than one English poet for more than twenty years.' Burns was the only true, fresh singer in these evil day's, and he, too, was a Scotchman, familiar with the less conventional, more nature-loving poetry which, in Scotland, had never died. It is to be doubted whether Wordsworth himself, if educated in the artificial atmosphere of London, instead of on the wild hills of Cumberland, would have struck the note of simplicity which is associated with his name.

It was not only that men wrote in a stilted fashion, or that when Pope, for instance, settled down in his easy chair and described the moon as silvering the slope behind which she rose, the picture was accepted as beautiful without questioning its accuracy; it was not that they did not see nature rightly, but that they did not regard her at all. So remarkable a man as Hazlitt took a walk through Llangollen Valley "by way of initiating himself in the mysteries of natural scenery," before he visited Coleridge in 1798. At that time he was twenty years old, an age when, nowadays, we expect a man to be particularly susceptible to the picturesque, to enjoy consciously a fine sunset or a green forest road. But, that we are trained in a habit of sensitiveness to the beautiful in natural scenery, is partly owing to the influence of Wordsworth's poetry, and to the long train of successors who have taken their inspiration directly or indirectly from Wordsworth and Coleridge. Concerning this visit, Hazlitt relates that Wordsworth, looking out of the window, remarked, "How beautifully the sun sets on that yellow bank," and says that he thought within himself, "With what eyes these poets see nature." If ordinary men did not even look at nature, and such men as Pope

did not observe her correctly, no wonder that poetry was the artificial, untrue thing it had become.

Of course there were a few spirits who did not yield to the prevailing fashion. Crabbe observed nature almost too minutely; the love of simplicity, started in France by Rousseau, had before the end of the century spread over the whole of Europe, and Blake wrote about children and children's thoughts.

The conjunction of Wordsworth and Coleridge was a most happy one for the crusade against prosy verse, and for purifying the two tendencies of naturalism and romance which were beginning to be felt. The passage from Coleridge's "Biographia Literaria,"1 concerning the evolution of the "Lyrical Ballads," need not be repeated here. Wordsworth felt that simple, commonplace objects might be invested with an ideal beauty; or rather, possess such beauty only needing to be discovered, and that they might become subjects for good poetry expressed in the ordinary language of prose. Coleridge contended that the supernatural or romantic is also a legitimate theme for poetry, and that it could be so treated as to appear for the time being as real and human as incidents of common life. In other words, the ideality of nature as she really exists was to be brought out, and the purely ideal was to be made to seem natural.

Each poet took up the side that was congenial to him. Wordsworth produced "We are Seven," "Goody Blake," "Expostulation and Reply," "Lines above Tin

"Biographia Literaria," chap. xiv.

66

tern Abbey," and other poems. Coleridge finished "The Ancient Mariner" and had begun and had begun "Christabel" and "The Dark Ladie," but did not wait to finish them. The Nightingale" and two fragments were substituted. The volume came out in 1798, with a simple advertisement stating the views of the authors. It began with 66 The Ancient Mariner" and ended with "Tintern Abbey."

To tell the truth, it was so different from anything that had appeared before, that the public hardly knew how to take it. That it had a sale is clear, for a second edition with a second volume added was printed in 1800, and Lamb wrote, August 9, 1800," They have contrived to spawn a new volume of lyrical ballads, which is to see the light in about a month, and causes no little excitement in the literary world!"

This, however, is the style of criticism it received from the Quarterly Review:

"Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman,' is the portrait, admirably painted, of every huntsman who by toil, age, and infirmities is rendered unable to guide and govern his canine family.

"Anecdote for Fathers.' Of this the dialogue is ingenuous and natural, but the object of the child's choice and the inferences are not quite obvious.

"We are Seven.' Innocent and pretty infantile prattle.

"Lines Written near Richmond.' Literally 'most musical, most melancholy.'

Poor poets! What hope had they of moving the world when a well-meaning critic in the best journal of the time could say no more, and understood the spirit of the poems

no better than this? It is not strange that, in the second edition, Wordsworth felt it necessary to explain his theories fully; and in a few over-strong statements of the new preface lay the germ of all the future pother about the "school" of Lake Poets. ·

In this preface and in succeeding additions to it, Wordsworth gave expression to a great many truths concerning the nature of poetry, but among other statements he declared that the common speech of country people is the proper language for poetry, and that no words should be allowed in poetry which are not commonly used in prose. Very different this, from Gray's dictum that "the language of the age is never the language of poetry. Our poetry has a language peculiar to itself, to which almost every one that has written has added something, by criticising it with foreign idioms and derivations, nay, often with new words and invented terms of their own." This was exactly what Wordsworth complained of, for in that age "poetic diction" was often the only thing that distinguished a poet from a prose writer.

The source of trouble lay in the fact that Wordsworth over-stated his own theory. In these very lyrical ballads he repeatedly put language into the mouths even of his country characters which they could not have employed, and sometimes words which are peculiar to poetry; e.g., "My watchful dog whose starts of furious ire," or "Cottage after cottage owned its sway.”

In addition to this, he seems never to have had a perception of how the pictures he presented might appear to other people. It is often acknowledged that he lacked humor, another way of saying that he had not a sympathetic imagination. If an incident affected him in a

certain way, then the same incident with all its details, would, he supposed, impress others in the same way. If his words expressed that idea to his mind, he did not understand that to others the effect might be different. The swollen ankles of Simon Lee made part of the pathos of the story, and he did not perceive that some details assume a prominence out of proportion to their real value, if put into words along with others more essential to the picture. Why should not his readers take as he did,

"For still, the more he works, the more

Do his weak ankles swell,"

or the famous couplet in "The Thorn " about the grave,

"I've measured it from side to side,

'Tis three feet long and two feet wide "?

Without the preface the public would have accepted such defects as something which the poet would learn to overcome, but when Wordsworth seemed to maintain that this sort of thing was his ideal of what poetry should be, and also attacked some of their cherished favorites, then they began to fear and hate him, and defended themselves by heaping ridicule on him and on everyone who happened to be connected with him.

It must be acknowledged that, into the most beautiful creations, Wordsworth would occasionally insert a trivial or a grotesque detail. His "hebetude of intellect" shows itself in several of the lyrical ballads, but we might suppose that the criticism of friends-Coleridge and Lamb were no mean critics—and his own natural affinity for the essential beauty of nature would have helped him to outgrow the tendency.