CHAPTER VI

.

IS THIS ALCESTE?

Minola's mind was a good deal disturbed by the various little events of the day, the incidents and consequences of her first visit in London. She began to see with much perplexity and disappointment that her life of lonely independence was likely to be compromised. She was not sure that she could much like the Moneys, and yet she felt that they were disposed and determined to be very kind to her. There was something ridiculous and painful in the fact that Mr. Augustus Sheppard's name was thrust upon her almost at the first moment of her crossing for the first time a strange threshold in London; then there was Mary Blanchet's brother turning up; and Mary Blanchet herself was evidently falling off from the high design of lonely independence. Again, there was Mr. Heron, who now knew where she lived, and who often went to the British Museum, and who might cross her path at any hour. Sweet, lonely freedom, happy carelessness of action, farewell!

Mr. Heron was especially a trouble to Minola. The kindly, grave expression on his face when he heard of her living alone declared, as nearly as any words could do, that he considered her an object of pity. Was she an object of pity? Was that the light in which any one could look at her superb project of playing at a lifelong holiday? And if people chose to look at it so, what did that matter to her? Are women, then, the slaves of the opinion of people all around them? "They are," Minola said to herself in scorn and melancholy--"they are; we are. I am shaken to the very soul, because a young man, for whose opinion on any other subject I should not care anything, chooses to look at me with pity!"

The night was melancholy. When the outer world was shut out, and the gas was lighted, and the two women sat down to work and talk, nothing seemed to Minola quite as it had been. The evident happiness and passing high spirits of the little poetess oppressed her. Mary Blanchet was so glad to be making acquaintances, and to have some prospect of seeing the inside of a London home. Then Minola's kindlier nature returned to her, and she thought of Mary's delight at seeing her brother, and how unkind it would be if she, Minola, did not try to enter into her feelings. Her mind went back to her own brother, to their dear early companionship, when nothing seemed more natural and more certain than that they two should walk the world arm-in-arm. Now all that had come to an end--faded away somehow; and he had gone into the world on his own account, and made other ties, and forgotten her. But if he were even now to come back, if she were to hear in the street the sound of the peculiar whistle with which he always announced his coming to her--oh, how, in spite of all his forgetfulness and her anger, she would run to him and throw her arms around his neck! Why should not Mary Blanchet love her brother, and gladden when he came?

"What is your brother like, Mary, dear?" she said gently, anxious to propitiate by voluntarily entering on the topic dearest to her friend.

"Oh, very handsome--very, very handsome!"

Miss Grey smiled in spite of herself.

"Now, Minola, I know what you are smiling at; you think it is my sisterly nonsense, and all that; but wait until you see."

"I'll wait," Minola said.

Miss Grey did not go out the next day as usual, although it was one of the soft, amber-gray, autumnal days that she loved, and the Regent's Park would have looked beautiful. She remained nearly all the morning in her own room, and avoided even Mary Blanchet. Some singular change had taken place within her, for which she could not account, otherwise than by assuming that it was begotten of the fear that she would be drawn, willingly or unwillingly, into uncongenial companionship, and must renounce her liberty. She was forced into a strange, painful, self-questioning mood. Was the whole fabric of her self-appointed happiness and independence only a dream, or, worse than a dream, an error? So soon to doubt the value and the virtue of the emancipation she had prayed for and planned for during years? Not often, perhaps, has a warm-hearted, fanciful, and spirited girl been pressed down by such peculiar relationship as hers at Keeton lately; a twice removed stepfather and stepmother, absolutely uncongenial with her, causing her soul and her youth to congeal amid dull repression. What wonder that to her all happiness seemed to consist in mere freedom and unrestricted self-development? And now--so soon--why does she begin to doubt the reality, the fulfilment of her happiness? Only because an impulsive and kindly young man, whom she saw for the first time, looked pityingly at her. This, she said to herself, is what our self-reliance and our emancipation come to after all.

It was a positive relief to her, after a futile hour or so of such questioning, when Mary Blanchet ran up stairs, and with beaming eyes begged that Minola would come and see her brother. "He is longing to see you--and you will like him--oh, you will like him, Minola dearest?" she said beseechingly.

Miss Gray went down stairs straightway, without stopping to give one touch to her hair, or one glance at the glass. The little poetess was waiting a moment, with an involuntary look toward the dressing table, as if Miss Grey must needs have some business there before she descended, but Miss Grey thought nothing of the kind, and they went down stairs together.

Minola expected, she could not tell why, to see a small and withered man in Mary Blanchet's brother. When they were entering the drawing-room, he was looking out of the window, and had his back turned, and she was surprised to see that he was decidedly tall. When he turned around she saw not only that he was handsome, but that she had recognized the fact of his being handsome before. For he was unmistakably the ideal poet of schoolgirls whom she had met at Mr. Money's house the day before.

The knowledge produced a sort of embarrassment to begin with. Minola was about to throw her soul into the sacrifice, and greet her friend's brother with the utmost cordiality. But she had pictured to herself a sort of Mary Blanchet in trousers, a gentle, old-fashioned, timid person, whom, perhaps, the outer world was apt to misprize, if not even to snub, and whom therefore it became her, Minola Grey, as an enemy and outlaw of the common world, to receive with double consideration. But this brilliant, self-conceited, affected, oppressively handsome young man, on whom she had seen Lucy Money and her mother hanging devotedly, was quite another sort of person. His presence seemed to overcharge the room; the scene became all compound of tall, bending form and dark eyes.

"I am glad to see you, Mr. Blanchet," Miss Grey began, determined not to be put out by any self-conceited poet and ideal of schoolgirls. "I must be glad to see you, because you are Mary's brother."

"You ought rather to be not glad to see me for that reason," he said, with a deprecating bow and a slight shrug of the shoulders, "for I have been a very neglectful brother to Mary."

"So I have heard," Miss Grey said, "but not from Mary. She always defended you. But I have seen you before, Mr. Blanchet, have I not?"

"At Mrs. Money's yesterday? Oh, yes; I only saw you, Miss Grey. I went there to see you, and only in the most literal way got what I wanted."

"But, Herbert, you never told me that you were going, or that you knew Mrs. Money," his sister interposed.

"No, dear; that was an innocent deceit on my part. You told me that Miss Grey had gone there, and as I knew the Moneys I hurried away there without telling you. I wanted to know what you were like, Miss Grey, before seeing my sister again. I hope you are not angry? She is so devoted to you that she painted you in colors the most bewitching; but I was afraid her friendship was carrying her away, and I wanted to see for myself when she was not present."

Miss Grey remained resolutely silent. She thought this beginning

## particularly disagreeable, and began to fear that she should never be

able to like Mary Blanchet's brother. "Oh, why do women have brothers?" she asked herself. There seemed something dishonest in Mr. Blanchet's proceeding despite the frank completeness of his confession.

"Well, Herbert, confess that I didn't do her justice; didn't do her common justice," the enthusiastic Mary exclaimed.

"If Miss Grey would not be offended," her brother said, "I would say that I see in her just the woman capable of doing the kind and generous things I have heard of."

"Yes; but we mustn't talk about it," the poetess said, with tears of gratefulness blinking in her eyes; "and we'll not say a word more about it, Minola; not a word, indeed, dear." And she put a deprecating little hand upon Minola's arm.

Then they all sat down, and Herbert Blanchet began to talk. He talked very well, and he seemed to have put away most of the airs of affectation which, even in her very short opportunity of observation, Minola had seen in him when he was talking to the Money girls.

"You have travelled a great deal," Miss Grey said. "I envy you."

"If you call it travelling. I have drifted about the world a good deal, and seen the wrong sides of everything. I make it pay in a sort of way. When any place that I know is brought into public notice by a war or something of the kind, I write about it. Or if a place is not brought into any present notice by anything, I write about it, and take a different view from anybody else. I have done particularly well with Italy, showing that Naples is the ugliest place in all the world; that the Roman women have shockingly bad figures, and that the climate is wretched from the Alps to the Straits of Messina.

"But you don't think that?" Mary Blanchet said wonderingly.

