jealousy to restrain the utterance of his admiration, an admiration which to Wordsworth was the most inspiriting, fortifying cordial the world could offer him. Through his whole after-life, Coleridge never relaxed in this estimate of the poetic genius of his friend, and by the printed as well as oral expression of it did much to enlighten the judgment of criticism in regard to Wordsworth. Coleridge, himself a great poet, paid him this disinterested, exquisite, but somewhat excessive tribute: "He strides so far before us that he dwarfs himself in the distance."

VII.

LYRICAL BALLADS.

In

WHAT may be called the occasion of beginning the "Lyrical Ballads" was the wish to earn five pounds, to pay for an excursion; their cause lay much deeper, namely, in the mental conformation of the two poets. their conversations on the sources of poetic interest, they agreed that a series of poems might be written of two sorts: in the one the incidents and agents were to be in part supernatural, and were to move and hold the sympathy of the reader through their human feeling and dramatic truth; in the other, subjects were to be taken from real and ordinary life in the village and country. Coleridge was to write poems of the first class, Wordsworth of the second. In the "Biographia Literaria" Coleridge thus describes their respective tasks: "It was agreed that my endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a

semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself, as his object, to give the charm of novelty to the things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand."

In putting the plan into execution, Wordsworth was so much more industrious, and the number of his pieces so much greater, that what his associate contributed 'seemed to be, says Coleridge, "an interpolation of heterogeneous matter." The heterogeneous matter was, however, chiefly the immortal "Ancient Mariner," which takes up fifty pages, or about one quarter of the volume.

Under the sway of a large humanity of individual nature, favored by early associations and impressions in secluded, unaristocratic Cumberland, and nourished by the deeper spirit of

the times (a cardinal characteristic of which was a more diffused fellow-feeling, an expansion and warming of the human heart towards man as man), Wordsworth had from the first been moved to note the condition of the humbler class of his fellow-men, and to hear in their heart-throb a deep poetic music. In his first printed poem, "An Evening Walk," we have seen that the only human being introduced is a destitute wayfaring mother with her two children,

"Denied to lay her head,

On cold, blue nights, in hut or straw-built shed.

In the next one, "Descriptive Sketches," we catch on the southern side of the Alps a glimpse of a wandering gypsy,

"A nursling babe, her only comforter,”.

and on the northern side, an enthusiastic description of the Swiss cottager, - a description so abstract, that it opens with Rousseau's fallacy about the savage state being the freest and most manly :

"Once man entirely free, alone and wild,

Was blest as free, for he was nature's child."

Of his third poem, "Guilt and Sorrow," the chief personages are a wandering widowed soldier's wife and a criminal, repentant sailor.

And now, in a new volume, made up of twenty pieces, the same spirit rather, the same principle rules.

prevails, or The lowly

and obscure are dragged forth to be suddenly presented to the world, crowned with the immortal wreath of poetry, presented to the astonished protesting world. For are not knights and ladies, kings and princesses, paladins and crusaders, the legitimate themes, and palaces and castles the congenial haunts, of poesy? And here vagrants and idiots and washerwomen, instead of being left to starve in huts, and freeze under hedge-rows, are thrust upon our notice, and, through the magic of genius, which defies the externalities of circumstance, whether splendent or homely, — are placed before and beside us in their naked, irresistible humanity.

One of the longer poems of the volume is "The Thorn." Imagine a reader, in the first quarter of this century, fresh from the "Giaour,” and "Lara," and "Lalla Rookh," and "The Lady of the Lake," coming upon "The Thorn" unexpectedly. The public being unprepared for such a return to nature, its judgment, too, misled by the half-criticism of its Jeffreys and Giffords, in nine readers out of ten the feeling would be distaste, or even disgust, ex