Page:Poems and extracts - Wordsworth.djvu/20

 this estimate. Mickle was one of the Spenserians, and his attempt to revive the spirit of Spenser has the touch of incongruity that marred all their work. It is possible that a passage (not here given) in Sir Martyn may have influenced Wordsworth's portrait of the 'youth from Georgia's shore' in Ruth.

The extract from Armstrong's Art of Preserving Health is from that 'sublime apostrophe to the great rivers of the earth,' which Wordsworth mentions (Knight's ed. 1882–4, vol. vi. p. 352). In the note on the Sonnet 'Not like his great compeers' (1820) Wordsworth also expresses his admiration for 'those sublime images which Armstrong has so finely described.'

The selections from Akenside exemplify a form of poetry that is now seemingly extinct, but that once suited the 'pensive' mood of poetic meditation. Wordsworth himself wrote and translated some good 'Inscriptions,' and here we see the models that he approved. They too deal with the life of quiet meditation, and the disturbing effect of passion.

In connexion with the three sonnets from Shakespeare that follow, it is enough to refer to Wordsworth's remarks in his 'Essay supplementary to the Preface' (1815). In 1819 people had still to be educated into reading Shakespeare's sonnets.

Marvell's beautiful lines on the dewdrop show the great significance of Wordsworth's remark somewhere that the sonnet should resemble a drop of dew.

Passing the short extract from Anne Killigrew—again on the theme of the glory of solitary communion with the divine in nature—we come to four pages of extracts from John Dyer's Ruins of Rome. The notes will give evidence of the selective xii