the cultivated ear as the delights of verse, and imaginative writers will seek musical prose as the more natural medium of their greater creations and thoughts; the recurrent decay of the taste for poetry, and the steady yet rapid advance in imaginative prose, point in the same direction.

,

19. In the latter half of the essay comes the description of the poet's art, as penetrative, as glowing, and as melodious as the best parts of his Prelude and Excursion. It is not a mere 66 matter of amusement and idle pleasure"; its "object is truth", "carried alive into the heart by passion"; "poetry is the image of man and nature", "an acknowledgement of the beauty of the universe", and the poet must "look at the world in the spirit of love"; "he considers man and nature as essentially adapted to each other and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting properties of nature"; "poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge"; "it is the impassioned expression that is in the countenance of all science"; "poetry is the first and last of all knowledge; it is as immortal as the heart of man"; the poet "looks before and after carrying everywhere with him relationship and love"; "if the time should ever come when what is now called science, familiarised to man, shall be ready to put on as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man". Here again he strikes on one of the deeper principles in the evolution of literature; the material, the ideas, the figures, and the symbols, that an imaginative work makes use of, must have become familiar to the audience addressed, to their feelings and passions; hence the failure of Blake when he came to use a symbolism and a circle of ideas, that were mystical and remote from the life of the new audience; and hence the fact that new discoveries have to wait almost a generation before they are ready for use in poetry. Thus the speculations of Newton came in as true poetic material at the close of last century, whilst the geological and physiological speculations of the close of last century had to wait for Byron and Shelley, Browning and Tennyson, and

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PERIOD OF PREPARATION

Darwin's ideas are only now ready for a new type of poetry and imaginative prose.

20. What is deepest and best in Wordsworth is scarcely touched by his theory; it is the spiritual power of rising above the common and the commonplace, and giving it such philosophical meaning, as to make it almost sublime; it is the interfusion of philosophy and poetry; it is still more the lofty moral attitude he takes, idealising and giving deep significance to the most trivial detail. One of the finest instances of this, "Lines left upon a seat in a yew tree was written as early as 1795; and that it is in his own free but musical blank verse shows how early his ear told him what was the appropriate medium of such impassioned philosophy; he begins by bidding the traveller rest in the solitude;

"the curling waves That break against the shore shall lull thy mind By one soft impulse saved from vacancy

He describes the man, who built the seat and enjoyed it, a solitary driven from the world by neglect, to nurse his soul in indignation and pride. He loved the beauty of the scene, yet would his "fancy feed" on "visionary views", "till his eyes streamed with tears". "In this deep vale he died". It is the lesson from this life that contains the poet's lofty moral attitude; he warns the stranger that "pride is littleness", that

"he, who feels contempt
For any living thing, hath faculties,

Which he has never used; that thought with him
Is in its infancy", "O be wiser, thou!

Instructed that true knowledge leads to love".

This is the inner secret of Wordsworth's power over the higher spirits of our century.

T

Section 28.

I. Coleridge had the same sense of superiority to all that is mean and all that is contemptuous, the same idealistic philosophy that insisted on the nobler elements of life and the necessity of love for the poetic interpretation of the world. And in his Biographia Literaria (1817), a

philosophical analysis and defence of true poetry, he pointed out the spiritual charm of Wordsworth's best poetry, whilst at the same time showing his dissent from the theory as stated in the preface and its variance from the poet's own practice even in his most commonplace ballads like The Thorn. In the same apology for his poetical career he gives an account of the inception of the Lyrical Ballads practically in consonance with that given by Wordsworth; he shows that his contribution was to be from the supernatural, making it as human and as interesting as his fellow-poet was to make his scenes from common and lowly life; he wrote The Ancient Mariner for it, and " was preparing among other poems The Dark Ladie and the Christabel, in which he should have more nearly realised his ideal than he had done in his first attempt". He never finished these and did not publish them in the volume, nor does he seem from the existing fragments to have approached The Ancient Mariner in giving human interest to the supernatural. Besides his ballad his contribution consisted of two scenes called The Dungeon, from Osorio, an unpublished drama, a Wordsworthian piece of blank verse, "The Nightingale, a Conver sation Poem ", and the ballad-lyric from the proposed Dark Ladie called "Love". The last has only one stanza that can be said to refer in any way to the supernatural; the knight, whose story the poet sings to Genevieve in order to subdue her love, saw "an angel beautiful and bright " look in his face and knew that "it was a fiend". The piece is quite in the spirit of the sentimentalism that entered so lavishly into the romances of the time and shows that Coleridge was in the eighteenth century greatly influenced by the two movements, the romantic and the sentimental, so much scorned by Wordsworth; it also shows how much more susceptible he was to the true ballad atmosphere than his friend. It is very musical and repeats words and refrains like the ballads; but it is the first stanza, containing as it does one of the central doctrines of the new poetic creed, that is best known ;