"Don't I? Well, I don't know. I almost think I do for the moment. One can get into that frame of mind. Besides, I really don't care about scenery. I don't observe it as I pass along. And I like to say what other people don't say, and to see what they don't see. Of course I don't put my name to any of these things; they are only done to make a living. I live _on_ such stuff as that. I live _for_ Art."

"It is glorious to live for art," his sister exclaimed, pressing her thin, tiny hands together.

Mr. Blanchet did not seem to care much about his sister's approval.

"My art isn't yours, Mary," he said, with a pitying smile. "Pictures of flowers and little children saying their prayers, and nice poems about good young men and women, are your ideas of painting and poetry, I am sure. You are a lover of the human race, I know."

"I hope I love my neighbors," Mary said earnestly.

"I hope you do, dear. All good little women like you ought to do that. Do _you_ love your neighbor, Miss Grey?"

"I don't care much for any one," Miss Grey answered decisively, "except Mary Blanchet. But I have no particular principle or theory about it, only that I don't care for people."

Although Miss Grey had Alceste for her hero, she did not like sham misanthropy, which she now fancied her visitor was trying to display. Perhaps too she began to think that his misanthropy rather caricatured her own.

Miss Blanchet, on the contrary, was inclined to argue the question, and to pelt her brother with touching commonplaces.

"The more we know people," she emphatically declared, "the more good we see in them. In every heart there is a deep spring of goodness. Oh, yes!"

"There isn't in mine, I know," he said. "I speak for myself."

"For shame, Herbert! How else could you ever feel impelled to try and do some good for your fellow creatures?"

"But I don't want to do any good to my fellow creatures. I don't care about my fellow creatures, and I don't even admit that they are my fellow creatures, those men and those women too that one sees about. Why should the common possession of two legs make us fellow creatures with every man, more than with every bird? No, I don't love the human race at all."

"This is nonsense, Minola; you won't believe a word of it," the little poetess eagerly said, divided between admiration and alarm.

"You good, little, innocent dear, is it not perfectly true? What did I ever do for you, let me ask? There, Miss Grey, you see as kind an elder sister as ever lived. I remember her a perfect mother to me. I dare say I should have been dead thirty years ago but for her, though whether I ought to thank her for keeping me alive is another thing. Anyhow, what was my way of showing my gratitude? As soon as I could shake myself free, I rambled about the world, a very vagrant, and never took any thought of her. We are all the same, Miss Grey, believe me--we men."

"I can well believe it," Miss Grey said.

"Of course you can. In all our dealings with you women we are just the same. Our sisters and mothers take trouble without end for us, and cry their eyes out for us, and we--what do we care? I am not worse than my neighbors. But if you ask me, do I admire my fellow man, I answer frankly, no. Not I. What should I admire him for?"

"One must live for something," the poetess pleaded, much perplexed in her heart as to what Miss Grey's opinion might be about all this.

"Of course one must live for art; for music and poetry, and colors and decoration."

"And Nature?" Mary Blanchet gently insinuated.

"Nature--no! Nature is the buxom sweetheart of ploughboy poets. We only affect to admire Nature because people think we can't be good if we don't. No one really cares about great cauliflower suns, and startling contrasts of blazing purple and emerald green. There is nothing really beautiful in Nature except her decay; her rank weeds, and dank grasses, and funereal evening glooms."

While he talked this way he was seated on the piano stool, with his face turned away from the piano, on whose keys he touched every now and then with a light and seemingly careless hand, bringing out only a faint note that seemed to help the conversation rather than to interrupt it. He was very handsome, Minola could not help thinking, and there was something in his colorless face and deep eyes that seemed congenial with the talk of glooms and decay. Still, true to her first feeling toward all men, Minola was disposed to dislike him, the more especially as he spoke with an air of easy superiority, as one who would imply that he knew how to maintain his place above women in creation.

"I thought all you poets affected to be in love with Nature," she said. "I mean you younger poets," and she emphasized the word "younger" with a certain contemptuous tone, which made it just what it meant to be--"smaller poets."

"Why younger poets?"

"Well, because the elder ones I think really were in love with Nature, and didn't affect anything."

He smiled pityingly.

"No," he said decisively, "we don't care about Nature--our school."

"I am from the country; I don't think I know what your school is."

"We don't want to be known in the country; we couldn't endure to be known in the country."

"But fame?" Minola asked--"does fame not go outside the twelve-mile radius?"

"Oh, Miss Grey, do pray excuse me, but you really don't understand us; we don't want fame. What is fame? Vulgarity made immortal."

"Then what do you publish for?"

He rose from his seat and seized his hair with both hands; then constrained himself to endurance, and sat down again.

"My dear young lady, we don't publish; we don't intend to publish. No man in his senses would publish for us if we were never so well inclined. No one could sell six copies. The great, thick-headed public couldn't understand us. We are satisfied that the true artist never does have a public--or look for it. The public can have their Tennysons, and Brownings, and Swinburnes, and Tuppers, and all that lot----"

"That lot!" broke in Miss Blanchet, mildly horrified--"that lot! Browning and Tupper put together!"

"My dear Mary, I don't know one of these people from another; I never read any of them now. They are all the same sort of thing to me. These persons are not artists; they are only men trying to amuse the public. Some of them, I am told, are positively fond of politics."

"Don't your school care for politics?" Miss Grey asked, now growing rather amused.

"Oh, no; we never trouble ourselves about such things. What can it matter whether the Reform bill is carried--is there a Reform bill going on now?--I believe there always is--or what becomes of the Eastern Question, or whether New Zealand has a constitution? These are questions for vestrymen, not artists; we don't love man."

"There I am with you," Miss Grey said; "if that alone were qualification enough, I should be glad to be one of your fraternity, for I don't love man; I think he is a poor creature at his best."

"So do I," said the poet, turning toward her with eyes in which for the moment a deep and genuine feeling seemed to light up; "the poorest creature, at his best! Why should any one turn aside for a moment from his path to help such a thing? What does it matter, the welfare of him and his pitiful race? Let us sing, and play, and paint, and forget him and the destiny that he makes such a work about. Wisdom only consists in shutting our ears to his cries of ambition, and jealousy, and pain, and being happy in our own way and forgetting him."

Their eyes met for a moment, and then Minola lowered hers. In that instant a gleam of sympathy had passed from her eyes into his, and he knew it. She felt a little humiliated somehow, like a proud fencer suddenly disarmed at the first touch of his adversary. For, as he was speaking scorn of the human race, she was saying to herself, "This man, I do believe, has suffered deeply. He has found people cold, and mean, and selfish--as _I_ have--and he feels it, and cannot hide it. I did him wrong; he is not a fribble or sham cynic, only a disappointed dreamer." The sympathy which she felt showed itself only too quickly in her very eloquent eyes.

Herbert Blanchet rose after an instant of silence and took his leave, asking permission to call again, which Miss Grey would have gladly refused if she could have stood up against the appealing looks of Mary. So she had to grant him the permission, thinking as she gave it that another path of her liberty was closed.

Mary went to the door with her brother, and, much to Minola's gratification, remained a long time talking with him there.

Miss Grey went to the piano and began to sing; softly to herself, that she might not be heard outside. The short autumnal day was already closing in London. Out in the country there would be two hours yet of light before the round, red sun went down behind the sloping fields, with the fresh upturned earth, and the clumps of trees, but here, in West-Central regions of London, the autumn day dies in its youth. The dusk already gathered around the singer, who sang to please or to soothe herself. In any troubled mood Miss Grey had long been accustomed to clear her spirits by singing to herself; and on many a long, dull Sunday at home--in the place that was called her home--she had committed the not impious fraud of singing her favorite ballads to slow, slow time, that they might be mistaken for hymns and pass unreproved. Her voice and way of singing made the song seem like a sweet, plaintive recitative, just the singing to hear in the "gloaming," to draw a few people hushed around it, and hold them in suspense, fearful to lose a single note, and miss the charm of expression. In truth, the charm of it sprang from the fact that the singer sang to express her own emotions, and thus every tone had its reality and its meaning. When women sing for a listening company, they sing conventionally, and in the way that some teacher has taught, or in what they believe to be the manner of some great artist; or they sing to somebody or at somebody, and in any case they are away from that truthfulness which in art is simply the faithful expression of real emotion. With Minola Grey singing was an end rather than a means; a relief in itself, a new mood in itself; a passing away from poor and personal emotions into ideal regions, where melancholy, if it must be, was always divine; and pain, if it would intrude, was purifying and ennobling. So, while the little poetess talked with her brother in the dusk, at the doorway, with the gas lamps just beginning to light the monotonous street, Minola was singing herself into the pure blue ether, above the fogs, and clouds, and discordant, selfish voices.

