BOOKS.

WORDSWORTH.*

THE only part of The Recluse which Wordsworth had finished is now given to the public for the first time. It might well have formed one of the books of The Prelude, and would, in fact, have furnished a very suitable conclusion to that noble poem, which the older Wordsworthians, perhaps because they knew The Excursion so well before they first read The Prelude, have never seemed to us to rate as high as it deserves. Even Mr. Morley, though in his striking essay on Wordsworth he gives a full meed of admiration to the three books in The Prelude, which deal with the French Revolution, seems, if we understand him aright, hardly to sympathise fully with the admiration which George Eliot expressed for Wordsworth's account of the growth of his own mind and character. The Recluse connects the story of that growth of mind and character with Wordsworth's subsequent career, and especially with his own and his sister's first settlement at Grasmere, in that com- panionship which was a substantial part of his poetic life, though it ended in a separation caused by the most painful and agonising of human mysteries. The Recluse is a beautiful supplement to The Prelude, but we do not suppose that it will

add substantially to Wordsworth's fame as a poet. Certainly it will not diminish it. It is a new and beautiful exempli- fication of his chief sources of inspiration, and that is all. It tells us how early had been the boy's delight in the scene in which (though he did not then know it) he was to spend his whole life ; and how grateful were the feelings with which he settled himself in the Paradise of his boyish dreams :—

" Yes the realities of life so cold, So cowardly, so ready to betray, So stinted in the measure of their grace As we pronounce them, doing them much wrong,

Have been to me more bountiful than hope, Less timid than desire."

It tells us how greatly the companionship of his sister, when first he took possession of this home over the beauty of which'

he had so long brooded, intensified the joy of his heart, and describes her influence over him in words the beauty of which he did not often contrive to excel,—though whenever he touched upon her in his poems, his language always rose to ita highest level :— "Mine eyes did ne'er

Fix on a lovely object, nor my mind Take pleasure in the midst of happy thoughts,

• (1.) The Recluse. By William Wordsworth. London: Macmillan and Co. —(2.) Selections from Wordsworth. By William Knight, and other Members of Wordsworth ordsworth Society. With Preface and Notes. London: Regan Paul, Trench, and Co.

But either She whom now I have, who now Divides with me this loved abode, was there, Or not far off. Where'er my footsteps turned, Her voice was like a hidden Bird that sang, The thought of her was like a flash of light, Or an unseen companionship, a breath Of fragrance independent of the Wind. In all my goings, in the new and old Of all my meditations, and in this Favourite of all, in this the most of all."

The poem contains, too, some of those touches, most distinctive

of Wordsworth, in which he claims a kind of suffering as the native air of the sort of poetry which seemed to him at once the most exalted and the most exalting. In praising the vale of Grasmere for its freedom from that overwhelming misery which renders the moral atmosphere of great cities suffocating, he says

" Here may the heart

Breathe in the air of fellow-suffering Dreadless, as in a kind of fresher breeze Of her own native element.'

There is not a touch in all Wordsworth's poetry more characteristic or more impressive than that.

But The Recluse contains too many instances of those little egotistic condescensions which make one frequently smile

and shrink in all Wordsworth's longer poems, as, for instance, when he assures the wild creatures of the vale of Grasmere,

"ye shall not want your own subordinate place in my affec- tions," as if he were afraid of some of his readers imagining that he would give away his heart too completely to creatures not fully deserving so great an honour. Defects of this

kind abound. Yet the poem shows that unfathomable joy in Nature without which Wordsworth's poetry could never have been the power it is :— " How vast the compass of this theatre,

Yet nothing to be seen but lovely pomp

And silent majesty ; the birch-tree woods Are hung with thousand thousand diamond drops Of melted hoar-frost, every tiny knot In the bare twigs, each little budding-place Cased with its several beads ; what myriads these Upon one tree, while all the distant grove, That rises to the summit of the steep, Shows like a mountain built of silver light : See yonder the same pageant, and again Behold the universal imagery Inverted, all its sun-bright features touched As with the varnish and the gloss of dreams.

