BOOKS.

MR. ARNOLD'S SELECTIONS FROM WORDSWORTH.* Ma. AliNoLD has executed a delicate rather than a difficult task with his usual grace and insight. But we wish he had added to his very admirable preface something more calculated to teach the students of Wordsworth in detail where Wordsworth's force really lies, and where his weakness lies, instead of restricting himself chiefly to an attempt to appreciate Wordsworth's place among the poets of Europe. No doubt, what he does say about the force with which Wordsworth deals with life,—the volume of living power which he threw into his finest poems,—is perfectly true, and touches the very heart of Wordsworth's genius. But then, though a fine and just point of departure, it is very insufficient as a guide to the student of Wordsworth.

One needs to hear in what directions Wordsworth deals with • life most powerfully, where he seems almost to lose his hold on it, where to retain it with a somewhat uncertain grasp. Nothing can be finer and truer than the following remarks, but we cannot help wishing that Mr. Arnold had followed them out into more detail of criticism :--

" Wordsworth owed much to Burns, and a style of perfect plain- ness, relying for effect solely on the weight and forcer of that which with entire fidellity it utters, Burns could show him :- " The poor inhabitant below

Was quick to learn and wise to know, And keenly felt the friendly glow And softer flame: But thoughtless follies laid him low And otain'd his name."

Every one will be coneeious of a likeness hero to Wordsworth ; and if Wordsworth did great things with OA nobly plain manner, wo must remember, what indeed he himself would always have been forward to acknowledge, that Burns used it before him. Still Wordsworth's use of it has something unique and unmatchable. Nature herself seems, I say, to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power. This arises from two canoes : from the profound sincereness with which Wordsworth feels his subject, and also from the profoundly sincere and natural char- acter of his subject itself. Ho can and will treat such a subject with

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* Poenu of WordsteOrth. Chosen and edited by Matthew Arnold. Loudon : Macmillan and Co. nothing but the most plain, first-band, MOB. al 1, i1,1181,011, His expression may often be called bald, as for iustanee, in the poem of Resolution and Independence ; but it is bald as the barn mountain- tops are bald, with a baldness which is full of grandeur. Wherever we meet with the successful balance, in Wordsworth, of profound truth of subject with profound truth of execution, ho is unique. His best poems are those which most perfectly exhibit this balance. I have a warm admiration for Land«nteia and for the groat Ode ; • but if I am to toll the very truth, I find Laudanteia not wholly free from something artificial, and the great Ode not wholly free from some- thing declamatory. If I had to pick out poems of a kind most per- fectly to show Wordsworth's unique power, I should rather choose poems such as Michael, The Fountain, The Highland Reaper. And poems with the peculiar and unique beauty which distinguishes these, Wordsworth produced in considerable number ; besides very many other poems of which the worth, although not so rare as the worth of these, is still exceedingly high."

We should have said that Wordsworth touches his highest point not only in the reflective poems here indicated, but iu those also in which the force of maternal passion is, as Mr. Arnold so finely says, delineated, as it were, by Nature herself, taking the pen out of Wordsworth's hand, and graving the lines "with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power." We cannot help keenly regretting that Mr. Arnold has omitted from this class of poems one which we should deem of the very highest merit, the poem beginning, " Her eyes are wild, her head is bare." This, with "The Affliction of Margaret" and "The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman," which Mr. Arnold has not forgotten to include, makes up a triad of a very rare kind of poetry, in which the otherwise matchless simplicity of Burns is even surpassed, but surpassed only because the passion which breathes through it is even more exalted and more profound. We wonder the more at Mr. Arnold's omission of this noble poem, because it is one to which Coleridge, in the Biographict Literaria, very early • drew attention, as amongst the most striking of Wordsworth's poems. The marvellous power with which the mother's madness is transfigured into a strain of exalted joy, seems to us amongst the finest things in English

literature

A fire was once within my brain, And in my head a dull, dull pain ; And fiendish faces, one, two, three, Hang at my breast, and pulled at me. But then there came a sight of joy, It came at once to do me good ; I waked and saw my little boy, My little boy of flesh and blood. Oh, joy for me that sight to see, For he was here, and only he !

