Who in vain blows the bellows of Milton's old

organ

While he thinks he could lull all the snakes on the Gorgon."

"The Ettrick Shepherd," James Hogg, coming up to London from his peasant life at Buccleugh, found warm welcome; but Wordsworth was unapproachable to him. He thus describes their first interview: "We were a' invited to dinner at Godswhittle's; and just as he came in at the East gate, De Quincy and me came in at the West; and says I, the moment me and Wordsworth were introduced, Lord keep us a'!' says I, 'Godswhittle, my man, there's nae want of poets here the day at ony rate.' Wi' that, Wordsworth turned up his nose, as if we had been a' carrion, and then he gied a kind of a smile, that I thought was the bitterest, most contemptible, despicable, abominable, wauf, narrow-minded, envious, sneezablest kind of an attitude that I ever saw human form assume,and Poets!' quo' he-PoetS, Mr. Hogg? Pray, where are they, sir?' Confound him!-I doubt if he would have allowed even Byron to have been a poet, if he had been there. He thinks there's nae real poets in our time, an it be not himself, and his sister, and Coleridge. Would ony mortal believe there was sic a donneration of arrogance in this warld?"

The merits of Wordsworth's poetry, like its faults, lie mostly on the surface, and may be thus classified:

1. It was original. It helped to abolish the torpid mannerism and feeble imitation which characterized most of the literature of the generation which ended with 1800, and substituted life and sensibility.

2. It was thoughtful. Poetry, which had been, since Pope, chiefly perceptive, became reflective; description and artifice were changed for spiritualism and metaphysics.

3. It was always chaste and moral, like his life. It stimulated no degrading passion; it fed no prurient fancy; its influence was uniformly ennobling.

4. It was inspired by a deep love of

nature, in all her protean forms; for it was produced by one who harbored a certain well-defined contempt for society; who doubted if any work of man was a fit theme for poetry; and who loved the woods like Pan, and sang about them, feeling that he failed in his pictures of human life, but

"Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her."

5. It preached with a rare unction the gospel of Humanity:

"Never to blend our pleasure or our pride

With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels."

The faults of Wordsworth's poetry are equally conspicuous:

1. What he intended for sentiment was sometimes only sentimentalism.

2. He possessed little passion, and rarely expressed himself with sufficient vigor.

3. He lacked a poet's ear for melody, and frequently constructed his rhyme clumsily, and failed in rhythm. 4. He possessed absolutely no humor whatever.

This last seems to have been his gravest fault, even more serious than his lack of virility. The most important function of humor is not that which excites mirth by the presentation of ludicrous images to the mind, but that which confers a sense of fitness and propriety, and which detects the points of likeness in things which are similar, and the points of contrast in things which are different. Lacking humor, Wordsworth was at sea without a compass. His imagination, which was preternaturally active in certain directions, was always leading him into a quagmire of absurdities. He was the butt and victim of his own genius. What he thought was sublime, was often only ridiculous. He crowned some of his grandest temples with incongruities; all because he lacked the touchstone of art.

Wordsworth would doubtless have written better if he had been occupied all his life with some exacting manual labor—if he had been compelled to

work with his hands, like Bunyan, or Sam Johnson, or Hogg, or Burns; for, if the sad tragedies of poverty had not made him more muscular, they would certainly have made him less prolix. I think the gracious Raisley Calvert bequeathed a curse to Wordsworth when he gave him the nine hundred pounds that nourished him while he diluted his inspiration at Rydal Mount.

Even when a boy in school, Wordsworth was so apathetic that he rarely learned his lessons, and he was inclined to sluggishness all his life. His languid verse is the fruit of his phlegmatic temperament, and his leisure was the Delilah that shore him of strength while he lay in her seductive lap.

But he had other enemies. One of the worst was the method which he adopted for himself. He began by laying down the following rules for the construction of poetry: 1. That the poet ought to write as the common people converse, because the colloquial talk of rustics was the most natural, and therefore the most enduring, and the fittest for verse of every description; 2. That the language of poetry ought to be the same as the language of prose. For, he argued, the prime object of poetry is to teach moral lessons; to paint the emotions; to show the spiritual significance of material things. Let us despise figures of speech, ornamentation, and fastidious advantages, then, and preach the simple, unadorned truth. The result of these vicious principles is, that many of his poems are puerile; some of them silly and tedious beyond description. But he disobeyed and defied his own laws frequently enough to produce three or four unsurpassed contemplative poems, and a few sonnets which, for sweetness and grace, have never been excelled. Such poems as "We are Seven," "Yarrow Unvisited," "Evening Ode," "Tintern Abbey," and the " Ode on the Intimations of Immortality," cannot be read too often, and their influence has been deep and beneficent. He was a keen observer of nature, and

some of his descriptions of plants and trees, mountain sides and river courses, have never been surpassed for simplicity, minuteness, and picturesqueness.

