PROFESSOR KNIGHT'S WORDSWORTH.

VOLUME III.*

Otrit appreciation of Professor Knight's edition of Wordsworth grows with every volume. Indeed, when completed, it will be an edition which the student of Wordsworth would not exchange for all the others put together. In familiarising himself with this third volume, the present writer has found himself not indeed actually reconciled to the poet's baldest lines—for no lover of Wordsworth can help regretting the violent and obtru- sive flaws in that great imagination, where Wordsworth's poetry declines not merely into prose, but into prose of the flattest kind—but in some degree helped to understand how it was that Wordsworth could ever have been unconscious of those .clumsy deformities of speech to which he sometimes seems posi- tively to invite attention, even at the very opening of a poem. In this -volume, for instance, we find the stanzas addressed to ." Mr. Wilkinson's spade," commencing, "Spade with which Wilkinson bath tilled his lands," an absurd invocation, which has probably repelled as many readers from Wordsworth and his poetry as ever were repelled from Mr. F. W. Newman's Iliad by such lines as (if we recall it rightly) "Antolyetts held up the meat, divine Ulysses sliced it." To break at once on the reader -of a poem with the vocative case of spade,' and then describe the spade so addressed merely as one that belonged to a gentle- man of the name of Wilkinson, is indeed to indulge in one of those familiarities with the reader which we can hardly dis- tinguish from a practical joke. It is something of the nature of a burlesque to invoke a spade at all, and still more to invoke it simply on the ground that it has been used by Wilkinson, the reader knowing nothing of Wilkinson but his name. But -one almost forgives Wordsworth his clumsy burst of invocation,

The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Edited by William Knight, LL.D. 'Vol. LH. Edinburgh: William Paterson.

when one has read what Professor Knight here tells us of the Wilkinson in question, and realises that it was because Wordsworth already knew the man, and knew him to be invested with these simple and touching and manly qualifies, that this invocation never suggested to him that effectual wet blanket for a kindling imagination which it has represented to so many of his readers :—

" Thomas Wilkinson of Yanwath, the friend of Wordsworth and the subject of these verses, deserves more than a passing note.

He was a man Whom no one could have passed without remark.

