enlarge upon a theme without illuminating it or he may philosophise upon the obvious; but his emotion is always sincere. The natural result is that those who put themselves under his guidance find more than appears at first sight in the studious quiet of his verse. Beneath its placid surface there is a reserve of feeling upon which the lover of poetry can always draw. His confidence in the faithfulness of Nature to those who will be led by her never fails: it is the influence which gives his poetry its supreme power of tranquillising and uplifting, of drawing aside the veil that hides from us 'to what fair countries we are bound.'

One particular district of England supplied Wordsworth with the most fruitful material for his verse. We speak of the 'Lake poets,' because Wordsworth lived at Grasmere, and Coleridge made his intermittent home for a few unhappy years at Keswick in the house permanently associated with the memory of Southey. But Coleridge is emphatically the poet, not of the Lake country, but of the Quantocks, amid which, in his native west, his most productive period was passed. The sources of Southey's poetry were his library, his love of early literature and romance. There is only one 'Lake poet' in the true sense of the term. Wordsworth was born upon the verge of the Lake country, where the Cocker, descending Lorton vale from Crummock water, falls into the Derwent. Nature revealed herself to him first on the surface of Esthwaite water and among the fells of Windermere and Coniston. His life at Racedown and Alfoxden had

a profound influence upon his intellectual development; but the low hills and rich valleys of the west had little effect upon his powers of description. It has already been remarked that the interest of Tintern Abbey is its spiritual beauty: the actual scene, sketched in the most perfunctory manner, goes for nothing, save in so far as its peaceful charm prompted him to a retrospect of the long debt which he owed to Nature. In order to picture natural scenery completely, to give the spirit of Nature a local habitation and home, he needed the presence of lakes and mountains. Where his imagination rises to its full grandeur in The Prelude, it is among such scenes, in the silence of night upon Esthwaite, in the flying shadows and the brightness of sea and mountain when vows were made for him by Nature as the summer sun rose, in the disturbed solitude of the Grande Chartreuse beside the sister streams of Life and Death, amid the cliffs and torrents of Alpine passes, in the moonlit groves by the lake of Como, in the mountain mists through which the Cumbrian shepherd drives his flock, and on the slopes of Snowdon with the moon riding in the firmament and the hill-tops heaving their 'dusky backs' above the sea of fog below. The inspiration which makes these passages memorable comes from his native Lake country. Its barren mountain-summits, the tranquil sheets of water that lie securely within their folds, moulded his spirit into a form identical with their own. His mind became the mirror of their stern grandeur and their peace; and 'the voice of mountain-torrents' is

audible again and again as we listen to his poetry, carrying far into our hearts 'a gentle shock of mild surprise.'

At the same time, just as poetic ornament is only a part, and not an indispensable part, of poetry, the power of describing scenery was only one aspect, and not the most essential aspect, of Wordsworth's debt to the Lakes. Nature did not confine herself to the task of infusing her personality into inanimate objects and giving them a being and a voice: her dwelling was everywhere, the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man. The change of mind recorded in Tintern Abbey was wrought by the growing conviction, enforced upon Wordsworth during the most unsettled period of his life, of the abiding relationship between man and Nature. Nature was no mere external power, to be admired and feared her spirit was inherent in man, bringing him into communion or possibility of communion with all that shared it, the influence which binds together the whole universe. To become the poet of Nature, Wordsworth had to emerge from solitary enjoyments into social life, to learn sympathy with his fellow-men. 'The still sad music of humanity' taught him the true meaning of those early visitations which Nature had vouchsafed him. More especially, his experiences in France gave him a fellow-feeling for the poor and the oppressed. In their strife against hardships which

threatened to overwhelm them, he found the virtues of independence, fortitude, mutual affection and selfsacrifice flourish most bravely. If an 'impulse from a vernal wood' can teach us more of man than all the sages, so the lessons of the unlettered and simple are of more value than the hoarded wisdom of book-learning. This is Wordsworth's constant theme in Lyrical Ballads: it is the substantive element which gives beauty and dignity to the unpretending verse of Resolution and Independence and Ruth, it is the quality which redeems The Idiot Boy and Peter Bell from the charge of wilful grotesqueness and intensifies the tragic pathos of The Affliction of Margaret and The Thorn. It called forth his highest lyrical gifts in The Solitary Reaper and in two only less beautiful poems of the Scottish tour of 1803, To a Highland Girl and Stepping Westward. Nowhere, however, did he find more opportunity for enlarging upon this subject than in the Lake country. The surroundings of Grasmere furnished him with the material of a pastoral life, led among difficulties and natural obstacles of a most formidable kind, shut out from the ordinary advantages of less sequestered districts, self-contained within the narrow bounds of arduous daily duty. Such a life might have provoked the gushings of a sentimentalist, content to admire and envy it for its merely artistic perfection. But Wordsworth loved and understood it, and lived among poor men with a kindred frugality. The Cumbrian peasant, farming his small plot of ground in daily

conflict with the powers of Nature, became his type of the highest virtues, virtues which rose to meet the unremitting call of duty. Nature, the stern teacher and taskmistress, taught love as well as fear. The dangers of the mountains, mist, storm and precipice, were not merely risks against which the countryman had to guard. They became the inspiration of his life, forming his character, developing courage and self-reliance, and imbuing him with their own severity and nobility.

Wordsworth, contemplating the encouragement which he had derived from this source, found an analogy to his own case in the legend of the Shepherd lord, the heir of the house of Clifford, who, saved from the ruin of his family, learned the mercy and justice and tranquillity of soul unknown to his fathers among the shepherds of the valleys at the foot of Helvellyn. The calm stanzas which follow the ecstasies of the Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle apply to the romantic story the experience of Wordsworth himself:

Love had he found in huts where poor men lie;
His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,

The sleep that is among the lonely hills.

Of the active application of this training to the life and scenes which lay immediately round him, no more perfect illustration can be chosen than Michael. It is a narrative of the simplest kind, the story of a Grasmere cottager whose ambitions are centred upon the preservation of