our life, and to wait resolvedly for whatever new shining of the day-spring, or whatever calm silence of night, the future years may yield. It is possible already to perceive in literature the influence of such religious conceptions as have been here suggested.

THE PROSE WORKS OF WORDSWORTH.

THE Prose Works of Wordsworth form a gift for which all who have ever truly listened to Wordsworth, and learned from him, will be grateful with no common gratitude. To some men now in middle life the poetry of Wordsworth in its influence upon their early years has been somewhat like a lofty mountain,

"An eminence, of these our hills

The last that parleys with the setting sun,"

which rose as chief presence and power near the home of their boyhood, which was the resort of their solitary walks, which kindled their most ardent thoughts, which consecrated their highest resolves, which created moods of limitless aspiration, which strengthened and subdued, from which came forth clear yet mysterious echoes, against whose front the glories of dawns that were sacred had been manifested, and on whose edges stars, like kindling watchfires, had paused at night for a moment in their course. Not less than this Wordsworth's poetry was to them, as they can remember now. But for such men the Wanderjahre, the years of travel, needful and inevitable, came; they went hither and thither; they took gifts from this one and from that; they saw strange ways and strange faces of men; they parted,

it may be, too cheaply with old things that had been dear; they looked, or seemed to look, at truth askance and strangely. And now if they are drawn back once more into the haunts of early years, they return not without dread and foreboding and tender remorse; to pass the barriers and re-enter the solitude seems as though it needed preparatory discipline and penance and absolution; having entered it, however, the consciousness of one's own personality and its altering state ceases; the fact which fills the mind is the permanence of that lofty, untroubled presence; "there it is," we say, "the same as ever," the same, though to us, who have ranged, it cannot continue quite the same, but seems now a little more abrupt and rigid in its outlines, and, it may be, seems a narrow tract of elevation in contrast with the broad bosom of common earth, the world of pasture-land and city and sea which we have traversed, and which we shall not henceforth forsake.

The contents of the three volumes of Wordsworth's Prose Works, miscellaneous as they are, fall into certain principal groups; first, the political writings, which represent three periods in the growth of Wordsworth's mind, that of his ardent, youthful republicanism (represented by the Apology for the French Revolution), that of the patriotic enthusiasm of his manhood (represented by his pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra,) and lastly, that of his uncourageous elder years." Certain essays and letters upon education, together with a deep

+

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"Years have deprived me of courage, in the sense the word bears when applied by Chaucer to the animation of birds in spring time.""Prose Works" vol. iii. p. 317.

thoughted letter of Advice to the Young, reprinted from the Friend, lie nearest to the political writings, having indirect bearings upon politics, but being immediately, and in the first instance, ethical.. The group entitled by Mr Grosart "Esthetical and Literary" comprises the Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns, notable for its fine. charity, and at the same time strength of moral judgment, the Essays upon Epitaphs, admirable pieces of philosophical criticism, and the several essays and prefaces which accompanied the editions of Wordsworth's poems. Hard by these is rightly placed Wordsworth's Guide through the District of the Lakes; this, besides being a singularly perfect piece of topographical description, is of unique interest as exhibiting Wordsworth's mind, in reference to external nature, at work not in the imaginative, but in the analytic manner. The letters on the Kendal and Windermere Railway belong to the same group of writings. In the third volume appear the notes to the poems, collected from many editions, and the whole of the precious and delightful memoranda, having reference chiefly to the occasions on which Wordsworth's poems were conceived or written, dictated by the poet to Miss Fenwick, and known to Wordsworth students as the I. F. MSS. Letters and extracts of letters follow, and the volume closes with various personal reminiscences of Wordsworth, among which must be distinguished for its deep sympathy with the character and genius of the poet, and the interest of its details, the notice contributed by a living poet, kindred in spirit to Wordsworth, Mr Aubrey de Vere. In the present study it will be possible only to gather up the sugges

tions which arise from one division of these various writings, the political division.

When a poet on great occasions, and with a powerful motive, expresses himself in prose, it may be anticipated that his work will possess certain precious and peculiar qualities. While working in the foreign material, he does not divest himself of his fineness of nerve, of his emotional ardour and susceptibility, nor can he disregard the sustenance through beauty of his imagination; but the play of his faculties takes place under new conditions. The imagination, used as an instrument for the discovery of truth, will pierce through the accidental circumstances of the hour and the place in its effort to deliver from the incidents of time the divine reality which they conceal; occasional and local events will be looked on as of chief significance in reference to what is abiding and universal; and the poet's loyalty to certain ideals will probably take the form of a strenuous confidence in the future of nations or of mankind. Thus, if he essays to write a political pamphlet, it is probable that the pamphlet will come forth a prophecy. No prose writer knows better than the poet (writing in Milton's expressive words, "with his left hand "), the limits to which he has subjected himself; yet he cannot quite subdue the desire to push back the limits, and assert the full privileges of his nature. No poet, indeed, as far as I am aware, has written in that hybrid species, which is the form of ostentation dear to the vulgarly ambitious, unimaginative mind, and which calls itself prose-poetry. The poet who writes in prose has made a surrender, and is conscious of self-denial and a