BOOKS.

WORDSWORTH'S LETTERS.*

Tan -L'aree volumes of Wordsworth letters now collected together for the first time by Professor Knight will be welcomed by all who are interested in the life and character

of one of our greatest poets. The merit of the collection lies rather in the completeness of the view which it gives us of

Wordsworth's history than in the novelty of its contents, though these include some interesting unpublished matter,— notably the newly discovered series of letters addressed to Coleridge. In bringing together and arranging chronologically

a great correspondence which hitherto has lain strewn up and down among a multitude of memoirs, remains, and mis-

cellaneous publications, Professor Knight has done a lasting service to literature. It is only to be regretted that he has not stated clearly the source of each letter, and thus afforded the reader at once a useful clue through the labyrinth of already published Wordsworthiana, and the means of arriving, without the effort of a somewhat elaborate collation, at what is new in the present book. As its title indicates, the

collection is not limited to the correspondence of the poet himself. Some of the most charming and interesting of the letters are those written by his sister Dorothy, who was able to bring into the service of familiar correspondence the same happy powers of vivid description which delight us in her Journals :-

Oh ! my dear friend," she exclaims to Mrs. Clarkson, " what a beautiful spot this is ! the greenest in all the earth, the softest green covers the mountains even to the very top. Silver How is before my eyes, and I forget that I have ever seen it so beautiful. Every bit of grass among the purple rocks (which are of all shades of purple) is green. I am writing in my own room. Every now and then I hear the chirping of a little family of swallows that have their abode against the glass of my windows. The nest was built last year, and it has been taken possession of again about six weeks ago, needing no repairs whatever. William calls me again."

Are we not transported at once into the air and the sunshine of the Grasmere cottage P We almost hear the voice of "William" calling again. William's own descriptions are equally vivid, though they - are usually more detailed and elaborate. Nothing can be more remarkable than the passionate intensity:with which, from their earliest years, the • Letters of the Werde+eorth Ppatily from 1985 to 1868. .Coilected and Edited by William Knight: 8 whs. LOndina Ginn and Co: [SW fid• net.]

brother and sister scrutinised and absorbed the appearances of the natural world. They looked upon the face of Nature with the eyes of lovers, and they loved the more in that they were first to love. During his tour in Switzerland Wordsworth was transported by the shadows of the moun- tains thrown across a lake by the midday sun. " It was beautiful," he wrote, "to watch them travelling up the sides of the hills ; for several hours to remark one half of a village covered with shade, and the other bright with the strongest sunshine "; and then, with the observation of a modern landscape-painter, he notes down for his sister the fact that the surface of the lake was "glowing with the richest green and gold, the reflection of the illuminated wood and path shaded with a soft blue tint." His account, in a letter to Coleridge, of-the waterfall at Hardrane in mid-winter is a striking example of his power of exact vision and minute description. It is too long to quote—it fills more than two pages of print—but the beautiful concluding passage may be given :—

" What a scene, too, in summer ! In the luxury of our imagina- tion we could not help feeding upon the pleasure which this cave, in the heat of a July noon, would spread through a frame exquisitely sensible. That huge rock on the right, the bank winding round on the left with all its living foliage, and the breeze stealing up the valley, and bedewing the cavern with the freshest imaginable spray ; and then the murmur of the water, the quiet, the seclusion, and a long summer day to dream in!"

In spite, however, of such passages as these, it is impossible to number Wordsworth among the great letter-writers. Not

only was he, as he himself declared, " the most lazy and impatient letter-writer in the world" ; his whole outlook upon life was the precise contrary to the kind which goes to the making of a good correspondent. The ideal letter is a happy cross between a prose essay and small-talk; and Wordsworth, though he could write excellent prose, was no master of the lighter arts of conversation. He could not spin charming sentences out of airy nothings; he was never content, like Horace Walpole and Madame de Sevigne, to sit down and "tell old tales, and laugh

