Perhaps, after all, The Excursion will leave Mr Wordsworth's admirers and contemners where they were. Each will be furnished with instances of excellence and deformity to strengthen his own persuasions. Certainly I could wish for a somewhat clearer development of the author's opinions, for the retrenchment of some of the uninteresting interlocutory matter, for the exclusion of one tale, the angry and avaricious and unkind woman, and curtailments in most of the other narratives. But with these deductions from the worth of the Poem, I do not hesitate to place it among the noblest works of the human intellect; and to me it is one of the most delightful. What is good is of the best kind of goodness, and the passages are not few which place the author on a level with Milton. It is true W. is not an epic poet; but it is also true that what lives in the hearts of readers from the works of Milton is also not the epic poem. Milton's story has merit unquestionably, but it is rather a lyric than an epic narrative. Wordsworth is purely and exclusively a lyric poet in the extended use of that term.” * Of The Excursion Southey wrote thus to Bernard Barton from Keswick, Dec. 19, 1814: "MY DEAR SIR,-. Wordsworth's residence and mine are fifteen miles asunder, a sufficient distance to preclude any frequent interchange of visits. I have known him nearly twenty years, and, for about half that time, intimately. The strength and the character of his mind you see in The Excursion, and his life does not belie his writings; for, in every relation of life, and every point of view, he is a truly * Referring to Crabb Robinson's Diary, may I be allowed to express the hope that the admirable critical estimates which he passes on Goethe's works (as they successively appeared), and on many others of his illustrious contemporaries, will some day be published? exemplary and admirable man. In conversation he is powerful beyond any of his contemporaries; and, as a poet, I speak not from the partiality of friendship, nor because we have been so absurdly held up as both writing upon one concerted system of poetry, but with the most deliberate exercise of impartial judgment whereof I am capable, when I declare my full conviction that posterity will rank him with Milton. . . .-Believe me, yours with sincere respect, ROBERT SOUTHEY.” * On Dec. 24, 1814, Southey wrote to Walter Scott: Jeffrey, I hear, has written what his admirers call a crushing review of The Excursion. He might as well seat himself upon Skiddaw, and fancy he had crushed the mountain. I heartily wish Wordsworth may one day meet him, and lay him alongside yardarm and yardarm in argument." The following letter of Southey to Chauncey Hare Townsend has an equal interest with the last : "KESWICK, August 17, 1816.+ MY DEAR CHAUNCEY,-. There is a paper of mine in the last Quarterly, upon the means of bettering the condition of the poor. You will be interested by a story which it contains of an old woman upon Exmoor. In Wordsworth's blank-verse it would go to every heart. Have you read The Excursion? and have you read the collection of Wordsworth's other poems, in two octavo volumes? If you have not, there is a great pleasure in store for you. I am no blind admirer of Wordsworth, and can see where he has chosen subjects which are unworthy in themselves, and where the strength of his imagination and of his feeling is * The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, vol. iv., p. 91. directed upon inadequate objects. Notwithstanding these faults, and their frequent occurrence, it is by the side of Milton that Wordsworth will have his station awarded him by posterity. God bless you! R. S." Five letters written by Charles Lamb to Wordsworth in the years 1814 and 1815, referring both to The Excursion and Lamb's review of it in The Quarterly, and to other poems of Wordsworth, are as instructive as the letters of Southey just quoted. These letters have been already published, and will be found, both in the Final Memorials of Charles Lamb, by Sergeant Talfourd, and in the admirable edition of Lamb's Letters, by Canon Ainger; but their reproduction here will give unity to the life of Wordsworth. The special interest in these letters of Lamb's is not their insight, or their humour, or even their delicate enthusiasm, but their disclosure of the way in which Lamb's criticism of The Excursion was mangled and travestied by Gifford. Lamb wrote thus to Wordsworth on receiving The Excursion: DEAR WORDSWORTH,-I cannot tell you how pleased I was at the receipt of the great armful of poetry which you have sent me; and to get it before the rest of the world too! I have gone quite through with it, and was thinking to have accomplished that pleasure a second time before I wrote to thank you, but M. Burney came in the night (while we were out) and made holy theft of it, but we expect restitution in day or two. It is the noblest conversational poem I ever read-a day in Heaven. The part (or rather main body) which has left the sweetest odour on my * See Letters of Charles Lamb, edited by Alfred Ainger, vol. i., pp. memory (a bad term for the remains of an impression so recent), is the Tales of the Churchyard; the only girl among seven brethren, born out of due time, and not duly taken away again; the deaf man and the blind man; the Jacobite and the Hanoverian, whom antipathies reconcile; the Scarron-entry of the rusticating parson upon his solitude;— these were all new to me too. My having known the story of Margaret (at the beginning), a very old acquaintance, even as long back as when I saw you first at Stowey, did not make her reappearance less fresh. I don't know what to pick out of this best of books upon the best subjects for partial naming. That gorgeous sunset is famous; I think it must have been the identical one we saw on Salisbury Plain five years ago, that drew Phillips from the card-table, where he had sat from rise of that luminary to its unequalled set; but neither he nor I had gifted eyes to see those symbols of common things glorified, such as the prophets saw them in that sunset-the wheel, the potter's clay, the wash-pot, the wine-press, the almond-tree rod, the baskets of figs, the fourfold visaged head, the throne, and Him that sat thereon. * One feeling I was particularly struck with, as what I recognised so very lately at Harrow Church on entering in it after a hot and secular day's pleasure, the instantaneous coolness and calming, almost transforming properties of a country church just entered; a certain fragrance which it has, either from its holiness, or being kept shut all the week, or the air that is . . . pure country, exactly what you have reduced into words; but I am feeling that which I cannot express. Reading your lines about it fixed me for a time, a monument in Harrow Church. Do you know it? with its fine long spire, white as washed marble, to be seen, * See The Excursion, Book ii., vol. v., pp. 102-3. by vantage of its high site, as far as Salisbury spire itself almost. I shall select a day or two, very shortly, when I am coolest in brain, to have a steady second reading, which I feel will lead to many more, for it will be a stock book with me while eyes or spectacles shall be lent me. There is a great deal of noble matter about mountain scenery, yet not so much as to overpower and discountenance a poor Londoner or south-countryman entirely, though Mary seems to have felt it occasionally a little too powerfully, for it was her remark during reading it, that by your system it was doubtful whether a liver in towns had a soul to be saved. She almost trembled for that invisible part of us in her. . . ." "1814.* DEAR WORDSWORTH,-I told you my review was a very imperfect one. But what you will see in the Quarterly is a spurious one, which Mr Baviad Gifford has palmed upon it for mine. I never felt more vexed in my life than when I read it. I cannot give you an idea of what he has done to it, out of spite at me, because he once suffered me to be called a lunatic in his Review. The language he has altered throughout. Whatever inadequateness it had to its subject, it was, in point of composition, the prettiest piece of prose I ever writ and so my sister (to whom alone I read the MS.) said. That charm, if it had any, is all gone: more than a third of the substance is cut away, and that not all from one place, but passim, so as to make utter nonsense. warm expression is changed for a nasty cold one. Every I have not the cursed alteration by me; I shall never look at it again; but for a specimen, I remember I had said the poet of the Excursion walks through common *The Letters of Charles Lamb, vol. i., pp. 280-282. |