narrative poems written at this time Michael, Resolution and Independence, The Brothers, and Margaret are the best known. In 1805 the Ode to Duty was written and in 1806 the Ode on Intimations of Immortality was finished. The White Doe of Rylstone belongs to the year 1808; Laodamia and Dion were both done in 1814, the year which may best be taken as the beginning of the second division. In this year was finished the Excursion, his longest poem, the second part of the projected Recluse, of which the Prelude had been made an introduction. The Excursion, like the Prelude, is a naïve statement in blank verse of his experiences and his philosophy, and to it we are indebted for much autobiography.

Even more important than the Excursion, in studying Wordsworth's life, is the great Ode on Intimations of Immortality. At first he states the theory that the boy, coming "from God, who is our home," is more wholly spiritual than the man; then that the man, under the influence of material surroundings, daily must travel farther from the east, gradually grows away from spiritual things, loses the divine presence which in the boy "is not to be put by," comes at last to

"Forget the glories he hath known,

And that imperial palace whence he came."

If Wordsworth had stopped here, the philosophy of the poem would be dreary enough and incompatible with his other work; it would have to be regarded as a freak, the offspring of a despondent mood. But he saves himself by contradicting himself, by saying that in us is "something that doth live," a "shadowy recollection " of the childhood glory.

"Hence, in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither."

There still exists that

"primal sympathy

Which having been must ever be."

"The innocent brightness of a new-born day
Is lovely yet;

The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober coloring from an eye

That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality."

Is not here a complete record of his childish idealism, of his period of conflict and despair, and of his maturity that brought back the idealism tempered and tried and infused with a love for man? He could finally say, at the end of the poem,

"To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

On account of this soberer faith that came with "years that bring the philosophic mind," because of his recanting from the wilder principles of the French Revolution, Wordsworth was accused by some of deserting the cause. Browning's Lost Leader, which the author himself would not admit to be the "very effigies" of Wordsworth, has been no doubt responsible for an accusation so false. Wordsworth's change was the natural result of maturity. Coleridge, too, recanted. All his great contemporaries did so, in fact, except Byron and Shelley, who were both constitutionally unable to put up with social laws. It is ridiculous to think that Wordsworth ever deserted for "a handful of silver" or for

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a riband to stick in his coat;" and of course Browning never meant that directly of him.

Until his death Wordsworth continued to write much. Among the great mass of indifferent poems in this second period (1814-50) there shine out The Duddon Sonnets (1820); one or two odes, such as that To a Skylark, beginning" Ethereal minstrel" (1825); and Yarrow Revisited (1831). During the years 1821-22 he wrote a great quantity of sonnets collected under the title Ecclesiastical Sonnets, and during a trip to Italy in 1837 he composed several poems included under the title Memorials of a Tour in Italy. In 1829-30 he spent much time over a translation of part of the Eneid. At this time, too, he wrote considerable prose, the most interesting of which is his description of the Scenery of the Lakes (1822). His magnum opus, The Recluse, was never finished. Of the three books planned, the first, called Home at Grasmere, to go between The Prelude and The Excursion, was published in 1888. A large part of what was intended for the third book is scattered among other poems. A fitting recognition finally accorded him came in the appointment to the post of poet-laureate, left vacant by the death of Southey in 1843.

Wordsworth's last days were very tranquil. At the age of eighty, after taking a cold which developed pleurisy, he died quietly at noon, on April 23, 1850. His grave was put between those of his sister Dorothy and his daughter Dora in Grasmere Churchyard, and to these was added, nine years later, that of his wife.

In spite of the laureateship and of his great age, the poet did not win very wide recognition till years after his death. There was not enough of the spectacular in

him to storm popular citadels, when Scott, Coleridge, and Byron were claiming attention. And immediately after his death Tennyson, with a more universal voice, held the ear of England. It was necessary, moreover, for the world, under the guidance of such excellent interpreters as Matthew Arnold, to grow to a comprehension of his meaning. There is in him a splendid spiritual power, an imperishable word to those who will truly listen.

"He is retired as noontide dew,

Or fountain in a noonday grove :
And you must love him, ere to you
He will seem worthy of your love.

"The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
And impulses of deeper birth

Have come to him in solitude.

"In common things that round us lie
Some random truths he can impart;

The harvest of a quiet eye

That broods and sleeps on his own heart."

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

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"As to my shape," Coleridge said in a letter describing himself, "'t is a good shape enough, if measured — but my gait is awkward, and the walk of the whole man indicates indolence capable of energies." Here are expressed the two most striking things about Coleridge: he was a very capable man, and he somehow usually failed to achieve the results he promised. He was one of the keenest critics of his time, he was a widely versed scholar, and he had a poetic skill rarely surpassed. Nor did he fail for want of divine fire; back of his scholarship and skill lay an especially bright genius. But physical irresolution possessed him from the first; he fell into indolence and then into opium-eating; and from a condition where he saw the bright visions of youth pass unrecorded, he sank rapidly to a condition where the visions grew feebler and more indistinct. As if to make his life more tragic, his reason remained good to the end; he saw clearly the awful penalty he was paying. There is something very sad in the humor of Lamb, in writing of Coleridge in 1810: "Coleridge has powdered his hair, and looks like Bacchus, Bacchus ever sleek and young. He is going to turn sober, but his clock has not struck yet." As early as 1794, when he was only twenty-two, Coleridge saw and expressed the tragedy of his life:

"Sloth-jaundiced all! and from my graspless hand

Drop Friendship's precious pearls, like hour-glass sand." Yet in spite of this curse of irresolution, Coleridge