On poetic interpretation of nature

by John Campbell Shairp

OSSIAN.

One more poetic influence, born of last century, must be noticed before we close. I mean the Celtic or Ossianic feeling about Nature.

I am not going now to discuss whether Macpherson composed the Gaelic poems which still pass for Ossian’s, or whether he only collected songs which had been floated down by tradition from a remote antiquity. Whichever view we take, it cannot be questioned that the appearance of this poetry gave to the English-speaking mind the thrill of a new and strange emotion about mountain scenery. Whether the poetry was old, or the product of last century, it describes, as none other does, the desolation of dusky moors, the solemn brooding of the mists on the mountains, the occasional looking through them of sun by day, of moon and stars by night, the gloom of dark cloudy Bens or cairns, with flashing cataracts, the ocean with its storms as it breaks on the West Highland shores or on the headlands of the Hebrides. Wordsworth, though an unbeliever in Ossian, felt that the fit dwelling for his spirit was

“Where rocks are rudely heaped and rent

As by a spirit turbulent,

Where sights are rough and sounds are wild

And everything unreconciled,

In some complaining dim retreat,

For fear and melancholy meet.”

And such are the scenes which the Ossianic poetry mainly dwells on. Here is a description of a battle—

“As hundred winds ’mid oaks of great mountains,

As hundred torrents from lofty hills,

As clouds in darkness rushing on,

As the great ocean tumbling on the shore,

So vast, so sounding, dark and stern,

Met the fierce warriors on Lena.

The shout of the host on the mountain height

Was like thunder on a night of storms,

When bursts the cloud on Cona of the glens,

And thousand spirits wildly shriek

On the waste whirlwind of the hills.”

And yet, though this is the prevailing tone, it is broken at times by gleams of tender light—

“Pleasing to me are the words of songs,

Pleasing the tale of the time that is gone;

Soothing as noiseless dew of morning mild

On the brake and knoll of roes,

When slowly rises the sun

On the silent flank of hoary Bens—

The loch, unruffled, far away,

Lies calm and blue on the floor of the glens.”[16]

Whatever men may now think of them, there cannot be a doubt but these mountain monotones took the heart of Europe with a new emotion, and prepared it for that passion for mountains which has since possessed it.

Cowper, Burns, the Ballads, Ossian, all these had entered into the minds that were still young when this century opened, and added each a fresh element of feeling, and opened a new avenue of vision into the life of Nature. When the great earthquake of the Revolution had shaken men’s souls to their centre, and brought up to the surface thoughts and aspirations for humanity never known till then, the deepened and expanded hearts of men opened themselves to receive Nature into them in a way they had never done before, and to love her with a new passion. But original as this impulse in the present century has been, we must not forget how much it owed, both in itself and in its manifold forms of expression, to the poetry of Nature which the eighteenth century bequeathed. Of that poetry there were two main streams, a literary and a popular. Of these the popular one was probably the most powerful in moulding the Poetry that was about to be.

CHAPTER XIV.
WORDSWORTH AS AN INTERPRETER OF NATURE.

There are at least three distinct stages in men’s attitude towards the external world. First comes the unconscious love of children—of those at least whose home is in the country—for all rural things, for birds and beasts, for the trees and the fields. The next stage is that of youth and early manhood, which commonly gets so absorbed in trade, and business, politics, literature, or science,—that is, in the practical world of man, that the early caring for Nature disappears from the heart, perhaps never again to revisit it. The third and last stage is that of—some at least, perhaps of many—men, who, after much intercourse with the world, and after having, it may be, suffered in it, return to the calm, cool places of Nature, and find there a solace, a refreshment, something in harmony with their best thoughts, which they have not discovered in their youth, it may be because they then less needed it.

Something like this takes place in the history of the race. Not to mention the savage state, men in the primeval era, when history first finds them, are affected by the visible world around them much as we see children and boys now are. Nature is almost everything to them. They use the forces, and receive the influences of it, if not in a wholly animal way, yet in a quite unconscious, unreflecting way. Then advancing civilization creates city life and affairs, in which man, with his material, social, and mental interests, takes the place of Nature, which then retires into the background. The love of it either wholly disappears or becomes a very subordinate matter. So it has been, so it still is, with whole populations, which know nothing beyond the purlieus of great cities. But probably the intensest feeling for Nature is that which is engendered out of the heart of the latest, perhaps over-refined, civilization. Ages that have been over-civilized turn away from their too highly-strung interests, their too feverish excitements, to find a peculiar relish in the calm, the coolness, the equability of Nature. Vinet has well said that “the more the soul has been cultivated by social intercourse, and especially the more it has suffered from it, the more, in short, society is disturbed and agonized, the more rich and profound Nature becomes,”—mysteriously eloquent for the one who comes to her from out the ardent and tumultuous centre of civilization.

Towards the end of last century Europe had reached this third stage. In all the foremost nations it showed itself by this as one among many new symptoms, that there was an awakening to the presence of Nature, and to the power of it, with an intimacy and vividness unknown before. Men became aware of the presence of the visible world, and, almost startled by it, they asked what it meant. What was so old and familiar came home to them as if it were now for the first time discovered. Here and there were men who, having had their fevered pulses stimulated almost to madness by the throes that preceded or accompanied the Revolution, turned instinctively to find repose in the eternal freshness that is in the outer world. This tendency showed itself in different ways in different countries, and expressed itself variously, according to the nature of the men who were the organs of it. In France this new passion for Nature found a representative in Rousseau, as early as 1759, in whose writings, in spite of their mawkish sentiment, their morbid “self-torturing,” their false politics and distorted morality, all men of taste have felt the fascination of their eloquence and the picturesqueness with which the shores of the Leman Lake are described. Later in the century, Goethe, in Germany, expressed the same feeling with all the difference there is between the Teutonic and the Gallic genius. More than any poet before him, or any since, he combined the scientific with the poetic view of Nature, or rather he studied the facts and laws of Nature with the eye of a physicist, and saw the beauty that is in these with the eye of a poet. It has been said of him that he worshiped God in Nature. It would be more true to say, that perceiving intelligently the unity that pervades all things, he felt intensely the beauty of that unity, he delighted in the wide views of the Universe which science had recently unfolded. But as the moral side of things, as duty and self-surrender hardly entered into his thoughts, it is misleading to speak of merely scientific contemplation and æsthetic delight as worship or devotion. Worship implies a personal relation to a personal being, and this was hardly in Goethe’s thoughts at all. But whatever may be the true account of his ultimate views, he is the German representative of the great wave of feeling of which I speak.