Yet his failures are scattered on every page of his works, because in his average mood he despised art, and held that no scene could be too common and no event could be too absurd to be a source of inspiration to his

muse.

"Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,"

were suggested to him, not merely by the humbler flowers, but by the wanderings of a peddler, the picture of a peasant woman stealing wood, the incoherent mumbling of an idiot, the lamentations of an infant lost in the street, the industry of a stable-boy, the discomfort of a washerwoman in the suds, the reproaches of an intellectual donkey, and the reflections of a pet lamb, when he

"His tail with pleasure shook." Wordsworth said:

"The primal duties shine aloft, like stars;

The charities that soothe, and heal, and bless,
Are scattered at the feet of man, like flowers."

Fearing that his immortality was not yet assured, however, he wrote

"It was a tub, like one of those

Which women use to wash their clothes!"'

Among his poems of sentiment that were almost pure bathos, and scarcely worthy even of circulation in the nursery, are "The Star-gazers," "The Beggars," "The Gypsies," "Poor Susan,' The Idiot Boy," "Peter Bell," The White Doe," The Pet Lamb," and "Alice Fell."

Wordsworth, in his higher reaches, was a moral philosopher; but his theories were vague and confused, and he never tried to reconcile them. Sometimes he was a pantheist; sometimes a Platonist; sometimes a Christian; sometimes a believer in metempsychosis. He harbored crude emotions and subtile ideas; and he propounded many questions in recondite metaphysics; but all his answers were obscure.

He was an introversive poet. All nature was subordinate to his feelings; and he spun his poems from within. In every phase of nature he saw a hidden meaning. He looked upon the daisy, which Burns saw only as a

Wee, modest crimson - tipped flower," and exclaimed, "How like human life!" He watched the cirrus clouds wheeling their fleeces above the moors, and exclaimed, How like human life!" He picked up a dry twig from an oak, and carried it along, murmuring to himself, How like human life! Let us write a poem about it." He saw a cat playing with dead leaves, and straight caught up the human analogy and embalmed it in eighty dull lines. He was forever classifying his emotions, as a botanist classifies flow

ers.

44

Nature was reflected from within. Self-examination was the work of his life. He picked his feelings to pieces, especially the more trivial, to see what they were made of, as the boy cut the bellows open to ascertain where the wind came from.

In obedience to his rule to adopt rustic subjects and rustic language, he produced "Peter Bell." This is one of the most pretentious, as it certainly is the very worst, of all his efforts. It consists of no less than two hundred and twenty-eight verses, and the author, in his dedication of it to Robert Southey, announces that it has been twenty years in course of preparation; and that "during this long interval, pains have been taken at different times to make the production less unworthy of a favorable reception; or, rather, to fit it for filling PERMANENTLY a station, however humble, in the Literature of my country," the emphasis of the word "permanently" being his own. It is a curious comment on this dedication that, in all the recent editions of Wordsworth's poems, this is entirely omitted; which shows that the shout of derision with which it was received throughout Great Britain is deemed to have had some foundation in justice.

A jackass that has lost its master is the hero of this pastoral, and the treatment of the topic is inconceivably weak absurd to the verge of burlesque. A worthless scoundrel like Peter Bell - a desperate felon, a bigamist, a highwayman, and an outlaw — might doubtless be converted and reformed; but Wordsworth outrages common sense and probability when he makes the "loud and piteous bray" of an ass the sole cause of the moral revolution, and leads the new-made saint into society, explaining that, the very same day, he

"Forsook his crimes, renounced his folly,
And after ten months' melancholy

Became a good and honest man."

"The White Doe of Rylstone" shows more skilful treatment, but the narrative is equally absurd, though Wordsworth declared it his masterpiece. The story is more incredible than any yarn ever told to the marines. It relates how a young lady, bereft of father and mother, spent most of her time at their graves, disconsolate, and found no relief from mourning, till a white doe licked her hand, and straightway healed the wound of orphanage in her heart, which time had been unable to soothe, and banished the pain which religion and philosophy had been powerless to allay. It is shocking to reason; while the doe's apotheosis adds to the offence.

