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ing (always prosaic) that the great golden veins of his imagina

tion are imbedded. He wrote too much to write always well; B.C for it is not a great Xerxes' army of words, but a compact Greek ten thousand, that march safely down to posterity. He set tasks to his divine faculty, which is much the same as trying to make Jove's eagle do the service of a clucking hen. Throughout "The Prelude" and "The Excursion" he seems striving to bind the wizard Imagination with the sand-ropes of dry disquisition," and to have forgotten the potent spell-word which would make the particles cohere. There is an arnaceous quality in the style which makes progress wearisome. Yet with what splendors, as of mountain sunsets, are we rewarded! what golden rounds of verse do we not see stretching heavenward with angels ascending and descending! what haunting harmonies hover around us, deep and eternal, like the undying baritone of the sea! and if we are compelled to fare through sand and desert wildernesses, how often do we not hear airy shapes that syllable our names with a startling personal appeal to our highest consciousness and our noblest aspiration, such as we wait for in vain in any other poet!

2. Wordsworth's mind had not that reach and elemental movement of Milton's, which, like the trade-wind, gathered to itself thoughts and images, like stately fleets, from every quarter; some deep with silks and spicery, some brooding over the silent thunders of their battailous armaments, but all swept forward in their destined track, over the long billows of his verse, every inch of canvas strained by the unifying breath of their common epic impulse. It was an organ that Milton mastered, mighty in . compass, capable equally of the tempest's ardors or the slim delicacy of the flute; and sometimes it bursts forth in great crashes through his prose, as if he touched it for solace in the intervals of his toil. If Wordsworth sometimes puts the trumpet to his lips, yet he lays it aside soon and willingly for his appropriate instrument, the pastoral reed. And it is not one that grew by any vulgar stream, but that which Apollo breathed through, tending the flocks of Admetus,—that which Pan endowed with every melody of the visible universe,—so that ever and anon, amid the notes of human joy or sorrow, there comes suddenly a deeper and almost awful tone, thrilling us into dim consciousness of forgotten divinity.

3. None of our great poets can be called popular in any exact sense of the word, for the highest poetry deals with thoughts and emotions which inhabit, like rarest sea-mosses, the doubtful limits of that shore between our abiding divine and our fluctuating human nature, rooted in the one, but living in the other, seldom laid bare and otherwise visible only at exceptional moments of entire calm and clearness. Of no other poet, except Shakespeare, have so many phrases become household words as of Wordsworth. If Pope has made current more epigrams of worldly wisdom, to Wordsworth belongs the nobler praise of having defined for us, and given us for a daily possession, those faint and vague suggestions of other world lines, of whose gentle ministry with our baser nature the hurry and bustle of life scarcely ever allowed us to be conscious. He has won for himself a secure immortality by the depth of intuition which makes only the best minds at their best hours worthy, or indeed capable, of his companionship, and by a homely sincerity of human sympathy which reaches the humblest heart. Our language owes him gratitude for the habitual purity and abstinence of his style, and we who speak it, for having emboldened us to take delight in simple things, and to trust ourselves to our own instincts. And he hath his reward. It needs not to bid

"Renowned Chaucer lie a thought more nigh

To rare Beaumond, and learned Beaumond lie
A little nearer Spenser ;"

for there is no fear of crowding in that little society with whom he is now enrolled as fifth in the succession of the great English poets.

INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY FROM RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD.

The child is father of the man;
And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

[INTRODUCTION. This noble ode, characterized by Emerson as the "highwater mark of English thought in the 19th century," was composed partly in 1803 and partly in 1806. The mood of mind out of which it grew is set forth by Wordsworth himself in an explanatory piece, herewith appended. (See page 300.) It may be noted that the word "immortality" in the title is used in a larger sense than its ordinary meaning; it implies not only deathlessness, but eternality of existence; that is, eternal pre-existence as well as eternal future existence.]

I.

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

NOTES.-Line 6. of yore. Not in the sense of olden times, but as related to the poet's own experi

ence as expressed in the first line-"There was a time when meadow, grove," etc.

LITERARY ANALYSIS.-1-5. Analyze the first sentence.

4. What is the primitive meaning of " Apparelled?"

1-9. Show the antithesis in the first stanza.-Compare the first stanza with this from Shelley:

"Out of the day and night

A joy has taken flight:

Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar

Move my faint breast with grief, but with delight
No more-O never more!"

5

II.

The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose.

The moon doth with delight

Look round her when the heavens are bare ;

Waters on a starry night

Are beautiful and fair;

The sunshine is a glorious birth;

But yet I know, where'er I go,

That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.

III.

Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound

As to the tabor's sound,

To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,

And I again am strong:

The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the echoes through the mountains throng,
The winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay;

LITERARY ANALYSIS.-10-18. Express briefly (and in general terms) the idea contained in stanza ii.

26. No more... wrong. What is the figure of speech? (See Def. 20.)—Express the thought in plainer language.

30, 31. Land... jollity. What is the figure of speech? (See Def. 22.)

10

15

20

25

30

And with heart of May

Doth every beast keep holiday ;—
Thou child of joy,

Shout round me, let me hear thy shout, thou happy

Shepherd boy!

IV.

Ye blessed creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make, I see

The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee ;*
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath its coronal,

35

40

ng

The fulness of your bliss I feel—I feel it all.
Oh evil day! if I were sullen

While the Earth herself is adorning

This sweet May morning,

And the children are pulling,

On every side,

In a thousand valleys far and wide,

Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,

And the babe leaps up on his mother's arm :—

I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
-But there's a tree, of many one,

A single field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The pansy at my feet

Doth the same tale repeat:

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

37. Ye blessed creatures: that is, the ob- | 41. coronal, a crown or garland (as at

jects of nature, animate and in

animate, mentioned in the pre

ceding stanza.

39. jubilee, shout of joy.

banquets in the days of Greece and Rome).

57. visionary = vision-like.

58. dream. See line 5.

LITERARY ANALYSIS.—32. with heart of May. Vary the phraseology.

39, 41, 55. Give the etymology of "jubilee;" "coronal;" "pansy."

44, 49. What is the grammatical construction of "herself?" Of "flowers?" 58. is... dream? How do you justify "is" and "it" where the reference

is to "the glory and the dream ?"

45

50

55