At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

Talk of court news Who loses and who wins, who's in, who's out" ;

be found it far easier, and far pleasanter, to take upon himself the mystery of things, as if he were God's spy. His character was a singularly homogeneous one; and the same mood of solemn elevation which gave birth to his greatest poetry clung to him through all the trivialities of epistolary inter- course, and makes his letters—especially the later ones—move Heavily and slowly, with an air of being more important than they are. Verbal felicities are rare in them, considering they were written by a consummate artist in words ; though here and there they do occur. The Cutnberland people, he tells Coleridge, are "prompt to serve, without servility," which is a fine phrase; and the following judgment on Pitt is almost an epigram : " His first wish (though probably unknown to himself) was that his country should prosper under his administration ; his next that it should prosper." But, after all, it is not upon a few strokes of this kind that the value of the letters depends ;

it is upon their power• of impressing upon the reader's mind a true conception of Wordsworth's character. They are at their best when they are most unlike letters, when their date

and their destination become irrelevant, when Wordsworth's pen, as we can feel, begins to tremble, and at last his whole soul bursts out upon the page with the utterance, not of a familiar correspondent, but of a poet and a seer. These moments occur most frequently when Wordsworth, in all the passion and arrogance of prophecy, takes up the task of ex- pounding and defending his views upon the nature of poetry and its place in the general scheme of the universe. What have his own poems to do, he exclaims to Lady Beaumont—or rather to himself and the world at large-

- "with routs, dinners, morning calls, hurry from door to door, afrom street to street, on foot or in carriage ; with Mr. Pitt.or Mr. Fox, Mr. Paul or Sir Francis Burdett, the Westminster election

• or the borough of Honiton P It is an awful truth that there neither is, nor can be, any genuine enjoyment of poetry :among nineteen out of twenty of those persons who live, or wish

• to live, in the broad light of the world; among those who either are, or are striving to make themselves, people of consideration in society: This is a truth, and an awful one, because to be in- -capable of a feeling of poetry, in my sense of the word, is to be -without love of humannature and reverence for God."

And he sometimes gave vent to similar• eloquence in the stress of personal emotion,—on the occasion, for instance, of his brother John being lost at sea :—

"I can say nothing higher of my ever-dear brother than that he was worthy of his sister, who is now weeping beside ine, and of the friendship of Coleridge,—meek, affectionate, silently enthusiastic, loving all quiet things, and a poet in everything but words."

These ociaaional outbursts show us, only less clearly than the greatest of his poems, the warm and glowing centre of Wordsworth's mind. But no portrait can be all high-light, and the great mass of these letters performs the function of a subdued, harmonious background to the lie features we already know. In the barest and the coldest of them there is an underlying sense of grandeur; as we read them we grow conscious more and more of a contact with something noble which, in some strange way, is none the less present, though its visible expression is so rare. In the later letters there is a stiffness and a heaviness which are paralleled in the later poems ; but it is easy to see that these characteristics of Wordsworth's old age were not, as is sometimes suggested, accidental accretions, but that they had their roots in the most essential qualities of his mind. From his earliest years his egotism, his introspection, and his love of freedom had been bounded and controlled by a profound sanity. Though from some points of view he was as modern as his great pre- decessor Rousseau, from others he was as old-fashioned as the Patriarchs. He was at once the first of the Romantics and the last of the Romans. " Rydal is covered with ice, clear as polished steel," he tells Coleridge in one of the newly dis- covered letters. "I have procured a pair of skates, and to-morrow mean to give my body to the wind; not, however, without reasonable caution." The proviso is typical of the whole cast of his mind. He was perpetually setting out to give his thought to the wind of the spirit which bloweth where it listeth, and at the same time to do so with "reason- able caution." In his best years he succeeded in achieving the impossible feat ; and it is in this bold and triumphant reconcilement of opposites that the heart of his greatness lies. With age his "reasonable caution" grew upon him, until at last he never ventured on to the deep waters, and the skates of his poetry, which in his youth had carried him so fast and so far, turned rusty. But this was not the result of chance ; it was the natural development of his character ; it was his "necessity in being old."