a livelihood; feeling, at the same time, that any work which would give him a livelihood would be hateful, because it would arrest, perhaps smother and suppress, his poetic aspirations and hopes, we can perceive what a rescue this thoughtful bequest was. His gratitude he uttered several years afterwards in the following cordial sonnet to his young benefactor : — -· "Calvert ! it must not be unheard by them This care was thine, when sickness did condemn Never was bequest more prolific in fruit. Never did a Shylock make gold breed more bountifully than did this short-lived youth when he bequeathed nine hundred pounds to his devoted companion, who would not desert him in his mortal sickness. To Mathews, who was negotiating in London to get him employment, Wordsworth wrote on the 7th of No vember, 1794, three months before the death of his young friend: "My friend has every symptom of a confirmed consumption, and I cannot think of quitting him in his present debilitated state!" And early in the following January he writes from Penrith: "I have been here for some time. I am still much engaged with my sick friend, and sorry am I to add that he worsens daily; he is barely alive." It were not easy to imagine the exultation of young Wordsworth at this unlooked-for good fortune. Suddenly was dispelled the black cloud that for several years had hung over him, threatening his high literary hopes. He was free,free to yield himself fully, unreservedly, to the deep, delightful solicitations of a creative soul, that longed to individualize its warm, vague yearnings and aspirations in concrete, definite forms of luminous verse; and he was free from the growing anxieties that had dogged his youthful life. And this great joy was to be heightened. His sister was by his side; she who was so richly and exquisitely organized that she could be the encourager, the comforter, the tutelary genius of William Wordsworth; she who could help his heart to feel, and even his poetic eye to see, so tender was her sensibility, so fine her per ception of the beautiful, so clear and delicate her intellect and her tact. That solitary ramble over the desolate plain of Salisbury had begotten on Wordsworth a tale of "Guilt and Sorrow," told in seventy-four Spenserian stanzas, a tale of almost too much sorrow; for within it is inclosed another story of utter deprivation and destitution, without a ray to streak the monotonous gloom, unless it be that in the inner tale guilt is not the cause of the lonely desolation. Into this poem is wrought Wordsworth's loving vision for nature, and his genuine fellow-feeling for the condition, the suffering, of the hopeless poor; the more effective because it exhibits a knowledge of their secret sentiment, -a knowledge so sure that it could only have been learnt, even by a poet, through sympathetic experience. The very earnestness of his feeling shuts off that imaginative play which might have woven into the stanzas some relieving colors. All is cheerless, like the wide expanse of Salisbury plain, which suggested the poem; but on the plain there must be at times a momentary radiance from rising or setting sun. The complicated Spenserian stanza, invented for the fanciful "Fairy Queen," is too highly wrought to be the medium of such a story, the narrative of which runs at times near the level of prose. The poem is, nevertheless, an advance upon "Descriptive Sketches," and has upon it, not only the flush of poetic promise, but the ineffaceable stamp of high performance. The date affixed is 1793-4. In the autumn of 1795 Wordsworth and his sister set up housekeeping near the sea-coast, in Dorsetshire. The country, Dorothy writes, "is delightful; we have charming walks, a good garden, a pleasant house." Here they walked and worked in the garden, and read and wrote. The place was secluded, with little society, and a post only once a week. In the winter of 1795-6 Wordsworth, in conjunction with a literary friend (Wrangham), set himself to writing poetic imitations of Juvenal, to be published in a volume. But the volume was laid aside unfinished. Ten years later, when applied to to have his imitations of Juvenal published, he refused, and wrote: "I have long since come to a fixed resolution to steer clear of personal satire; in fact, I never will have anything to do with it, as far as concerns the private vices of individuals, on any account." The volume which he thus refused to let see the light was full of sharp satire upon the abuses of the time, upon the vices of those high in place, and the corruptions of fashionable aristocratic society. Wordsworth, free, rejoicing in his freedom, like fresh-fledged songsters of the woods, was still trying his wing, discovering by experiment to what kind of flight his pinion was best adapted. Juvenalian satire was not his forte. His next attempt was at a higher - the very highest-poetic flight, tragedy. To poets the drama is fascinating through its innate attractions of life-like impersonation; through its union of realism and idealism; through its interplay of active passions, and its concentration of human life at fullest tension; and through the supremacy which, by virtue of these qualities and requirements, it holds over all forms of poetic embodiment. Now Wordsworth's deficiencies, great poet as he is, were such as to place dramatic success out of his reach. He lacked the power of throwing himself out of himself into another individuality, a power which, although not at all implying deep, large mental resources, is of primary need to the writer as well as to the actor of dramas. Wordsworth was eminently meditative, with the resources of sensibility and of intellect which make meditation productive; but for fusing the results of meditation with |