sion of that hardy imaginative simplicity which is the chief

charac- teristic of his genius. This is one great charm of his sister's diary of the Highland Tour of 1803. Miss Wordsworth, who cherished every incident connected with the origin of one of his poems, puts down in this journal, not for public perusal, but for the wife who stays behind with her child, the modest story of their adventures, and yet not a word in it from beginning to end betrays the con- scious seeker after wathetic feelings, or suggests the attendant nymph sharing something of the glow of a poet's inspiration. There is a remarkable self-restraint, not to say fortitude, in the manner in which the constantly recurring bad weather, and not unfrequently severe discomforts of the journey are described, as though nothing better were to be expected. There is not a trace ,of the feeling that there was any sort of merit in the ideal

objects of the travellers' search, or any prerogative belonging to a poet which is injuriously treated by the buffets to which ordinary men are liable. The journal is as simple and natural as if there were no poetic reputation either to gain or to keep up. When any touch of poetry marks the journal, it is as plain that it comes there through the natural ardour of the writer's own—

not even her brother's—feelings, as it is that when you might conventionally have expected it, it is often not to be found. Miss Wordsworth writes generally with extreme literalness of the inci- dents of travel, though, of course, as one whose expectations are on the stretch for the beauties of which she has heard so much. Her brother and Coleridge figure not in the least as poets, but simply as fellow-travellers who share her fatigues and enjoyments, and who frequently help her to discern what is most memorable. Anything less like the style of a "sentimental journey," of a pilgrimage made in order to experience exalted feelings, it is im-

possible to imagine. Moreover, there is no effort in Miss Words- worth's diary to look at things with her brother's eyes. She keeps her own eager, lively eyes on everything, and even when she gets hold of a scene which profoundly strikes her, she does not attempt to Wordsworthise upon it, but just defines her own impressions, and there leaves it. A being of completer simplicity than Dorothy Wordsworth we should think it not easy to find again. Principal Shairp, in his very interesting preface, gives us De Quincey's graphic account of her wild bright eyes and

abrupt reserve of manner thus:—

" Her face was of Egyptian brown;' rarely, in a woman of English birth, had I seen a more determinate gipsy tan. Her eyes were not soft as Mrs. Werdsworth's, nor were they fierce or bold ; but they were wild, and startling, and hurried in their motion. Her manner was warm, and even ardent; her sensibility seemed constitutionally deep ; and some subtle fire of impassioned intellect apparently burned within her, which—being alternately pushed forward into a conspicuous expression by the irresistible instincts of her temperament, and then immediately checked in obedience to the decorum of her sex and age and her maidenly condition—gave to her whole demeanour, and to her conversation, an air of embarrassment, and even of self-conflict, that was almost distressing to • Reeolleetiorts of a lbw. made in Scotland in 1803 by Dorothy Wordsworth. Edited by J. C. Shairp, LL.D., Principal of the United College of St. Salvator and St. Leonard, St. Andrews, Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, witness. Even her very utterance and enunciation often suffered in point of clearness and steadiness, from the agitation of her excessive organic sensibility. At times the self-counteraction and self-baffling ef her feelings caused her even to stammer. But the greatest deductions from Miss Wordsworth's attractions, and from the exceeding interest which surrounded her' in right of her character, of her history, and of the relation which she fulfilled towards her brother, were the glancing quickness of her motions, and other circumstances in her deportment (such as her stooping attitude when walking), which gave an ungrace- ful character to her appearance when out of doors."

But though this bright, eager manner penetrates many portions of her diary, there is no trace in it of the embarrassment or con- flict of feeling of which De Quincey speaks, and which may very possibly have been more or less provoked by his own critical glances. What one notes in it is the delicacy of her appreciation of all the human interests of the scenes visited, a consider- able power of artless intensity in describing any scene, whether grand or simple, which struck her imagination,—and it was oftener simple than grand,—and a certain ardent nimbleness in her manner of looking at things which reminds one very often of the few sets of verses by her published amongst her brother's poems. One is especially often reminded in this journal of that charming little child's poem by Miss Wordsworth, beginning,— " What way does the wind (some? Which way does he go? He rides over the water, and over the snow,

Through wood and through vale, and o'er rocky height, Which the goat cannot scale, takes his sounding flight."

