Page:Studies of a Biographer 1.djvu/275

 pathetic power, which, in its way, seems to me to be unapproachable. Henceforward, he found in such themes the inspiration of his truest poetry. The principle is given in the Song at the Feast at Brougham Castle, where he says of the shepherd lord:

and in countless other utterances of the same sentiment. A change, indeed, took place, of which M. Legouis gives a curious illustration. About the beginning of 1798, Wordsworth, as he shows, wrote the story of the ruined cottage which is now imbedded in the fifth book of the Excursion. M. Legouis translates the story, omitting the subsequent interpolations. Coleridge, long afterwards, declared it to be the finest poem of the same length in our language. The poem, as originally written, is a painfully pathetic story of undeserved misery patiently borne, and ending in the destruction of a peasant's household. In the later form the narrator has to interrupt himself by apologies for the sadness of the story and edifying remarks upon the ways of Providence. Wordsworth, somehow or other, had become reconciled.