She came back to earth with something like a heavy fall, as Mary Blanchet ran in upon her in the dark and exclaimed--

"Now, do tell me--how do you like my brother?"

To say the truth, Miss Grey did not well know. "I wonder is he an Alceste?" she asked herself. On the whole, his coming had made an uncomfortable, anxious, uncanny impression upon her, and she looked back with a kind of hopeless regret on the days when she had London all to herself, and knew nobody.

WORDSWORTH'S CORRECTIONS.

When an author, in his later editions, departs from his earlier text, he is apt to reveal some traits of his method and genius that might not otherwise have been so evident, and a poet's corrections may thus have more than a merely curious interest. Take Mr. Tennyson's, for instance: "The Princess," to say nothing of his shorter emended poems, has been, one might say, rewritten since the first edition, and his corrections are always interesting. Yet they spring, I think, from a narrower range of motive than Wordsworth's; they are directed more exclusively toward the object of artistic finish; they commonly show the poet busied in casting perfume upon the lily. Take this example from "The Miller's Daughter." In the first version of that poem, as it appeared in 1842, we are told that before the heroine's reflection became visible in the mill-pool--

A water-rat from off the bank Plunged in the stream.

Later editions give us this more graceful version of what occurred:

Then leapt a trout. In lazy mood I watch'd the little circles die; They passed into the level flood, And there a vision caught my eye.

Unquestionably that is an improvement, and of a sort which Wordsworth was continually making. But Wordsworth's corrections do not merely illustrate the effort to reach artistic finish, though very many of them are made with that intent; they have a relation to his theories, tastes, creeds, to his temperament and training, to his manner of receiving friendly or hostile criticism; and in comparing these textual variations we seem to watch the artist at his work--to enter in some sort into his very consciousness--as we see him manipulating the form or the thought of his verses:

Ta de torneuei, ta de kollomelei, Kai gnomotupei, k'autonomazei.

Nor is this to consider too curiously; Wordsworth himself has invited us to the task. In his letters as well as in the notes to his poems, frequent mention is made of these labors of emendation. Writing in 1837 to Edward Quillinan, he asks him to "take the trouble ... of comparing the corrections in my last edition [that of 1836] with the text in the preceding one," "in the correction of which I took great pains," as he had written to Prof. Reed a month before. And there is ample opportunity of this sort; I do not know an ampler one of the kind in the works of any other poet. Tasso's _variae lectiones_ are numerous, but they were mostly made to conciliate his critics; Milton's are of great interest, but they are comparatively few in number, and Gray's are fewer still: Pope's are numerous, but not often interesting; while Tennyson's, as I have intimated, seem to me to spring from a less serious poetic faculty than Wordsworth's, and are therefore less significant. But I am anxious not to claim too much significance for Wordsworth's corrections, for I can do little more here than to point out some of them, leaving for the most part their interpretation to the reader. To attempt more than this would be to enter upon an analysis of Wordsworth's genius, for which this is not the occasion.

And yet we shall see, I think, that his genius might be in some sort "restored," as naturalists say, were it necessary, from these fragmentary data, for Wordsworth's corrections cover the whole term of his literary activity. He preferred, one might say, to correct after publication rather than before; and, revising his youthful writing during a second and a third generation following, his final texts had received the benefit of more than half a century of criticism by himself and others. From the year 1793, in which his first volumes appeared, the "Evening Walk" and the "Descriptive Sketches," to the year of his death, 1850, he put forth not fewer than twenty-four separate publications in verse, each of which contained more or less of poetry previously unpublished; and in the greater number of these texts may be found variations from the previous readings. The larger part of them, indeed, are slight--the change of single words, the alteration of phrases, the transposition of verses or stanzas. And yet few of them, I think, are quite without interest for persons in whose reading, as Wordsworth himself expresses it, "poetry has continued to be comprehended as a study." I have noted some thousands of his corrections; but a copious citation of them might weary all but actual students of poetic _technique_, a class that is hardly as numerous, I suspect, as that of the actual practitioners of poetry, and I will therefore keep mainly to such _variae lectiones_ as may be referred to motives of more general interest.[B]

[Footnote B: After the early poems just mentioned and the "Lyrical Ballads," 1798 to 1802, the chief editions to be consulted for the changes of text are the complete editions of 1807, 1815, and 1836, and the original issues of "The Excursion" (1814), of "The White Doe of Rylston" (1815), of "Peter Bell," and of "The Waggoner" (1819). Unfortunately I have not been able to get access to Mr. W. Johnston's useful collection of Wordsworth's "Earlier Poems" (London, 1857): it would have lightened the task of collecting the _variantes_, the more important of which, for the period covered by the collection, are given in it. But, having gone in nearly every case to the original texts, I need hardly say that I have been careful to quote them accurately in the present article.]

The first question which we naturally ask about Wordsworth's corrections is this: Were they improvements? My readers will decide for themselves; for my own part, it seems to me that they generally were improvements; that Wordsworth bettered his text three times out of four when he changed it. Nor is this surprising; few admirers of Wordsworth's poetry will deny that there were many passages quite susceptible of amendment in it; for that task there was ample room. But on the other hand, it happened not infrequently, as we might expect, that when the poet returned, in the critical mood, to mend his first form of expression, he marred it instead. In the poem, for instance, beginning, "Strange fits of passion have I known," the second stanza as originally published ran thus:

When she I loved was strong and gay, And like a rose in June, I to her cottage bent my way, Beneath the evening moon. --_Lyrical Ballads_, 1800.

The passage stood thus for many years, and was finally altered to read:

When she I loved looked every day Fresh as a rose in June, I to her cottage bent my way, Beneath an evening moon.

Is there not some loss of vividness here? The later reading is perhaps the more graceful, and yet the picture seems to me brighter in the early version. This, too, seems a doubtful improvement; it occurs in "The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale." Wordsworth wrote at first:

His staff is a sceptre--his gray hairs a crown: Erect as a sunflower he stands, and the streak Of the unfaded rose is expressed on his cheek. --1815.

In later editions we read:

His bright eyes look brighter, set off by the streak Of the unfaded rose that still blooms on his cheek.

Here the last line is bettered; but I, for one, am sorry to lose the sunflower comparison; it is picturesque, and it aptly describes this hearty child of the earth.

Look now at the poem "We are Seven," as it began in the "Lyrical Ballads":

A simple child, dear brother Jim, That lightly draws its breath, And feels its life in every limb-- What should it know of death?

It is now sixty years since "dear brother Jim" was dismissed from his place in these lines--dismissed, perhaps, with the less compunction because the stanza was written by another hand--Coleridge's--as an introduction to the rest of the poem. But I think the lines were better as the young poets first sent them forth. "Brother Jim" had, perhaps, no clearly demonstrable business in the poem; and yet, having been there, we miss him now that he is gone. That homely apostrophe had in it the primitive impulses of the Lake school feeling; the phrase refuses to be forgotten, and seems to have a persistent life of its own. I have seen the missing words restored, in pencil marks, to their rightful place in the text of copies belonging to old-fashioned gentlemen who remembered the original reading. Nor can we easily deny existence to our "dear brother Jim"; his name still lingers in our memories, haunting about the page from which it was excluded long ago; he lives, and deserves to live, as the symbol of immortal fraternity.

But as I have said, Wordsworth mended his text oftener than he marred it, and first by refining upon his descriptions of outward nature. Among the cases in point, one occurs in a poem entitled "Influences of Natural objects in calling forth and strengthening the Imagination in Boyhood and early Youth"--a cumbrous heading enough. May I digress for a moment upon the unlucky titles which Wordsworth so often prefixed to his poems, and the improvements occasionally made in them? Surely a less convenient caption than the one just quoted is not often met with, or a less attractive one than this other, prefixed to an inscription not very many times longer than itself:

"Written at the Request of Sir George Beaumont, Bart., and in his Name, for an Urn, placed by him at the termination of a newly-planted Avenue in the same Grounds."

