Delights us. Rapine, avarice, expense, And these, It is not to be thought of that the Flood We must be free or die, who speak the tongue That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold Wordsworth was one of the few choice spirits of earth who rebelled against the convenient doctrine of conducting life according to the principle of expediency. To him there was but one 66 supreme expediency," JUSTICE. A great deal more than Coleridge did, he followed the latter's principle of referring facts to the mightiness of his own inner nature, in opposition to those forces which men can see with their eyes and reduce to figures upon a slate.” There are few great sonneteers amid the poets of any nation. England has her full share: Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Mrs. Browning, the two Rossettis, - some would add Swinburne. We have quoted above from some of the political sonnets of Wordsworth. The sonnet beginning "The World is too much with us" is better known than any other of Wordsworth's. To write a sonnet is no easy task, for its structure of fourteen lines, its relatively fixed rhyme scheme, its division into two parts, one of eight lines, the other of six lines, with their subdivisions into four lines and three lines, its content of general statement, elaboration into details, the turning about of thought to view it at another angle, the application or summing up of these things require thinking and care, however forceful the passion of thought and emotion may be. Upon Westminster Bridge is a wonderfully magnificent picture, especially to those who know London. all, Earth has not anything to show more fair; The beauty of the morning: silent, bare, Never did sun more beautifully steep The river glideth at his own sweet will: And all that mighty heart is lying still! The sonnet as a type of lyric poetry was well suited to the balanced, contemplative spirit of Wordsworth. He loved to ponder, and to discipline his intellectual and emotional ideas. The sonnet hardly permits of strains of "unpremeditated art "; and Wordsworth's sonnet To a Sky-Lark, beautiful as it is, lacks the spontaneity of Shelley's longer lyric to the same ethereal minstrel. Wordsworth wrote his praise of this pilgrim of the sky in both a fourteen and an eighteen-line poem,the latter an unusual variation from what it is the custom to call a sonnet, but this illustrates the freedom from convention which the man who loved discipline so much was willing, nevertheless, to take. Of all Wordsworth's hundreds of poems the greatest are the Ode on Intimations of Immortality and the Lines Composed above Tintern Abbey, the Ode being the superior of the two. Close to these in greatness come The Affliction of Margaret, The Daffodils, some of the political sonnets, and passages here and there in The Excursion and The Prelude. The work of Wordsworth was too multitudinous to permit more than the merest suggestions concerning it here. One will not read far in his work, it may be remarked, without concluding that the interpretation. of romanticism which makes it a convertible term with medievalism is nothing short of absurd. It is his love of nature, and his belief that nature and man are akin, that nature has power to subdue and to solace passionate and suffering man, which have given Wordsworth his influence upon poets and readers who are not poets. This attitude to nature is the universally recognized thing about him. Matthew Arnold has made most of this aspect of Wordsworth's work. Among many other things he said about Wordsworth is the following, Time may restore us in his course Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force; Again find Wordsworth's healing power? "Wordsworth," says Stopford Brooke, "conceived that nature was alive. It had, he imagined, one living soul which, entering into flower, stream, or mountain, gave them each a soul of their own. Between this Spirit in nature and the mind of man there was a pre-arranged harmony which enabled nature to communicate its own thought to man, and man to reflect upon them, until an absolute union between them was established." Effect of Natural Objects, Stepping Westward, Stray Pleasures, Brougham Castle, and Resolution and Independence are among the large number of poems that help to give an idea of the poet's attitude to nature. Wordsworth had also much of the affection for animals and children which Coleridge and Blake had. The White Doe of Rylstone and many passages in The Prelude make this more finely evident than some more frequently read, but more trivial poems. Of course, The Solitary Reaper and She was a Phantom of Delight should be given due praise, for from them thousands have found the glow and glory which does really fill the common life of all of us, if we have but eyes to see. No other English poet has had such full and true sympathy, such strong feeling for nature, as had Wordsworth. To me the meanest flower that blows can give meant to Wordsworth precisely what it said. And so, also, the little poem beginning "She dwelt among the untrodden ways," it meant what it said, to a profoundly thinking as well as feeling man, as much as did his Ode to Duty. Scott. The Wizard of the North was the appropriate name which was given to Sir Walter Scott. Walter Scott was brought up upon legends and stories and poetic background of all sorts, out of which stands prominently Percy's Reliques, which was a sort of Bible to the writers of the Romantic "revival." He had, however, the careful training which preparation for the |