"All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,

All are but ministers of Love,

And feed his sacred flame.

een",

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2. It is however only The Ancient Mariner, that fulfils his idea of creating human interest in the supernatural, and completely succeeds in adapting the ballad style to modern tastes. The earlier form of this poem, as it appeared in Lyrical Ballads is closely modelled on the ballad as seen in Percy's Reliques. The later form has got clear of innumerable archaisms like ne" for "nor ", drouth for drought ", " withouten sterte ", "pheer", eldritch ", "beforne", 66 66 ee' "n'old " aventure", "what manner man ; it has retained only as many as to give a quaint flavour without needing a commentary to make them understood. With its running commentary, it is more connected and intelligible, and it has abandoned many verses and lines and expressions that have the cruder features and repetitions of the old ballad. It is the first version that is more instructive as to Coleridge's connection with the eighteenth century, and is most worth analysing as an evidence of the mingling of the two periods after the Revolution. There is in it a little of that stucco Gothic which was made so much of in The Castle of Otranto and other attempts in fiction to return to the mediaeval world and its chivalry and its supernaturalisms; there are the old belief in the efficacy of the sign of the cross against evil spirits, and in a spell brought on by a curse, the appeal to "Mary queen of heaven”, the presence of holy hermits who shrive great sinners, the idea of perpetual wandering from land to land and repetition of some act as penance for some great sin, as in the legend of the Wandering Jew, the ubiquity of spirits evil and good through all elements, the conflict of evil and good spirits for souls, and the power of sinning and goodness, of spirits and demons over the sun, moon, and stars, and the elements. Beside these are set pictures from Holbein's Dance of Death, the dead rising and doing the common labours of men, the seraphs standing over corpses, and Death and his paramour dicing for human lives; two stanzas that give the most unearthly description of death, quite in the style of Holbein, are omitted from the later version,

"His bones were black with many a crack,
All black and bare I ween;

Jet black and bare, save where with rust

Of mouldy damps and charnel crust,

They're patched with purple and green ".

"A gust of wind sterte up behind,

And whistled thro' his bones :

Thro' the holes of his eyes and the hole of his mouth
Half-whistles and half-groans ".

There are elements from a still later age, from the Elizabethan; the spectral ship is out of the legend of The Flying Dutchman, which was born of the sea-adventures of the time of English and Dutch rivalry and the floating mediaeval superstitions; whilst the sweet sounds in the air and all round the ship in the fifth part after the partial undoing of the curse are clearly from The Tempest and the music of Ariel. Thus the ages are mingled quite in the style of the Gothic romances of the time.

3. And interfused with this amalgam of various olden times are unmistakable traces of the modern spirit, and even of the new spirit that was coming over literature as the century closed. We have the Protestant phases of Christianity in the congregation in the "kirk ", where "each to his great father bends", "old men and babes ", the appeals to Christ and the great emphasis laid upon the prayer of the worshipper and its efficacy; in the later version he gets clear of one of these by substituting

for

"And never a saint took pity on
Me in my agony",

"And Christ would take no pity on &c ".

The passionate love of country and home, so strongly expressed at the end of the ballad, is to a large extent modern, a growth of that emigrative faculty which arose again in Western man with the expansion of commerce and adventure. So the nautical atmosphere that is around the whole poem belonged to the two preceding centuries; it came from the Voyages that Wordsworth and he had been reading and from the love of "bursting" first "into silent seas " that still lingered from Elizabethan times along the coast of Devonshire; both Arctic and tropical adventures are drawn upon. There is even in the use of older language a mark of the new archæology and philology; we have nothing of the artificial jumble of glossaries that clogs the poetry of Chatterton; the old idioms and words are on the whole accurately used, and the archaic colours are no

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