Titles like these are not only fatiguing in the very reading, a preliminary disenchantment, but they are not properly names at all; they are headings, rubrics, captions which do not name. Wordsworth seems to send forth these unlucky children of the muse with a full description of their eyes, hair, and complexion, but forgets to christen them; and I believe that this oversight, though it may not appear a very serious one, has interfered more than a little with the effectiveness of his minor poetry, and consequently with the fame and influence of the poet. For it makes reference to them difficult, almost impossible: how is one to refer to a favorite passage, for instance, in a poem "Written at the Request of Sir George Beaumont, Bart., and in his Name, for an Urn, placed by him at the termination of a newly-planted Avenue in the same Grounds"? These titles are fit to discourage even the admirers of Wordsworth, and to repel his intending students; nor will they attract any one, for they are formless; they are the abstracts of essays, the _precis_ of an argument, rather than fit designations for works of poetic art. A considerable number, too, of Wordsworth's minor pieces remain without name, title, or description of any kind whatever. If that desirable thing, a satisfactory edition of his poems, should ever appear, it will be given us by some editor who shall be sensitive to this northern formlessness, and who may venture, perhaps, to improve the state of Wordsworth's titles.

Let me end this digression by noting another singular title, with its emendation. In the "Lyrical Ballads" of 1798 appeared a poem with this extraordinary caption:

"Anecdote for Fathers, shewing how the art of Lying may be taught."

Now, certainly, Wordsworth did not intend to teach the art of lying, yet nothing can be clearer than his declaration. He failed to see the ludicrous meaning of these words, and it took him thirty years, apparently, to find out what he had said; but he saw it at last, and dropped the explanatory clause of the title, quoting in its place an apt motto from Eusebius; and we now read:

"Anecdote for Fathers. _Retine vim istam, falsa enim dicam, si coges_;" and the charming story professes no longer to show how boys may be taught to lie, but to point out the danger of making them lie when you press them to give reasons for their sentiments.

And now, returning to the corrections of text in the descriptive passages, let us note a curious change in the poem already mentioned, "On the Influence of Natural Objects," etc. Wordsworth is describing the pleasures of skating; and these are some of them, according to the passage as originally published in "The Friend":

Not seldom from the uproar I retired Into a silent bay--or sportively Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng _To cut across the image of a Star That gleamed upon the ice._

To do this is of course impossible, and the lines which I have italicized are mere closet description. We cannot skate across the reflection of a star until we can skate into the end of a rainbow; and the curious thing is that the so-called "poet of nature" should ever have fancied, even for a moment at his desk, that he had ever done it. Clearly, Wordsworth's study was not always out of doors, to use a favorite phrase of his; on the contrary, this passage is so unreal that a critic unacquainted with the personal history of the poet might argue that he had never been on skates--as Coleridge wrote the "Hymn in the Valley of Chamouni" without ever visiting that valley. But Wordsworth seems to have found out that his description was false; for he made a compromise, in the later editions, with the optical law of incidence and reflection; and we now see him attempting merely, but not achieving, the impossible thing:

----Leaving the tumultuous throng To cut across the reflex of a star That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed Upon the glassy plain.

But Wordsworth held stoutly, in the main, to his own experience, his own impressions; and he did this even to the injury of his descriptions. He was never, for instance, in sailor's phrase, "off soundings"; he never saw the mid-ocean; and consequently, when he described Leonard, in the first edition of "The Brothers," as sailing in mid-ocean, he says that he gazed upon "the broad green wave and sparkling foam." But he found out his mistake at last; he was fond of reading voyages and travels, and he seems to have become convinced finally, perhaps by the testimony of his sailor brother, that the deep sea was really blue and not green; that the common epithet was the true one; for he corrected the line to read "the broad blue wave."

Let us now examine some of those curiously prosaic passages which Wordsworth strove faithfully to convert into poetry, and strove with various success. And first, those famous arithmetical passages in "The Thorn," one of which stands to-day as it stood in the "Lyrical Ballads." We still read there, indeed, of

A beauteous heap, a hill of moss, Just half a foot in height,

the precise altitude that Wordsworth gave it in 1798; not an inch to the critics, he seems to have said. But these other peccant lines in the preceding stanza he recast, and in a way that is curious to follow:

And to the left, three yards beyond, You see a little muddy Pond Of water never dry: I've measured it from side to side: 'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.

Of these lines Crabb Robinson said to Wordsworth that "he dared not read them aloud in company." "They ought to be liked," rejoined the poet. Well, we may not like them; but they are interesting, for they present a really instructive specimen of bad art. Clearly enough, here is a poet in difficulties. The "little muddy pond" was not a pond in nature, but a pool; and a pool it would have been in verse, but for the particular exigency--the necessity of rhyming with the word _beyond_. Note now the honesty of our poet. For rhyme's sake he has temporarily sacrificed accuracy; he has called a pool a pond; but to show what the piece of water actually was, that actually it was a pool, though the exigencies of rhyme had forced him to call it provisionally by another name, he goes on to give us its accurate measurement, not only from "side to side," but from end to end as well. "'Tis three feet long and two feet wide," he tells us; and now his northern conscience is satisfied; he seems to say, "I was unfortunately compelled to use the wrong word in this passage, but I make amends at once; these are the precise dimensions of the object, and you can give it the right name yourself." This devotion to the topographical truth of the matter was abated, however, in later editions, perhaps by the derision of the critics. Wordsworth rewrote the passage, one would say, to please the graces rather than the mathematical verities; and the lines now read thus:

You see a little muddy pond Of water, never dry, Though but of compass small, and bare To thirsty suns and parching air.

Another considerable improvement was made, a little further on, in the same poem. These are the lines as they ran in the "Lyrical Ballads":

Poor Martha! on that woful day A cruel, cruel fire, they say, Into her bones was sent; It dried her body like a cinder, And almost turned her brain to tinder. --1798.

Certainly there was room for improvement here; and in the edition of 1815 we find the lines recast as follows:

A pang of pitiless dismay Into her soul was sent; A Fire was kindled in her breast, Which might not burn itself to rest.

Or see again this prosaic passage from "The Brothers," as first published in the "Lyrical Ballads." The lines describe the parting of James from his companions at a certain rock:

----By our shepherds it is call'd the Pillar. James, pointing to its summit, over which They all had purposed to return together, Inform'd them that he there would wait for them; They parted, and his comrades pass'd that way Some two hours after, but they did not find him At the appointed place, a circumstance Of which they took no heed. --1800.

It would occur to few readers to call this poetry were it not visibly divided into verse; and Wordsworth himself seems to have thought as much, for after many years he rewrote the passage, condensing and poetizing it as follows:

----By our shepherds it is called THE PILLAR. Upon its airy summit crowned with heath The loiterer, not unnoticed by his comrades, Lay stretched at ease; but, passing by the place On their return, they found that he was gone. No ill was feared.

There are hundreds of corrections in this style; and we naturally ask what made it necessary for Wordsworth to weed his poetic garden so often, to amend with care and trouble what some other poets would have done well at first? We need not hold with some of his critics that Wordsworth had in any peculiar sense a dual nature, to explain the amount of prosaic poetry, if I may call it so, that he wrote. No real poet ever wrote, as I take it, a greater amount of prosaic poetry than he; and no real poet ever published a greater number of verses that might fairly be called not only poor poetry, but considered as proof that their author could not write good poetry at all.