One of the old race of Cambrian statesmen—men who owned, and themselves cultivated, small bits of land (see note on Michael and The Brothers in appendix to Volume IL)—he was Wordsworth's senior by nineteen years, and lived on a patrimonial farm of about forty acres, on the banks of the Emont,—the stream which, flowing out of Ullswater, divides Cumberland from Westmoreland. He was a Friend, and used to travel great distances to attend religions con- ferences, or to engage in philanthropic work,—on one occasion, riding on his pony from Yanwath to London, to the Yearly Meeting of the Friends ; and, on another walking the 300 miles to town, in eight days, for the same purpose. A simple, genuine nature ; serene, refined, hospitable, naive, and hamourons withal ; a quaint, original man, with a true eye for Nature, a keen relish for rural life (especially for gardening), and a happy knack of characterisation, whether he under- took descriptions of scenery in the course of his travels, or narrated the incidents which befell him in the way. This is how he writes of his farm, and his work upon it We have at length some traces of spring (6th April, 1784) ; the primrose under the hedge begins to open her modest flower, the buds begin to swell, and the birds to build ; yet we have still a wide horizon, the mountain tops resign not their snows. The happiest season of the year with me is now commencing —I mean that in which I am at the plough ; my horses pace slowly on before, the larks sing above my head, and the furrow falls at my side, and the face of Nature and my own mind seem to wear a sweet and cheerful tranquillity.' The following extract shows the interest which he took in the very implements of his industry, and may serve as an illustration of Wordsworth's stanzas on his'spade.' Eighth month, 16th, 1789. Yesterday I parted without regret from an old acquaintance—I set by my scythe for this year. I have often this season seen the dark blue mountains before the sun, and his rising embroider them with gold. I have had many •tt good sleep in the shade among fragrant grass and refreshing breezes, and though closely engaged in what may be thought heavy work, I was sensible of the enjoyments of life with uninterrupted health.' In the closing years of the last century, when the spirit of patriotic ardour was so thoroughly roused in England by the restlessness of France and the ambition of Napoleon, he lived on at his pastoral farm, busy with his husbandry.' In London, he made the acquaintance of Edmund Burke ; and Thomas Clarkson, the philanthropist,—whose labours for the abolition of the slave-trade are matter of history,—becanne his intimate friend, and was a frequent visitor at Yanwath. Clarkson afterwards bought an estate near to Wilkinson's home, on the shores of ITllswater, where he built a house, and named it Eusemere, and there the Wordsworths were not infrequent guests. (See note to The Daffodils, p. 7 of this volume.) Wordsworth stayed at Yanwath for two days in 1806. The Tours to the British Mountains, with the Descriptive Porms of Lowther and Emont Vale' (London, 1824), have been referred to in the note to The Solitary Reaper, one of the poems in the 'Memorials of a Tour in Scotland, 1803' (see Vol. IL, p. 347). It is an interesting volume—the prose much superior to the verse— and might be reprinted with advantage. Wilkinson was urged re- peatedly to publish his'Tour Through the Highlands,' but he always declined, and it was printed at last without his knowledge, by some one to whom he had lent his MS. Wilkinson's relations to Wordsworth are alluded to in the note to The Solitary Reaper. He is occasionally referred to in Miss Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal of January and March, 1802, e.g. :=Monday, March 12th.—The ground covered with snow. Walked to T. Wilkinson's, and sent for letters. The woman brought me one from Wm. and Mary. It was a sharp, windy night. Thomas Wilkinson came with me to Barton, and ques- tioned me like a catechiser all the way. Every question was like the snapping of a little thread about my heart. I was so full of thought of my half-read letter and other things.' The following are extracts from letters of Wilkinson to Miss Mary Leadbeater of Ballintoret- ' Yanwath, 15. 2. 1801.--I had lately a young Poet seeing me that sprang originally from the next village. He has left the College, turned his back on all preferment, and settled down contentedly

among our Lakes, with his Sister and his Muse. He writes; in what he conceives to be the language of Nature, in opposi- tion to the finery of our present poetry. He has published two volumes of Poems, mostly of the same character. His name is Wil- liam Wordsworth.' In a letter, dated 29. 1. 1809, the following

occurs Thou haat wished to have W. Wordsworth's Lines on my Spade, which I shall transcribe thee. I had promised Lord Lonsciale to take him to Lowther, when he came to see me, bat when we arrived be was gone to shoot moor-game with Judge Sutton. William and I then returned, and wrought together at a walk I was then forming, which gave birth to his Verses.'" This account of Mr. Wilkinson does not in any degree atone for the much more than flat opening to what are, on the whole, ex- ceedingly flat stanzas, but it does help one to understand how Wordsworth may have invested his friend with an atmosphere of individuality and simplicity which disguised from himself how little he had succeeded in telling the public what he too easily took for granted that the public would infer from his own

halting lines. So, again, when we know that his sister, Dorothy Wordsworth, suggested the following lines, we can in some degree pardon Wordsworth for supposing that they would convey to the outer world what was clearly in his own mind, though it certainly never got into the verses :—

" LOUISA,

AFTER ACCOMPANYING HER ON A MOUNTAIN EXCURSION.

Comp. 1805. Pak 1807.

I met Louisa in the shade, And, having seen that lovely Maid,

Why should I fear to say That, nymph-like, she is fleet and strong,

And down the rocks can leap along

Like rivulets in May ?

She loves her fire, her cottage home ; Yet o'er the moorland will she roam In weather rough and bleak;

And, when against the wind she strains, Oh! might I kiss the mountain tains That sparkle on her cheek.

Take all that's mine beneath the moon,' If I with her but half a noon May sit beneath the walls Of some old cave or mossy nook, When up she winds along the brook To hunt the waterfalls."

