tinent. He had entirely disapproved of the war against France, from its beginning in 1793 to about 1797; but when Napoleon emerged in 1798 as the conqueror of Switzerland and Italy, with vast imperialistic designs upon the Orient, and the evident purpose of making himself master of the world, Wordsworth began to see that English liberty, imperfect though he deemed it, was to be preferred before this travesty of Republicanism. But he was too stubborn to admit that he had changed his mind, and, moreover, he was restrained by the thought that Annette Vallon and the child, Caroline, were French. During the brief period of peace, in 1802, he and Dorothy hastened to France, met the mother and daughter at Calais, and arrived at some arrangement with Annette. It must have been an agreement to part completely, for at once Wordsworth began. writing, and publishing in the newspapers, those patriotic sonnets in which he gloried in the fact that England was the implacable foe of Napoleon; and furthermore, within two months he had married Mary Hutchinson, a girl friend of his sister. The poem called A Farewell was written shortly before leaving Grasmere on this prolonged excursion, so full of painful possibilities and happy hopes. The next year was enlivened by a journey through the west and south of Scotland, made by William, Dorothy, and Coleridge, with a horse and cart. It furnished material for most of the lovely poems composed in 1803. Repentance and anxiety in connection with his grievous ill-doing, the responsibilities of family life, the awful events of the war, which was raging anew, the disappointment of his hopes for a blessed revolution, and finally the death of his sailor brother, John, wrought in Wordsworth a profound change of heart, not sudden, hardly even admitted by himself to himself. To estimate its extent, one should read carefully the Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, in which he proclaims his confidence in the sufficiency of Nature-a proclamation repeated in Peter Belland then, immediately, turn to two poems composed in that crucial year 1805, the Ode to Duty and Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm. Here we find him honestly confessing that he needs something more than Nature's guidance, even while he holds fast with lingering attachment to the thought that, perhaps, for some souls, purer and more childlike than his, Nature may indeed be an all-sufficient light. He that comprehends these two poems and perceives that they stand at the very centre and turning-point of the man's moral history and of his poetic career, containing in line after line the essence of many of his other poems, may truly say that he knows the secret of Wordsworth. Everything that is unique or characteristic in his work radiates from this focus. That it is a double focus, and that even here we find no certainty, but only a question, are significant facts. Wordsworth was, in truth, not sure what he should profess. He was outspoken enough on both sides of the sharp divide which broke his life into two incompatible sections, frank in his naturalism before 1805, and vehement in the statement of supernaturalism throughout the long years that came after that. And to his immense credit, be it said, he was clear-eyed when he stood at the apex and looked before and after. Henceforth he is most careful to avoid even the appearance of naturalism; the names and attributes of God are mentioned with increasing frequency in his verse; he labors to be orthodox; he even alters some of his early poems so as to give them a less pagan as well as a less politically radical effect; but all in vain for any reader with eyes in his head, since doubt and a sense of loss perplex the thread of discourse and darken the colors that were once so bright. Another poem of this crucial period is the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. Its real subject, a recurring one with Wordsworth, is the superiority of natural perceptions, the fresh, direct perceptions of a child, over those that are made when experience and tradition have dulled our faculties. We have here, and in the Anecdote for Fathers and We Are Seven, variations upon the theme propounded by Rousseau, that the progress of the arts and sciences has tended to corrupt the morals of mankind. The child is father of the man, and if we would live well and preserve our original innocence and insight we must look back with respect, or natural piety, to the fountain-light of all our day, the master-light of all our seeing. This, at least, seems to have been the thought with which the poet began the ode and wrote the first nine starzas. But in the last two he is overcome by the same mood which dominated the composition of Elegiac Stanzas and the Ode to Duty, and he adds that we must find strength "In the soothing thoughts that spring Out of human suffering; In the faith that looks through death, In years that bring the philosophic mind." Interpretation of Wordsworth's poetry has been rendered extremely difficult and interesting by his habit of altering lines and whole passages long after they were originally composed. The Prelude, which has high autobiographical value, high historical value as a first-hand report of the French Revolution by a man of genius who witnessed an important part of it, and high philosophical value as a comment on the theories about nature and social life that inspired the leaders of that movement, was composed, for the most part, in 1800, 1804, and 1805, though some sections of it date from earlier years; but it was not published