STUDIES IN POETRY

AND PHILOSOPHY

BY

J. C. SHAIRP

PROFESSOR OF HUMANITY, ST. ANDREWS

PII VATES ET PHOEBO DIGNA LOCUTI.

EDINBURGH

EDMONSTON AND DOUGLAS

PREFACE.

THE contents of this volume, written during leisure weeks of recent summers, originally appeared in the North British Review. They were put together not hastily at first, and have since been revised, in some places retrenched, in more enlarged. This is true of all the papers, except the third, which stands now much as it did at first. Though each of the four Essays has a distinct subject of its own, it is hoped that they will be found to have a unity both of thought and purpose. The first three were written from a desire to acknowledge, as far as possible, a debt of gratitude long owed to three eminent teachers of the last age. The only way in which that acknowledgment could now be rendered, was by trying to hand on some knowledge of the men and of the work they did to a few at least of the younger generation. Each of these three papers has been introduced by a short

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biography, in the hope that the concrete facts might throw light on the abstract thoughts, and add to them a human interest.

The thought of Wordsworth and Coleridge is of such worth, that too much cannot be done to commend it to those unacquainted with it. They deserve to be known for this, if for nothing else, that they two were the men of most original genius who have been born into England for a century and more. But original genius has sometimes done questionable work, for which perhaps small thanks are due. Theirs, however, was not only original, it was beneficent genius. To a sense-bound age, rejoicing in a mechanical philosophy, they came speaking from the soul to the soul. In time they awakened a response. Younger men, one by one, turned towards them, and found in their teaching that which at once called out and satisfied their aspirations as no other writings of the time did.

deepest, most spiritual in the

Whatever is best,

thinking and feel

ing of the last thirty years, is either their product or akin to it. But now again the recoil has come, and we are once more in the midst of a way of thinking which excludes the spiritual. As against this compacted system Wordsworth and

Coleridge have certainly no complete system, no spiritual theory of life to furnish, but they supply a body of thought which, though unsystematized, is the best counteractive to be found in English literature, till the full spiritual theory gets born.

There is another aspect in which the mental experience of these men is instructive. This is proclaimed on all hands to be an age of disintegration, when all old things must either be reconstructed or disappear. An uneasy, restless searching after something larger and more satisfying is no doubt visible on the surface both of books and of society. In this mood of men's minds, is there not something to be learnt from the experience of Wordsworth and Coleridge? Here were two men of amplest power, born into an age fuller of anarchic change than our own. They threw themselves fearlessly on their time, broke with old faiths and institutions, in search of truth set their faces to the wilderness, and after sojourning for a season there, came out on the other side, and found peace. They have been branded for this as mere timid reactionaries. But this I believe to be no true account of them. If they returned in some sense to their first faiths, they did so not in blind conservatism,