It was a fortunate thing for England that when the time had come when she was to open and expand her heart towards Nature, as she had never before done, the function of leading the new movement and of expressing it was committed to a soul like Wordsworth’s,—a soul in which sensibility, far healthier than that of Rousseau, and deeper than that of Goethe, was based on a moral nature, simple, solid, profound. It is the way in all great changes of every kind. When the change is to come, the man who is by his nature predestined to make it comes too. So it was in history and in art. Contemporary with Wordsworth’s movement, a change in these was needed. Men ever since the Reformation had got so absorbed in the new order of things, that they had quite forgotten the old, and had become ignorant of and unsympathetic to the past. So history, art, architecture, and many other things, had become meagre and starved. Men’s minds, in this country at least, had to be made aware that there had lived brave men before Cromwell, good men before Luther and Knox. And Walter Scott was born into the world to teach it this lesson, and to let in the sympathies of men in full tide on the buried centuries. The change which Scott wrought in men’s way of apprehending history was not greater than that which Wordsworth wrought in their feelings towards the world of Nature, with which, not less than with the world of History, their lives are encompassed. If Scott taught men to look with other eyes on the characters of the past, Wordsworth not the less taught them to do the same towards the present earth around them, and the heavens above them. This was indeed but half of Wordsworth’s function. For he had moral truth to communicate to his generation, not less than naturalistic truth. It is, however, with the latter order of truth that we have now to do. Yet in him each kind of truth was so interpenetrated with the other, they were balanced in such harmony, that it is not possible in any study of him to dissever them.

Thus it seems that two poets were the chief agents in letting in on men’s minds two great bodies of sentiment, the one historical, the other naturalistic, which have leavened all modern society, and even visibly changed the outward face of things. Sir W. Stirling Maxwell, at the Scott Centenary, remarked that the mention of any spot by Scott, in his poems or romances, has increased the market value of the surrounding acres more than the highest farming could do. And there is not an inn or small farm-house in all the Lake country which does not reap every summer in hard coin the results of Wordsworth’s poetry. Can even the stoutest utilitarian, seeing these things, say that Poetry is mere sentimental moonshine, with no power on men’s lives an actions?

To understand what Wordsworth did as an interpreter of Nature, we must bear in mind the experience through which he passed, the natural gifts and the mental discipline which fitted him to be so. He was sprung from a hardy North of England stock that had lived for generations in Yorkshire, afterwards in Cumberland, in a social place intermediate between the squires and the yeomen, and from both his parents he had received the inheritance of a moral nature that was healthy, frugal, and robust. Early left an orphan, with three brothers and one sole sister, his childish recollections attached themselves rather to school than to home. At the age of eight he went with his brothers to Hawkshead, “an antique village, standing a little way to the west of Windermere, on its own lake of Esthwaite, and possessing an ancient and once famous grammar school.” There he boarded with a humble village dame, and attended the school by day; but it was a school in which our modern high-pressure system was unknown, and which left the boys ample leisure to wander late and early by the lake-margins, through the copses, and on the mountain-sides. Of the village dame under whose roof he lodged he has left a pleasing portrait in “The Prelude.” The early and not the least beautiful part of that poem, and many of his most delightful shorter poems, refer to things seen and felt at that time. For, as the late Arthur Clough has truly said, “it was then and there beyond a doubt, that the substantive Wordsworth was formed; it was then and there that the tall rock and sounding cataract haunted him like a passion, and that his genius and whole being united and identified itself with external Nature.” From this primitive village school, he passed like other north-country lads, to Cambridge, where he spent three years, the least profitable years of his life, if any years are unprofitable to a man like him. More profit he got from summer visits to his own country, Hawkshead, and his mother’s relations, and especially from a walking tour through France, Switzerland, and the Italian lakes,—regions then but little trod by Englishmen. After graduating at Cambridge he gladly left it in 1791 to plunge headlong into the first fervor of the French Revolution.

The high hopes which that event awoke in him, as in many another enthusiast, the dreams that a new era was about to dawn on down-trodden man, these things are an oft-told tale. When the revolutionary frenzy culminated in bloodshed and the Reign of Terror, Wordsworth’s faith in it remained for long unshaken and unchanged. On the scenes which appalled others he looked undismayed, and even seriously pondered himself becoming a leader in the business. Luckily for himself and the world, he was recalled from France towards the close of 1792 by some stern home-measures, probably the cutting short of his always scanty supplies. In 1793 he published an “Apology for the French Revolution,” in which he rails against all the most cherished institutions of England, and recommends the Utopia of absolute democracy as the one remedy for all the ills which afflict the world. Not even the murder of Louis XVI., nor the bloodshed and horrors which followed, shook him. The fall of Robespierre in July, 1794, gave him new heart to believe that his golden dreams would yet be realized. But when from the struggle he saw emerge, not freedom, peace, and universal brotherhood, but the First Consul with his armies, his high hopes at last gave way. Despairing of the destinies of mankind, he wandered about the country aimless, dejected, almost in despondency. Public affairs never appear so dark as when a man’s own private affairs are getting desperate. And such was Wordsworth’s case at that time. He had no profession, no aim in life, was almost entirely destitute of funds. From absolute want he was relieved in 1795 by the bequest of nine hundred pounds left to him by his friend Raisley Calvert. This enabled his sister—a soul hardly less gifted, and altogether as noble as himself—from whom he had been much separated, to take up house with him, and to minister not only to his bodily but much more to his mental needs. Seeing that his office on earth was to be a poet, she turned him away from brooding over dark social and moral problems, and led him to look once more on the open face of Nature, and to mingle familiarly with humble men. They made themselves a home, first in Dorsetshire, then in Somersetshire, where Coleridge joined them. Then it was that, warmed by the society of his sister and his poet friend, and wandering freely among the hills of Quantock, the fountain of his poetic heart was opened, which was to flow on for years. Soon followed the final settlement, in the last days of last century, in the small cottage at the Townhead of Grasmere, which became their home for more than eight years, and will forever continue to be identified with the most splendid era of Wordsworth’s genius. For it was during the years immediately preceding Grasmere, and during the eight Grasmere years, that he attained to embody in one poem after another the finest effluence of his spirit.

