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To compress a figure of Wordsworth's magnitude into as small a scope as this must have been very difficult-indeed, and Mr. Burra is to be congratulated on the adroitness with which he has succeeeded in including in this hOOIC(Duekviorth, 2s.) all that is essential to a knowledge of the man and the poet. Above :al, he has been successful in stating the heart of Wordsworth's personal problem, Which has so frequently and so disastrously eluded his critics. The poet was a man of strong natural passions and his claim to greatness, as a man, lies in the fact that, instead of yielding to or suppressing those passions, he preserved them, though under -strict control, to the end of his life. The danger of this struggle, as Mr. Burra points out, was that of " losing the sense of his own con- tinuity." He preserved it, largely in process of cempoAing The Prelude, and dared thereby to acquire an adult view of life —an acquisition which has expo4e4 him,..tO the thoughtless charge of being false to earlier-and more ideals. No view could be more fallacious, for Wordsworth did not change, he developed. In the happy Warrior he describes himself in the character of the " hero . . in whom the .pasts of himself are never at war with one another, because they have never been divided." Mr. Burra is not less happy in his analysis of Wordsworth's contribution to poetry, though he quOtes per- haps too freely' for the space at his command; and I feel that he overrates the value of the While Doe. But he is right in calling attention to the superiority, in most cases, of the 1850 version of•The Prelude to the earlier ; and it was a good idea to suggest thnt we should find it worth while to read The Borderers again. It was no doubt impossible, in so hasty a survey; to get all the perspectives right,- and the -account oE the poet's dealings with Coleridge is misleading : to describe '"Coleridge as " removing himself " from Wordsworth's influence, after the Montagu row, and to represent the subsequent reconcilia- tion as satisfactory, is to skate over the depth of Wordsworth's !
disappointment at the revelation of his friend's character. And in this connexion the parallel case of De Quincey, which is most illuminating, is not mentioned at all. But there can be no two opinions over the quality of Mr. Burra's appreciation of the poetry itself.
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