view, nothing is commonplace-nothing is unworthy of a place in poetry. But surely poetry is the life around us seen from a height, and illumined with more than a common light. The ordinary mind is unable thus to rise or to illuminate what it finds, and its attempt is the ordinary failure. Wordsworth was not able always to do it, but we can safely maintain that the height he had attained and the vision which he had won were so much vaster than that of most men, that there are very few of his poems we can dismiss as trivial from his point of view, or without careful consideration on ours. For, if we have felt the thrill of a new delight as we have looked at the network of grey budding boughs against the spring's blue sky-if we have found out for ourselves the beauty of a wayside flower unheeded before, or heard for the first time with our soul's ears the song of a bird-if one human being has become to us more sacred, or we have begun, however feebly, to have a vision of something beyond commonplace in the lives which are daily lived around us; and if any or all of these possessions have come to us from the teaching of a mind that was great enough to find them out and consecrate them, we may feel that for us Wordsworth's choice of subjects is justified. II.-ON WORDSWORTH'S VIEW OF DEATH. There is surprisingly little about Death in Words worth's poems, and what there is, for the most part, is treated with a calm which warrants us in believing that it appeared to him less of a crisis than it does to many of us. It would be interesting to ascertain what induced and warranted this calm; for that, in spite of philosophy, he knew the human shrinking from Death, and understood the great pathetic doubt which lies at the root of most of our lives, seems clear from several of his poems. The Solitary of the 'Excursion,' in his hopelessness, thought only of his life as a particular current of the stream which, he hoped, would soon reach "The unfathomable gulf where all is still." He summoned fortitude to face the thought of annihilation : "As the Hindoos draw Their holy Ganges from a skiey fount, Even so deduce the stream of human life From seats of power divine; and hope, or trust, Beneath the sun, like Ganges, to make part Of a living ocean: or, to sink engulfed, Like Niger, in impenetrable sands And utter darkness: thought which may be faced, And again : "Sleep, Doth, in my estimate of good, appear A better state than waking; death than sleep: It may be urged that Wordsworth is not speaking in either of these passages in his proper person; that he told the doubts of the Solitary merely that he might go on to express the consolation of the Wanderer. But no man who had not realised such doubts could state them with such power; and the pathos of some of his elegies is quite as great and heartfelt. For instance, in the lines on Sir G. Beaumont: "If things in our remembrance held so dear, And thoughts and projects fondly cherished here, Time's vanities, light fragments of earth's dream." This is sad enough, but not so sad as the words of his lament over the Ettrick Shepherd, which come with dreary force to us who, in this day, are mourning such men as Emerson, Darwin, Green, Rossetti and Longfellow : "How fast has brother followed brother, From sunshine to the sunless land!" Even Byron's 'first dark day of nothingness' is not more chill and blank than the words, "A power is passing from the earth To breathless nature's dark abyss." All this goes to show that it was not from want of imagination that Wordsworth could write of Death with calm, and wrote of it so little. But then we turn to such triumphant utterances as that of the Wanderer: "I cannot doubt that they whom you deplore Beyond the tenderness of human hearts. or the calmer thought in his own loss, "Not without hope we suffer and we mourn ;" or the simple heaven-learned wisdom of the cottage child, who still trails enough of the clouds of glory about her to realise the strength of the bond which Death has tried to break, and holds to her feeling that 'We are Seven;' or the strange solemnity of the comfort given to the bereaved one in 'Laodamia :' "The invisible world with thee hath sympathised; and then we feel that Wordsworth's faith transcended his fears. But no doubt his view, whenever he realised it at all, was that which he describes in the 'Excursion: '— "Death and its two-fold aspect! Wintry-one, Cold, sullen, blank, from hope and joy shut out; Replete with vivid promise, bright as spring.” And we can never forget that through all his philosophy there ran a deep vein of orthodoxy-curiously deep in such a profound and wide thinker, leading us almost to believe that his mind was capable of such a vast range that it was glad to rest itself by limitations. He reverenced, and was ready to adopt and use, accepted formularies and doctrines, while he seemed to pass beyond and above them all, in his own far-reaching inspiration. It has been truly said of him, 'by that consummate vision which is superior to all processes of reasoning, he reached the ultimate data of speculative philosophy and theology;' and the calm with which his greatest utterances about Death are fraught, seems due neither wholly to orthodoxy or to philosophy, but to that same 'consummate vision.' For was it not the law of Being rather than of Personality which engrossed Wordsworth? It was this 'greater which contained the less' that he felt it was his vocation to show mankind, and Death was to him an incident in the story of Being, just as he showed human life to be in the 'Ode on Immortality.' He seems in that poem to prove life an interruption for some Divine purpose of unseen Being-God passing through humanity and becoming God again: "Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of the eternal Silence: " We come 'from God, who is our home.' True, we forget our home, as we pass for the most part unconsciously through our divinely ordered probation; but in |