The full brightness of that gay and breezy little poem is to be found less frequently than we could wish in the diary of this rather gloomy-weathered tour ; but one is very often struck with the pleasure which Miss Wordsworth feels in tracing, just as in that poem, the effect of an influence of which she cannot tell the whence or the whither, and the extreme enjoyment with which she takes note of anything like a god-send. Take this, for instance :— " The woman of the house was very kind: whenever we asked her for anything it seemed a fresh pleasure to her that she had it for us ; she always answered with a sort of softening-down of the Scotch excla- mation, 'Hoot!' ' Ho ! yes, yell get that,' and hied to her cupboard in the spence. We were amused with the phrase Yell get that ' in the Highlands, which appeared to us as if it came from a perpetual feeling

of the difficulty with which moat things are procured We asked for sugar, butter, barley-bread, and milk, and with a smile and a stare more of kindness than wonder, she replied. Yell get that,' bringing each article separately. We caroused our cups of coffee, laughing like children at the strange atmosphere in which we were: the smoke came in gusts, and spread along the walls and above our heads in the chimney, where the hens were roosting like light clouds in the sky. We laughed and laughed again, in spite of the smarting of our eyes, yet had a quieter pleasure in observing the beauty of the beams and rafters gleaming between the clouds of smoke. They had been crusted over and varnished by many winters, till, where the firelight fell upon them, they were as glossy as black rocks, on a sunny day cased in ice. When we had eaten our supper we sat about half an hour, and I think I had never felt so deeply the blessing of a hospitable

welcome and a warm fire The walls of the whole house were of stone unplastered. It consisted of three apartments,—the cow-house at one end, the kitchen or house in the middle, and the .spence at the other end. The rooms were divided, not up to the rigging, but only to the beginning of the roof, so that there was a free passage for light and smoke from one end of the house to the other. I went to bed some time before the family. The door was shut between us, and they had a bright fire, which I could not see ; but the light it sent up among the varnished rafters and beams, which crossed each other in almost as intricate and fantastic a manner as I have seen the under-boughs of a large beech-tree withered by the depth of the shade above, produced the most beautiful effect that can be conceived. It was like what I should suppose an underground cave or temple to be, with a dripping or moist roof, and the moonlight entering in upon it by some means or other, and yet the colours were more like melted gems. I lay look- ing up till the light of the fire faded away, and the man and his wife and child had crept into their bed at the other end of the room. I did not sleep much, but passed a comfortable night, for my bed, though hard, was warm and clean : the unusualness of my situation prevented me from sleeping. I could hear the waves beat against the shore of the lake ; a little syke ' close to the door made a much louder noise ; and when I sate up in my bed I could see the lake through an open window-place at the bed's head. Add to this, it rained all night. I was loss occupied by remembrance of the Trossachs, beautiful as they were, than the vision of the Highland hut, which I could not get out of my head. I thought of the Fairyland of Spenser, and what I had read in romance at other times, and then, what a feast would it be for a London pantomime-maker, could he but transplant it to Drury Lane, with all its beautiful colours!"

Evidently the indications of poverty of resource in the Highland woman's larder, the triumph with which she identified anything asked for, as amongst the very small category of things obtainable in her house, made the little meal all the more delightful to Miss Wordsworth, who felt a poetry in the surprises of nature and life, which she could not so much feel in the habitual order thereof. This seems to have been the secret also of her delight in the flying shadows crossing the rafters as she lay in bed in the Highland hut, listening to the plash of the waves of Loch Katrine, and yet think.

big more of the novelty and picturesqueness of her own position, in one compartment of a hut shared with her by a cow and the Highland ferryman and his family. Indeed, as every one has noticed who has hitherto criticised this diary, Miss Wordsworth is always more alive to the human touches in the midst of natural beauty, than even to the natural beauty itself. On Loch Lomond she singles out a little bark-hut on a lonely island as an object of special interest, and they get the boatman to land at the bark-hut, that they may enjoy its beauty the more. Again, how a single desolate figure makes the whole scene seem deso- late to her, and how her words immediately shiver, as it were, in sympathy with the loneliness she feels!—

