hedge of honeysuckles, roses, and jasmines; and I will make you a bouquet of myrtle every day.

In another letter he says, "Occurrences are as scarce as cucumbers at Christmas." We can imagine the pleasure of the winter evening from his well-known description:

Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And, while the bubbling and loud - hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups

That cheer, but not inebriate, wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in.

Having finished "The Task," Cowper was again in need of literary occupation, and some friend suggested a translation of Homer. This was good for the poet, as it furnished something to keep his brain from preying upon itself; but it did not add very much to the literary possessions of the world. The Odyssey is more interesting than the Iliad; but neither has the spirit and life of the later translations which have made the grand old Greek familiar to us. As compared with Pope's translation, Cowper's is the less polished, and the more exact and faithful; a difference to be expected from the fact that Cowper freed himself from the trammels of rhyme by choosing blank verse; that is, tensyllabled rhymeless lines.

Not long after the completion of this work, Mrs. Unwin, his faithful friend and helper through many years of mingled trouble and happiness, was stricken with palsy, and, losing her mind, became in turn the object of his tender care. But the strain upon him was too great. After her death he sank into hopeless melancholy, and in this pitiable condition dragged out the remaining years of his life. With his death in 1800, we bring our sketch of the literary men of his century to a close.

CHAPTER XL.

WORDSWORTH. COLERIDGE.

E have already spoken of Cowper, Burns and Crabbe as inaugurating a new school of poetry more natural and more human than the formal or artificial one which preceded it. In William Wordsworth (1770-1850) we find the humanitarian school joined to the philosophical, and bringing in the element of genius (which, except in the case of Burns, had been lacking in the preceding generation of poets) to illumine the new development.

The second group of contemporary writers, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, have been improperly classed together as "The Lake Poets," until many persons are under an impression that they belong to one another from similarity of mind or style, instead of the unimportant fact that their dwellings were comparatively near each other on the Westmoreland lakes, and that they were friends. They have even been called by an amusing misnomer, "the lake school" of poets. However these names arose, they can not now be separated from the original subjects, and "the lakers" will go down to posterity together.

Wordsworth was born in Cumberland, another of the lake counties, and therefore not far from the scene of his later celebrity. He was early left an orphan, and was sent to college, as so many poets have been, by the kindness of relatives. After graduating at Cambridge he went to Paris, where the French Revolution was in full progress (1792-3). He was intensely interested in the republic, which he at first felt to be identified with the cause of human freedom; after a time he sympathized more with the moderate party, the Girondists, and probably escaped the wholesale destruction which overtook them in 1793,

only by a timely retreat from the country. At a later time, when the excesses of the revolution revealed its worst side, he become a conservative as to everything regarding church and state.

When Wordsworth was twenty-six, the smallness of his means made it necessary that he should do something toward getting a living; and his friends were much disgusted to find that he could not be induced to adopt any of the professions, nor any kind of business offered him, being determined to devote himself to poetry. This appeared to them rank perverseness; though, as his mother was said to have pronounced him "stiff, moody and violent in temper" as a child, they were the less surprised at it. One person, however, stood by him; his sister Dorothy, a lovely, sensitive creature, herself of a highly poetic nature, who devoted herself heart and soul to his service. Wordsworth adhered to his determination to be a poet and nothing but a poet; and when his means were about exhausted, a friend whom he had nursed in his last illness left him a legacy of £900, saying that he did this in order that Wordsworth might devote himself to a literary life. The brother and sister felt that they had inherited a fortune. Dorothy had £100 of her own, and on the income of these united sums they chiefly lived, thanks to her excellent management, for several years. They kept house in the humblest way, first at Racedown in Dorsetshire, and then, in order to be near Coleridge, whose acquaintance they had lately made, at Alfoxden in Somersetshire. The two poets published together a volume of "Lyrical Ballads," which contained such incongruous material as Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner" and Wordsworth's "Idiot Boy." The public laughed at both, and did not buy the book very freely, but the twenty guineas which fell to Wordsworth's share made it possible for him to take his sister to Germany, where they spent a quiet winter. Here he began what is

considered his most profound work, "The Prelude,” a history of the growth and workings of his mind up to the point where he had matured his plan of life, and felt himself ready to begin what he took as his peculiar task-the development of a new standard in poetry. "The Prelude" was not completed for several years, and was not published until after his death-more than fifty years from the time of its commencement. It was dedicated to Coleridge.

On their return from Germany, the brother and sister settled at Grasmere, in Westmoreland; a place still so full of the associations of their lives that one seems almost to see and hear them while going over the little cottage. This is kept with pious care as a memorial of those beautiful days. "Plain living and high thinking," as Emerson calls it, was the order of the day; and to the many choice spirits who visited the poet's home, this was more agreeable than if the adjectives had been reversed. Thither Wordsworth brought his bride, the gentle Mary Hutchinson, and the three lived together in the closest of friendship during their lives.

From this time there was little variety in the poet's life. A sum of money due Wordsworth's father, which had been withheld through obstinacy on the part of the debtor, was paid, principal and interest, on the death of the latter, by his son, Lord Lonsdale; and the family from that time lived in comfort, without any puzzling questions as to ways and

means.

Through Lord Lonsdale's influence, Wordsworth was appointed to the office of distributor of stamps, which gave him an additional £500 a year of income, with very light duties to perform, so that he could give his mind entirely. to composition and to the study of natural things. He has been called a high-priest of Nature; he was rather one. of her humble worshippers. By constant endeavor to know her secrets, he arrived at the closest communion with her

that man can enjoy; and his delight in her companionship› never flagged for a moment.

Mingled with this reverence was a lofty sense of the dignity of man; and the two ideas are blended in the magnificent poem called "The Excursion," the work of some of his ripest years of thought and observation. There are few reflective poems so abounding in quotable passages; and though at times its diffuseness makes it appear tedious, the general impression it gives is, as has often been said,. like that of organ music.

Jeffrey, the dreaded critic of the "Edinburgh Review,” began his famous notice of the "Excursion" with the words, "This will never do!" But the thinking world, even in Wordsworth's own day, discovered that it would do, and posterity has sustained the verdict. It is a poem written only for those who are able to reflect; to the frivolous it presents no attractions. The "Excursion" was meant to be only one of the three parts of a great life- - poem, of which the "Prelude" (which name, by the way, was given to it by his wife after his death) was to be the first. The plan, however, was too vast, and the work was never completed. How slowly the world appreciated it is shown by the fact that the first edition of five hundred copies lasted six years, and the second, of equal size, still longer.

Wordsworth had some severe sorrows. The loss of two children in youth, of his sister, who overtaxed her more delicate frame in trying to keep up with his mountainclimbing, and of his beloved daughter Dora, Mrs. Quillilan, weighed heavily upon him, and he sank into apathy during the last years of his life. But his work was done; and every poet who has written since it began owes a debt of gratitude to Wordsworth.

Regarding his shorter poems, the "Ode on Intimations of Immortality," "The Daffodils," "Ode to Duty," "Tintern Abbey," and the exquisite sonnets,—we can only advise the