tive Sketches," at scenes through which he had passed the year before. The poet's tools are imaginations, and with these, polished by the passionate light of the beautiful, he transmutes, transfigures reality, making it, according to the degree of his gifts, more transparently, more delightfully real, piercing to its core, revealing its affinity with an essential, eternal ideal.

The isolation in a foreign land helped to kindle memories of home into poetic imaginations:

"I traveled among unknown men,

In lands beyond the sea;

Nor, England, did I know till then,
What love I bore to thee."

The exquisite poems relating to Lucy were all written this winter. From the solitude of the Hartz Mountains the poet's memory flew back to his opening manhood, and his imagination, radiant with poetic glow, wrought upon early tender impressions to mould them into glistening diamonds of verse. A more felicitous, original, sigificant little poem (it is of only fortytwo lines) never was warbled out of the heart, even of Wordsworth, than the stanzas beginning, "Three years she grew. in sun and shower." Never was the active, purifying influence of nature more lovingly exemplified

than in the growth of this sweet Lucy. Here

are two of the seven stanzas:

"The floating clouds their state shall lend

To her; for her the willow bend;

Nor shall she fail to see,

Even in the motion of the storm,

Grace that shall mould the maiden form

By silent sympathy.

"The stars of midnight shall be dear

To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place

Where rivulets dance their wayward round,

And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face."

In Wordsworth the intellectual mental constituent is ever there to brace the sentimental, his art bringing about a close musical marriage between thought and feeling, the fruit of happy meditation coming to the surface buoyed on the rhythm of healthful sensibility. The following stanzas are taken from "A Poet's Epitaph" (written this winter), and, in addition to their fresh beauty and significance, have an interest as being a portrait—whether so intended or not of Wordsworth himself:

"But who is he with modest looks,

And clad in homely russet brown?
He murmurs near the running brooks
A music sweeter than their own.

"He is retired as noontide dew,

Or fountain in a noonday grove;
And you must love him, ere to you
He will seem worthy of your love.

"The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley he has viewed;
And impulses of deeper birth

Have come to him in solitude.

"In common things that round us lie

Some random truths he can impart,
The harvest of a quiet eye

That broods and sleeps on his own heart."

In Goslar, going back to his school-days, he wrote, in his best vein,—the vein of rhythmic, tender thoughtfulness, those three poems, "Mathew," "The two April Mornings," and "The Fountain." All three have a solid foundation in fact, all relating to one of the headmasters at Hawkshead, and each is a poetic pathetic tribute to his kindly teacher, Taylor, to whom, as we have seen, he devoted some grateful lines in "The Prelude."

Between the parted companions at Ratzeburg and Goslar warm intercourse was kept up through letters, Wordsworth sending some of . his poems to Coleridge, and receiving, in return, cordial comments. In one of his letters Coleridge says to Wordsworth: "I am sure I. need not say how you are incorporated into

the better part of my being; how, whenever I spring forward into the future with noble affections, I always alight by your side." In another he discusses hexameters, and sends as a sample, composed when he was ill and wakeful, twenty or thirty lines full of vivacity and fun, which end,

"William, my head and my heart! dear William and dear Dorothea!

You have all in each other, but I am lonely, and want you."

In February, 1799, Wordsworth and Dorothy quitted Goslar, and after paying a visit to Coleridge at Goettingen, returned to England early in the spring.

IX.

GRASMERE.

THE summer of 1799 Wordsworth and his sister spent for the most part with their cousins, the Hutchinsons, at Sockburn-on-Tees. In September Wordsworth, accompanied by Coleridge, went into Westmoreland and Cumberland. Coleridge saw the Lake Country for the first time. The impression made upon him is shown in the following sentence of a letter to Dorothy: "At Rydal and Grasmere I received, I think, the deepest delight; yet Hawes-water, through many a varying view, kept my eyes dim with tears."

Wordsworth hired a small house in Grasmere; he and his sister took possession at the end of December, on St. Thomas's day, after what he calls "our wild winter journey from Sockburn,❞—

"The naked trees,

The icy brooks, as on we passed, appeared
To question us, 'Whence come ye? to what end?'"

On the journey they passed the spring which