[1] The following pages reproduce the two concluding lectures of a short course on the Age of Wordsworth, given at Oxford in April, 1903, and intended specially for undergraduates in the School of English Language and Literature. A few passages from the other lectures appear elsewhere in this volume. On the subject of the course may I advise any reader who may need the advice to consult Professor Herford’s The Age of Wordsworth, a little book which is familiar to students of the history of English Literature, and the more admired the more they use it?
[2] These statements, with the exception of the last, were chosen partly because they all say, with the most manifest seriousness, much the same thing that is said, with a touch of playful exaggeration, in The Tables Turned, where occurs that outrageous stanza about ‘one impulse from a vernal wood’ which Mr. Raleigh has well defended. When all fitting allowance has been made for the fact that these statements, and many like them, are ‘poetic,’ they ought to remain startling. Two of them—that from the story of Margaret (Excursion, I.), and that from the Ode, 1815—were made less so, to the injury of the passages, by the Wordsworth of later days, who had forgotten what he felt, or yielded to the objections of others.
[3] Goody Blake, to my mind, tries vainly to make the kind of impression overwhelmingly made by Coleridge’s Three Graves. The question as to the Anecdote for Fathers is not precisely whether it makes you laugh, but whether it makes you laugh at the poet, and in such a way that the end fails to restore your sobriety. The danger is in the lines,
| And five times to the child I said, Why, Edward, tell me why? |
The reiteration, with the struggle between the poet and his victim, is thoroughly Wordsworthian, and there are cases where it is managed with perfect success, as we shall see; but to me it has here the effect so delightfully reproduced in Through the Looking-glass (‘I’ll tell thee everything I can’).
[4] Some remarks on We are seven are added in a note at the end of the lecture.
[5] The phrases quoted in this paragraph are taken chiefly from Hazlitt and De Quincey.
[6] The publication of the Excursion seems to have been postponed for financial reasons. One edition of a thousand copies sufficed the world for thirteen years.
[7] Evening Voluntaries, iv. We know that he refers to Byron.
[8] Poems on the Naming of Places, iv. Keats need not have been ashamed to write the last line.