as his own, "she gave me eyes, she gave me ears," and he might have added that sometimes she gave him words as well. In his prose he often took passages bodily from her Journals, as if oblivious in which mind they first originated; and, in his poems, there is sometimes but the slight transformation needed for the verse form. Dorothy's letters, like women's letters usually, tell us the little daily incidents of the home or of the walks and talks abroad, and furnish valuable flashes of insight into the manner in which Wordsworth turned facts into poetry.

Another delusion that needs to be shattered is that Wordsworth's life was exceptionally sheltered from obstacles, that everything went his way, and that he had no unsatisfied longings. On the contrary, he had more than the usual difficulties in fixing upon a career by which he could make a living. The money due him from his father's estate was withheld by a dishonest debtor for nearly twenty years. His poetry did not "take" and (so he told Matthew Arnold) did not for many years bring him in enough to buy his shoestrings; at the age of sixty he declared that the entire literary earnings of his long life had been about equal to those of a lawyer for two retainers or of the singer of two songs. He contrived somehow to live, marry, and travel on an income of one hundred pounds a year, but there were times when this meant a diet of

essence of carrots, cabbages, and other esculent vegetables, not excluding parsley"-the produce of his own garden. He did not allow such facts to embitter him, but he did not enjoy poverty any more than most men do.

Moreover, this stay-at-home man often declared that the

one passion of his life was for travelling. In his declining years the chief grudge he bore against Jeffrey for his harsh treatment in the Edinburgh was not for the literary wrong done him, but that "it prevented his going to Italy until he was sixty-three years old, by delaying the sale of his works." It was a wish to raise money enough to take a walking tour with his sister Dorothy and his neighbor Coleridge that gave the first impulse toward the publication of that epoch-making book "Lyrical Ballads." Five pounds being needed, and the combined purses of the three being unequal to such a strain, they planned to raise the amount by composing a poem en route, for magazine publication. The scheme grew from a single poem to a volume containing twenty-three poems, nineteen of which were furnished by Wordsworth. Comparing Southey with himself, Wordsworth says: "Books were his passion; and wandering, I can with truth affirm, was mine." A Wanderer is the hero of his principal work, known to the world as "The Excursion," but during its composition always called by the family "The Pedlar Poem." Bearing in mind that Pedlars or Packmen were more esteemed in those days than now, it is significant that Wordsworth should confess, "Had I been born in a class which would have deprived me of what is called a liberal education, it is not unlikely that being strong in body I should have taken to a way of life such as that in which my Pedlar passed the greater part of his days." He speaks with enthusiasm of the opportunities offered by such a life to an intimate knowledge of human concerns. Persons of nomadic habits, -beggars, waggoners, leech-gatherers, emigrants, destitute

wayfaring folk such as a roving soldier's widow or a criminal, outcast sailor these and such as these always attracted him.

Wordsworth's self-appreciation has been made the subject of many a merry jest. That Wordsworth was fully conscious of the supreme importance of what he had to say is doubtless true. How could it be otherwise without an entire default of the critical faculty? But that it left him insensible to the work of others or jealous of their success is absolutely false. His abhorrence of envy was great. He recalled with regret two occasions in his life. when he had suffered from this "horrid feeling," but neither of them was connected with his literary composition, once when distanced in studying Italian by a fellow-student at Cambridge, and once when he tripped up his brother's heels in a foot-race when the brother was about to outstrip him. To competent criticism he was humbly deferential. When Sir Henry Taylor and Mr. Lockhart criticised the sonnets, he replied: "I have altered them as well as I could to meet your wishes, and trust you will find them improved, as I am sure they are where I have adopted your own words." He believed that his writings would live because "We have all of us one human heart"; but self-assurance like this is not arrogance, it is the self-confidence that accompanies all genius when it is of the highest order. Shakespeare in his "Sonnets," Spenser, and Milton are instances. As a matter of fact, Wordsworth underestimated rather than overestimated that effect of his verse on modern thought of which we are the living witnesses.

Of Wordsworth's originality it is hardly possible to say too much. With most poets, especially in their early work, there are traces of the influences of other minds, -as Browning was indebted to Shelley, Shelley himself to Southey, Keats to Spenser, etc. But Wordsworth seems never to have come under the spell of any other poet; his themes are those which he encountered in his daily walks, his similes are drawn from things which he had observed with his own eyes.

Even the French Revolution, which certainly did for a time dominate him, lost its hold as soon as he began to see to what it was leading. His justification for his change in political ideals is a grand protest against the bonds which the word consistency makes for men of smaller mind, —"I should think I had lived to little purpose if my notions on the subject of government had undergone no modification. My youth must, in that case, have been without enthusiasm and my manhood endured with small capability of profiting by reflection." The "Sonnets to Liberty" are the place to which we must turn to learn how true a patriot Wordsworth was at heart. To an American visitor he said that, although he was known to the world only as a poet, he had given twelve hours' thought to the condition and prospects of society for one to poetry.

It was Nature Nature in the largest meaning of that word—that was Wordsworth's great teacher and inspirer. True, it was Nature in her spiritual rather than in her material or pictorial aspects; therefore this is indeed the great matter for the reader of Wordsworth. Many and

able are the guides who have offered themselves for this upper region; but if one be himself attuned to the message, no guide is needed, and without such harmony no guide can avail. Other readers, perhaps of not less insight, but only of less patience, may welcome the humbler service here offered, a guide to some of Wordsworth's well-beloved haunts, hoping that at some happy moment, at some favored spot, perchance, to attain to the same vision which the poet recognized in his young friend on the top of Helvellyn:

"For the power of hills is on thee,
As was witnessed through thine eye,
Then, when old Helvellyn won thee
To confess their majesty."

GRASMERE, ENGLAND
June, 1907.

A. B. McM.