It was almost entirely at Grasmere, between the years 1800 and 1805, that he composed “The Prelude,” an autobiographic poem on the growth of his own mind. It is for the purpose of better understanding this poem that I have given the foregoing brief framework of the outward facts of Wordsworth’s life on which “The Prelude” comments from within. The poem consists of fourteen books in blank verse, probably the most elaborate biographic poem ever composed. Readers of Lord Macaulay’s Life may perhaps remember his remarks on it: “There are,” he says, “the old raptures about mountains and cataracts; the old flimsy philosophy about the effects of scenery on the mind; the old crazy mystical metaphysics; the endless wildernesses of dull, flat, prosaic declamations interspersed.” No one need be astonished at this estimate by Lord Macaulay. We see but as we feel. To him, being such as he was, it was not given to feel or to see the things which Wordsworth most cared for. No wonder, then, that to him the poem that spoke of these things was a weariness. Doubtless much may be said against such a subject for a poem—the growth of a poet’s mind from childhood to maturity: much too against the execution, the sustained self-analysis, the prolixity of some parts, the verbosity and sometimes the vagueness of the language. But after making full deduction for all these things, it still remains a wonderful and unique poem, most instructive to those who will take the trouble required to master such a work. If after a certain acquaintance with Wordsworth’s better-known and more attractive poems, a person will but study “The Prelude,” he will return to the other poems with a new insight into their meaning and their truth.

How highly Coleridge esteemed it those know who remember the poem in which he describes the impression made on himself by hearing Wordsworth read it aloud for the first time after its completion:—

“An Orphic song indeed,

A song divine, of high and passionate thoughts,

To their own music chanted.”

This poem, read to Coleridge in 1805, was not given to the world till July, 1850, a few months after the author’s death. The reason why I shall now dwell on it at some length is because no other production of Wordsworth’s gives us so deep and sustained a view of his feeling about Nature, and of the relation which he believed to exist between Nature and the soul of man.

In Wordsworth’s mental history two periods are especially prominent. The first was his school-time at Hawkshead, by Esthwaite Lake, eight years in all. The second was the mental crisis through which he passed after his return from France till he settled with his sister in the south of England, and ultimately at Grasmere. The first was the spring-time of his soul—a fair spring-time, in which all the young impulses and intuitions were first awakened, when the colors were laid in and deeply engrained into every fibre of his being. The second was the trial time, the crisis of his spirit, in which all his early impulses, impressions, intuitions, were brought out into distinct consciousness, questioned and tested—vindicated by reason, and embraced by will as his guiding principles for life—in which, as one may say, all that had hitherto existed inwardly in fluid vapor was gathered up, condensed, solidified into deliberate substance and permanent purpose.

A healthful, happy, blissful school-time was that which Wordsworth spent by Esthwaite Lake—natural, blameless, pure, as ever boy spent. School rules were few, discipline was light, school hours were short, and, these over, the boys were free to roam where they willed, far or near, high and low, early and late, sometimes far into the frosty starlight. Then it was that Nature first

“Peopled his mind with forms sublime and fair,”

came to him like instincts unawares, as he went about his usual sports with his companions. Rowing on the lake, snaring woodcocks among the hill copses by night, skating by starlight on the frozen lake, climbing crags to harry the raven’s nest, scudding on horseback over Furness Sands:—

“From week to week, from month to month, we lived

A round of tumult.”

In all this there was not anything lackadaisical, nor any maundering about Nature, but only the life you might expect in a hardy mountain-bred boy, with robust body and strong animal spirits. These things he shared with other boys. There was nothing special in them. But what was peculiar, eminently his own, was this—the feelings that sometimes came to him in the very midst of the wild hill sports—in the pauses of the boisterous games. There were times when, detached from his companions, alone in lonely places, he felt from within

“Gleams like the flashing of a shield, the earth

And common face of Nature spake to him

Rememberable things.”

During his later school years he tells us that he would walk alone under the quiet stars, and

“Feel whate’er there is of power in sound

To breathe an elevated mood, by form

Or image unprofaned, and I would stand,

In the night blackened with a coming storm,

Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are

The ghostly language of the ancient earth,

Or make their dim abode in distant winds,

Thence did I drink the visionary power.”

He speaks, too, of a morning when he had stolen forth before even the birds were astir,

“And sate among the woods

Alone upon some jutting eminence,

At the first gleam of dawnlight, when the vale,

Yet slumbering, lay in utter solitude.

How shall I seek the origin? where find

Faith in the marvelous things which then I felt?

Oft in these moments such a holy calm

Would overspread my soul, that bodily eyes

Were utterly forgotten, and what I saw

Appeared like something in myself, a dream,

A prospect in the mind.”

These were his supreme moments of existence, when the vision first dawned upon his soul, when without knowing it he was baptized with an effluence from on high, consecrated to be the poet-priest of Nature’s mysteries. The light that then came to him was in after years “the master-light of all his seeing,” the fountain-head of his highest inspirations. From this was drawn that peculiar ethereal gleam which rests on his finest after productions—the ode to the Cuckoo, the poems on Matthew, Tintern Abbey, the Intimations of Immortality, and many another poem. Not that he knew in these accesses of soul what he was receiving. He felt them at the time, and passed on. Only long afterwards, when

“The eagerness of infantine desire”

was over, in hours of tranquil thought, the remembrance of those bright moments recurred, with a sense of distance from his present self so remote, that

“Often did he seem

Two consciousnesses, conscious of himself,

And of some other being.”

The Prelude contains nothing more beautiful Of instructive than the whole account of that Hawkshead school-time. It portrays the wonderful boyhood of a wonderful boy, though neither he himself nor others then thought him the least wonderful. Reflecting on it long afterwards, Wordsworth saw, and every student of his poetry will see, that in that time lay the secret of his power, by the impulses then received his whole philosophy of life and of poetry was determined. Natural objects, he tells us, then came home to him primarily through the human affections and associations of which they are the outward framework,—just as the infant when he first comes to know sensible objects, learns to associate them with the interventions of the touch, the look, the tenderness of its mother. Gradually, even before school-time was past, Nature had come to have a meaning and an attraction for him, by herself, without the need of such intervening agents.

Further, he tells us, that while for him at that time each individual rock, tree, and flower, had an interest of its own, he came deeply to feel the great living whole which Nature is. All his thoughts, he says, were steeped in feeling.

“I was only then

Contented, when with bliss ineffable

I felt the sentiment of being spread

O’er all that moves, and all that seemeth still;

O’er all that lost beyond the reach of thought

And human knowledge, to the human eye

Invisible, yet liveth to the heart;

O’er all that leaps, and runs, and shouts, and sings,

Or beats the gladsome air; o’er all that glides

Beneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself

And mighty depth of waters. Wonder not

If high the transport, great the joy I felt,

Communing in this sort through earth and heaven

With every form of creature, as it looked

Towards the Uncreated with a countenance

Of adoration, with an eye of love.”

