Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/718

Rh 676 W R W O K purposes more completely than before in an essay on &quot; Poetry as a Study.&quot; In the same year he was persuaded to publish the The White Doe of Eylstone, written mainly eight years before. In purely poetic charm the White Doe ought to be ranked among the most perfect of Wordsworth s poems, the most completely successful exhibition of his finest qualities ; nowhere is the peculiar music of his verse more happily sustained or more per fectly in harmony with the noble and tender feeling which here springs as if from infinite depths, to flow round and subdue the tragic agony of the incidents. But Jeffrey, who was much too busy a man to enter into a vein of poetry so remote from common romantic sentiment, would have none of the White Doe : he pronounced it &quot;the very worst poem ever written,&quot; and the public too readily endorsed his judgment. Two other poems, with which Wordsworth made another appeal, were not more successful. Peter Bell, written in 1798, was published in 1819; and at the instigation of Charles Lamb it was followed by The Waggoner, written in 1805. Both were mercilessly ridiculed and parodied. These tales from humble life are written in Wordsworth s most unconventional style, and with them emphatically &quot; not to sympathize is not to understand,&quot; but when they are read sympathetically they are felt to be written with the spontaneity and freedom of the poet s most inspired moments, although they are not in his high serious vein. Meantime, the great design of The Recluse languished. The neglect of what Wordsworth himself conceived to be his best and most characteristic work was not encouraging; and there was another reason why the philosophical poem on man, nature, and society did not make progress. Again and again in his poetry Wordsworth celebrates the value of constraint, and the disadvantage of &quot;too much liberty,&quot; of &quot;unchartered freedom.&quot; l This thought was impressed upon him by his own experience. There was &quot; too much liberty &quot; in his vague scheme of a philosophical poem. He needed more of the constraint of a definite form to stimulate his working powers to prosperous vigour. The formlessness of the scheme prevented his working at it continuously. Hence his &quot; philosophy &quot; was expressed in casual disconnected sonnets, or in sonnets and other short poems connected by the simplest of all links, sequence in time or place. He stumbled upon three or four such serial ideas in the latter part of his life, and thus found beginning and end for chains of considerable length, which may be regarded as fragments of the project which he had not sufficient energy of constructive power to execute. The Sonnets on t/ie River Duddon, written in 1820, follow the river from its source to the sea, and form a partial embodiment of his philosophy of nature. The Ecclesiastical Sonnets, written in 1820-21, trace the history of the church from the Druids onwards, following one of the great streams of human affairs, and exhibit part of his philosophy of society. A tour on the Con tinent in 1820, a tour in Scotland in 1831, a tour on the west coast in 1833, a tour in Italy in 1837, furnished him with other serial forms, serving to connect miscel laneous reflections on man, nature, and society ; and his views on the punishment of death were strung together in still another series in 1840. He sought relief from &quot;the weight of too much liberty&quot; in this voluntary subjection to serial form, taking upon himself that &quot; Constraint Whence oft invigorating transports flow That choice lacked courage to bestow.&quot; His resolute industry was productive of many wise, impressive, and charitable reflexions, and many casual 1 See the Sonnet, A r &amp;gt;ms fret not, &o., The, Pass of Kirkstone, and the Ode to Duty. felicities of diction, but the poet very seldom reached the highest level of his earlier inspirations. Wordsworth was appointed poet-laureate on the death of Southeyin 1843. His only official composition was an ode on the installation of the Prince Consort as chan cellor of Cambridge university in 1847. This was his last writing in verse. He died at Rydal Mount after a short illness, on the 23d of April 1850, and was buried in Grasmere churchyard. It was Wordsworth s own desire that there should be no elaborate criticism of his poetry. This desire has not been respected. We have already referred to Lamb s severely edited review of The. Excursion (1814), and to Coleridge s criticism in the Biographia Literaria (1817). This last, together with the enthusiastic and unreserved championship of Wilson in Black-wood s Magazine in a series of articles between 1819 and 1822 (see Recreations of Chris topher North), formed the turning point in Wordsworth s reputation. From 1820 to 1830 Do Quincey says it was militant, from 1830 to 1840 triumphant. By 1850 there were signs of reaction, but, though the language of criticism has become more judicial, there has been no falling off in veneration for Wordsworth s character or appreciation of his best work. Among critics that are specially interesting for various reasons we may mention De Quincey ( Works, vols. ii. and v.), Sir Henry Taylor ( Works, vol. v.), George Brimley (Essays], Matthew Arnold (preface to Selection], Mr Swinburne (Miscellanies], Mr F. W. H. Myers (&quot;Men of Letters&quot; series), and Mr Leslie Stephen (Hours in a Library, 3d series, &quot;Wordsworth s Ethics&quot;). Wordsworth s writings in prose have been collected by Mr Grosarfc (London, 1876). This collection contains the previously unpub lished Apology for a French Revolution, written in 1793, besides the scarce tract on the Convention of Cintra (1809) and the political addresses To the Freeholders of Westmoreland (1818). The bulk of three volumes is made up by including letters, notes, prefaces, &c. Wordsworth s Guide to the Lakes originally appeared in 1810 as an introduction to Wilkinson s Select Views, and was first published separately in 1822. The standard editions of Wordsworth are Moxon s six-volume edition originally settled by the poet himself in 1836-7, and Moxon s single-volume double-column edition sanctioned by the poet in 1845. A carefully annotated edition in nine large volumes, by Prof. Knight, is in course of publication. It contains a useful chronological table of the poems ; and the hitherto unpublished part of The Recluse is promised for the ninth volume. Prof. Knight s book on The English Lake District is also useful to minute students of Wordsworth. (W. M. ) WOEKINGTON, a seaport and market-town of Cumber land, England, on the south bank of the Derwent, where it enters the Solway Firth, and on several branch railway lines, 34 miles south-west of Carlisle and 311 miles from London by rail. The Derwent is crossed by a stone bridge of three arches erected in 1841. In the more ancient portions of the town the streets are narrow and irregular, but there are now many spacious streets with handsome houses and shops. The ancient parish church of St Michael was rebuilt in 1770, and, this building having been destroyed by fire in 1887, another is now (1888) in course of erection. The other public buildings are the jubilee hall, the assembly-rooms, the temperance hall, the mechanics institute, the infirmary, the new covered market, the custom-house, and the bonded warehouses. Near the town is Workington Hall, the seat of the ancient lords of the manor, a quadrilateral castellated structure in great part modern, but still retaining some of the ancient rooms, including that in which Mary queen of Scots is said to have slept when she escaped to England after the battle of Langside in May 1568. The harbour is remark ably safe, and has been improved by the construction of a breakwater 600 feet in length. The Lonsdale dock, 4J acres in extent, was opened in 1862. In 1886 37 vessels in the foreign and colonial trade (19,806 tons) entered the port, and 24 cleared (10,495 tons); 1687 in the coasting-trade entered (197,487 tons), and 1682 cleared (206,404 tons). The value of the exports of the produce of the United Kingdom in 1882 was 181,012, but in 1885 it was only 13,845, and in 1886 it was 38,468. The chief exports are pig-iron, lime, coal, steel rails, and