Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/716

Rh 674 WORDSWORTH the Lines on Westminster Bridge, was composed on the roof of the Dover coach ; the first of the splendid series &quot;dedicated to national independence and liberty,&quot; the most generally impressive and universally intelligible of his poems, Fair Star of Evening, Once did she Hold the Gorgeous East in Fee, Toussaint, Milton, thou shouldst be Living at this Hour, It is not to be Thought of that the Flood, When I have Borne in Memory ivhat has Tamed, were all written in the course of the tour, or in London in the month after his return. A tour in Scotland in the follow ing year, 1803, yielded the Highland Girl and The Solitary Reaper. Soon after his return he resumed The Prelude ; and The Affliction of Margaret and the Ode to Duty, his greatest poems in two different veins, were coincident with the exaltation of spirit due to the triumphant and success ful prosecution of the long-delayed work. The Character of the Happy Warrior, which he described to Miss Martineau as &quot;a chain of extremely valooable thoughts,&quot; though it did not fulfil &quot;poetic conditions,&quot; 1 was the pro duct of a calmer period. The excitement of preparing for publication always had a rousing effect upon him ; the preparation for the edition of 1807 resulted in the com pletion of the ode on the Intimations of Immortality, the sonnets The World is too much with us, Methouaht I saw the Footstejis of a Throne, Two Voices cere there, and Lady, the Songs of Spring were in the Grove, and the Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle. After 1807 there is a marked falling off in the quality, though not in the quantity, of Wordsworth s poetic work. It is significant of the com paratively sober and laborious spirit in which he wrote The Excursion that its progress was accompanied by none of those casual sallies of exulting and exuberant power that mark the period of the happier Prelude. The com pletion of The Excursion was signalized by the production of Laodamia. The chorus of adverse criticism with which it was received inspired him in the noble sonnet to Haydon High is our Calling, Friend. He rarely or never again touched the same lofty height. It is interesting to compare with what he actually accomplished the plan of life-work with which Wordsworth settled at Grasmere in the last month of the eighteenth century. 2 The plan was definitely conceived as he left the German town of Goslar in the spring of 1799. Tired of the Avandering unsettled life that he had led hitherto, dissatisfied also with the fragmentary occasional and disconnected char acter of his lyrical poems, he longed for a permanent home among his native hills, where he might, as one called and consecrated to the task, devote his powers continuously to the composition of a great philosophical poem on &quot;Man, Nature, and Society.&quot; The poem was to be called The Recluse, &quot;as having for its principal subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement.&quot; He com municated the design to Coleridge, who gave him enthusi astic encouragement to proceed. In the first transport of the conception he felt as if he needed only solitude and leisure for the continuous execution of it. But, though he had still before him fifty years of peaceful life amidst his beloved scenery, the work in the projected form at least was destined to remain incomplete. Doubts and misgiv ings soon arose, and favourable moments of felt inspiration delayed their coming. To sustain him in his resolution he thought of writing as an introduction, or, as he put it, an antechapel to the church which he proposed to build, a 1 This casual estimate of his own work is not merely amusing but also instructive, as showing what is sometimes denied that Words worth himself knew well enough the difference between &quot;poetry&quot; and such &quot; valuable thoughts&quot; as he propounded in The Excursion. 2 Wordsworth s residences in the Lake District were Townend. Grasmere, from December 1799 till the spring of 1808; Allan Bank, from 1808 to 1811 ; the parsonage at Grasmere, from 1811 to 1813: Rydal Mount, for the rest of his life. history of his own mind up to the time when he recognized the great mission of his life. One of the many laughs at his expense by unsympathetic critics has been directed against his saying that he wrote this Prelude of fourteen books about himself out of diffidence. But in truth the original motive was none other than distrust of his own powers. He began this review of his early life to reassure himself from misgivings whether nature and education had fitted him for his proposed task, partly by elevating his mind to a confidence in nature s special destination, and partly by making practical trial of his powers in a simpler work. He turned aside from The Prelude to prepare the second volume of the Lyrical Ballads and write the explan atory Preface, which as a statement of his aims in poetry had partly the same purpose of strengthening his self-con fidence. From his sister s Journal we learn that in the winter of 1801-2 he was &quot;hard at work on The Pedlar&quot; - the original title of The Excursion. But this experiment on the larger work was also soon abandoned. It appears from a letter to his friend Sir George Beaumont that his health was far from robust, and in particular that he could not write without intolerable physical uneasiness. We should probably not be wrong in connecting his physical weakness with his rule of waiting for favourable moments. His next start with The Prelude, in the spring of 1804, was more prosperous ; he dropped it for several months, but, resuming again in the spring of 1805, he completed it in the summer of that year. But still the composition of the great work to which it was intended to be a portico proceeded by fits and starts. It was not till 1814 that the second of the three divisions of The Recluse, ultimately named The Excursion, was ready for publication ; and he went no further in the execution of his great design. It is possible that he had his own unfinished project in mind when he wrote the sonnet on Malham Cove. &quot; Mid the wreck of Is and Was, Things incomplete and purposes betrayed Make sadder transits o er thought s optic glass Than noblest objects utterly decayed.&quot; We shall speak presently of the reception of The Excur sion. Meantime we must look elsewhere for the virtual accomplishment of the great design of The Recluse. The purpose was not after all betrayed ; it was really fulfilled, though not in the form intended, in his various occasional poems. In relation to the edifice that he aspired to con struct, he likened these poems to little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses ; they are really the completed work, much more firmly united by their common purpose than by any formal and visible nexus of words. Formally dis connected, they really, as we read and feel them, range themselves to spiritual music as the component parts of a great poetic temple, finding a rendezvous amidst the scenery of the district where the poet had his local habita tion. The Lake District, as transfigured by Wordsworth s imagination, is the fulfilment of his ambition after an en during memorial. The Poems collected and published in 1807 compose in effect &quot;a philosophical poem on man, nature, and society,&quot; the title of which might fitly have been The Recluse, &quot; as having for its principal subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement.&quot; As a realization of the idea of The Recluse, these poems are from every poetical point of view infinitely superior to the kind of thing that he projected and failed to complete. The derisive fury with which The, Excursion was assailed upon its first appearance has long been a stock example of critical blindness, conceit, and malignity. And yet, if we look at the position claimed for the Excursion now by competent authorities, the error of the first critics is seen to lie not in their indictment of faults, but in the pro minence they gave to the faults and their generally dis-