13. as the fawn] Cf. Tintern Abbey, 68, 69 (p. 7 above). Wordsworth himself, in attaining 'the silence and the calm' referred to in 1. 17, had lost the animal spirits of his earlier days. Here the two qualities are combined: the healing calm of Nature lends its thoughtful cast to natural gaiety of disposition without repressing it. See also the lines To Louisa, 3-6:

Why should I fear to say

That, nymph-like, she is fleet and strong,

And down the rocks can leap along

Like rivulets in May?

39. She died] Cf. She dwelt among the untrodden ways,' 9-12:

She lived unknown, and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave, and, oh,

The difference to me.

SELECTIONS FROM MICHAEL.

Michael, a pastoral poem, consisting of 482 lines, was written in the autumn and early winter of 1800 at Dove cottage, Townend, Grasmere, and published at the end of the year. Classified among Poems founded on the Affections (No. XXXII). The selections given here are 11. 40–139, 194–203, 448-82. Wordsworth founded the narrative upon the story of a family to whom Dove cottage had belonged many years before. He connected its main incidents with the remains of a ruined sheep-fold in the valley of Greenhead gill, which descends from Rydal fell to the Easedale beck about a mile and a half beyond Dove cottage, on the road to Keswick. The first selection gives the account of the dramatis personae, the old shepherd, his wife and their son. As the son grew up, he became his father's 'comfort and his daily hope.' But, when the boy was eighteen, Michael was called upon to discharge the debts of a nephew for whom he had stood surety. Unwilling to sell his lands and deprive Luke

of his succession, he determined to send him to a prosperous tradesman of his kindred, in whose employment he would be able to retrieve this loss. The tradesman consented to receive the boy, and preparations were made for his departure. The night before he left home, his father took him to the heap of stones which had been collected to build a sheep-fold, and, reminding him of the love which existed between them and bound them to their simple forefathers, the rustic dwellers in the same spot, bade him lay the corner-stone as a covenant between them, the memory of which would recall the life his ancestors had lived and stand as a shield against the temptations of the world outside his native valleys. The boy consented with a full heart, but temptation was too strong for him: he fell into dissolute courses and disgrace, and Michael and his wife were left in their lonely old age. The conclusion of the story is given in the third selection.

Simple as the narrative is, 'unenriched with strange events' and told in the plainest language, it occupies a place of great importance in Wordsworth's poetical work. He tells us that

it was the first

Of those domestic tales that spake to me

Of shepherds, dwellers in the valleys, men

Whom I already loved; not verily

For their own sakes, but for the fields and hills
Which were their occupation and abode.

Gradually this sympathy with the living occupants of the scenes which he loved took a more active shape and broadened into love of man and enthusiasm for the nobility of the simple type of character which, as in the case of Michael, had Nature for its only teacher. Earlier poems, such as Ruth, had expressed this feeling; but Michael is taken directly from Wordsworth's immediate surroundings at the time of writing and reproduces them and the kinship between them and their inhabitants with a peculiar natural skill. Matthew Arnold gave it special prominence among the poems which illustrate Wordsworth's unique power, 'the successful balance...of profound truth of subject

N.B

with profound truth of execution.' No one who recognises the function of poetry to reflect and interpret life can fail to see that the unadorned style of Michael bears the closest relation possible to the bareness of mountain solitudes and the frugal life of those who earn their scanty and hard-won living among them. If Wordsworth's language is austerely simple and may even at times. be bald, it is,' as Matthew Arnold says, 'bald as the bare mountain-tops are bald, with a baldness which is full of grandeur,' and its freedom from luxuries of phrase is at one with the necessary sacrifice of superfluous comfort 'in huts where poor men lie.' To quote Arnold again, Nature herself seems to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power.'

I. THE EVENING STAR.

I. the forest-side] A forest is not necessarily a woodland district, but implies, in the legal sense of the word, an unenclosed tract of land used for purposes of hunting, like the forest of Dartmoor. The word is still given to ranges of bare hills in various parts of the British isles, e.g. Macclesfield forest, Radnor forest and the mountains known as the Fforest fawr (i.e. great forest) which divide Breconshire from Glamorgan and Carmarthenshire.

20. many thousand mists] Cf. this description of the shepherd's life with the longer passage in The Prelude, VIII, 223-93, especially the striking passage in 11. 262-75:

When up the lonely brooks on rainy days
Angling I went, or trod the trackless hills
By mists bewildered, suddenly mine eyes
Have glanced upon him distant a few steps,
In size a giant, stalking through the fog,
His sheep like Greenland bears; or, as he stepped
Beyond the boundary line of some hill-shadow,
His form hath flashed upon me, glorified

By the deep radiance of the setting sun:
Or him have I descried in distant sky,

A solitary object and sublime,

Above all height! like an aerial cross
Stationed alone upon a spiry rock

Of the Chartreuse, for worship.

There

95. Easedale is the valley north-west of Grasmere. is an elaborate description of it in De Quincey's essay, Early Memorials of Grasmere. Dunmail-raise is one of the hills north of Grasmere, over the shoulder of which the high-road from Ambleside to Keswick passes. Wordsworth notes that the cottage known as the 'Evening Star' was not actually Dove cottage, but 'another on the same side of the valley, more to the north.' A house called Forest Side (see note on 1. I above) stands at the point indicated, near the foot of Greenhead gill.

II. THE SHEPHERD AND HIS SON.

9. A line characteristic of Wordsworth at his best, creating magical effects by the use of the simplest words. All that Michael had learned to love in Nature was endeared to him still more by its association with human ties.

III. THE UNFINISHED SHEEP-FOLD.

I. The selection begins at the point where the story of Luke's disgrace has been told. The unchanging beauties of Nature remain, as the old man pursues his daily occupations (11. 8 sqq.), and with them remain the indelible memories of the past life with his son and the associations which it had given to his natural surroundings. Thus, amid disappointment, the strength of love with its recollections becomes a source of comfort and fortitude.

19. Matthew Arnold cites this line as 'the right sort of verse to choose from Wordsworth, if we are to seize his true and most characteristic form of expression....There is nothing subtle in it,. no heightening, no study of poetic style, strictly so called, at all; yet it is expression of the highest and most truly expressive kind.' This criticism is perhaps exaggerated, as regards its first part: Wordsworth's most characteristic form of expression is found in lines like 1. 9 in the selected passage immediately preceding this, in which we find a perfect illustration of Coleridge's remark (Biog. Literaria, ed. Ashe, p. 232) that, in the exercise of imaginative power, 'he does indeed to all thoughts and to all objects add the gleam,

The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration, and the poet's dream.'

The present line seems to fall short of this highest attainment, in that it lacks the full charm of imagination. But, if it fails to stimulate in the same degree, the truth of the second part of Arnold's statement is unchanged. It expresses simply and completely the mental attitude of Michael in words which no heightening of phrase could improve, and therefore has a peculiarly dramatic value and imaginative power of its own.

TO JOANNA.

The second poem of the series entitled Poems on the naming of places. Joanna Hutchinson was a younger sister of Mary Hutchinson, who became Wordsworth's wife in 1802. Dorothy Wordsworth (Journals, 1, 46) notes on 23 Aug. 1800: 'Wm. read Peter Bell and the poem of Joanna, beside the Rothay by the roadside'; which fixes the approximate date of composition. It was published in 1800. Wordsworth's preliminary note says: 'The effect of her laugh is an extravagance; though the effect of the reverberation of voices in some parts of the mountains is very striking. There is, in the “Excursion,” an allusion to the