Dreamlike the blending also of the whole Harmonious landscape : all along the shore The boundary lost—the line invisible That parts the image from reality; And the clear hills, as high as they ascend Heavenward, so deep piercing the lake below.

Admonished of the days of love to come The raven croaks, and fills the upper air With a strange sound of genial harmony; And in and all about that playful band, Incapable although they be of rest, And in their fashion very rioters, There is a stillness ; and they seem to make Calm revelry in that their calm abode."

The Recluse, then, though it is too inconsiderable an addition to his highest work, and too much of a piece with the

rest of that work, to exalt appreciably Wordsworth's fame, will amply sustain it. And every lover of Wordsworth will

love to have this further evidence of his character and genius. Professor Knight's volume of Selections from Wordsworth seems to us superior to Matthew Arnold's volume of Selections in judgment, though, of course, we miss some great favourites,

and find not a few pieces which we could have well spared. We regret that the very weak face of Margaret Gillies's miniature should have been prefixed to the volume, as it gives an emphasis to the preachiness which was undoubtedly in Wordsworth, and ignores the hardiness and dreamy exaltation of mind which characterised him best, so as to prejudice those who have to make their

first acquaintance with Wordsworth by means of this volume against one of the very greatest of English poets. Moreover, as we are to pass a general criticism on Mr. Knight's selection, it seems to us to include too many pieces

disfigured by passages of such intrinsic weakness that they will repel those who do not already love Wordsworth. Doubt- less there are very few pieces selected here,—though in our opinion there are a few,—which have not a gleam of the pure Wordsworthian rapture in them ; but then, the true Words- worthian who is familiar with Wordsworth, knows where to find these nuggets in the quartz, without having both quartz and nuggets preserved for him in these Selections. What we desire in "Selections," is gems without an ugly setting, something that we can put into the hands of an un- believer without furnishing him with food for ridicule. Mr.

Knight has improved greatly upon Matthew Arnold in this

respect, but he has not done all he might. For example, he includes the piece, containing some lovely verse, we admit, which falls into such—(may we not almost call it drivel ?)—as

this at the close :— " I gazed, and gazed, and to myself I said, Our thoughts at least are ours ; and this wild nook, My Ewes, I will dedicate to thee.'

Soon did the spot become my other home, My dwelling and my out-of-doors abode ; And of the shepherds who have seen me there, To whom I sometimes in our idle talk Have told this fancy, two, or three perhaps, Years after we are gone and in our graves, When they have cause to speak of this wild place, May call it by the name of Emma's Dell."

We observe that Professor Knight shares the admiration which we have too often heard expressed to treat without a certain unintelligent respect, for the lines written "while resting at the foot of Brothers Water," beginning, "The cock is crowing." To the present writer, often as he has read that piece in the hope of discerning its charm, it appears, he confesses, very poor doggerel, without either pas- sion or music. To pass from cavilling at what Mr. Knight has admitted to cavilling at him for what he has rejected, we must seriously complain of his having excluded one of the few poems written in Wordsworth's later period which appears to us fully worthy of his very best years ; we mean the exquisite poem called "Devotional Incitements," com- posed in 1832, a piece almost touching the highest point of Wordsworth's genius. It seems to us even worthier of him than the much earlier and very lovely poem to which Mr. John Morley refers as the only one in which Words- worth in his later period rose to his old height, the lines of 1818, "composed on an evening of extraordinary splendour and beauty." Yet Professor Knight has included the in-

teresting but very tame lines on Charles Lamb, not worthy to be mentioned in the same context as "Devotional Incitements," and the sonnet written in sight of the town of Cockermouth, in

which there is all Wordsworth's effort to be impressive, but no success.

On the whole, however, this volume is a very worthy monu- ment of the labours of the Wordsworth Society, and especially of its most active and able member. Professor Knight has done as mach for Wordsworth's fame as perhaps any ten other men of our generation, and has earned, what we are sure that he receives, the honour of all true Wordsworthians. Why, in

addition to the "Table of Contents," has he not given us an. "Index of First Lines"?