XIII.

SONNETS.

THE "Lyrical Ballads" were published in 1800. Since that, Wordsworth's reputation had been slowly growing. His admirers were not numerous, but they were a choice class, led by Coleridge, Sir George Beaumont, De Quincey, Wilson. Enemies of course he had. Success is a strong fertilizer, bringing up rapid crops of the weeds of envy and jealousy, particularly among clever, ambitious men of talent barren of genius. So that when in 1807 appeared two more volumes of "Poems by William Wordsworth," his former detractors, embittered by the vitality there was in this heterodox poet, indignant that he should presume to be alive after the stabs they had given him, assailed the new volumes with their old malignity envenomed by their failure. When we reflect that the new volumes contained "She was a Phantom of Delight," "The Happy Warrior," "The Seven Sisters," "Resolution and Independence;" some of his best Sonnets, including

those grand martial ones to Liberty, and other poems of the same stamp, we can perceive that in the first decade of the nineteenth century critics of poetry were not yet out of the slough of arrogant ignorance, and that their effrontery was equal to their blindness. And these critical sciolists were for years flattered by an appearance of success in their endeavors to crush Wordsworth; for the effect of their strictures so checked the sale of the volumes, that no new edition was called for from 1807, the year of their publication, to 1815.

Meanwhile the Poet was as firm and as confident in his belief in their durability as he was in that of the mountains that daily delighted his vision, and as calm, amid these blasts of injurious comment as one of his neighbor lakes, when in a sunny June morning it reflects the hills and the heavens in the smooth mirror of its deep waters. Among many letters from Wordsworth, given in the "Memoir," the most interesting, and one of the most valuable, morally and æsthetically, ever written by a great poet, is a letter to Lady Beaumont, dated May 21, 1807. Lady Beaumont, one of his warmest friends and admirers, having, among the earliest, already read them, writes to him to express her interest in them, and her solicitude

as to their reception by the public. Wordsworth opens his answer with cordial thanks, begging her not to have any anxiety about the opposition the poems may excite, and then continues:

"It is impossible that any expectations can be lower than mine concerning the immediate effect of this little work upon what is called the public. I do not here take into consideration the envy and malevolence, and all the bad passions which always stand in the way of a work of any merit from a living poet; but merely think of the pure, absolute, honest ignorance in which all worldlings of every rank and situation must be enveloped, with respect to the thoughts, feelings, and images, on which the life of my poems depends. The things which I have taken, whether from within or without, what have they to do with routs, dinners, morning calls, hurry from door to door, from street to street, on foot or in carriage; with Mr. Pitt or Mr. Fox, Mr. Paul or Sir Francis Burdett, the Westminster election or the borough of Honiton? In a word, for I cannot stop to make my way through the hurry of images that present themselves to me, what have they to do with endless talking about things nobody cares anything for, except as far as their own

vanity is concerned; and this with persons they. care nothing for but as their vanity or selfishness is concerned? What have they to do (to say all at once) with a life without love? In such a life there can be no thought; for we have no thought (save thoughts of pain) but as, far as we have love and admiration.

"It is an awful truth that there neither is, nor can be, any genuine enjoyment of poetry among nineteen out of twenty of those persons who live, or wish to live, in the broad light of the world, among those who either are, or are striving to make themselves, people of consideration in society. This is a truth, and an awful one, because to be incapable of a feeling of poetry, in my sense of the word, is to be without love of human nature and reverence for God.

"Upon this I shall insist elsewhere; at present let me confine myself to my object, which is to make you, my dear friend, as easy-hearted as myself with respect to these poems. Trouble not yourself upon their present reception; of what moment is that compared with what I trust is their destiny? to console the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight, by making the happy happier; to teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think, and feel,

and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous; this is their office, which I trust they will faithfully perform long after we (that is, all that is mortal of us) are mouldered in our graves."

I give the most striking part of this long letter. It presents prominently to view the selfconfidence of Wordsworth, which, in a man of so much worth, and a poet of so much power, shines here as a virtue, enabling him to bear and defy neglect and scoffs, and to walk right on in the upward path he had deliberately entered.

The Rev. F. W. Robertson, of Brighton, England, that spiritually-gifted preacher and sound thinker, in an admirable lecture on Wordsworth, in 1853, declares wisely that the first qualification for appreciating poetry is unworldliness; and then thus defines worldliness: "By worldliness I mean entanglement in the temporal and visible. It is the spirit of worldliness which makes a man love show, splendor, rank, title, and sensual enjoyments; and occupies his attention, chiefly or entirely, with conversation respecting merely passing events, and passing acquaintances."

The poet being the cordial mouth-piece of the most momentous, the finest, the truest