CHAPTER XXII.

WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE, AND SOUTHEY.

§ 1. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH: his life and works. § 2. Criticism of his poetry. § 3. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE: his life. § 4. His literary character and poems. § 5. His prose works and conversation. § 6. ROBERT SOUTHEY: his life. § 7. His poems. Joan of Arc. Madoc. Thalaba. Kehama. Roderick. § 8. His prose works.

§ 1. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850), the founder of the socalled Lake School of poetry, was born at Cockermouth, in Cumberland, April 7, 1770. In his ninth year he was sent to a school at Hawkshead, in the most picturesque district of Lancashire, where the scholars, instead of living under the same roof with a master, were boarded among the villagers. They were at liberty to roam over the surrounding country by day and by night, and Wordsworth largely availed himself of this privilege. The relish for the beauties of creation, to which he mainly owes his place among poets, was early manifested and rapidly developed. In his fourteenth year his father died, and the care of the orphans devolved on their uncles. The poet was sent to St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1787, where he spent his time chiefly in the study of the English poets, and in the ordinary amusements of the University. After taking his degree in 1791, he went over to France, where he eagerly embraced the ideas of the wildest champions of liberty in that country. Wordsworth's eye, much more practised to scan landscapes than men, nowhere penetrated beneath the surface; and he concluded that a king and his courtiers were the only Frenchmen by whom power could be abused. His political sentiments, however, became gradually modified, till in later life they settled down into steady Conservatism in Church and State. To vindicate his talents, which his Cambridge career had brought into question, he, in 1793, produced to the world-hurriedly, he says, though reluctantly-too little poems, An Evening Walk, and Descriptive Sketches. If the Evening Walk was hastily corrected it had not been hastily composed, for it was begun in 1787, and continued through the two succeeding years. The metre and language are in the school of Pope, but they are the work of a promising scholar, and not of a master. The Descriptive Sketches had been penned at Orleans and Blois, in 1791 and 1792. The execution is of the same school as the Evening Walk, but the language is simpler, and so far superior.

In 1793 Wordsworth commenced, and in 1794 completed, the story of Salisbury Plain, or, Guilt and Sorrow, which did not appear entire till 1842, but of which he published an extract in 1798, under the title of The Female Vagrant. In regard to time it is separated from the Descriptive Sketches by a span, but in respect of merit they are parted by a gulf. He had ceased to write in the train of Pope, and composed in the stanza of his later favourite Spenser. There is an exquisite simplicity and polish in the language, equally removed from the bald prattle of many of the Lyrical Ballads and the turgid verbosity of many pages in The Excursion. It was about this time that the poet received a legacy of 9007., which enabled him to indulge the great wish of his heart— to live with his sister Dorothy, and to devote himself entirely to poetry. The autumn of 1795 found them settled in a house at Racedown, in Dorsetshire. It is a remarkable feature of his history that, during all the time he was a hotheaded intractable rover, he had lived a life of Spartan virtue. His Hawkshead training had inured him to cottage board and lodging, and the temptations of London and Paris had failed to allure him to extravagance or vice. His temperance and economy enabled him to derive more benefit from the above-mentioned small bequest than would have accrued to poets in general from five times the sum.

Wordsworth now entered upon his poetical profession by paraphrasing several of the satires of Juvenal, and applying them to the abuses which he conceived to reign in high places. These, however, he never published. His second experiment was the tragedy of The Borderers, which was considered, when it appeared, an unqualified failure. It was in June, 1797, when this tragedy was on the verge of completion, that its first critic arrived at Racedown. Coleridge formed a close friendship with Wordsworth and his sister, and the following year they started upon a tour together in Germany. To furnish funds for this journey the two friends published their Lyrical Ballads, the first piece in which was Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, but several of the remaining poems were by Wordsworth. Of these, three or four were in Wordsworth's finest manner-about the same number partly good, partly puerile; and the remainder belonged to a class all but universally condemned.

On their return to England in 1798 Wordsworth and his sister settled at Grasmere, from whence they afterwards went to Allan Bank, and finally in 1813 to Rydal Mount. It was from his residence in this district that he and his friends Coleridge, Southey, De Quincey, and Wilson, received the name of the Lake School. He now set himself to work, both by precept and practice, to inculcate those peculiar views of poetry, which are mentioned more particularly below, and which encountered for a long time the fierce hosti

lity of the critics. In 1799 he commenced The Prelude, which was not published in full till after his death. This metrical autobiography is valuable because it preserves many facts and opinions which might otherwise have gone unrecorded; but, upon the whole, it is bald and cumbrous as a poem. In 1800 he published an enlarged edition of the Ballads. Thirty-seven pieces were added to the original collection, and the supplement materially increased the proportion of good to bad.

The year 1802 was an eventful one to the poet. He received a considerable accession of fortune, which had been due to his father at the time of his death, but which the children had not recovered till now. The poet's share enabled him to marry a lady to whom he had been long attached, Mary Hutchinson, his sister's friend. In 1807 he gave to the world two new volumes of Poems which contained the Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle, and many more of his choicest pieces. Here appeared his first sonnets, and several of thein are still ranked among his happiest efforts in that department. Wordsworth's next publication was in prose. His indignation rose at the grasping tyranny of Napoleon; and in 1809 he put forth a pamphlet against the Convention of Cintra. The sentiments were spirit-stirring, but the manner of conveying them was the reverse, and his protest passed unheeded. His great work, The Excursion, appeared in 1814. This is a fragment of a projected great moral epic, discussing and solving the mightiest questions concerning God, nature, and man, our moral constitution, our duties, and our hopes. Its dramatic interest is exceedingly small; its structure is very inartificial; and the characters represented in it are devoid of life and probability. That an old Scottish pedler, a country clergyman, and a disappointed visionary, should reason so continuously and so sublimely on the destinies of man, is in itself a gross want of verisimilitude; and the purely speculative nature of their interminable arguments,

