I.

APPENDIX

Page II. Note 1. It is not intended in this book to depreciate the value of emotions in poetry. If the will is the first power of personality certainly the "emotions, chiefly those essential and eternal in the heart" are a close second. But the will and the emotions are complementary to each other, not antagonistic. The will prevents the emotions from becoming maudlin and the emotions prevent the will from becoming sterile. The emotions give tone and color and substance to the will and the will gives dignity and distinction to the emotions; and the two together constitute the most important powers of personality and therefore the chiefest material for poetry.

Page II. Note 2. It seems that in life, too, as in poetry, the energy of will is a more vital force than intellectual conceptions. Professor Dewey in his Psychology, for instance, says: "There is possible no knowledge without attention. Attention involves the discrimination of sensations from each other, and the identification of some one group of these sensations with self-in short, an act of choice........ The process of knowledge is a process of volition;" and Professor William James, as quoted in this text on page 247, says that the cognitive faculty is but one element in the larger powers of will.

Page 41. Note 3. Perhaps the most favorite words of Wordsworth, especially during the period of his greatest literary production, are the words "motion" and "gleam" with their various adjectival and verbal forms,

together with words of kindred meaning—words at once In addition to the examples

dynamic and volitional.

given in the text, a few more must suffice:

To cut across the reflex of a star

That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed
Upon the glassy plain.

Even then I felt

Gleams like the flashing of a shield.

And add the gleam,

The light that never was, on sea or land.

Lighted by gleams of moonlight from the sea
We beat with thundering hoofs the level sand.

Now is crossed by gleam

Of his own image, by a sunbeam now

And wavering motions sent he knows not whence.

Sounds of undistinguishable motion—

No motion but the moving tide, a breeze

All the shadowy banks on either side

Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
The rapid line of motion.

Ye motions of delight that haunt the sides

Of the green hills.

From the blessed power that rolls

About, below, above.

No motion has she now, no force;

She neither hears nor sees;

Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,

With rocks, and stones, and trees.

Those hallowed and pure motions of the sense

On the first motion of a holy thought

And all the tender motions of the soul

Thou Soul that art the eternity of thought
That givest to forms and images a breath
And everlasting motion.

Listen the mighty Being is awake,

And doth with his eternal motion make

A sound like thunder— everlastingly.

This list might very easily be extended. From it we see that Wordsworth, in a very peculiar sense, attributes vital movement, not only to all the objects of the outer world, but also to the senses, the thoughts, and the soul of man, and even to God. And the mere act of pronouncing repeatedly the words "gleam" and "motion" and "roll" in the sense Wordsworth uses them, gives a healthy and voluntary thrill to the soul.

Page 70. Note 4. The device which the pre-existent idea was to serve was no doubt that of giving largeness of movement to the poem. There is indeed something of epic movement in it. This effect is produced mainly by the device of conceiving the soul as existing in an immeasurable past, coming "in trailing clouds of glory" to the present, and sweeping through the present into the measureless future. This conception produces in the reader a sense of vast movement and a sense of the superiority of the soul over things of time. Any criticism that ignores Wordsworth's explanation and makes more of the pre-existent idea than a poetical device is likely to be unsound.

Page 124. Note 5. To prove that this point is really as important as indicated here one needs only to turn to the testimony of the "Memoir" where Free-will is spoken of as the "main miracle, apparently an act of self-limitation by the Infinite, and yet a revelation by Himself of Himself." "Take away the sense of individual responsibility and men sink into pessimism and madness." etc.

Vol. I, pages 316, 317, etc. Moreover, there are many passages in Tennyson's poetry besides those quoted in this book which emphasize the importance of the point, but the following single passage from Enone must suffice as illustration:

My vigor, wedded to thy blood,
Shall strike within thy pulses, like a God's,
To push thee forward thro' a life of shocks,
Dangers, and deeds, until endurance grow
Sinew'd with action, and the full-grown will,
Circled thro' all experiences, pure law,
Commeasure perfect freedom.

That the goddess of wisdom should pronounce this passage adds to its significance. For the end of wisdom is perfect freedom that is attained by the power of endurance and the power of will circling through all experi

ences.

Page 178. Note 6. This and many other quotations from Browning that follow are taken from his dramatic monologues. It would certainly be wrong to identify the mind of Browning with the minds of some of the speakers in these monologues, as, for instance, the speaker in "My Last Duchess." Yet it seems not to be wrong to quote from such a poem as "Rabbi Ben Ezra" in order to state an attitude of mind of Browning. This difference of selection seems to be determined by two principles of criticism. The first principle is that, as in life we tend to identify a man with his best deeds and his solidest thinking, so in literature we tend to identify the poet with his greatest and noblest characters, or at least, with the finest qualities in such characters. The best part of a poet's mind is bequeathed to his best characters. The second principle is that we tend to identify the mind of a poet with the ideas that recur oftenest in his work as a whole.