What critic would believe before the proof, that the poet who had written the lines just quoted from "The Thorn," and others like them, could have written also the "Lines to H. C." and "She Was a Phantom of Delight"? But to inquire at length into this contrast is to inquire into the deepest traits of Wordsworth's genius. One cause of his prosaic verse, however, may be mentioned here. Wordsworth had injurious habits of composition; he dictated his prose to an amanuensis, and he composed his poems in the fields as he walked. He was thus a libertine of opportunity, and though he strictly economized his subjects, and made the least yield him up its utmost, yet he was prodigal in the quantity of his expression. He did not wait for what are called moments of inspiration; he was always ready to compose, and thus he composed too much; he made verses whenever he was out of doors, "murmuring them out" to the astonishment of the rustics. Doubtless the first factor of genius is this abundance of power. But, on the other hand, the control, the direction of power is the first essential to the beauty of the work of art. "Good men may utter whatever comes uppermost; good poets may not," says Landor; and the aphorism touches upon a serious fault of Wordsworth's method. He lacked due power of self-repression; he was too much interested in his own thoughts to make a sufficiently jealous choice among them when he came to write them down. Two qualities, indeed, of his nature he kept in such abeyance, the amative and the humorous--and he was not without a humorous side--as to express but little of them in his writings. But he seems to have recorded almost everything, not humorous or amatory, that came into his mind; and, in consequence, we feel that his poetry comes perilously near being a verbatim transcript of his processes of consciousness. But no man's thought is always sufficiently valuable for a shorthand report; and we often wish that Wordsworth had reflected, with Herrick, that the poet is not fitted every day to prophesy:

No; but when the spirit fills The fantastic pannicles Full of fire--then I write As the Godhead doth indite.

Does it seem an invidious task to recall the unhappy readings that I have mentioned--readings abandoned by Wordsworth long ago, and unknown to many of his younger students? To do it with slighting intent, or from mere curiosity, would be unworthy; nor will the routine mind be persuaded that there is anything more than a merely curious interest in the comparison of editions. We, thinking that Wordsworth cannot really be understood in a single edition, must leave the routine mind to its conviction that one text contains all that there is of value in his poetry. And to offset the ungraceful verses that we have just considered, let us look at some changes by which Wordsworth has made fine passages finer still. Of the sonnets published in 1819 with "The Waggoner," none is more striking, as I think, than the one beginning, "Eve's lingering clouds extend in solid bars." In it at first he spoke as follows of the reflection of the heavens at night in perfectly still water:

Is it a mirror?--or the nether sphere Opening its vast abyss, while fancy feeds On the rich show?--But list! a voice is near; Great Pan himself low-whispering through the reeds.

In the later editions this passage is enriched by a grand stroke of imagination:

Is it a mirror?--or the nether sphere Opening to view the abyss in which she feeds Her own calm fires?--But list! a voice is near; Great Pan himself low-whispering through the reeds.

The following change is from the same sonnets; the passage describes a bright star setting:

Forfeiting his bright attire, He burns, transmuted to a sullen fire That droops and dwindles; and, the appointed debt To the flying moments paid, is seen no more.

So in 1819; in later editions we find the passage as follows:

He burns, transmuted to a dusty fire, Then pays submissively the appointed debt To the flying moments, and is seen no more.

That is scarcely an improvement; but the alteration of epithet is curious: the substitution of fact for fancy in changing the low star's "sullen fire" into a "dusty fire."

Here, again, is a case where the new reading has a fresher phrase than the old. It occurs in the last stanza of "Rob Roy's Grave," where Wordsworth spoke thus of the hero's virtues:

----Far and near, through vale and hill, Are faces that attest the same; And kindle, like a fire new-stirred, At sound of ROB ROY's name.

Later, a new line was substituted as follows:

----Far and near, through vale and hill, Are faces that attest the same; The proud heart flashing through the eyes At sound of ROB ROY's name.

And Wordsworth insisted, quite as strongly as his severest critics, upon finish, upon literary art as discriminable from the substance. While he was blaming Byron, Campbell, and other eminent poets for its lack, his assailants were loud in the same charge against him; they protested that whatever other merits the new poetry might have, that of artistic finish was surely not one. Jeffrey wrote in 1807 that Wordsworth "scarcely ever condescended to give the grace of correctness or melody to his versification." But Wordsworth, in a letter lately first published, criticises Campbell's "Hohenlinden" in a way that shows him by no means unstudious of form. He writes thus to Mr. Hamilton:[C] "I remember Campbell says, in a composition that is overrun with faulty language, 'And dark as winter was the _flow_ of Iser rolling rapidly'; that is, 'flowing rapidly.' The expression ought to have been 'stream' or 'current.' ... These may appear to you frigid criticisms," he adds; "but depend upon it, no writings will live in which these rules are disregarded." This is good doctrine, and we have seen Wordsworth striving to realize it in his practice. He did realize it to a certain extent; if his style was not always eloquent, not always poetical, it was generally better English than that of his popular contemporaries. And yet a critic in "The Dial," following, as recently as 1843, the lead of Jeffrey in this blame of Wordsworth, could write of him as follows:[D] "He has the merit of just moral perception, but not that of deft poetic execution. How would Milton curl his lip at such slip-shod newspaper style! Many of his poems, as for example the 'Rylstone Doe,' might be all improvised.... These are such verses as in a just state of culture should be _vers de Societe_, such as every gentleman could write, but none would think of printing." That passage is worth reading twice; note the condescension of the praise, the flippancy of the blame, the inaccurate English and French; and what a jaunty misquotation of Wordsworth's title! It was not very profitable censure; but Wordsworth received much criticism by which he was glad to profit. Let us look at some of the cases in which he turned the strictures of friends or of enemies to account. The changes that he made in deference to criticism are striking, and so too are some of the cases in which he refused to profit by criticism. I will speak of both.

[Footnote C: "Prose Works," III., 302.]

[Footnote D: "The Dial," Vol. III., p. 514.]

Of the former kind are the corrections in "Laodamia." That poem appeared first in 1815, having been suggested during a course of classical reading which Wordsworth had taken up for the purpose of directing the studies of his son. Landor criticised this poem in the first volume of his "Imaginary Conversations," and in the main very favorably; he makes Porson say that parts of it "might have been heard with shouts of rapture in the regions he describes"; he calls it "a composition such as Sophocles might have delighted to own." But he points out blemishes in two stanzas, the first and the seventeenth; he blames the execution of one and the thought of the other. Wordsworth rewrote both of them, and I quote the second passage as affording the more interesting change. In the first edition Protesilaus, says the poet, returning from the shades to visit Laodamia,

Spake, as a witness, of a second birth For all that is most perfect upon earth.

On this Landor remarks, putting the words into Porson's mouth:

How unseasonable is the allusion to _witness_ and _second_ birth, which things, however holy and venerable in themselves, come stinking and reeking to us from the conventicle. I desire to see Laodamia in the silent and gloomy mansion of her beloved Protesilaus; not elbowed by the godly butchers in Tottenham court road, nor smelling devoutly of ratafia among the sugar bakers' wives at Blackfriars.

Wordsworth dropped these lines; and we now read instead, that the hero

Spake of heroic arts in graver mood Revived, with finer harmony pursued.

In the first volume of his "Imaginary Conversations" Landor said of Wordsworth: "Those who attack him with virulence or with levity are men of no morality and no reflection." In a later volume, however, Landor attacks him thus himself, with both virulence and levity, as I fear we must say, and Wordsworth declined to profit by these later gibing criticisms, though some of them, and especially those upon the "Anecdote for Fathers," were valuable, and suggested real improvements of text. In this attack, which is contained in the second conversation of Southey and Porson, Landor had noticed Wordsworth's adoption of his earlier criticism of Laodamia; and this circumstance was probably a reason why Wordsworth refused to receive further critical favors at his hands. The poem "Goody Blake and Harry Gill," for instance, sharply criticised by Landor, stood almost untouched through the editions of fifty years. And in a letter of 1843, recently published for the first time,[E] Wordsworth speaks thus severely of an attack made upon his son-in-law, Edward Quillinan, by Landor: "I should have disapproved of his [Quillinan's] condescending to notice anything that a man so deplorably tormented by ungovernable passion as that unhappy creature might eject. His character may be given in two or three words: a madman, a bad man; yet a man of genius, as many a madman is." That criticism seems rather more than righteously severe; but Wordsworth, while he cared little for the criticism of the reviews, felt keenly the lash of the violent Landor. The violent Landor we must call him, for violence was the too dominant trait of his noble genius; and he exasperated Wordsworth, as we see. But compare what I have just quoted with his familiar remark about the small critics: "My ears are stone dead to this idle buzz, and my flesh as insensible as iron to these petty stings." That Wordsworth said at thirty-six years of age; and here is a striking reminiscence recorded during his later years, and published in the "Prose Works." At seventy-one he said to Lady Richardson:

It would certainly have been a great object to me to have reaped the profits I should have done from my writings but for the stupidity of Mr. Gifford and the impertinence of Mr. Jeffrey. It would have enabled me to purchase many books which I could not obtain, and I should have gone to Italy earlier, which I never could afford to do until I was sixty-five, when Moxon gave me a thousand pounds for my writings. This was the only kind of injury Mr. Jeffrey did me, for I immediately perceived that his mind was of that kind that his individual opinion on poetry was of no consequence to me whatever; that it was only by the influence his periodical exercised at the time in preventing my poems being read and sold that he could injure me.... I never, therefore, felt his opinion of the slightest value except in preventing the young of that generation from receiving impressions which might have been of use to them through life.