“Towards the Uncreated,”—the looking thitherward through both Nature and his own moral being, so as to find both based on one Divine order, witnessing to one Eternal Being, this is one of Wordsworth’s deepest tendencies. This is his teaching in many forms, emphatically in the “Ode to Duty,” of which, after recognizing duty as the law of his own being, he exclaims,

“Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;

And the eternal heavens through thee are fresh and strong.”

The passage last quoted from “The Prelude” has the same meaning, and testifies that from and through his communing with Nature he had learnt, even in boyhood, a true and real natural religion—had felt his soul come into contact with Him who is at once the author and upholder of Nature and of man. Not perhaps that, in his school days, he was fully aware of what he then learnt. He felt at the time, he learnt to know what he felt afterwards. At Cambridge, when surrounded by trivial and uncongenial interests, he became aware that he had brought with him from the mountains powers to counterwork these—

“Independent solaces,

Incumbencies more awful, visitings

Front the Upholder of the tranquil soul.”

What then was the spiritual nutriment he had gathered from that boyhood passed in Nature’s immediate presence? He had felt, and after reflection had made the feelings a rooted and habitual conviction, that the world without him, the thing we call Nature, is not a dead machine, but something all pervaded by a life—sometimes he calls it a soul; that this living Nature was a unity; that there was that in it which awoke in him feelings of calmness, awe, and tenderness; that this infinite life in Nature was not something which he attributed to Nature, but that it existed external to him, independent of his thoughts and feelings, and was in no way the creation of his own mind; that, though his faculties in nowise created those qualities in Nature, they might go forth and aspire towards them, and find support in them; that even when he was withdrawn from the presence of that Nature and these qualities, yet that they subsist quite independent of his perceptions of them. And the conviction that Nature there was living on all the same, whether he heeded her or not, imparted to his mind kindred calm and coolness, and fed it with thoughts of majesty. This, or something like it, is the conviction which he tries to express in “The Prelude.” Those vague emotions, those visionary gleams which came to him in the happier moments of boyhood, before which the solid earth was all unsubstantialized and transfigured—these he held to be, though he could not prove it, intimations coming to his soul direct from God. In one of these moments, a glorious summer morning, when he was spending a Cambridge vacation by the Lakes, he for the first time consciously felt himself to be a dedicated spirit, consecrated to truth and purity and high unworldly endeavor.

Again, the invisible voice that came to him through the visible universe was not in him, as has often been asserted, a Pantheistic conception. Almost in the same breath he speaks of

“Nature’s self, which is the breath of God,”

and

“His pure word by miracle revealed.”

He tells us that he held the speaking face of earth and heaven to be an organ of intercourse with man,—

“Established by the sovereign intellect

Who through that bodily image hath diffused,

As might appear to the eye of fleeting time,

A deathless spirit.”

And again, he says that even if the earth was to be burnt up and to disappear,

“Yet would the living Presence still subsist

Victorious.”

To assert this, whatever it may be, is not to preach Pantheism. It is only to make the earth not a mere piece of mechanism but a vital entity, and to regard it as in living and intimate relation with Him who made and upholds it, and speaks to man more or less distinctly through it.

I pass now to the second stage, the great turning point in Wordsworth’s mental history, which lay between his residence in France and his settlement at Grasmere, that is, between the years 1793 and 1800.

The three years he had spent at Cambridge, from 1787 till the end of 1790, if they did nothing else for him, had begun to draw out his social feelings. The order of his interests had been this. In early boyhood animal activity and trivial pleasures had engrossed him. In due time these had retired, and, before school-time was over, Nature stood out preëminent, almost alone, in his affections. Up to his twenty-second year, man had been to him a quite subordinate object. What Cambridge began, residence in France had perfected,—his interest in man for his own sake, and in all the great problems, practical and speculative, connected with man. These problems, present, more or less, to every age, had by the revolutionary fervor been quickened into feverish intensity, and driven on to new and far-reaching issues. Smitten to the core with the contagion of the time, Wordsworth began to meditate feelingly on man, his sufferings, his artificial restraints, his aspirations, his destiny. He pondered long and deeply the questions of government, and the best forms of it,—of society, of morality and its grounds, of man’s perfection and its possibility. Even when for a time under the Reign of Terror his immediate hopes from the Revolution faded, yet he did not cease to ponder the questions which recent events had brought to the surface. The fall of Robespierre and his “atheist crew” revived his hopes. Though none of the public acts of France pleased him, yet his faith in the people was still strong; no external blunders, he believed, would take “life from the young Republic.”

For a while he dreamed on his golden dreams about a perfected humanity. Still for a time to him

“The whole earth

The beauty wore of promise.”...

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to the young was heaven.”

But when Britain declared war against France, and France changed a war of self-defense for one of aggression, then came disgust with his own country, disappointment and vexation with France, despair of her promoting the cause of Liberty. Still he clung stubbornly to his old tenets, and even strained them farther. At last, when he saw the Emperor crowned by the Pope, this was too much for him. It was the last opprobrium, the final blow to his republican ardor. He had seen a people from whom he hoped all things, a nation which erewhile had looked up in faith to heaven for manna, take a lesson from the dog returning to his vomit. Then for a time the whole fabric of his hope and faith gave way. He fell into distrust, not only of nations, but of himself. The faiths, intuitions, aspirations which he had hitherto lived by, failed him. He cross-questioned all fundamental principles, and if they could not vindicate themselves by formal proof, rejected them. At last, losing all hold on conviction, wearied out with endless perplexities, he doubted all moral truth, and gave it up in despair. With his hopes for man, and his faith in man’s destiny, the poetic vision of Nature, which had hitherto been with him, disappeared, and his immediate converse with Him who through Nature spoke to him was for a time eclipsed. Under the tyranny of the logical and analyzing faculty, his intelligence was no longer an organ which transmitted clearly the light from without to the light within him, but, entangled in the meshes of the finite understanding, he could for a time see or receive nothing which he could not verify by logic. He looked on the outer world no more in a free imaginative way as of old, but compared scene with scene, and judged and criticised them by artificial rules.

“To the moods

Of time and season, to the moral power,

The affections and the spirit of the place

Insensible.”

This to one like Wordsworth, more than to most men, was abnegation of his higher self, was in fact moral death. It was the lowest depth into which he sank, the climax of what he himself calls “his degradation.”

