of new beauty and new truth, they must be solitary. When, through splendor of soul, they gain new glimpses into the divine depths, fresh glances into the beautiful mysteries of life, they are as much alone as was Galileo in his joy when that first look into his telescope laid bare to him new wonders in the heavens. In his inspired moments the poet's vision is telescopic, and inspiration is severely individual. Of his inspiration, the flow is fed from such large fountains of spiritual power, that, down to the finer streams, the very capillaries, of execution, all beats with the full pulse of ever-freshened life. Hence those inextinguishable sparkles of genius, where poetry glows and glories in its sunny summits, — sparkles which imply such concentration of genial soul that in their warmest brilliancy they are rare even in the greatest. If, in a poet of second or third order, you meet with one of these sparkles, you may be pretty sure that it is borrowed. He had the judgment to value and the art to appropriate it. Read in Pickering's edition of Gray the notes on the famous "Elegy," where you will find, in every stanza, laid bare close resemblances between lines and phrases of Gray and passages in a host of poets of the past, from Dante to Pope. And in poets of the calibre of Gray, or even of higher name, who have much talent and art and comparatively little inspiration, can be detected, in their brightest passages, similar appropriations. Wordsworth and Coleridge, being both of them poets of vast original resources, did not need this pumping into their veins from foreign streams to strengthen their poetic vitality; their own arteries supplied their embodiments with abundant vivacious blood. And thus, one experiment was enough to prove how fruitless it were to combine their rhythmic movements for the production of one work. The poem they made the attempt upon was the "Ancient Mariner," founded on a dream of a friend of Coleridge. Several suggestions were offered by Wordsworth, who, referring in "The Prelude" to the time when they roved "Unchecked upon smooth Qautock's airy ridge," thus addresses his companion : "Thou in bewitching words, with happy heart, On April 12, 1798, Wordsworth writes from Alfoxden to his friend Cottle, the bookseller of Bristol "You will be pleased to hear that I have gone on very rapidly adding to my stock of poetry. Do come and let me read it to you under the old trees in the park. We have little more than two months to stay in this place." That freedom he had longed for, and so suddenly obtained, Wordsworth had not forfeited. Its basis he strengthened by extreme frugality. All indulgences were made subsidiary to the one indulgence, — delight in producing poetry. This was his master passion, which all other passions must serve. His breakfasts and his dinners, his walks and his talks, his reading and his meditation, all were directly or indirectly tributary to that which he had set before him as the purpose and aim, the happiness, of his life. And what a happiness! What a life! This inward lambent light of poetry, throwing its beams outward to lure forth the beautiful from its hiding-places, seeking the best and aiming to glorify it, this interior sunshine is a perpetual exhilaration to its possessor, awakening joy which empowers him to triumph over sorrows, and even to turn their sting into a taper. The beautiful, being the best there is in all creation, in all the inward as in all the outward, in conduct as in aspect, is more alive with the infinite creative soul. And thus the beautiful calms while it moves us, always exalts, and therefore to saddest conjunctions it brings a sanative refreshment, it becomes a consolation. In the beautiful there is always hope; for the beautiful is fullest of the divine spirit, and the divine spirit is, to the healthy human mind, overflowing with encouragement, with promise. The poet living in and by the beautiful, to him all outward creation is illuminated with a Saturnian light, and the inward spiritualized by faith and hope. And thence the poet's high instruction, by turning this divine light of the beautiful upon the education of man, may be most efficacious, revealing to him more clearly his resources. One of the poet's privileges it is that, subject, through excess of sensibility, to keener pain as well as to livelier joy, (Quanto la cosa è più perfetta, Più senta il bene, e cosi la dolghenza), 1 — he eases the pain and heightens the joy by transfiguring them into poetry. Inasmuch as to the poet all life may glisten with poetry, his being, while it is exalted, is enlarged in proportion to the range of his other faculties; so that his individuality may, like Shakespeare's or Goethe's, become almost representative of the universe. 1 Dante, Inf., c. vi. ག To the enjoyment, to the very continuance, of this Elysian freedom, Dorothy was more than auxiliary. By her sympathy — a sympathy so genuine that it was actively coöperative she not only sweetened its possession, she helped it to be. With a poet's eye and feeling herself, but without vanity, without pretension, she threw all her stock into the venture of her brother she lived for him and in him; while by her sparkling intelligence and cheerful companionship she breathed upon the strenuous poet's every day and hour the breath of a renovating spring. Could poet, with the deep inwardness of Wordsworth, be more favored outwardly? Picturesque, rural nature, its charms redoubled by the impress of man's judicious hand; man himself in his less sophisticated condition of country seclusion, with a background in the poet's memory of congregated humanity in huge cities. And then, when he and Dorothy, who never tired of each other, wished for conversational refreshment from without, by an hour's walk they found themselves listening to the rich, fluent speech of him who was already the most fascinating, the widest and deepest talker in England, a clear-sighted, generous appreciator of his brother-poet, and in whom was no |