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ENGLISH VERSE

IMPRESSIONS

BY

WILLIAM STEBBING

HON. FELLOW OF WORCESTER COLLEGE, OXFORD
AUTHOR OF SIR WALTER RALEGH: A BIOGRAPHY'
TRUTHS OR TRUISMS', PARTS I AND II

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HENRY FROWDE

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON, EDINBURGH, GLASGOW

NEW YORK, TORONTO, MELBOURNE, BOMBAY

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THREE ESSAYS: Posthumous Fame, Tolera-
tion, and Brilliant Failures. Cr. 8vo. 6d. net.

TRUTHS OR TRUISMS (Part I). 8vo. 4s. net;
also on Oxford India paper, 6s. net.

CONTENTS: The Dead Hand-Necessary Nuisances-How to
Quarrel-Counsels of Perfection-Eccentrics-Great-Freedom
-Doing Without-Clerical Errors-Courtesy-Self-deception-
The Marriage Lottery-A New Law of Libel-Temper-De
Jure v. De Facto-The Elder Sister-How to Make the Most of
Life-Memory-August 29, 1905-Putting the Brain into Com-
mission-Through Whose Glasses ?-Cupboards-Insincerities
-Popularity.

TRUTHS OR TRUISMS (Part II). 8vo. 4s. net;
also on Oxford India paper, 6s. net.

CONTENTS: Vices we could spare-Our great Prose Poem-
Pauperizing - Dinner-table Talk-Concerning War—Atoms—
'With one Consent they made Excuse '-The Shadow of Crime
-June 22, 1911-Readable-Sophists-Sensations-Even as
this Publican-Pleasure in ArtCruelty-The Ideal News-
paper Les grands Hommes Méconnus'- Why-How-and
Whom? It is more Blessed to Give than to Receive'-Shake-
speare's Brother-Dramatists-Inconceivably Incompatible-Man
Anticipated-A new Circulating Library.

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FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

1770-1850

AN Evangelist among the heathen for thirty years. Supreme Pontiff for twenty. What is he now?

No student of literature can doubt what he was. In the history of learning Crusades are no novelties. The close of the eighteenth and earlier part of the nineteenth centuries had a monopoly of crusading in poetry. Goethe and Schiller in Germany; de Musset, Victor Hugo, with the Romanticists, in France; Wordsworth, at the head of the Lake School, in England, sang and fought, sang to fight. Elizabethan poets waged no wars; they were discoverers without being, in the realm of fancy, buccaneers, as some of them were on the Spanish Main. These others were invaders of established kingdoms, as were the Israelites of Canaan. Of all the combatant poets Wordsworth had set himself the hardest task, and won the most signal victory. His hand was against every man. In the rude battle he did not shun to wound a natural ally—a forerunner, like Cowper, in the onslaught upon poetic diction, an observer of rural life, like Thomson! A fanatic doubtlessat once of wide views, and narrow; but it was he who, though in the panoply of a Captain, fighting for the most part alone, taught how to replace poetic phrases and commonplaces by poetic ideas clothed in plain, pre English, with rhythm to match. Above all, it is to him.

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