But as his faith in man and his love of Nature had suffered shipwreck together, it was by the same influence they were restored. From the temporary obscuration of the master vision, the laying asleep of his inner faculties, the first thing to arouse him was the influence of human affection, and that came to him through the presence of his sister, his “sole sister.” When after his return from France he was wandering about aimless and dejected, she saw and understood his mental malady. She made a home for him, and became his hourly companion. If he had labored zealously to cut off his heart from all the sources of his former strength, she by her influence and sympathy maintained for him, as he expresses it, “a saving intercourse with his true self.” She saw that his true vocation was to be a poet, and a teacher of men through poetry, and bade him seek in that alone “his office upon earth.” She took him once more to lonely and beautiful places, till Nature again found access to him, and, combining with his sister’s human ministry,

“Led him back

To those sweet counsels between head and heart,

Whence groweth genuine knowledge fraught with peace.”

Thus began that sanative process which in time restored him to his true self, to “his natural graciousness of mind,” and made him that blessing to the world he was destined to become.

But there was not a restoration only, but there came through that same sister an accession of new emotions, an opening of his heart to influences heretofore disregarded. His nature was originally, he tells us, somewhat austere and unbending. She opened his eyes to perceive in Nature minute lovelinesses formerly unnoticed, his heart to feel sympathies and tendernesses for human things hitherto uncared for. In her company, whether they wandered about the country or dwelt in a settled home, his former delight in Nature returned. He felt once again, like the breath of spring, visitings of the imaginative power come to him; the overflowings of “the impassioned life” that is in Nature streamed in upon him, and he stood in her presence once more

“A sensitive being, a creative soul.”

The restoration, the sanative process I speak of, showed itself in two directions, as regards his feeling towards man and towards Nature.

First as to man: his interests and sympathies, stimulated to excess by the political convulsions he had passed through, now found healthier objects in the laboring poor whom he conversed with in the fields, and in the vagrants he met on lonely roads. These became his daily schools. In many an exquisite poem he has embalmed the incidents and characters he saw or heard of at that time. His early upbringing combined with after experience and reflection to make him esteem simple and humble life more than artificial. The homely ways of the people he had spent his boyhood with—village dames, hardy dalesmen and shepherds—concurred with his own native bias to make him love and esteem what is permanent, not what is accidental in human life, the inner, not the outer man of men, the essential soul, not its trappings of birth, fortune, and position. This native bias had been deepened by all he had seen, felt, and thought during the revolutionary ferment, and now became the fixed habit and purpose of his mind, part of his permanent self. For in humble men, when not wholly crushed or hardened by penury, he seemed to see the primary passions and elementary feelings of human nature existing as it were in their native bed—freer, stronger, more unalloyed than in men of so-called position and education, who, as he thought, were often overlaid by artifice and conventionality. The formalities which pass by the name of education he thought have little to do with real feeling and just sense, and intercourse with the talking world does little to improve men. He therefore turned away from artificial to natural man, and resolved to let the world know what he had seen and found in men and women whose outside was least attractive.

“Of these, said I, shall be my song, of these

Will I record the praises, making verse;

Deal boldly with substantial things, in truth

And sanctity of passion, speak of these

That justice may be done, obeisance paid

Where it is due.”

Much more might be said of his views of man, as they ultimately became, for his insight into the heart and its workings, though confined to certain lines, and reflective, not dramatic, was within these lines true and deep.

But we must now turn to consider, secondly, what were his views about Nature, when they were fully matured. He now came to hold with conscious conviction, what formerly he had only felt, hardly knowing that he felt it, that Nature had

A self-subsistence, existing outside of man’s thoughts and feelings, and wholly independent of them;

A unity of life and power pervading it through all its parts, and binding them together into a living whole;

A true life of her own, which streamed through and stimulated his life—a spirit which, itself invisible, spoke through visible things to his spirit.

That this life had qualities inherent in it:—

Calmness, which stilled and refreshed man;

Sublimity, which raised him to noble and majestic thoughts;

Tenderness, which, while stirring in the largest and loftiest things, condescends to the lowest, is with the humblest worm and weed as much as in the great movements of the elements and of the stars.

Above all, Nature he now saw to be the shape and image of right reason, reason in the highest sense, embodied and made visible in order, in stability, in conformity to eternal law. The perception of these satisfied his intellect, calmed and soothed his heart.

Thus the powers and impulses which converse with these qualities, as they exist in the external work, had quickened within his boyish mind, now once more in this reviving time asserted themselves, and filled him with a happiness which, if soberer, was sanctioned by his mature reason. The Universe therefore was to him no mere reverberation of his own voice, no mere reflection of hues cast from his own changeful moods. It was not a thing to practice the pathetic fallacy on. It was not true that, as Coleridge dreamed,

“Ours is the wedding garment, ours the shroud.”

Not this at all, but an existence independent of us and our moods, stable, equable, serene. And our wisdom is to receive her native impulses without imposing on her our caprices. Hence it is that Nature is to man a supporting, calming, cooling, and invigorating power. So it was that at this time he felt both emotion and calmness come to him from Nature, from the one energy to seek the truth, from the other that happy stillness which fits the mind to receive truth when it comes unsought. With clearer conviction than ever, he now saw in Nature a power, which is the shape and image of right reason—reason, in its highest sense, embodied and made visible. The order, the stability, “the calm obedience to eternal law,”—these, as I have just said, which are the image of right reason, satisfied his intellect, calmed and soothed his feelings. From Nature’s calmness, and from her slow and steadily-working processes, he received an admonition to cease from hoping to see man regenerated by sudden and violent convulsions, and yet to esteem and reverence what is permanent in human affection, and in man’s moral being, and to build his hope on the gradual expansion and purification of these. All these perceptions about Nature had been more or less present to him from boyhood, only now what were before but vague emotions came out as settled convictions.

But there was a further step, which he now made. He discovered that in order to attain the highest and truest vision of Nature, the soul of man must not be altogether passive, but must act along with and in unison with Nature, must send from itself abroad an emanation, which, meeting with natural objects, produces something better than either the soul itself or Nature by herself could generate. This creation is, as has been observed, “partly given by the object, partly by the poet’s mind,” is neither wholly mind, nor wholly object, but something, call it aspect, effluence, emanation, which partakes of both. It is the meeting or marriage of the life that is in the soul with the life that is in the Universe, which two are akin to each other, that produces the truest vision and the highest poetry. This view Wordsworth illustrates by the marvelous effect produced on a landscape by a change in the atmosphere, a clearing of the clouds, a sudden flood of moonlight let down into the darkness of mountain abysses, such as that he saw at midnight while ascending Snowdon. A like power he thinks the mind can exercise on outward things—what he calls

“An ennobling interchange

Of action from without and from within.