Dorothy Wordsworth was so much to her brother, was, indeed, so indissolubly associated with all the poetry that was deepest and truest in him, that he probably hardly knew how much of his own intense feeling for her he had introduced into his verse, and how much of it remained quite unexpressed in his own breast. The deadly-lively stanza which opens the verses just quoted would suggest nothing in the world to an ordinary reader except the query, "Why, indeed, should you fear to say it? but that is no reason at all why you should not fear to pub- lish so very pert a verse as that ;" and though the two next verses rise to something better, they do not succeed in extin- guishing the unpleasant impression of the opening verse. But, knowing, as we now know, all that Dorothy Wordsworth was to her brother, we cannot doubt that what he wrote concerning her was to his mind invested with a specially glorifying atmo- sphere of feeling, even when he did not succeed in sufficiently steeping his own words in that atmosphere of feeling, and there- fore failed to impress his thought on the mind of the reader.

And that reminds us how much the value of this volume is increased by its extracts from Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal, a journal frill of the essential poetry which breathed in the noblest of her brother's verse. We know few poems of his which are more perfect and more buoyant with genuine poetical delight than "The Daffodils," but even the poem on "The Daffodils" grows in beauty and value, when we have this marvellously lovely description by his sister of the scene which suggested it :—

" The following is from Miss Wordsworth's Journal, under date, Thursday, April 15th, 1802. It is a specimen of the general char- acter of that Journal. It was a threatening, misty morning, but mild. We set off after dinner from Easmere. Mr. Clarkson went a short way with us, but turned back. The wind was furious, and we thought we must have returned. We first rested in the large Boat House, then under a furze bush opposite Mr. Clarkson's. Saw the plough going in the field. The wind seized our breath. The lake was rough. There was a boat by itself, floating in the middle of the bay below Water Millock. We rested again in the Water Millock Lane. The hawthorns black and green ; the birches here and there greenish, but there is yet more of purple to be seen on the twigs.

A few primroses by the roadside—wood-sorrel flower, the anemone, scentless violets, strawberries, and that starry-yellow flower which Mrs. C. calls pilewort. When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park, we saw a few daffodils close to the water-side. We fancied that the sea had floated the seeds ashore, and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more, and yet more ; and, at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones, about and above them ; some rested their heads upon these stones, as on a pillow for weariness ; and the rest tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake. They looked so gay, ever glancing, ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little knot, and a few stragglers higher up ; but they were so few RS not to disturb the simplicity, unity, and life of that one busy highway. We rested again and again. The bays were stormy, and we beard the waves at different distances, and in the middle of the water, like the

sea. But it is not in extracts from Miss Wordsworth's Journal only that this edition is so rich,—though it would be impossible to exaggerate the value of these illustrative extracts. Everything we want is here. For example "The Waggoner,"—one of Words- worth's most delightful poems, and as Sara Coleridge well said,

one touched off with a lightness and spirit which Wordsworth very rarely attained,—was dedicated to Charles Lamb, and the dedication acknowledged in one of Lamb's most charming letters, which, of course, one wants to read at the time one reads the poem, and not to have to hunt up in Talfourd's Memoir. Professor Knight appends it for us. Again, when Words- worth lost his brother,—the captain of an Indiaman,—by ship- wreck, Mary Lamb wrote to Miss Wordsworth to express her tender sympathy, and the beautiful letter, with its simple and touching verses, is quoted by Professor Knight in an appendix to the poems which Wordsworth wrote on the occasion of his • brother's death. And so it is all through. Whatever one needs to illustrate the poems is found either in Miss Penwick's notes, or in the editor's, or in the appendix.

"The Prelude" gains less in proportion by Professor Knight's notes than the minor poems, and for a very good reason, that Professor Knight reserves for the volume of biography what he has to say on this great autobiographical poem. To that volume, —the sixth and last, we believe, of the series,—we shall look forward with the most vivid interest. It will, we hope, form the fitting crown of a work of great and lasting value, a work in which the individuality of a great poet is made to illustrate his poems in a manner more complete, than any in which it has ever been the good-fortune of a previous critic to illustrate the poems. of the author to whose works he had devoted himself.