BOOKS.

LYRICAL BALLADS * THIS reprint of the first edition of the joint production of Wordsworth and Coleridge is valuable, of course, more as setting up a visible monument of a great era in the history of English literature, than for its restoration of a few obsolete readings of some of the most remarkable poems in the English language. There is something gratifying in possessing and physically handling a volume identical with that which our grandfathers or great-grandfathers read without in general being at all aware that it was the signal of a greater change in the tendencies of English poetry, and (one may almost say) of English faith so far as faith is affected (as it is often very greatly affected) by English poetry, than any other which the century has produced. Scott and Byron, whose fame blazed out soon afterwards, and blazed out so brilliantly as to eclipse for a time both Coleridge and Wordsworth, were mere passing literary meteors, in comparison with Wordsworth and Coleridge ; not that Scott's poems, at least, are ever likely to lose their hold on English minds and hearts, but that there was a good deal less in them of that which would bring about the mental changes of the coming age than there was in the poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge. We say Wordsworth and Coleridge, rather than Coleridge and Wordsworth, because the influence of Wordsworth has weighed far more heavily in the result than the influence of Coleridge, in spite of the fact that indisputably the most popular and superficially brilliant, as well as the longest poem in the Lyrical Ballads, was Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner." Yet Coleridge's four poems cast very long shadows before them of tendencies,— not always perfectly healthy in form, though always admitting of transformation into a healthy form,—which were to manifest themselves still more strongly in the later years of the century. Who would deny, for instance, that the poem called " The

Dungeon," a fragment from Coleridge's play of Osorio, con- tains the germs of that rather hysterical modern humani- tarianism of which we have heard so much of late years F-- " And this place our forefathers made for man !

This is the process of our love and wisdom,

To each poor brother who offends against us—

Most innocent, perhaps—and what if guilty ?

Is this the only cure ? Merciful God !

Each pore and natural outlet shrivell'd up By ignorance and parching poverty, His energies roll back upon his heart, And stagnate and corrupt ; till changed to poison, They break out on him, like a loathsome plague-spot ;

Then we call in our pamper'd mountebanks—

And this is their best cure ! uncomforted And friendless solitude, groaning and tears, And savage faces, at the clanking hour Seen through the steams and vapour of his dungeon, By the lamp's dismal twilight ! So he lies Circled with evil, till his very soul Unmoulds its essence, hopelessly deformed By sights of ever more deformity !

With other ministrations thou, 0 nature !

Healest thy wandering and distempered child : Thou pourest on him thy soft influences, Thy sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets, Thy melodies of woods, and winds, and waters, Till he relent, and can no more endure To be a jarring and a dissonant thing, Amid this general dance and minstrelsy ; But, bursting into tears, wins back his way, His angry spirit healed and harmonised By the benignant touch of love and beauty."

That is modern humanitarianism in all its onesidedness and all

• Lyrical Ballads. lieprinted from the First Edition of 1798. Edited by Edward Dowden, LL.D., Professor of English Literature in the University of Dublin. London : David Nutt. 1890. its supersensitiveness, its hyperiesthesia. Something of the same kind mast be said even of the drift of " The Ancient

Mariner,"—not, of course, of its lesson of sympathy and pity for all the dumb creation, but of the undue importance which. it attaches to a mere gush of emotion in the heart of the man who was supposed to be suffering a highly coloured spiritual torture by way of penalty for an act of thoughtless cruelty, or cruel thoughtlessness. The poet's account of the redeeming crisis is, to our minds, sickly in its sentimentalism, though it is painted in colours so rich that we ignore to some extent the unhealthy emphasis laid upon a mere emotional fluctuation in the right direction,—one not even involving any right action or self-denial :—

" Beyond the shadow of the ship

I watch'd the water-snakes : They mov'd in tracks of shining white ; And when they rear'd, the elfish light Fell off in hoary flakes.

Within the shadow of the ship I watch'd their rich attire : Blue, glossy green, and velvet black They coil'd and swam ; and every track Was a flash of golden fire.

0 happy living things ! no tongue

Their beauty might declare : A spring of love gusht from my heart, And I bless'd them unaware ! Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I bless'd them unaware.

