self drifting along the tide of feeling, and keeps an eye open outside his heart. But though he overhears himself, he does not interfere with himself; he listens breathlessly, and notes it down. Wordsworth, on the other hand, refuses to listen to this natural self at all. He knows another world of pure and buoyant meditation; and he knows that all which is transplanted into it bears there a new and nobler fruit. With fixed visionary purpose, he snatches away his subject from the influence of the lower currents it is beginning to obey, and compels it to breathe its life into that silent sky of conscious freedom and immortal hope in which his own spirit lives. Wordsworth has himself explained this fixed purpose of his imagination to stay the drift of common thoughts and common trains of feeling, and lift them up into the light of a higher meditative mood, in a passage of a remarkable letter to The Friend. It illustrates so curiously the deeper methods of his genius, that we must quote it:

"A familiar incident may render plain the manner in which a process of intellectual improvement, the reverse of that which nature pursues, is by reason introduced. There never perhaps existed a school-boy who, having, when he retired to rest, carelessly blown out his candle, and having chanced to notice, as he lay upon his bed in the ensuing darkness, the sullen light which had survived the extinguished flame, did not, at some time or other, watch that light as if his mind were bound to it by a spell. It fades and revives-gathers to a pointseems as if it would go out in a moment-again recovers its strength, nay becomes brighter than before: it continues to shine with an endurance, which in its apparent weakness is a mystery-it protracts its existence so long, clinging to the power which supports it, that the observer, who had lain down in his bed so easy-minded, becomes sad and melancholy his sympathies are touched-it is to him an intimation and an image of departing human life; the thought comes nearer to him-it is the life of a venerated parent, of a beloved brother or sister, or of an aged domestic; who are gone to the grave, or whose destiny it soon may be thus to linger, thus to hang upon the last point of mortal existence, thus finally to depart and be seen no more. This is nature teaching seriously and sweetly through the affections; melting the heart, and through that instinct of tenderness, developing the understanding. In this instance the object of solicitude is the bodily life of another. Let us accompany this same boy to that period between youth and manhood, when a solicitude may be awakened for the moral life of himself. Are there any powers by which, beginning with a sense of inward decay, that affects not, however, the natural life, he could call to mind the same image, and hang over it with an equal interest as a visible type of his own perishing spirit? O, surely, if the being of the individual be under his own care; if it be his first care; if duty begin from the point of accountableness to our conscience, and through that, to God and human nature; if without such primary sense

of duty, all secondary care of teacher, of friend or parent, must be baseless and fruitless; if, lastly, the motions of the soul transcend in worth those of the animal functions, nay give to them their sole value, then truly are there such powers: and the image of the dying taper may be recalled and contemplated, though with no sadness in the nerves, no disposition to tears, no unconquerable sighs, yet with a melancholy in the soul, a sinking inward into ourselves from thought to thought, a steady remonstrance, and a high resolve. Let, then, the youth go back, as occasion will permit, to nature and to solitude, thus admonished by reason, and relying upon this newly-acquired support. A world of fresh sensations will gradually open upon him as his mind puts off its infirmities, and as, instead of being propelled restlessly towards others in admiration, or too hasty love, he makes it his prime business to understand himself. New sensations, I affirm, will be opened out-pure, and sanetioned by that reason which is their original author; and precious feelings of disinterested, that is, self-disregarding joy and love may be regenerated and restored: and, in this sense, he may be said to measure back the track of life he has trod."

Now it is clearly this mood (a mood which gave birth to all his finest poetry) that throws so deep an air of solitude around Wordsworth's poems. We feel that the poet must live alone in order thus consciously to bathe all that he touches with a new atmosphere not its own. We are most alone when we most distinctly feel the boundary-line between ourselves and the world beyond us. In acts of free-will the sense of human solitude is always at its height; for in them we distinguish ourselves from all things else. And in the world of imagination this spiritual freedom is especially remarkable. There we have always heard that freedom is not, that genius is undisputed master of the will. Wordsworth's poetry is the living refutation of this assertion. He is so solitary, because we feel that his spirit consciously directs his imagination, and imposes on it from within influences stronger than any it receives from without.

but

"The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley, he has viewed;"

"impulses of deeper birth

Have come to him in solitude."*

Reverie is not solitary, and Wordsworth is not the poet of reverie. In reverie the mind wholly loses the boundaries of its own life, and wanders away unconsciously to the world's end. Wordsworth's musings are never reveries. He never loses either himself or the centre of his thought. He carries his own spiritual world with him, draws the thing or thought or feeling on which

*A Poet's Epitaph, vol. v. of Wordsworth's Poems, p. 24. (The seven-volume edition.)

he intends to write from its common orbit, fixes it, like a new star, in his own higher firmament, and there contemplates it beneath the gleaming lights and mysterious shadows of its new sphere. It is in this respect that he differs so widely in habit of thought from Coleridge, who was also a muser in his way. All his thoughts in any one poem flow as surely from a distinct centre as the fragrance from a flower. With Coleridge they flit away down every new avenue of vague suggestion, till we are lost in the inextricable labyrinth of tangled associations. The same spiritual freedom which set Wordsworth's imagination in motion, also controlled and fixed it on a single focus. And this he himself noted in contrasting his own early mental life with his friend's abstract and vagrant habits of fancy :

"I had forms distinct

To steady me; each airy thought revolved
Round a substantial centre, which at once
Incited it to motion and controlled.