In 1814 he published “a fragment," which would have been the longest poem ever published in any language if he had lived to complete it: "The Recluse." It was to appear in three parts, and the fraction which we possess, called "The Excursion," consisting of nine books and occupying two hundred and seventy-five pages, is only "a part of the second part." There are many paragraphs of tranquil beauty in this ambitious attempt to record "the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement;" but the story is puerile, for Wordsworth could not invent. He was not an artist, and

he lacked the dramatic instinct - -two omissions which are almost fatal to a poet. He appeared not to possess the masculine power of induction. He knew his own feelings, but he seemed wholly incapable of inferring the feelings of others. He could paint exter- . nals, but was a poor student of the human heart. tween thought and action was beyond his reach. In fifty years of writing, he never created a character.

The subtle relation be

Let us not fail to do Wordsworth justice. When he kept within the rather narrow path which nature had fitted to his feet, he succeeded grandly. Many passages of his poems have a simplicity and a beauty that will live forever. One who cares much for sentiment and nothing for style, and who feels and thinks as Wordsworth felt

and thought, will admire his works and carry them in his love. Many of his pictures beam with sunshine. He did much to turn the weary heart of man back to nature, after it had been desolated with Byron's hurricanes. Every worm that crawls is indebted to him for having implanted in the breast of the young a kindlier regard for the brute creation. The cottagers and the lowly living, too, owe him a debt of gratitude, for the tendency of all he wrote is towards democracy. So, on the whole, spite of the curious wrecks which lie along the pathway of his song, he had built to himself an imperishable monument of love and honor, when, at the age of eighty, he handed the divining wand to Tennyson, and lay tranquilly down to sleep under the daisies of Grasmere. W. A. Croffut.

Mrs. William Wells.

TH

"

HE present agricultural editor and stock reporter for the New York Times" is, without doubt, one of the most remarkable women in the United States to day. Never before, in the annals of journalism, we venture to assert, has any woman held such a strange position. While her education was not directed towards such an occupation, she has gradually grown up to it, until today it may be doubted if any man or woman is better fitted to fill it. Her story is more romantic than a tale of fiction, full of strange, unthought of events in connection with the carcer of a woman. At the same time, it beautifully illustrates what a woman may accomplish when circumstances are such as to throw her out of the beaten track of her sex. Every day brings to light some great life accomplished by a woman, in walks little suspected by men. The longer we live the more fully we are convinced that women may do whatsoever they find to do, without unsexing themselves, or losing any of those charms so much admired by the opposite sex.

"Since I can do no good because a woman," Reach constantly at something that is near it,"

was sung by the brother poets, Beaumont and Fletcher, many years ago. Sentiments have changed since then; women can do good; they can live their own individual lives, support themselves if need be, while they accomplish as much in certain directions as men. Little Saint Theresa went forth one morning to seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors. Joan of Arc placed herself at the head of a crowd of ruffians, to free France from the presence of the invader. Many a woman since then has led an epic life. Some domestic reality has met them, perhaps, turning their footsteps into

paths heretofore untrodden. Such was the case with Mrs. Leonowens, the brilliant authoress. Finding herself a widow in India, with two small children to support, she accepted the invitation of the despotic King of Siam, to become the English governess of his royal family. She left all her friends, entering upon a new life, full of ominous mysteries, to earn bread. Those who have read her works, know something of her story. They know how she, looking into the secrets of that wonderful heathen people, studying Sanskrit, reading the literature of Siam, becoming familiar with its religion, its statesmen, its traditions, and customs, since her return to America has written books of the deepest interest. To look at the small, pale, modest woman, as one sees her in literary society in New York, one would never take her for a world-round traveller, a dweller in Asiatic palaces, an instructor of kings.

With Midy Morgan, the case is different. One cannot hear her talk for half an hour without discovering that she is a woman intensely fond of the lower animals. She expresses deep admiration for horses; she knows all the points of a good cow; she can talk sheep with a wool grower from California; or discourse learnedly about dogs, cats, and birds. So few American women know anything about animals, beyond tending a canary, or feeding the chickens! If more of them would practice horseback riding, it would give strength to their backs, tone to the stomach, and add roses to the cheeks.

The life of Midy Morgan may very properly be divided into three parts