[Footnote E: "Prose Works," III., 381.]

This is grand self-confidence; and it is in the same tone that elsewhere he says:

Feeling that my writings were founded on what was true and spiritual in human nature, I knew the time would come when they must be known.

In this connexion the English reviews of that time are still interesting reading, particularly the "Quarterly" and the "Edinburgh." What was Jeffrey saying in his "organ" during the years of Wordsworth's earlier fame? In 1807 he described the poem of "The Beggars" as "a very paragon of silliness and affectation"; and he said of "Alice Fell," "If the printing of such verses be not felt as an insult on the public taste, we are afraid it cannot be insulted." Two years later he calls upon the patrons of the Lake school of poetry to "think with what infinite contempt the powerful mind of Burns would have perused the story of Alice Fell and her duffle cloak, of Andrew Jones and the half-crown, or of little Dan without breeches and his thievish grandfather." Wordsworth dropped the poem of "Andrew Jones," and never restored it--an omission almost unique, as we shall see; for he stood by the substance of his work, if not always by the form, with great pertinacity. He said of "Alice Fell," in his old age, "It brought upon me a world of ridicule by the small critics, so that in policy I excluded it from many editions of my poems, till it was restored at the request of some of my friends." Wordsworth had no stancher friend, his poetry had no more delicate critic, than Charles Lamb; and Lamb wrote thus in 1815 to Wordsworth about "Alice Fell" and the assailants of the poem. He said: "I am glad that you have not sacrificed a verse to those scoundrels. I would not have had you offer up the poorest rag that lingered upon the stript shoulders of little Alice Fell, to have atoned all their malice: I would not have given 'em a red cloak to save their souls."

Jeffrey decried two other pieces that rank among the most perfect of Wordsworth's minor poems, as "stuff about dancing daffodils and sister Emmelines," and spoke of another, which we count for pure poetry to-day, as "a rapturous, mystical ode to the cuckoo, in which the author, striving after force and originality, produces nothing but absurdity." And he attacked these lines in the "Ode to Duty":

Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong: And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong.

This, Jeffrey said, is "utterly without meaning: at least we have no sort of conception in what sense Duty can be said to keep the old skies _fresh_, and the stars from wrong." We need not be surprised at Jeffrey's failing to admire these lines: they are transcendentalism, and it would have troubled Wordsworth himself to render them into the plain speech which he recommended as the proper diction of poetry. For they have not a definite translatable content of thought; and we cannot read them as philosophy or ethics; but as poetry we may feel their power; we are willing to enjoy them for their own sake, because beauty is enough. But this Jeffrey did not admit; Jeffrey was not vulnerable by magnificent phrases, and of course he could not foresee what a power Wordsworth's transcendentalism was to exert. When the ode "Intimations of Immortality" first appeared (with the edition of 1807), Jeffrey called it "the most illegible and unintelligible part of the publication."[F] The remark need not surprise us. Jeffrey looked for logical thought in the poem, and logical thought it had not; whatever else it may contain, it will hardly be said to propound any new arguments for immortality. But Jeffrey wrote in all sincerity, and later in his life he read Wordsworth's poetry a second time, with a view to discover, if he could, the merits which he had failed to see when he criticised it--the merits which the English public had then found out. His effort was a failure: for him the primrose remained a primrose to the last, and nothing more. The acute lawyer was not a poet, nor a judge of poets; he had an erroneous notion of what the office of poetry is; of what it has been and will be--to please, to elevate, to suggest, but not to argue or convince; and to the last he did not get beyond his early decision, which, in the article just quoted from, runs as follows:

We think there is every reason to hope that the lamentable consequences which have resulted from Mr. Wordsworth's open violation of the established laws of poetry, will operate as a wholesome warning to those who might otherwise have been seduced by his example, and be the means of restoring to that ancient and venerable code its honor and authority.

[Footnote F: "Edinburgh Review," October, 1807.]

But the critic cannot always tell what the new "song is destined to, and what the stars intend to do." It is now evident enough where the early assailants of Wordsworth were mistaken; and yet which critic of to-day would be sure of his ground in a similar case? For the faults of genius are old, familiar, and easily to be discerned; while, on the other hand, genius itself is always novel, and therefore may be easily mistaken. It takes genius to recognize genius; and most of Wordsworth's critics were not men of genius. Landor, who was one, made a wise remark upon this point. He said, "To compositions of a new kind, like Wordsworth's, we come without scales and weights, and without the means of making an assay."

But by pointing out his faults, his critics did him and us a service; and it was one by which the poet profited, as we have seen, in spite of his independence.

Let us now look at some of Wordsworth's multiple readings, if we may call them so--passages, namely, in which he has returned, year after year, to certain peccant verses, changing them again and again in the quest of adequate expression. After repeated experiments he sometimes finds a reading to please himself; sometimes, having allowed a provisional text to stand throughout many years, he discards it and returns to the original form; and sometimes, again, he abandons a passage entirely, after scarring it with a lifetime's emendations. Of the first sort I will cite three readings of a stanza in "A Poet's Epitaph." As first published in the "Lyrical Ballads" of 1800, the poem contained this adjuration to the philosopher "wrapped in his sensual fleece":

O turn aside, and take, I pray, That he below may rest in peace, Thy pin-point of a soul away!

Lamb did not like this; and he wrote to Wordsworth: "The 'Poet's Epitaph' is disfigured, to my taste, by the coarse epithet of 'pin-point' in the sixth stanza." In the edition of 1815 the "coarse epithet" disappears, and the passage is modified as follows:

----Take, I pray, That he below may rest in peace, That abject thing, thy soul, away!

The years that "bring the philosophic mind" did not, however, reconcile Wordsworth with the particular "philosopher" here in question. (Sir Humphrey Davy, as Crabb Robinson, if I am not mistaken, tells us). On the contrary, the poet devised a still more injurious epithet for that unhappy physicist; and the passage now reads:

----Take, I pray,... Thy ever-dwindling soul away!

Another of these multiple corrections has attracted much notice; it occurs in the successive descriptions of the craft wherein the "Blind Highland Boy" went sailing. In the first edition of that poem Wordsworth called it

A Household Tub, like one of those Which women use to wash their clothes!

It would seem difficult to defend this couplet upon any accepted theory of aesthetics, rhyme, or syntax; and the "Household Tub" provoked quite naturally a shout of derision from all the critics; it became the poetical scandal of the day. Jeffery, mindful of "the established laws" of poetic art, protested that there was nothing, down to the wiping of shoes, or the evisceration of chickens, which may not be introduced in poetry, if this is tolerated. The tub, in short, proved intolerable to the reviewers; and when next the poem appeared in a new edition, that of 1815, Wordsworth transmuted the craft into a green turtle shell, noting the change as made "upon the suggestion of a Friend":

The shell of a green Turtle, thin And hollow: you might sit therein, It was so wide and deep. 'Twas even the largest of its kind, Large, thin, and light as birch tree rind; So light a shell that it would swim, And gaily lift its fearless brim Above the tossing waves.

Lamb's comment upon this change was as follows:

I am afraid lest that substitution of a shell (a flat falsification of the history) for the household implement, as it stood at first, was a kind of tub thrown out to the beast, or rather thrown out for him. The tub was a good honest tub in its place, and nothing could be fairly said against it. You say you made the alteration for the "friendly reader," but the "malicious" will take it to himself. Damn 'em, if you give 'em an inch, etc.