until 1850, after Wordsworth's death. He kept retouching it at intervals during that time, endeavoring, no doubt, to tone down the religious naturalism of the first three books and the political radicalism of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh, and to bring the whole into conformity with his later views. This process has deprived it of much of the authority it would otherwise have had as a source of knowledge of his early adventures and opinions. Yet even as we possess it now, it is easy to see that the mood of 1805, the mood of recantation, expressing itself in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth books, which date, on the whole, from that year, contrasts sharply with the mood or moods of the preceding eleven. The Prelude was intended to serve as the introduction to an enormous philosophical poem in three parts. A fragment of the first of these was written, and is represented in this volume, by three selections which contain the best lines. A second part, The Excursion, containing matter composed at various periods between 1795 and 1814, but chiefly after 1808, was published in 1814. The third part seems not to have been undertaken at all. The first selection from The Excursion is a narrative and descriptive piece begun in 1795 and known at first to Wordsworth and his friends as "Margaret, or the Ruined Cottage." He incorporated it rather violently into The Excursion, where it stands out from its surroundings as a beautiful example of his second manner, the plain, realistic manner which he used after abandoning his first, conventional and artificial style, as seen in An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. The selection from the Fourth Book shows him working in a much later manner, on an extremely abstruse subject. In its kind, what one might call "the philosophical sublime," it is surpassed by Milton, but by few if any other of our poets. Whatever may have been the effect of Wordsworth's religious change upon his character and everyday behavior, it is plain that his poetical powers, his boldness and originality, began to depart from him after 1805. The uncommon intensity of his interest in Nature had been due, in a considerable degree, to his theoretical veneration of Nature as a divine power, and when he gave up his theory he lost much of his peculiar insight. Similarly, his enthusiasm for the doctrine of human equality had enabled him to see fine points in the conduct of quite ordinary persons, and when he lost this enthusiasm he turned his gaze away from men, women, and children in humble circumstances and began to write about legendary and historical characters, as hundreds of other poets had done. Naturally enough, and perhaps without his being conscious of the fact, his style suffered a corresponding alteration, and by 1812 he had fallen back, on several occasions, into the use of words which he would have scornfully rejected a few years before as belonging to the artificial vocabulary of "Gaudyverse." He could write of wild ducks, for example, as "the feathered tenants of the flood," which is as remote from the language of real life as anything in Pope or Collins. In the Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle we find the last great poem which he composed under his old impulses, belief in the essential equality of men, trust in the moralizing power of Nature, and reverence for the ideals of child hood. The meaning and force of the whole poem are revealed in the last four stanzas. It is a commonplace to say that Laodamia, written in 1814, is a wonderful example of true classical poetry, classical in every sense of the word,-as being founded on a Greek legend, composed with Greek clearness and restraint, and written with Virgilian elevation and regard for the exact meaning of words, in language which the best English writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries might have used in their happiest moments. No one has remarked, publicly at least, that it is also, probably, an apologia for Wordsworth's final separation from Annette, a highly idealized and imaginatively transformed account of the meeting and parting at Calais in the summer of 1802. In like manner, and even more obviously, Dion is the most condensed expression of his reason for giving up and finally condemning the French Revolution. He lost faith, not in the cause itself, but in the instruments. This is all summed up in the last three lines of the poem: "Him only pleasure leads, and peace attends, Whose means are fair and spotless as his ends." The Warning and the lines which immediately precede it have been included in the present volume to show how alarmed Wordsworth was in his old age by the democratic movement which resulted in Catholic emancipation, the abolition of penalties on combination of workmen, the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, the extension of the franchise, Free Trade, and other measures, which were among the reforms for which he pleaded in his letter to the Bishop of Llandaff. Truly we have here a different man, a trembling conservative in place of a hopeful radical, and so he remained until his death, in 1850. Throughout the long years when his poetical inspiration was declining, Wordsworth's artistic skill, his technique, continued to develop, and occasionally the deeper power returned and he produced noble sonnets and other pieces, such as Mutability, the farewell to Sir Walter Scott, The Pillar of Trajan, and the touching lines entitled Memory, which may be read as a reiteration, by the aged poet, of |