distress that has humanized his soul, to disparage the poet's imagination that is "housed in a dream" and that loves to build an ideal castle

Beside a sea that could not cease to smile;

On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss.

But the mystic's sense of absolute reality, carried to its logical sequence, places the poet's art in a false light. For, in his substitution of the supposed facts of absolute reality for imagination, he encroaches upon and limits the poet's power of idealization and creation. The poet can never avoid being a creator, for that is his highest function. He is no doubt to try to see things as they are, but it is equally important that he should create new values for those things, and the mystic's ideal of absolute reality is an impossibility in a world where creation is going on. Are not the "Elegiac Stanzas" themselves, from the artistic standpoint, a refutation of the mystic's theory? Let us place side by side two stanzas from the poem, one from the earlier part, in which he tells how he once would have painted the picture, and one from the latter part where the picture is given in reality:

A Picture had it been of lasting ease,
Elysian quiet, without toil or strife;

No motion but the moving tide, a breeze,
Or merely silent Nature's breathing life.

And this huge Castle, standing here sublime,

I love to see the look with which it braves,

Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time,

The lightning, the fierce wind, and trampling waves.

Are not both of these stanzas creations? Do they not both have the added gleam, the "consecration and the poet's dream?" And does not the first possess as much reality as the latter, and is it not just as legitimate as a

poetic creation? Wordsworth's poetic art defies his mystic theory; and though in theory he was often a pure mystic, in practice he was a genine creative artist. The poet in him prevailed over the mystic. But the conflict and the renuciations which it brought with it were boundlessly fruitful. For out of the struggle between the mystic, who by the intensity of pure vision would have his "eye on his object" and would see "into the life of things," and the poet, who, bound by his art, must find words and concrete imagery in which to express his thoughts, there was born a synthesis of the actual and the ideal, of solid substance and idealization, that led the poet a long way toward, yet somewhat on the hither side, of absolute truth and absolute reality.

In the Second Book of the "Prelude," which was written considerably earlier than the Fourteenth and the "Elegiac Stanzas," Wordsworth, in tracing the growth of his poetic mind, gives a less mystical and a more just account of the poet's idealizing power:

An auxiliar light

Came from my mind, which on the setting sun
Bestowed new splendour: the melodious birds,
The fluttering breezes, fountains that run on
Murmuring so sweetly in themselves, obeyed
A like dominion, and the midnight storm
Grew darker in the presence of my eye:
Hence my obeisance, my devotion hence,
And hence my transport.

Here the eye is on the object and it also idealizes the object. This is in accordance with the facts of realistic depiction and poetic creation, together with the power of intensifying by mystical vision.

The power of the mind by which this unity of ideality and actuality is effected is penetration, or vision. The

measure of the mind's power is the measure of the tension we feel resulting from the attempt to express the universal in the particular, the ideal in the actual. The whole history of Wordsworth's literary life may be summed up as a constant and persistent endeavor to substitute this power of vision for imagination as ordinarily conceived, to put himself at once at the center of eternal being and at the center of his own life, and to make those centers, not imaginatively but actually, identical. To attain this end completely, however, is an impossibility forever, for it is always by a leap of imagination that the final identity is made. Perhaps in the "Ode to Duty" more nearly than anywhere else, Wordsworth attained to this identity by pure vision, as, for example, in the following eight lines where he draws the power of the inner and personal life into identity with the "Stern lawgiver" of the outer world:

Flowers laugh before thee on their beds

And fragrance in thy footing treads;

Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;

And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh
and strong.

To humbler functions, awful Power!

I call thee: I myself commend
Unto thy guidance from this hour;
Oh, let my weakness have an end!

But even in these lines the transition from the thought
in the first four to that in the last four is made by a leap
of the imagination. Thus the very last step in the attempt
at any such identity is an imaginative step, and the re-
sult obtained is the result almost, but not wholly, of pure
vision. Yet it is precisely by such an aim (even though it
is not ideally attainable) and by such an intensely mys-

tical conception of existence that in his poetry Wordsworth, with penetration and power, has drawn together sense and soul, body and spirit, earth and heaven, has given us solid substance and intense idealizations, has made us deeply aware of the mind's forces of moral and spiritual Freedom, and has won the distinction of depending more than any other poet on the power of unaided vision-the power of volitional penetration.

CHAPTER V

TENNYSON AND HIS TIMES.

In the annals of English Literature Tennyson has not only been Wordsworth's most natural mystical successor but his greatest successor as a theorizer on the principle of free-will. But this likeness, of course, involves deep and serious contrasts. Wordsworth, for example, gave us poetry charged with mystical intensity, while Tennyson for the most part described objectively some of our mystical qualities. Wordsworth exercised in his "high en-. deavors" the power of free-will concretely, while Tennyson theorized about free-will poetically. Although Tennyson was never able to penetrate behind the veil as far as Wordsworth and victoriously render a reason as a man who had seen with his own eyes the splendor and grandeur of the eternities, yet the man who could write—

Moreover, something is or seems,

That touches me with mystic gleams,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams-

Of something felt, like something here;
Of something done, I know not where;
Such as no language may declare-1

possessed a sweetness and grace, a flexibility of mind that could adjust itself to a variety of impressions, which was denied his more strenuous and giant-like elder brother.

"The Two Voices."