The self-same moment I could pray; And from my neck so free The Albatross fell off, and sank Like lead into the sea."

That certainly greatly over-estimates the moral value of a flash of momentary right feeling, but it over-estimates it just as the sentiment of our own day unquestionably tends to over- estimate it. In this, as in the previous piece, Coleridge antici- pated the supersensitiveness, the morbid appreciation of mere right feeling as distinguished from firm action, which dis- tinguishes our own day. But Coleridge anticipated ten- dencies that were sound as well as tendencies that were unsound in our modern social feeling. His conception of Nature as a great organism for transmitting supernatural

influences to the mind, though presented in a highly coloured and very imaginative form in " The Ancient Mariner," has taken hold of all the higher English thought, and has had much to do with the ecclesiastical teaching of various religious schools in our own day. Indeed, it has popularised the concep- tion of sacramental influences embodied in physical media. Coleridge's transcendentalism, both on its more sickly and on its more healthy side, was the forerunner of a great deal that has manifested itself much more powerfully in the last quarter of a century than it did in that quarter of the century which immediately followed his death.

But if Coleridge's influence has been fruitful in results for our own day, Wordsworth's hardier and loftier, though narrower nature, has been far more prolific of moral and intellectual consequences. Coleridge penetrated the thought of the day with the imaginative conception of physical influences transformed by supernatural agency into moral and spiritual influences : Wordsworth penetrated it with a much deeper conviction that almost all physical influences, however common, and, indeed, all the more because they are common, are, or may become, moral and spiritual influences of the most potent kind. Wordsworth far more than Coleridge was, we believe, sent to prepare, and as it were forewarn, the world against that predominance of the physical view of natural. things which would otherwise have followed such discoveries as Darwin's and his brother-evolutionists'. Wordsworth's poetry was the great antidote to the dangerous side, the superstitious side, of physical speculation, because it has taught us to view physical agencies as necessarily carrying with them, to ob- servant minds, moral and spiritual agencies, and has ex- pressed that view so powerfully, that when the doctrine of evolution came with a rash upon the world, it no longer found this country at least prepared to acquiesce in the conception of physical influences as mere material influences. On the contrary, it found the higher minds of the day imbued with the conviction which Tennyson had taken up from Wordsworth, that even physical influences are in their very origin spiritual and moral ; and that the frame of physical nature, as Wordsworth was always declaring, is one of the most potent of all the media of divine teaching :—

" Though absent long, These forms of beauty have not been to me, As is a landscape to a blind man's eye : But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart, And passing even into my purer mind With tranquil restoration.

Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime ; that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world

Is lighten'd :—that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on, Until, the breath of this corporeal frame, And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul : While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things."

The " Lines written near Tintern Abbey," from which this passage is taken, are the last in this memorable volume pub- lished in 1798, a year both in itself one of revolution and one full of the consequences of a greater revolution which took place nine years earlier. Yet no physical revolution of the time was so pregnant with change as that which this little volume con- tained. For in it the world first experienced an influence of which, at first rejected and scoffed at, has grown with the century till we should single it out as by far the most powerful

poetic leaven which has leavened the century. For, un- scientific and in some degree unartistic as it was, it has transformed for us the very meaning of science and of art, and has turned both into the agencies and instruments of a spiritual faith. Lyrical Ballads, by two authors who did not even put their names on the title-page of the book they - published, came into the world apparently only to receive neglect or excite contemptuous wonder and scorn ; but, like the grain of mustard-seed in the Gospel, the idea of which it contained the germ, grew and grew until it became one of the greatest of trees, borrowing much from, and giving back much to, that still greater tree of life for which the grain of mustard-seed suggested one of the earliest analogies. We heartily thank Professor Dowden for setting up for us this great literary monument of one of the greatest spiritual growths of our own time. Carlyle, who perhaps wrote the most memorable prose work of our century, made light of Wordsworth and Coleridge. But all that was greatest in Carlyle's own thought was either taken from them, or from the same source as that from which they drew, and all that was weakest in it was due to his cynical distrust of the influence which these convictions had wielded over him.