"Came to a bark-hut by the shores, and sate for some time under the shelter of it. While we were here a poor woman with a little child by her side begged a penny of me and asked where she could 'find quarters in the village.' She was a ;ravelling beggar, a native of Scot- land, had often 'heard of that water,' but was never there before. This woman's appearance, while the wind was rustling about us, and the waves breaking at our feet, was very melancholy ; the waters looked wide, the hills many, and dark, and far off—no house but at Luse. I thought what a dreary waste must this lake be to such poor creatures, struggling with fatigue and poverty and unknown ways I"

What a tone of sympathetic dreariness there is in the words, "the waters looked wide, the hills many and dark and far off," when they come in as the mere shadow of the poor woman's deso- lation. Again, observe her delight when the solitude of Loch Awe is broken by the sudden appearance of a vessel on it :—

"Alter we had wound for some time through the valley, having met neither foot-traveller, horse, nor cart, we started at the sight of a single vessel, just as it turned round the point of a hill, coming into the reach of the valley where we were. She floated steadily through the middle of the water, with one large sail spread out full swollen by the breeze, that blew her right towards us. I cannot express what romantic images this vessel brought along with her—bow much more beautiful the mountains appeared, the lake how much more graceful. There was one man on board, who sate at the helm, and he, having no companion, made the boat look more silent than if we could not have seen him. I had almost said the ship, for on that narrow water it appeared as large as the ships which I have watched sailing out of a harbour of the son."

Of course, the chief interest of this journal will be usually re- garded as its account of the few incidents which were the germs of some of Wordsworth's most striking poems,—that, for instance, which suggested the lines to a Highland girl at Inversneyde, upon Loch Lomond, and that which gave rise to the lines, "What, you are stepping Westward?" In both instances we see some- thing more than the mere occasion, indeed, the true germ of the poetic conception which makes the poem, in Miss Wordsworth's own thought. In both cases we find it easy to conceive that Wordsworth's fine tribute to his sister,—

" She gave me eyes, she gave me ears, And humble cares and delicate fears, A heart the fountain of sweet tears, And love and thought and joy,"

was literally true ; for in both cases the starting-point of the poem, its very mood and tone of feeling, is supplied by the sister, though all the brooding power of the brother was needed to make so much out of so little. Take the first case as an example. This is Miss Wordworth's account of the Highland girl to whom her brother's poem was, but not till after many weeks, written :—

"I think I never heard the English language sound more sweetly than from the month of the elder of these girls, while she stood at the gate answering our inquiries. her face flushed with the rain : her pro- nunciation was clear and distinct : without difficulty, yet slow, like that of a foreign speech. She moved with unusual activity, which was chastened very delicately by a certain hesitation in her looks when she spoke, being able to understand us but imperfectly."

And here is the fine passage into which Wordsworth expanded his sister's thought :—

" Thou wear'st upon thy forehead clear The freedom of a mountaineer : A face with gladness overspread Sweet smiles, by human-kindness bred And seemliness complete, that sways Thy courtesies, about thee plays ; With no restraint but such as springs From quick and eager visitings Of thoughts that lie beyond the reach Of thy few words of English speech: A bondage sweetly brook'd,,a strife That gives thy gestures grace and life ! So have I, not unmoved in mind, Seen birds of tempest-loving kind, Thus beating up against the wincL"

Noble as the passage is, and especially its concluding image, Miss Wordsworth's description conveys a far more distinct definition than this does of the real manner portrayed, when she speaks of the girl's want of knowledge of English as "very delicately chastening" her activity, by the hesitation of bearing and modesty of speech it produced. Wordsworth's phrase,

"A bondage sweetly brook'd, a strife

That gives thy gestures grace and life,"

is more deeply charged with meditation ; but the "delicately chastened" activity conveys better the exact idea of the feminine modesty with which the Highland lass deprecated her own power to choose her words correctly, than the grander range of the poet's language.

The part of the journal completed in its present shape in 1804 is more vivid than that finished in 1805, and more full of delicate touches. It is obvious that the last portion suffered from the diminution caused in Miss 'Wordsworth's own enjoyment of her reminiscences by the tragical death of her sailor brother early in 1805. Principal Shairp's prefatory account of Miss Wordsworth and of her relation to her brother, is written with fine taste and discrimination, and this volume is one which adds a strong personal regard and affection for Miss Wordsworth to the plea- sure of the wide range of associations which her brother's great name excites in the mind of all genuine lovers of his deep and buoyant genius.