Suck, little babe, oh, suck again ! It cools my blood, it cools my brain ; Thy lips, I feel them, baby, they Draw from my heart the pain away. Oh, press me with thy little hand ; It loosens something at my chest ; About that tight and deadly baud I feel thy little fingers prost. The breeze, I see, is in the tree, It comes to cool my babe and me."

These are but two of the finest verses in a poem which haunts the imagination only as poetry of the highest power ever can haunt it, and we regret that Mr. Arnold has left out any one of this noble triad of which it is certainly not the least impressive. And we rather regret, also, that he has classed even the two of this kind that he has included, "The Affliction of Margaret" and " The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman," in the class of narrative poems. In a very true sense, they may be called akin to the dramatic, and do not seem to us properly to belong to the same type with " Michael," or " Hart-leap Well," or " Simon Lee," or the story of " Margaret " in "The Excursion," or " The Brothers." Yet another poem, that does belong to that class more nearly than to any other, Mr. Arnold has also, to our great regret, omitted,—we mean "The Thorn,"—the poem de- scribed so characteristically by fiord Jeffrey, as one in which a woman in a red cloak goes up to the top of a hill to say, " 011, Misery !" and then comes down again. To our minds, "The Thorn" should never be omitted from any selection intended to exhibit the chief characteristics of Wordsworth. No doubt, of a kind to provoke the Philistines to ridicule, as it did pm yoke Lord Jeffrey ; but so are many of the poems which Mr. Arnold has quite rightly insisted on including. For our own parts, "The Thorn" seems to us far more strongly stamped with Wordsworth's characteristic power than Sir Francis Doyle's favourite, "The Brothers," which Mr. Arnold takes. And it is surely less open to the charge of affected simplicity, of siniplesse, than the " Anecdote for Fathers," and Alice Fell," or "The Pet Lamb." "The Thorn" is full of

Wordsworth's peculiar passion,—his sympathy with the " pangs, the eternal pangs," by which "the generations are prepared,"— and it also contains some of the finest of his descriptions of those bare and rugged scenes into the characteristic effects of which he had the profoundest insight. The exquisite beauty of moorland mosses has never been described with more force, and we might almost say, more sympathy, than in these singular and vivid verses :—

" And close beside this aged Thorn There is a fresh and lovely sight, A beauteous heap, a hill of moss Just half a foot in height.

All lovely colours there you see, All colours that were ever seen ; And mossy network, too, is there, As if by hand of lady fair The work had woven been ; And cups the darlings of the eye, So deep is their vermilion dye.

All me ! what lovely tints are there Of olive-green and scarlet bright, In spikes, in branches, and in stars, Green, red, and pearly white. This heap of earth o'ergrown with WOKS Which by tho Thorn you see, So fresh in all its beauteous dyes, Is like an infant's grave in size, As like as like can bo : But never, never, anywhere, An infant's grave was half so fair!"

Indeed, these lines, and those from which they are taken, contain something of the essence of Wordsworth which none others of his poems embody so fully,—his power of clothing the most common and poignant forms of human misery with organic life as hardy, as bright, as beautiful as the mosses in which the infant's grave was 'mothered ; and this without dis- guising the misery,—nay, because ho is making you feel the depth and intensity of it. Wordsworth always deepens your respect for the life which is capable of such pangs as he delineates.

These are the two omissions of which we are most inclined to complain. But there are others which we regret. Mr. Arnold has not, we think, plucked by any means the most characteristic and impressive of Wordsworth's three " Daisies,"—certainly not that one which is most identified by all genuine devotees of Wordsworth with lines that came from his very heart of hearts. And the one which he has chosen he has given us in a form which to us is unfamiliar, and inferior to that to which we are accustomed. In the last edition of Wortlsworth's poems published during his lifetime,—the edition of 1849,—it is given in the form which we here place side by side with the one adopted by Mr. Arnold

Ma. ARNOLD'S VERSION. "Bright flower, whose home is everywhere !

A Pilgrim bold in Nature's care, And oft, the long year through, the heir Of joy or sorrow, Methinks that there abides in thee Some concord with humanity, Given to no other flower I see The forest thorough !

And wherefore ? Man is soon d (Trost ; [uublest, A thoughtless Thing ! who, once Does little on his memory rest, Or on hie reason ; But Thou would'st teach him bow to find A shelter under every wind, A hope for times that are unkind And every season."