The excellence, pure function, and best power,

Both of the object seen and eye that sees.”

When his mind thus put forth its higher power on the actual familiar world, on life’s every-day appearances, he seemed to gain clear sight of a new world, not hitherto reflected in books, but worthy to be so reflected, and made visible to other eyes. This he set himself to accomplish, and the result still lives in many a pure and deathless creation. That combined action of the object seen and of the eye that saw, above spoken of, is especially embodied in such poems as “The Yew-Trees of Borrowdale,” “Stepping Westward,” “The Leech-Gatherer,” and “To the Cuckoo.” In all these, and many more, the poet, letting his own spirit pass forth into the scene before him, and become identified with it, has caught the inner spirit of the place and of the hour, brought it out, and interpreted it as no mere outward description could have done. A few strokes, giving one or two of the most characteristic features, as seen by a keenly-observant eye, and then he glides into that which no eye can see, but only the living power of a deep and sympathetic imagination. And though few other imaginations could have penetrated so deeply into the secret of Nature, and given articulate voice to her silences, yet every true imagination feels at once that he had gone to the quick, and truly rendered the invisible but not unfelt presence that dwells there. It is in this way that he has gathered up into himself the sleep that from oldest time has brooded over those Westmoreland mountains, and uttered it in his own perfect and melodious language. This has been done by him for that region once for all, and no other poet need attempt to repeat it, any more than a sculptor need essay another Apollo Belvedere, or a painter a new Transfiguration.

On many of the poems descriptive of Nature that followed his recovery from despondency,—that is, those composed between the years 1796 and 1808,—there rests an ethereal gleam, something of

“The light that never was on sea or land,”

which gives to these a peculiar charm, but which is less present in his later productions. This idealizing light was drawn either from remembrances of that dream-like vividness and splendor above noticed, which in childhood he saw resting on all things, or from occasional returns of the same vivid emotion and quick flashings from within, which his restored happiness in Nature for a time brought back. This peculiar light culminates in the “Ode on Immortality,” though there it is rather a remembrance of something gone than a present possession. Perhaps the last powerful recurrence of this visionary gleam which he felt is that recorded in the lines composed upon “An Evening of Extraordinary Beauty and Splendor,” seen from the little mount in front of his Rydal home in the year 1818.[17]

But these high instincts, and all the impulses akin to them, what are they, what is their worth and meaning, what are we to think about them? Are they merely erratic flashes, garnishing for a moment our sky in early years, soon to be lost forever in the gray light of common day? This is the way in which most poets have regarded them, and so they have sung many a sad depressing strain over the vanished illusions of youth. But this was not the way with Wordsworth. Mr. Leslie Stephens, in a recent essay of great value, has admirably pointed out how his whole philosophy is based on “the identity between the instincts of our childhood and our enlightened reason,” and is busied with expounding the process by which “our early intuitions may be transformed into settled principles of feeling and action.” Those vague instincts, Wordsworth believed, come to man from a divine source, and are given to him not merely for pleasure’s sake, but that he may condense them into permanent principles by thought, by the faithful exercise of the affections, by contemplation of Nature, and by high resolve. The outer world was best and most truly seen when viewed, not as a solitary existence apart from man, but as the background of human life, and looked at through the human emotions of awe, reverence, and love. Thus, though those early ideal lights might disappear, something else, as precious and more permanent, would be wrought into character as the vague emotions became transmuted into what he calls “intellectual love,” “feeling intellect,” “hopeful reason,” all of which are but different names for that state of consciousness which he held to be the organ or eye that sees all highest truth.

“This spiritual love acts not nor exists

Without imagination, which, in truth,

Is but another name for absolute power

And clearest insight, amplitude of mind,

And reason in her most exalted mood.”

It may be said, perhaps, This philosophy is all well enough for those who have in childhood known such ideal experiences in the presence of Nature. But these are the few; most men know nothing of them. Be it so. But to these, too, this philosophy has a word to speak. If the many have been insensible to Nature, most surely they have known the first home affections, to father and mother, to brother and sister. In early youth they have felt the warm glow of friendship, and later in life the first domestic affections may have revived more deeply when manhood has made for itself a second home. Of these emotions time must needs make many of them past experiences. Are they then to be no more than fond memories without influence on our present selves? Wordsworth teaches, and all wise men agree with him, that if we allow these to pass from us, as sunbeams from a hill-side, the character is lowered and worsened; if they are retained in thought and melted into our being, they become the most fruitful sources of ennobled character. The firm purpose not to

“Break faith with those whom he has laid

In earth’s dark chambers,”

—to how many a man has this become the chief incentive to perseverance in high endeavor!

This is a philosophy which will wear. It suits not only the visionary in his solitude, but is fitted as well for the counting-house and the market-place.

Again, it may be said, This way of looking at Nature and life may suit a man in the heyday of life, when his nerves are strong, his hopes high, and all things wear their summer mood. In such a time he may well sing

“Naught shall prevail against us or disturb

Our cheerful faith that all which we behold

Is full of blessings.”

No doubt, through “The Prelude,” and through all Wordsworth’s poetry contemporary with it, that is, all his poetry composed before the age of thirty-five, there runs a vein of Optimism. But a man’s views of life are not complete at that age. Though he never expressly recanted any of the views expressed in “The Prelude,” yet he added to them new elements when time and grief showed him other sides of life. Hitherto, human sorrow had been to him but a “still sad music” far away. But when, in 1805, Nature, with her night and tempest, drove his favorite brother’s ship on the Shambles of Portland Head, and wrecked the life he greatly loved, then he learned that she was not always serene, but could be stern and cruel. Then sorrow came home to him, and entered into his inmost soul. In that bereavement we find him writing—“Why have we sympathies that make the best of us afraid of inflicting pain and sorrow, which yet we see dealt about so lavishly by the Supreme Governor? Why should our notions of right towards each other, and to all sentient beings within our influence, differ so widely from what appears to be his notion and rule, if everything were to end here? Would it not be blasphemous to say that ... we have more of love in our nature than He has? The thought is monstrous; and yet how to get rid of it, except upon the supposition of another and a better world, I do not see.” This is not the language of a pantheist, as he has been often called, nor of an optimist, one blind to the dark side of the world, as his poetry would sometimes make us fancy him. From that time on, the sights and sounds of Nature took to Wordsworth a soberer hue, a more solemn tone. The change of mood is grandly expressed in the “Elegiac Stanzas on a Picture of Peele Castle,” where he says that he now could look no more on

“A smiling sea, and be what I have been.”