"On knowledge, will, and fate,"

are not relieved from their monotony even by the abundant and beautiful descriptions and the pathetic episodes so thickly interspersed. It is Wordsworth, too, who is speaking always and alone; there is no variety of language, none of the shock and vivacity of intellectual wrestling; but, on the other hand, so sublime are the subjects on which they reason, so lofty and seraphic is their tone, and so deep a glow of humanity is perceptible throughout, that no reader, but such as seek in poetry for inere food for the curiosity and imagination, can study this grand composition without everincreasing reverence and delight.

In 1815 appeared The White Doe of Rylstone, the only narrative

poem of any length which Wordsworth ever wrote. The incidents are of a mournful kind; turning chiefly on the complete ruin of a north-country family in the "Rising of the North" in 1569: but the atmosphere of mystical and supernatural influences in which the personages move, the superhuman purity and unearthliness of the characters, and above all the part played in the action by the white doe, which gives name to the work,—all these things contribute to communicate to the production a fantastic, unreal, and somewhat affected air. Peter Bell was published in 1819, and was received with a shout of ridicule. The hierophant had neglected no precaution to provoke the sneers of the profane. He stated in the dedication that the work had been completed twenty years, and that he had continued correcting it in the interval to render it worthy of a permanent place in our national literature. An announcement so well calculated to awaken the highest expectation was followed by a prologue more puerile than anything which ever proceeded from a man with a fiftieth part of his powers. The work is meant to be serious, and is certainly not facetious, but there is so much farcical absurdity of detail and language that the mind is revolted. This poem was followed by The Waggoner, which was not more successful. Wordsworth's whole returns from his literary labours up to 1819 had not amounted to 1407.; but through the influence of Lord Lonsdale, he had been appointed in 1813 distributor of stamps for the County of Westmoreland, which brought him about 500l. a year; and it was between 1830 and 1840 that the flood which floated him into favour rose to its height. Scott and Byron had in succession entranced the world. They had now withdrawn, and no third king arose to demand homage. It was in the lull which ensued that the less thrilling notes of the Lake bard obtained a hearing. It was during this time that he published his Ecclesiastical Sonnets and Yarrow revisited, and in 1842 he brought forth a complete collection of his poems. His fame was now firmly established. On the death of Southey in 1843 he was made Poet-Laureate. He died on April 23, 1850, when he had just completed his eightieth year.

§ 2. The poetry of Wordsworth has passed through two phases of criticism, in the first of which his defects were chiefly noted, and in the second his merits. Already we have arrived at the third era, when the majority of readers are just to both. An acute critic, to whom we have been much indebted in the preceding sketch of the poet's life and works, gives the fairest estimate that has appeared of Wordsworth's poetry:-"It is constantly asserted that he effected a reform in the language of poetry, that he found the public bigoted to a vicious and flowery diction, which seemed to mean a great deal and really meant nothing, and that he led them back to sense and simplicity. The claim appears to us to be a fanciful assumption,

refuted by the facts of literary history. Feebler poetasters were no doubt read when Wordsworth began to write than would now command an audience, however small; but they had no real hold upon the public, and Cowper was the only popular bard of the day. His masculine and unadorned English was relished in every cultivated circle in the land, and Wordsworth was the child and not the father of a reaction, which, after all, has been greatly exaggerated. Goldsmith was the most celebrated of Cowper's immediate predecessors, and it will not be pretended that The Deserted Village and The Traveller are among the specimens of inane phraseology. Burns had died before Wordsworth had attracted notice. The wonderful Peasant's performances were admired by none more than by Wordsworth himself: were they not already far more popular than the Lake-poet's have ever been—or ever will be? and were they, in any respect or degree, tinged with the absurdities of the Hayley school? When we come forward we find that the men of the generation were Scott, Byron, Moore, Campbell, Crabbe, and one or two others. Wordsworth himself was little read in comparison, and if he had anything to do with weaning the public from their vitiated predilections, it must have been through his influence on these more popular poets, whose works represented the reigning taste of the time. But nothing is more certain than that not a single one of them had formed his style upon that of the Lyrical Ballads or The Excursion. Whatever influence Wordsworth may have exercised on poetic style, be it great or small, was by deviating in practice from the principles of composition for which he contended. Both his theory, and the poems which illustrate it, continue to this hour to be all but universally condemned. He resolved to write as the lower orders talked; and though where the poor are the speakers it would be in accordance with strict dramatic propriety, the system would not be tolerated in serious poetry. Wordsworth's rule did not stop at the wording of dialogues. He maintained that the colloquial language of rustics was the most philosophical and enduring which the dictionary affords, and the fittest for verse of every description. Any one who mixes with the common people can decide for himself whether their conversation is wont to exhibit more propriety of language than the sayings of a Johnson or the speeches of a Burke. If it were really the case, it would follow that literary cultivation is an evil, and that we ought to learn English of our ploughboys, and not of our Shakspeares and Miltons. But there can be no risk in asserting that the vocabulary of rustics is rude and meagre, and their discourse negligent, diffuse, and weak. The vulgarisms, which are the most racy, vigorous, and characteristic part of their speech, Wordsworth admitted must be dropped, and either he must have substituted equivalent expressions, when the language