conception of a personal Deity separate from his creation is not as sharply defined as we might wish. There are times in his life and poetry when he seems to love the idea of the universe as objective and to resolve it into the being of God. This tendency was pronounced even in his boyhood. In his philosophic monologues among the mountains, this transcendental tendency is ever manifest. Where others beheld and enjoyed, Wordsworth almost worshiped, and at this point was the peril. Hence, we are not surprised to hear the charge of Pantheism, as Devey thus writes: "This deification of the powers of nature; this effort to break down the antithesis between mind and matter-this is all at war with the doctrine of the fall and the essential constituents of the Christian faith." This is all true in so far as tendency is concerned. We must believe, however, that the poet escaped the legitimate results of his own theory. At first, it is true that his views of good and evil, of the soul's origin, and of natural phenomena, were more Platonic than biblical. He never came to the statement, however, that the world is but a mode of the divine existence. Maturer opinions and beliefs are seen to modify the earlier for the better, and not, as in the case of Milton, for the worse. No sympathetic reader of his life can forget the serious mental struggle through which he was called to pass at this juncture, taking its intensest form after he had left England and lived at the center of European commotions. Doubts of all kinds harassed him. He was, as so many others have been, the victim of what Hood calls "the Everlasting No"-the blank denial of all personal existence and accountability. The struggle, however, was not a hopeless one. The light gradually broke

in upon him, and he saw the truth in its reality and right relations. In noting the religious beliefs of Wordsworth, it must be confessed that we fail to discover those references to the redemptive system that belong to the writings of a Christian poet. In this, however, he is not alone, while we are

bound, moreover, to make due allowance for the different
ways in which men manifest their piety. So true is this,
that Mr. Brooke in his "Theology of the English Poets,"
devotes more than one-half of the treatise to Wordsworth's
religious life. With the Bible before him, and nature about
him, he used, each in his own way, to interpret the other.
"Early had he learned to reverence the volume

That displays the mystery, the life which cannot die,
But in the mountains did he feel his faith."

It was precisely to this combination, in his character, of the earthly and the unearthly that he strikingly refers in the poetic desire,

"And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety."

This was his own interpretation of his own religious life. His piety, as his poetry, was, in a true sense, natural, on the basis of which it required but little faith to rise to the supernatural and rest therein.

I.

III. THE CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS POETRY.

1. Its Ethical Character-Wordsworth was a Literary Moralist. His mind was eminently ethical. As Mr. Taine would express it, he was constitutionally devout, “pre-inclined" to piety. We look in vain in his character to find any trace of that groveling temper so often found in authors and authorship. He recognized, from his earliest boyhood onward, his relations to God and duty. Very much of his earlier and later devotion to natural scenery was but the expression of this reverential spirit. Mr. Taine pronounces, unwittingly, a most decided eulogium upon Wordsworth's poetry as he ironically writes, "When I shall have emptied my head of all worldly thoughts, and looked up to the clouds for ten years, to refine my soul, I shall love this poetry." It was this very unworldliness which the worldly French critic could not appreciate had he looked up to the clouds for

twenty years, and which only serves to cast about the genius of the poet a purer luster than it would otherwise have possessed. We are not surprised to learn from the poet's biography that his friends had designed him for the holy ministry. He understood, however, still better than they, the aptitudes of his nature, and preached through his literary work to a far larger audience than he could have reached from an English pulpit. All spheres and activities of human life were to him serious. Hence, we mark in his verse the absence of mere sentiment or of words uttered for their own sake. How striking the absence of that species of poetry so common to all the poets from Spenser to Mooreamorous lyrics in honor of some personal or imaginary favorite! By no means devoid of deep and generous feeling, he always gave expression to it in the forms of simple truth. So decided was this ethical bias, that we fail to discover that ingenuous humor and pleasantry of temper which naturally belongs to the poet's nature. The critics are correct when they affirm that this defect serves to detract from the merits, as indeed from the readableness of his style. Still, the defect is so thoroughly consistent with his character, that what is lost on the side of pleasantry is more than gained on that of an honest adherence to the reality of things. From first to last, there is not a whit of the affected and conventional; no studied artifice by which to attract attention, but the everpresent influence of a lofty moral aim. There is here, what Christopher North has purposely called," an out-of-the-worldish look." It was always an occasion of regret to Wordsworth that the great majority of men were so thoroughly engrossed in the pursuit of merely temporal good.

"The world is too much with us, late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers."

He thus aimed to exalt virtue among all classes. As a citizen, he was cautious and conservative. His very politics were

ethical. Stating in one of his familiar talks, "that he had given twelve hours to society for one to poetry," he adds, "The world is running mad with the notion that all its evils are to be relieved by political remedies; whereas the great evils lie deep in the heart, and nothing but religion can remove them." He well knew that all sound political economy was based on public virtue. In the noble work that he did on behalf of popular rights, and in his soul-stirring sonnets on the same key and theme, we can see that he was laboring for the civic good through the use of moral agencies. The peculiar views which he held of nature softened and ennobled his character; so that he always connected conscience with national progress, and made it his mission as a man and a poet to elevate his race. "One thing," he said, "is a comfort of my old age, that none of my works written since early youth contains a line I should wish to blot out because it panders to the baser passions of our nature." In this respect he falls into line with the larger number of our best English authors, and confirms the character of English literature as eminently moral. In this respect we may add, that there is a far wider distance between British and Continental Letters than the breadth of the English Channel.

In speaking of this ethical element in Wordsworth's poetry, it is in place to refer with emphasis to his conscientious devotion to his mission as a poet. Poetry was his solemn calling, and he pursued it as devoutly as a priest serves his parish, or ministers at the altar. This is the high sentiment to which he gives expression in his dedicatory verses to "The White Doe of Rylstone."

"He serves the Muses erringly and ill

Whose aim is pleasure, light and fugitive;

O that my mind were equal to fulfill

The comprehensive mandate which they give."

It is true, indeed, that we do not find in our author's personal history the presence of those crucial struggles which have

tested the moral fidelity of so many authors, as Dante and Cervantes, Milton and Bunyan. He did not suffer, as they, from exile, imprisonment, or poverty, and yet he may be said to have had his full share of personal trials. Mrs. Browning, in her "Vision of the English Poets," gives us a touching description of the four pools, the waters of which must be tasted by every successful bard. At these Wordsworth had knelt

and drunk. He knew what it was to be contemned of men. Rarely has an author been so beset in his early life by the critics and reviewers. Public sentiment was prejudiced against the kindly reception of his poems, while brother bards, either from envy or from an undue concession to the reigning criticism, swelled the general voice against him. Fully thirty years passed before he rose into merited repute, and, even after this, a score of years was spent in literary conflict ere his final reputation was established. Christopher North, of Blackwood, and De Quincey, the essayist, are led to rebuke their countrymen, and to praise themselves as a quarter of a century in advance of British criticism in their high appreciation of the worth of Wordsworth. Through all this hostile and malicious fault-finding, the poet of the Lakes remained more loyal than ever to his sacred trust. At the time when his friends were the least friendly, and his foes the most bitter, he took up the defense of his own productions with all the heroism of a knight. Nor was this all. His temptation to abandon the sphere of verse was not alone from the side of captious judgment, but from the very abundance of his worldly resources and the delights of leisure. Though at one period his circumstances were somewhat reduced, all difficulties soon vanished, and full provision was made for his needs. With all the appliances of luxury at hand, and with rare inducements on the part of the English government to confine his attention to English politics, we see him at Rydal Mount passing a life of modest retiracy and frugality, devoted, as he tells us, "to plain living and high thinking." More than once