Wordsworth, however, instead of restoring the old text, went on amending, and with reason; the reading just given is diffuse. But see now the third and final form which he gave to the passage. The sublimation of the Household Tub is now completed; it becomes, at last,

A shell of ample size, and light As the pearly car of Amphitrite, That sportive dolphins draw. And as a Coracle that braves On Vaga's breast the fretful waves, This shell upon the deep would swim.

Here again are some new readings that Wordsworth discarded after long trial. A well-known sonnet, one of his earliest, began thus in 1807:

I grieved for Buonaparte, with a vain And an unthinking grief! The vital blood Of that Man's mind, what can it be? What food Fed his first hopes? What knowledge could he gain?

In 1815 we find the passage rewritten as follows:

I grieved for Buonaparte, with a vain And an unthinking grief! for, who aspires To genuine greatness but from just desires, And knowledge such as He could never gain?

But in the later editions the first reading was restored, except the words "vital blood," and we now read:

The tenderest mood Of that man's mind, what can it be?

In "The Nightingale" Wordsworth first called that bird "a creature of a fiery heart"; but in the edition of 1815 it became "a creature of ebullient heart," a flat disenchantment of the verse. The change was questioned from the first, as Crabb Robinson tells us, and in later editions the first reading was restored. A fortunate correction made in the same edition was retained--the change of "laughing company" to "jocund company," in "The Daffodils":

A poet could not but be gay In such a jocund company. --1815.

The poem "Rural Architecture," in the "Lyrical Ballads" of 1800, was curtailed of its closing stanza in the edition of 1815:

Some little I've seen of blind boisterous works In Paris and London, 'mong Christians and Turks, Spirits busy to do and undo, etc., etc.

But in Lamb's correspondence of the same year he complains to Wordsworth that the omission "leaves it [the poem] in my mind less complete," and the lines were restored in the later editions. Not to differ hastily with Lamb, the lines yet seem lines to be spared. In the same sentence he complains that in the new edition there is another "admirable line gone (or something come instead of it), 'the stone-chat, and the glancing sandpiper,' which was a line quite alive. I demand these at your hand." Wordsworth restored the line, and the three versions of the passage are worth comparison. It is from the "Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew Tree," and describes a wanderer in the solitude of the country:

His only visitants a straggling sheep, The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper: And on these barren rocks, with juniper, And heath, and thistle, thinly sprinkled o'er, Fixing his downcast eye, he many an hour A morbid pleasure nourished. --"Lyrical Ballads."

In the second reading he corrects a bad assonance thus:

His only visitants a straggling sheep, The stone-chat, or the sand-lark, restless bird, Piping along the margin of the lake.... --1815.

Here the "line quite alive" is gone--to be restored in deference, apparently, to Lamb's request. Another assonance is got rid of in the later editions, the "thistle thinly sprinkled o'er," and the passage now reads melodiously as follows:

His only visitants a straggling sheep. The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper: And on these barren rocks, with fern and heath, And juniper and thistle, sprinkled o'er, Fixing his downcast eye, he many an hour A morbid pleasure nourished.

Wordsworth struck out many lines and stanzas in the course of his revisions, besides main passages of considerable length, as from the "Thanksgiving Ode" and the patriotic ode of January, 1816. These omissions are too long to quote here; but the following lines dropped from the ode on "Immortality" will have interest; they are not to be found, I think, in any English edition since that of 1815. Addressing the child over whom Immortality, in the language of the ode,

Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave, A Presence which is not to be put by--

this earlier reading continues:

To whom the grave Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight Of day or the warm light: A place of thought where we in waiting lie.

Another notable omitted passage is the introduction to "Dion," published in 1816:

Fair is the Swan, whose majesty, prevailing O'er breezeless water on Locarno's lake....

Here nineteen lines full of beauty are sacrificed by Wordsworth in the interest of the unity of the poem. He struck out, too, some lines from "The Daisy," "The Thorn," and "Simon Lee," and eight stanzas have disappeared from "Peter Bell" since the first edition of that poem. Among them are these grotesque lines, favorites with Charles Lamb:

Is it a party in a parlour? Cramm'd just as they on earth were cramm'd-- Some sipping punch, some sipping tea, All silent and all damn'd!

And here are some verses that have interest from the glimpse they give of Wordsworth's faculty in a field that he declined to cultivate--the amatory or "fleshly," as it has been conveniently named for us of late. I quote from that rare book, the "Descriptive Sketches" of 1793; and as the lines are not included in any edition of his poems, they are unfamiliar to most readers. But two copies of this book, so far as I know, exist in this country. One of them, which belonged to the late Prof. Henry Reed, Wordsworth's American editor, is full of corrections in Wordsworth's own handwriting; and it is by the courtesy of its present owner that I am enabled to give here the early text with these corrections, never before printed. The young Wordsworth takes leave of Switzerland, at the conclusion of his pedestrian tour, with this glowing apostrophe:

ye the Farewell! those forms that in thy noontide shade your Rest near their little plots of oaten glade, Dark Those stedfast eyes, that beating breasts inspire, To throw the "sultry rays" of young Desire; soft =Those= lips whose ^ tides of fragrance come and go Accordant to the cheek's unquiet glow; Ye warm Those shadowy breasts In love's soft light array'd And rising by the moon of passion sway'd.[G]

[Footnote G: I venture to note, in passing, a small class of corrections in which the poet has cleared his text from certain innocencies of expression that were liable to be misread by persons on the alert for double meanings. The following are among the Wordsworthian simplicities that have been amended in the later editions; the reference is made to the octavos of 1815, which may be compared with any of the editions since 1836:

Vol. I., page 111, "The Brothers," passage beginning, "James, tired perhaps."

Vol. I., page 210, "Michael," passage beginning, "Old Michael, while he was a babe in arms."

Vol. I., page 223, "Laodamia," stanza beginning, "Be taught, O faithful Consort."]

Wordsworth thus dropped, for one reason or another, many passages from his poems. But did he abandon entire poems? That did not often happen. He strove patiently to perfect the form of his thought; but he was unwilling to let the substance of it go. In the seven volumes of his poetry, as they now stand, but two poems are lacking, to the best of my knowledge, of all that he ever published. One of these, an unimportant piece beginning, "The confidence of youth our only art," was printed with the "Memorials of a Tour on the Continent" (1822), and no longer appears in the collected editions. The other missing poem, "Andrew Jones," was abandoned for reasons, as I think, of considerable critical interest. In the "Lyrical Ballads" it began thus:

I hate that Andrew Jones: he'll breed His children up to waste and pillage: I wish the press-gang or the drum With its tantara sound would come, And sweep him from the village!

This poem may be found (with, slight emendations) as late as the edition of 1815; but after that date I meet with it nowhere but in foreign reprints. Why was it dropped? It is doubtless a story of unrelieved though petty suffering; it corresponds, in small, to what Mr. Matthew Arnold calls the "poetically faulty" situation of Empedocles, a situation "in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done." But, on the other hand, that fragment of AEschylus, the "Prometheus Bound," in which everything is endured and nothing done, yet remains a work of the deepest interest: nor need we think that Wordsworth abandoned his little poem for a reason so refined as that which led Mr. Arnold to abandon one of his own. There was, as I take it, a moral reason which led to Wordsworth's decision; namely, that the story of "Andrew Jones" is told with bitterness of feeling from beginning to end; and against bitterness of feeling Wordsworth had recorded, during his earlier years, a striking protest. We shall read it presently; but first let us couple with the poem a sentence from his prose--a sentence full of the same feeling, and which was early dropped for the same reason. We shall find it in the edition of 1815, in the essay supplementary to the famous Preface of that date. There Wordsworth turns upon his critics as follows:

"By what fatality the orb of my genius (for genius none of them seem to deny me) acts upon these men like the moon upon a certain description of patients, it would be irksome to enquire: nor would it consist with the respect which I owe myself to take further notice of opponents whom I internally despise."