Yet he gives way to no weak or selfish lamentation, but sets himself to draw from the sorrow fortitude for himself, sympathy and tenderness for others:—

“Then welcome fortitude, and patient cheer,

And frequent sights of what is to be borne;

Such sights, or worse, as are before me here;—

Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.”

That is manly and health-giving sorrow. It was his happiness, more than of most men, to use all that came to him for the end it was meant for. Early ideal influences from Nature, the first home affections, sorrows of mature manhood—none of them were lost. All melted into him, and did their part in educating his heart to a more feeling and tender wisdom. But they could not have done this, they could not have so deepened and purified him, had they not been received into a spirit based in firm faith on God, from whom all these things came, whose purpose for himself and others they subserved. This discipline of sorrow was increased when, a few years after the loss of his brother, he laid in Grasmere church-yard two infant children. Those trials of his home affections sank deep into him,—more and more humanized his spirit, and made him feel more distinctly the power of those Christian faiths which, though never denied by him, were present in his early poems rather as a latent atmosphere of sentiment than as expressed beliefs. It cannot be denied that in his pure, but perhaps too confident youth, the Naturalistic spirit, so to call it, is stronger in his poetry than the Christian. He expected more from the teaching of Nature, combined with the moral intuitions of his soul, than these in themselves, and unaided, can give. He did not enough see that man needs other supports than these for the trials he has to endure. This is not a matter of positive assertion or of positive denial,—rather of comparative emphasis and proportion. We may say that the Christian view of life and Nature does not at first receive the prominence which is its due. But under the pressure of sorrow, and the sense of his own weakness, he more and more turned to the Christian consolations. This change was a very gradual one, and he has left no direct record of it. Only it is perceptible here and there in his later poems, and, what is most to our purpose, it colors the eye with which he looked on Nature. This cannot, perhaps, better be illustrated than by comparing two poems composed in the same region at an interval of thirty years. In 1803, in his buoyant youth, during an evening walk by the shores of Loch Katrine, with his face toward a glowing sunset, he composed the exquisite lines “Stepping Westward,” in which the scene around him and a chance word addressed to him suggested

“The thought

Of traveling through the world that lay

Before me in my endless way.”

In the autumn of 1831, when he was in his sixty-second year, he again passed through the Trossachs, and this was the sentiment that then arose within him. It may, as he himself suggests, have been colored by the remembrance of his recent parting with Sir Walter Scott and the thought of his decay, but it is altogether in keeping with his own habitual mood at that time—

“There’s not a nook within this solemn Pass,

But were an apt confessional for one

Taught by his summer spent, his autumn gone,

That life is but a tale of morning grass

Withered at eve. From scenes of art which chase

That thought away, turn, and with watchful eyes

Feed it, ’mid Nature’s old felicities,

Rocks, rivers, and smooth lakes more clear than glass

Untouched, unbreathed upon. Thrice happy quest.

If from a golden perch of aspen spray

(October’s workmanship to rival May),

The pensive warbler of the ruddy breast,

That moral sweeten by a heaven-taught lay,

Lulling the year, with all its cares, to rest.”

There is another poem of the same date, 1831, which, though it is seldom quoted, shall be given here in full, since it well illustrates Wordsworth’s later phase of feeling about natural objects. It is entitled “The Primrose of the Rock,” and refers to a rock which stands on the right hand, a little way up the middle road leading from Rydal to Grasmere:—

“A Rock there is whose homely front

The passing traveler slights;

Yet there the glow-worms hang their lamps,

Like stars, at various heights;

And one coy Primrose to that Rock

The vernal breeze invites.

“What hideous warfare hath been waged,

What kingdoms overthrown,

Since first I spied that Primrose-tuft,

And marked it for my own;

A lasting link in Nature’s chain

From highest heaven let down!

“The flowers, still faithful to the stems,

Their fellowship renew;

These stems are faithful to the root

That worketh out of view;

And to the rock the root adheres

In every fibre true.

“Close clings to earth the living rock

Though threatening still to fall;

The earth is constant to her sphere;

And God upholds them all:

So blooms this lonely Plant, nor fears

Her annual funeral.

“Here closed the meditative strain,

But air breathed soft that day,

The hoary mountain-heights were cheered.

The sunny vale looked gay,

And to the Primrose of the Rock

I gave this after-lay.

“I sang—Let myriads of bright flowers,

Like thee, in field and grove

Revive unenvied; mightier far,

Than tremblings that reprove

Our vernal tendencies to hope

Is God’s redeeming love;

“That love which changed—for wan disease,

For sorrow that had bent

O’er hopeless dust—for withered age—

Their moral element,

And turned the thistles of a curse

To types beneficent.

“Sin-blighted though we are, we too,

The reasoning Sons of Men,

From our oblivious winter called

Shall rise, and breathe again,

And in eternal summer lose

Our threescore years and ten.

“To humbleness of hearts descends

This prescience from on high

The faith that elevates the just,

Before and when we die,

And makes each soul a separate heaven,

A court for Deity.”

Is not this more in keeping with the whole of Nature, more true to human life in all its aspects, than poetry which dwells merely on the bright and cheerful side of things? If Nature has its vernal freshness, and its “high midsummer pomps,” has it not as well autumnal decay, bleakness of winter, and dreary visitations of blighting east wind? What are we to make of these? Are not suffering and death forever going on throughout animated creation? What meaning are we to attach to this? As for man, if he has his day of youth and strength and success, what are we to say of failure, disappointment, bereavement, and life’s swift decay? This last, the dark and forlorn side of things, is as real as the bright side. How are we to interpret it? Surely, without attempting any theory which will explain it, nothing is more in keeping with these manifold and seemingly conflicting aspects of life than the faith that He who made and upholds the Universe does not keep coldly aloof, gazing from a distance on the sufferings of his creatures, but has himself entered into the conflict, has himself become the great Sufferer, the great Bearer of all wrong, and is working out for his creatures some better issue through a redemptive sorrow which is Divine. Such a faith, though it does not explain the ills of life, gives them another meaning, and helps men to bear them as no other can. This view of suffering, latent in much of Wordsworth’s poetry, if not fully uttered, at last found full expression in these, which are among his latest lines.

