exhaustive enumeration of details.

Only one or two of the most essential features faithfully given, and then from these he passes at once to the sentiment, the genius of the place, that which gives it individuality, and makes it this and no other place. Numerous instances of the way in which he seizes the inner spirit of a place and utters it, will occur to every reader. To give one out of many after sketching briefly the outward appearance of the four fraternal yew-trees of Borrowdale, who else could have condensed the total impressions into such lines as these, so intensely imaginative, so profoundly true!

'Beneath whose sable roof

Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked
With unrejoicing berries-ghostly shapes

May meet at noontide; Fear and trembling Hope,
Silence and Foresight; Death the Skeleton,
And Time the Shadow; there to celebrate,

As in a natural temple, scattered o'er
With altars undisturbed of mossy stone,
United worship; or in mute repose

To lie and listen to the mountain flood,
Murmuring from Glaramara's inmost caves.'

When in this passage, or in that wonderful poem, 'What, are you stepping westward?' and many more, we find the poet spiritualizing so powerfully the familiar appearances and common facts of earth, adding, as he himself says,

'The gleam,

The light that never was, on sea or land,
The consecration, and the poet's dream,'

one is tempted to ask, Is this true, is the light real,

or only fantastic? Now in this, I conceive, lies Wordsworth's transcendent power, that the ideal light he sheds is a true light, and the more ideal it is, the more true. Poets, all but the greatest, are apt to adorn things with fantastic or individual hues, to suffuse them with their own temporary emotions, which Mr. Ruskin has called the 'pathetic fallacy.' The ideal light which Wordsworth sheds does not so, but brings out only more vividly the real heart of nature, the inmost feeling, which is really there, and is recognised by Wordsworth's eye in virtue of the kinship between nature and his soul. If it be asked how is this, I can but reply, that there is a wonderful and mysterious adaptation between the external world and the human soul, the one answer

1

1 This expression has been objected to as vague or meaningless. It is certainly a condensed form of words, but it aims at expressing a real though subtle truth. If asked to explain it, I should do so in this way: Each scene in nature has in it a power of awakening, in every beholder of sensibility, an impression peculiar to itself, such as no other scene can exactly call up. This may be called the 'heart' or 'character' of that scene. It is quite analogous to, if somewhat vaguer than, the particular impression produced upon us by the presence of each individual man. Now the aggregate of the impressions produced by many scenes in nature, or rather the power in nature on a large scale of producing such impressions on us; is what, for want of another name, I have called the heart' of nature. The test of what is the real heart or character of any scene is to be ascertained by the experience of what the largest number of men of the truest poetic sensibility feel in the presence of that scene. What it is in nature which produces these impressions on human imaginations I do not undertake to say. But that one cannot explain the cause or mode of operation, is no reason why one should not notice and name the fact.

ing to the other in ways not yet explained by any philosopher.

Secondly, It is perhaps but turning to another side of the same quality to note what a base of natural, rather than philosophical idealism lay at the bottom of the eye which Wordsworth turned on nature. Whereas to most men the material world is a heavy, gross, dead mass, earth a ball of black mud, painted here and there with some colour, Wordsworth felt it to be a living, breathing power, not dead, but full of strange life; his eye almost saw into it, as if it were transparent. So strongly did this feeling possess him, that in childhood he was a complete idealist. Speaking of himself at that age, he says, 'I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence, and I communed with all I saw as something, not apart from, but inherent in my own immaterial nature. Many times while going to school have I grasped at a wall or tree to recall myself from the abyss of idealism to the reality. At that time I was afraid of such processes. In later periods of life I have deplored, as we have all reason to do, a subjugation of an opposite character, and have rejoiced over these remembrances.' Here is idealism, far beyond that of Berkeley or any other philosopher, engendered not by subtle arguments of metaphysics, but born from within by sheer force of soul, before which the solid mass of earth is fused and unsubstantialized. Out of moods like these, or rather the remembrance of them, are projected some of his most ideal lights, such as form

the charm of his finest poems, like the lines to the Cuckoo, and the 'Ode on Immortality.' Hence came the

'Obstinate questionings

Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings,'

which he looked back to with thankful joy in mature manhood. With these abstract and visionary feelings there blended more tender human remembrances of that early time, making together a beautiful light of morning about his after days, and touching even the common things of life with an affecting, tender solemnity.

Thirdly, With this spiritualizing power of soul Wordsworth combined another faculty, which might seem the most opposed to it,-wonderful keenness and faithfulness of eye for the minutest facts of the outward world. Seldom in his library, much in the open air, at all hours, in all seasons, from childhood to old age, his watchful observant eye had stored his mind with all the varied and ever-changing aspects of nature. His imagination was a treasure-house whence he drew forth things new and old, the old as fresh as if new. No modern poet has recorded so large and so varied a number of natural facts and appearances, which had never before been set down in books. And these he brings forth, not as if he had noted, and carefully photographed them, to be reproduced whenever an occasion offered, but as familiar knowledge that had come to him unawares, and recurred with the naturalness of an instinct.

E

Many no doubt had seen before, but who before him had so described the hare ?—

'The grass is bright with rain-drops; on the moors
The hare is running races in her mirth;

And with her feet she from the plashy earth

Raises a mist; that, glittering in the sun,

Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run.'

Or again, who else would have noted the effect of a leaping trout, or of a croaking raven, in bringing out the solitariness of a mountain tarn ?——

"There sometimes doth a leaping fish

Send through the tarn a lonely cheer;
The crags repeat the raven's croak

In symphony austere.'

Or again, in the calm bright evening after a

stormy day

'Loud is the Vale! the voice is up

With which she speaks when storms are gone,

A mighty unison of streams!

Of all her voices, one!

'Loud is the Vale !-this inland depth

In peace is roaring like the sea;
Yon star upon the mountain-top
Is listening quietly.'

Who but Wordsworth would have set off the uproar of the vale by the stillness of the star on the mountain head? Here, in passing, I may note the strange power there is in his simple prepositions. The star is upon the mountain-top; the silence is in the starry sky; the sleep is among the hills; 'the gentleness of heaven is on the sea,' not 'broods o'er,' as the later editions have it. This double gift of soul and eye, highest ideality and most literal real