Rising or setting, would he stand alone
Beneath the trees or by the glimmering lake;
And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands
Pressed closely palm to palm, and to his mouth
Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,
Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls,

That they might answer him; and they would shout
Across the watery vale and shout again,
Responsive to his call, with quivering peals,
And long halloos and screams, and echoes loud
Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild
Of mirth and jocund din: and when it chanced
That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill,
Then sometimes, in that silence while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind,

With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,

Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received
Into the bosom of the steady lake."

No other poet but Wordsworth that the world ever produced could have written this; you feel in reading it that the lines "a gentle shock of mild surprise has carried far into his heart the voice of mountain torrents," had for him an exactness as well as a fulness of meaning;-for he shows a curious power of carefully discriminating the degrees of depth in his poetic imaginations: some lie near the surface; others lie deeper, but still within the sphere of less meditative minds; others spring from a depth far beyond the reach of any human soundings.

Again, the beauty of Wordsworth's little ballads is never properly understood by those who do not enter into the contemplative tone in which they are written. There is none of them that can be approached in a mood of sympathetic emotion without failing to produce its full effect. "Lucy Gray," for example, is a continual disappointment to those who look for an expression of the piteousness and desolation of the lost child's

fate.* Wordsworth did not feel it thus; he was contemplating a pure and lonely death as the natural completion of a pure and lonely life. He calls it not "Desolation,' but "Solitude." He strikes the key-note of the poem in speaking of her in the first verse as "the solitary child," and then

"No mate, no comrade Lucy knew ;

She dwelt on a wide moor,

The sweetest thing that ever grew
Beside a human door."

Wordsworth's purpose evidently was to paint a perfectly lovely solitary flower snapped, for its very purity, in its earliest bud, that it might remain an image of solitary beauty for ever. He intended to dissolve away all pain and pity in the loveliness of the picture. It was not the lot of Lucy Gray, but the spiritualised meaning of that lot as it lived in his imagination, that he desired to paint. Again, in the exquisite ballad "We are seven,” few discern how every touch throughout the whole is intended to heighten the contrast between the natural health and joy of life in the living child and the supernatural secret of death. It is not a mere tale of one little cottage girl, who could not conceive the full meaning of death it is the poet's contemplative contrast between the rosy beauty and buoyant joyousness of children's life and the "incommunicable" sleep, which is the subject of the poem. The perfect art with which this is effected is seldom adequately observed. He introduces the living child with a glimpse of the inward brightness that childish health and beauty breathe around them :

:

"She had a rustic woodland air,

And she was wildly clad ;

Her hair was fair, and very fair :

Her beauty made me glad."

* Such as Mr. Kingsley, for instance, has so finely given in his ballad on the girl lost on the sands of Dee.

And when he has drawn the picture of her eating her supper by the little graves of her brother and sister, that she may "sit and sing to them," he heightens the contrast yet more,

"The first that died was little Jane :
In bed she moaning lay,
Till God released her of her pain,
And then she went away.

So in the churchyard she was laid;
And when the grass was dry,
Together round her grave we played,

My brother John and I.

And when the ground was white with snow,

And I could run and slide,

My brother John was forced to go,

And he lies by her side."

Simple as this language is, it is not dramatic, it is not the language in which a child would have spoken. It is the language of a poet musing on the contrast between the little silent graves, changing with every season, freshening with the spring, wetted by the rain, and whitened by the winter's snow, like any other specks of common earth, and the buoyant child's unshaken fancy that they contain her sister and her brother still. So full is she of life herself, that though she can "run and slide," the whitened mounds still seem to her to hide a life as vivid as her own. The voluntary element that I have noticed in Wordsworth's genius-the preference for checking obvious and natural currents of thought or feeling in order to brood over them meditatively and bring out a result of a higher order-leads to many of his imperfections as well as beauties. He had, as I have noticed, an eminently frugal mind. He liked of all things to make the most of the smaller subject before he gave himself up to the greater. The sober, sparing, free-will with which he gathers up the crumbs, and feeds his genius on them before he will break

in on any whole loaf, is eminently characteristic of him.
Emotion does not hurry him into poetry nor into anything
else. He "slackens his thoughts by choice,"* when they
grow eager; he defers his feast of nuts that he may first
enjoy expectation to the full; he will wear out the luxury
of his imaginations of Yarrow before he tries the reality;
he is more willing by far to wait for the due seasons of
poetry than the husbandman for the due seasons of
fruit :-
"His mind was keen,

Intense, and frugal; apt for all affairs,
And watchful more than ordinary men."+

The poem on the strawberry-blossom is right from the heart of his own nature :

"That is work of waste and ruin :
Do as Charles and I are doing.
Strawberry-blossoms one and all,
We must spare them-here are many
Look at it, the flower is small-
Small and low, but fair as any;
Do not touch it-summers two
I am older, Anne, than you.

Hither, soon as spring has fled,
You and Charles and I will walk ;

Lurking berries ripe and red

Then will hang on every stalk,

Each within its leafy bower;

And for that promise spare the flower."

And so Wordsworth himself would always have saved up his strawberry-blossoms of poetry till the "lurking berries ripe and red" lay in them, had he had the quick eye to distinguish surely between the unripe beauty and the ripe. But this he had not. As he himself tells us, he found it almost impossible to distinguish "a timorous capacity from prudence," "from circumspection, infinite delay." He had not that swiftness and fusion of nature which + Michael.

* "Prelude," book i.

helps a man to distinguish at once the fruit of his lower from that of his higher moods. He gathered in

"the harvest of a quiet eye,

That broods and sleeps on its own heart,"

with undiscriminating frugality, gathering in often both tares and wheat. It was that same voluntary character of his imaginative life, which enabled him to give so new an aspect to his themes, which also rendered him unable to distinguish with any delicacy between the various moods in which he wrote. A poet who is the mere instrument, as it were, of his own impulses of genius, knows when the influence is upon him; but a poet whose visionary mood is always half-voluntary, and a result of a gradual withdrawing of the mind into its deeper self, cannot well have the same quick vision for the boundary between commonplace and living imagination which belongs to natures of more spontaneous genius. Wordsworth seems to kindle his own poetic flame like a blind man kindling his own fire; and often, as it were, he goes through the process of lighting it without observing that the fuel is damp and has not caught the spark; and thus, though he has left us many a beacon of pure and everlasting glory flaming from the hills, he has left us also many a monumental pile of fuel from which the poetic fire has early died away.

It is clear that Wordsworth as a poet did, as he tells us himself, "feel the weight of too much liberty." finest poem he declares

"Me this unchartered freedom tires,
I feel the weight of chance desires."

In his

And no doubt he had even too complete a mastery over himself. He could not distinguish the arbitrary in his poetry from the conscious conquests of insight. And being, as we have seen, most frugal,-feeling, as he did, to the very last day of his poetic life, that it was the