Thou wander'st the wide world about, tneheek'd by pride or scrupulous doubt, With friends to greet thee, or without, Yet pleased and willing ; Meek, yielding to the occasion's call, And all things suffering from all, Thy function apostolical

In pence fulfilling."

It seems to us that Mr. Arnold's version, as it stands in this little volume, for which we do not know his authority, has an un- finished air; and that the form of the second verse is inferior, as being more didactic, and less avowedly fanciful than that which Wordsworth, in the latest edition of his poems, gave it. But we should greatly have preferred the " Daisy " of 1802 to EDITION 08 1849.

" Bright flower, whose home is everywhere, Bold in maternal Nature's care, And all the long years through the heir Of joy or sorrow, Methinks that there abides in thee Some concord with humanity, Given to no other flower I coo Tho forest thorough.

Is it that man is soon deprest P A thoughtless Thing, who, once noblest, Does little on his memory rest, Or on his reason ; And Thou would'et teach him how to find A shelter under every wind, A hope for times that are unkind And every season P

the " Daisy " of 1803. The lines in which Wordsworth recog-

nises—

"The homely sympathy that heeds The common life our nature breeds, A wisdom suited to the needs Of hearts at leisure."

have become now one of the classical passages of Eng- lish literature. Again, we regret the absence of that radi- ant and most characteristic poem to the girl who had ascended Helvellyn ; the exquisite poem on the " Green Linnet," and that bright one upon the "Mountain Echo" which answers " to the shouting cuckoo, giving to her sound for sound." We much grudge Mr. Arnold's oblivion of this last still, small, Wordsworthian voice. Of course, however, there must be differences of taste ou such subjects as these. And, barring a sonnet or two, there are only two pieces which Mr. Arnold has included which we 'should wish to see away, and they are both contained in the lyrical division. The piece beginning "The Cock is Crowing" always seemed to us an

attempt of Wordsworth's to express a mood of lighter gaiety than any he could really fit his mind to, and to be a sad failure in consequence; while the verses intended to express the pro- found despair with which he wakened from his illusion that Lucy could never feel the touch of earthly years, to find her in the unfeeling ground,— "Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, With rocks and stones and trees,"

—certainly strikes a very false note. If it were only thai unlucky word diurnal,'—and it is more than that, it is the, baldness of the whole couplet in which it occurs,—the not

of despair would ring dead, instead of living. The sonnet' selected do not, we think, include all those which touch Words. worth's highest point, and do include one or two of the second N. or even a lower rank, as, for instance, the comically bad and prosy

sonnet to "that worthy, short-lived youth " who left Words- worth a competence. But how was it that Mr. Arnold could overlook that most pathetic sonnet beginning, " Surprised by

joy, impatient as the wind,"—certainly one of the very finest sonnets in the language P

But wo have done with our grumbling. We quarrel with the specks of dust here and there, when the real feeling which the whole volume produces, is one of all but unalloyed pleasure and gratitude. No one who could not learn to love Wordsworth from this volume, could learn to love him at all. Here are at least all the materials for thoroughly understanding, enjoying, and admiring him, with only a very little which the Philistines might turn to account in his disfavour. There is not a division in the classification into which Mr. Arnold has divided the poems whore a great bulk of true poetry is not to be found,

though the first division, perhaps, is less likely to attract minds alien to Wordsworth than any other. We could have wished, indeed, as we have said, to have had a new class, " Poems akin to the dramatic," and we would rather have classed the " Leech- gatherer " with the elegiac than the narrative poems. But these are small criticisms. What is of more importance is that Mr. Arnold has arranged his selections with such fine feeling, that the sequence itself adds to the enjoyment of them. " The Brothers," "Michael," and "Margaret," for instance, blend together in as fine a harmony, as "We aro Seven" with "Lucy Gray ;" while " The Cuckoo " and " The Skylark," lead up to the well- known lines, " She was a phantom of delight," so as to give them quite a new force and meaning, Again, "The Solitary Reaper,"—perhaps the most perfect poem Wordsworth ever wrote,—strikes just the note we need before reading the two pathetic and powerful poems written at the grave of Burns. In fine, Mr. Arnold has done much to popularise a poet who, though ho may never be in the largest sense popular, will always wield over those whom he finds at all, a far more potent and more inspiring influence, than the most popular of the world's poets wields over the most susceptible of his devotees.