to Lady Beaumont: "To teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think, and feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous; this is their office, which I trust

they will faithfully perform long after we mouldered in our graves." An appeal through our deepest thought and healthiest feeling to the higher spiritual part of our nature-that is the secret of Wordsworth's power. Whatever the ostensible subject, the real theme of all his best verse is some high moral truth which has passed into the study of his imagination.

The occasion which suggests the truth may be of the most plain and homely sort. There is no poet in whose work such simple, often apparently trivial, emotional impulse can suggest such varied and noble thought. But the transient impulse does not often find expression in his lines until it has passed through his imagination, and ripened into truth. The rationale of his poetic process is almost always the same. It is indicated by one of his definitions of poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquillity." He begins with some incident or narrative, no matter how homely, if only the emotion it suggests be healthy and natural; then this emotion is detained in memory and interpreted by imagination, till it slowly shades into reflection and begets some truth of life or character. It is just at this last stage that the mental process is shaped into verse. No

tice, for example, in this beautiful poem, how the sound of a pleasant sunset salutation blends in the poet's imagination with the quiet beauty of the hour and place, and insensibly suggests the large and tranquil thought of the last couplet.

STEPPING WESTWARD

"What, you are stepping westward?"-"Yea."
-Twould be a wildish destiny,

If we, who thus together roam

In a strange Land, and far from home,
Were in this place the guests of Chance:
Yet who would stop, or fear to advance,
Though home or shelter he had none,
With such a sky to lead him on?

The dewy ground was dark and cold;
Behind, all gloomy to behold;
And stepping westward seemed to be
A kind of heavenly destiny:

I liked the greeting; 'twas a sound
Of something without place or bound;
And seemed to give me spiritual right
To travel through that region bright.

The voice was soft, and she who spake
Was walking by her native lake:

The salutation had to me

The very sound of courtesy:

Its power was felt; and while my eye
Was fixed upon the glowing Sky,