I did not pine like one in cities bred,
As was thy melancholy lot, dear friend,
Great spirit as thou art, in endless dreams
Of sickliness, disjoining, joining, things
Without the light of knowledge."*

That this spiritual freedom, acting through the imagination, and drawing the objects of the poet's contemplation voluntarily and purposely into his own world of thought, is the most distinguishing characteristic of Wordsworth's poetry, no one can doubt who compares him with any other of our great poets. All other poets create their poetry, and even their meditative poetry, in the act of throwing themselves into the life of the scene or train of thought or feeling they are contemplating: Wordsworth deliberately withdraws his imagination from the heart of his picture to contemplate it in its spiritual relations. Thus, for instance, Tennyson and Wordsworth start from the same mood, the one in the song "Tears, idle tears," the other in the poem called the "Fountain." Tennyson's exquisite poem is well known:

"Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean;
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld;
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

* Prelude, book viii. p. 224.

Ah, sad and strange, as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds

To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret ;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more."

Now turn to Wordsworth's treatment of the same theme:

"My eyes are dim with childish tears,
My heart is idly stirred;

For the same sound is in my ears
Which in those days I heard.

Thus fares it still in our decay;

And yet the wiser mind

Mourns less for what age takes away

Than what it leaves behind.

The blackbird amid leafy trees,
The lark above the hill,

Let loose their carols when they please,
Are quiet when they will.

With Nature never do they wage
A foolish strife; they see

A happy youth, and their old age
Is beautiful and free.

But we are pressed by heavy laws;
And often, glad no more,

We wear a face of joy because

We have been glad of yore."

Tennyson continues in the same strain of emotion with which he begins, picturing the profound unspeakable sadness with which we survey the irrecoverable past; Wordsworth no sooner touches the same theme than he checks the current of emotion, and, to use his own words, "instead of being restlessly propelled" by it, he makes it the object of contemplation, and, "with no unconquerable sighs, yet with a melancholy in the soul, sinks inward into himself, from thought to thought, to a steady remonstrance and a high resolve." And thus meditating, he wrings from the temporary sadness fresh conviction that the ebbing away, both in spirit and in appearance, of the brightest past, sad as it must ever be, is not so sad a thing as the weak yearning which, in departing, it often leaves stranded on the soul, to cling to the appearance when the spirit is irrecoverably lost. There is no other great poet who thus redeems new ground for spiritual meditation from beneath the very sweep of the tides of the most engrossing affections, and quietly maintains it in possession of

the musing intellect. There is no other but Wordsworth who has led us 66 to those sweet counsels between head and heart" which flash upon the absorbing emotions of the moment the steady light of a calm infinite world. None but Wordsworth have ever so completely "transmuted," by an imaginative spirit, unsatisfied yearnings into eternal truth. No other poet ever brought out as he has done

"The soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;"

or so tenderly preserved the

"wall-flower scents

From out the crumbling ruins of fallen pride;"

or taught us how,

"By pain of heart, now checked, and now impelled,
The intellectual power through words and things
Went sounding on a dim and perilous way."

He has himself described this self-determination of his genius to "preserve and enlarge the freedom in himself" in lines so beautiful, that, though we have already lingered long on this point, we cannot forbear quoting them:

"Within the soul a faculty abides

That, with interpositions that would hide
And darken, so can deal that they become
Contingencies of pomp, and serve to exalt
Her native brightness. As the ample moon,
In the deep stillness of a summer even
Rising behind a thick and lofty grove,
Burns like an unconsuming fire of light
In the green trees; and, kindling on all sides
Their leafy umbrage, turns the dusky veil
Into a substance glorious as her own,
Yea with her own incorporated, by power
Capacious and serene. Like power abides
In man's celestial spirit; virtue thus
Sets forth and magnifies herself; thus feeds
A calm, a beautiful, and silent fire

From the incumbrances of mortal life,

From error, disappointment, nay, from guilt;
And sometimes, so relenting justice wills,
From palpable oppressions of despair."

Of other poets, Tennyson alone may seem in some of his more thoughtful poems (the " In Memoriam" and "The Two Voices") to have approached Wordsworth's domain in employing the spiritual imagination to illuminate the moods of human emotion. In reality, however, even these poems are quite distinct in kind. They are more like glittering sparks flying upwards from the

* Excursion, book iv. p. 152.