This is not quite in the vein of the serenely meditative poet; and if we look back to a time twenty years earlier than this, we shall find that Wordsworth had reproved his heat beforehand. In 1795, when he first chose definitely the poet's career, he had written these lines:

If thou be one whose heart the holy forms Of young imagination have kept pure, Stranger! henceforth be warned; and know that pride, Howe'er disguised in its own majesty, Is littleness: that he who feels contempt For any living thing, hath faculties Which he has never used: that thought with him Is in its infancy.

That is the teaching of earlier and serener years, of the time when the poet was still quietly embayed in youth, when jealous criticism, and envy, and disappointment were still trials of the future. Youth has its own passions; but it has also its peculiar serenity; and after Wordsworth had passed through the stormy years which gave him fame, we see the maturer man recalling the teaching of his calmer self. It was in obedience to this, as I believe, that he cancelled the passages that have just been mentioned; feeling their discord with the pure song of that early time.

Let us now look at some of the passages which Wordsworth has emended, not by taking away from the words of his book, but by adding to them. As he wrote to Mr. Dyce, he diligently revised the "Excursion," in the edition of 1827, and got the sense "in several instances, ... into less room"; and minor changes are to be counted by hundreds. But he made some additions to this poem, and for significant reasons.

Readers of Christopher North's essay, in the "Recreations," on "Sacred Poetry," will remember the long indictment which he there brings against the earlier poems of Wordsworth; he complains of them as being irreligious. It is interesting to find the earthly Christopher displaying the pious zeal of an inquisitor in the matter, declaring that in all of Wordsworth's writings, up to the "Excursion," "though we have much fine poetry, and some high philosophy, it would puzzle the most ingenious to detect much, if any, Christian religion"; and lamenting its absence even in the "Excursion," in the story of "Margaret," as told in the first book. This tale Christopher North calls "perhaps the most elaborate picture he [Wordsworth] ever painted of any conflict within any one human heart;" but he adds, with how much sincerity we will not now ask, that it "is, with all its pathos, repulsive to every religious mind--_that_ being wanting without which the entire representation is vitiated.... This utter absence of Revealed Religion ... throws over the whole poem to which the tale of Margaret belongs an unhappy suspicion of hollowness and insincerity in that poetical religion which at the best is a sorry substitute indeed for the light that is from heaven."

That Wordsworth laid to heart this criticism, will appear on comparing the original passage, as reprobated by Christopher North, with the form which the poet gave it in the latter editions. Originally the peddler, finishing the story of "Margaret," moralizes thus:

My Friend! enough to sorrow you have given; The purposes of wisdom ask no more: Be wise and cheerful, and no longer read The forms of things with an unworthy eye; She sleeps in the calm earth, and peace is here. I well remember that those very plumes, Those weeds, and the high spear-grass on that wall, By mist and silent raindrops silvered o'er, As once I passed, into my heart convey'd So still an image of tranquillity, So calm and still, and look'd so beautiful Amid the uneasy thoughts which fill'd my mind, That what we feel of sorrow and despair From ruin and from change, and all the griefs The passing shows of Being leave behind, Appear'd an idle dream, that could not live Where meditation was. I turn'd away, And walk'd along my road in happiness.

"What meditation?" cries out Christopher North. "Turn thou, O child of a day, to the New Testament, and therein thou mayest find comfort." And Wordsworth in his revision made the following additions to this fine pagan passage:

----Enough to sorrow you have given; The purposes of wisdom ask no more: Nor more would she have craved as due to one Who in her worst distress, had often felt The unbounded might of prayer; and learned, with soul Fixed on the cross, that consolation springs From sources deeper far than deepest pain For the meek sufferer. Why then should we read The forms of things with an unworthy eye? She sleeps in the calm earth, and peace is here.

Then follow the beautiful lines about the weeds, the spear-grass, the mist and rain-drops, as quoted above; but the close of the passage is extended as follows:

----All the griefs That passing shows of Being leave behind, Appeared an idle dream, that could maintain Nowhere dominion o'er the enlightened spirit Whose meditative sympathies repose Upon the breast of Faith. I turned away, And walked along my road in happiness.

It remains to be said that a certain number of Wordsworth's poems--and these were, as we might expect, among his best--have stood unchanged in all the editions from the first, running the gauntlet of their author's critical moods for half a century, and coming out untouched at last. I will not call them uncorrected poems, but rather poems in which all the needed corrections were made before their first publication, for they belong to that exquisite class of creations--too small a class, even in the works of the greatest masters--in which the poet has fused completely the refractory element of language before pouring it out into the mould of poetic form. Among these untouched poems are three from the "Lyrical Ballads"--"A slumber did my spirit seal," "Three years she grew in sun and shower," and "She dwelt among the untrodden ways"--all written at the age of twenty-nine; such are the "Yew Tree," written four years later, and "She was a phantom of delight." Several of the best sonnets, too, were unchanged; as that on "Westminster Bridge," and "Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour."

And lastly, I may mention one or two changes of text which Wordsworth did not make, but which belong to the class for which careless editors or proofreaders are responsible. An edition well known to the American public is especially peccant in this respect; that beautiful line, for instance, in "The Pet Lamb"--

And that green corn all day is rustling in thy ears,

becomes,

That green cord all day is rustling in thy ears.

And here is a really interesting _erratum_; it occurs in the poem of "The Idiot Boy," where it has stood unnoticed for twenty years and more. Wordsworth's stanzas, describing the boy's night-long ride under the moon, "from eight o'clock till five," hearing meanwhile "the owls in tuneful concert strive," originally put these words into his mouth, the actual words of his hero, as Wordsworth tells us in a note:

The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo, And the Sun did shine so cold, Thus answered Johnny in his glory.

But this reading puzzled the proofreader. How could the sun shine at night? This being clearly impossible, he restored the idiot boy to

## partial sanity. He made him say:

The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo, And the Moon did shine so cold;

and the only wonder is that he did not also read,

The cocks did crow cock-a-doodle-doo.

Some one proposes, I believe, a similar emendation in "As You Like It," intending to make the Duke speak better sense than Shakespeare put into his mouth. He is to say,

Sermons in books. Stones in the running brooks, and good in everything.

But while in the main the text of Shakespeare is bettering under criticism, Wordsworth is suffering miscorrection; and for the good that he has to give us we cannot quite dispense with the original editions.

TITUS MUNSON COAN.

PORTRAIT D'UNE JEUNE FEMME INCONNUE,

GALERIE DE FLORENCE.

I saw a picture in a gallery: Go where I will, it still abides with me. The hair rich brown, one lovely golden tress Strayed from the braid and touched the loveliness Of the fair neck, so smooth, so white, so young, It shamed the pearls a prince's hand had strung. The dress is white, with here and there a gleam Of amber brilliant, sunlight on a stream! And hanging on her arm, a scarf; the thing About that glorious head and neck to fling, Protecting from the night, scarlet and black and gold, And gems are woven in each gleaming fold. The picture has that gracious air which tells The hand that painted it was Raphael's. They know she's beautiful, and know no more. Thus questioned I, as many did before: "Why art thou sad, thou delicate, proud face? Thou art a Dame of bright and cheerful race, Thy fortunes grand, thy home this Florence fair. Does an unworthy heart thy palace share? Or with a soft caprice dost turn from joy, And play with sorrow as a costly toy? Or has thy page forgotten, or done worse-- Failed he to find the fond expected verse Thy lover promised thee? I know not why I linger near thee, beautiful and sad, Yet with such sorrow, who would have thee glad?" (Is she not gifted with the anointed eye That sees the trouble of the passer-by?) "Is thine that great, that tender sympathy That calls all heart-aches nearer unto thee? Or a great soul with aspirations rife, Feeling the insufficiency of this our life? Thou hast attraction of a grander tone, Some charm more subtle e'en than beauty's own! "Though woman throws no greater lure than this, The lip regretful which we fain would kiss, The eye made softer by the unfallen tear, And sunlight brighter for the shadow near. Why do I ask? will woman ever tell The secret of the charm that fits her well?" She did not answer, sweet, mysterious Dame. I left her sadly, locked in gilded frame.

M. E. W. S.

MISS TINSEL.

A GOLD-MINER'S LOVE STORY.--IN FIVE CHAPTERS.

##