No doubt this, and the few other meditative poems, composed in the same strain at that later day, have not the magic charm, the ethereal beauty, of those songs sung in buoyant youth, when before the transfiguring power of his imagination the earth appeared to be

“An unsubstantial faery place.”

That passed with youth, and could not return; but another sedater, more moralizing, yet sweetly gracious mood came on,—a mood which is in keeping with that earlier, its natural product representative in one, whose days and whose moods were as he himself wished them to be, “linked each to each by natural piety.” As there is in character a grace that becomes every age, so there is a poetry. And Wordsworth’s later expressions about Nature and life are, I venture to think, as becoming in an old man, matured by much experience and by sorrow, as his earlier more ideal poems became a young man just restored from a great mental crisis, but still with youth on his side. If the poems of the maturer age lost something that belonged to the earlier ones, they also gained new elements,—they contain words which are a support amid the stress of life, and a benediction for its decline.

There were many who knew Wordsworth’s poetry well while he was still alive, who felt its power, and the new light which it threw on the material world. But though they half-guessed they did not fully know the secret of it. They got glimpses of part, but could not grasp the whole of the philosophy on which it was based But when, after his death, “The Prelude” was published, they were let into the secret, they saw the hidden foundations on which it rests, as they had never seen them before. The smaller poems were more beautiful, more delightful, but “The Prelude” revealed the secret of their beauty. It showed that all Wordsworth’s impassioned feeling towards Nature was no mere fantastic dream, but based on sanity, on a most assured and reasonable philosophy. It was as though one who had been long gazing on some building grand and fair, admiring the vast sweep of its walls, and the strength of its battlements, without understanding their principle of coherence, were at length to be admitted inside by the master builder, and given a view of the whole plan from within, the principles of the architecture, and the hidden substructures on which it was built. This is what “The Prelude” does for the rest of Wordsworth’s poetry.

For all his later phases of thought, all that followed the republicanism of “The Prelude,” Wordsworth, I know, has been well abused. Shelley bemoaned him, Mr. Browning has flouted him, and following these all the smaller fry of Liberalism have snarled at his heels. But all his changes of thought are self-consistent, and if fairly judged, the good faith and wisdom of them all can well be justified. For a few years during the Revolution he had hoped for a sudden regeneration from that great catastrophe. He found himself deceived, and gradually unlearnt the fallacies whence that deception had sprung. He ceased to look for the improvement of mankind from violent convulsions. Neither did he expect much from gradual political change, nor from those formalities which we nickname education, not from a revised code and payment by results, not from these nor from any outward machinery. But he hoped much from whatever helps forward the growth, the expanding, and the deepening, in all the grades of men, of the “feeling soul,” by which they may become more sensitive to the face of Nature, more sensitive towards their fellow-men and the lower creatures, and more open to influences which are directly divine. In these things he believed, for these he wrought consistently, till his task was done.

I have dwelt thus fully on the growth of Wordsworth’s character, the moral discipline through which he passed, and the ultimate maturity of soul to which he attained, in order that we may understand his doctrine regarding Nature. He held that it was only through the soul that the outer world is rightly apprehended—only when it is contemplated through the human emotions of admiration, awe, and love. This he held all his life through. But yet in his way of dealing with Nature, taken as a whole, we shall not be wrong if we note two different, though not conflicting, phases. In his earlier poetic period he was mainly absorbed in the unity and large livingness of Nature—in feeling and interpreting the life that is in each individual thing, as well as in the whole, in substituting for a mere machine,—a universe of death,—one which

“Moves with light, and light informed,

Actual, divine, and true.”

In doing this it is not too much to say that his poetry is the most powerful protest which English literature contains against the views of the world engendered by a mechanical deism—the best witness to the spiritual element that exists both in Nature and in man. Nor less is it our surest antidote to the exclusively analytic and microscopic view of Nature, so tyrannous over present thought, the end of which is universal disintegration. This was the work he did when he worked more in his earlier, what has been called, his naturalistic vein.

In his later period the moral tendency became predominant, not that it had ever been absent from his thought. Even at a comparatively early time he had been wont to take the sights and sounds of the sensible world as symbols and correspondences of the invisible. In 1806, hearing the cuckoo’s voice echo from Nab-scar, as he walked on the opposite side of Rydal Mere, he exclaimed:—

“Have not we too? yes, we have

Answers and we know not whence

Echoes from beyond the grave,

Recognized intelligence!

“Often as thy inward ear

Catches such rebounds, beware—

Listen, ponder, hold them dear;

For of God—of God they are.”

Again, in that Evening ode composed in 1818, to which reference has been already made, as he gazes on

“The silent spectacle—the gleam—

The shadow—and the peace supreme,”

he exclaims—

“Come forth, ye drooping old men, look abroad,

And see to what fair countries ye are bound!”

In his latest phase, as seen in the two poems of 1831, quoted above, the moral has so overpowered the naturalistic mood that this spiritualizing of all Nature into symbols of things unseen is rather obviously obtruded than delicately hinted. However this may be, to do this, to treat Nature in this way, so to interpret it that it shall touch the moral heart of the most thoughtful and apprehensive men—this is one of the two highest functions of inspired Poetry. And in the exercise of this function, too, Wordsworth has taught us much.

It would be interesting to continue this investigation, and to trace the different phases of the great movement towards Nature, as it manifests itself in the poets who were Wordsworth’s contemporaries, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Scott, and Keble; and in the poets of the present generation, and in other writers still living, who in prose works have treated of æsthetics. But to do so would require at least another volume. With Wordsworth, however, as the great leader of that movement, one may, with propriety, pause for the present. For however various and interesting have been the aspects of Nature that have been presented by his contemporaries, or by more recent poets, none of them has rendered those aspects he has essayed more truly, broadly, and penetratingly. And Wordsworth alone, adding the philosopher to the poet, has speculated widely and deeply on the relation in which Nature stands, to the soul of man, and on the truths suggested by this relation. In that relation, and along the lines of thought that radiate from it, is to be found the true interpretation of Nature—that interpretation which man still craves, after Science has said its last word. This interpretation, however, is a truth which can only be apprehended by the moral imagination, that is, the imagination filled with moral light, and which will commend itself only to the most thoughtful men in their most feeling moods. It is not likely ever to be vindicated by logical processes, or tabulated in scientific registers. Not the less for that is it a vital truth, attesting itself, as all vital truths do, by the harmony it brings into all our thoughts—by the response it finds in the inner man.