Not seldom from the uproar I retiredInto a silent bay—or sportivelyGlanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throngTo cut across the image of a StarThat 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 throngTo cut across the reflex of a starThat fled, and, flying still before me, gleamedUpon 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 PondOf 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 wordbeyond. 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 pondOf water, never dry,Though but of compass small, and bareTo 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 dayA 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 dismayInto 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 whichThey all had purposed to return together,Inform'd them that he there would wait for them;They parted, and his comrades pass'd that waySome two hours after, but they did not find himAt the appointed place, a circumstanceOf 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 calledThe Pillar.Upon its airy summit crowned with heathThe loiterer, not unnoticed by his comrades,Lay stretched at ease; but, passing by the placeOn 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 fillsThe fantastic panniclesFull of fire—then I writeAs 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 sphereOpening its vast abyss, while fancy feedsOn 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 sphereOpening to view the abyss in which she feedsHer 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 fireThat droops and dwindles; and, the appointed debtTo 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 debtTo 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 ofRob 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 eyesAt sound ofRob 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 theflowof 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 bevers de Société, 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.
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 birthFor all that is most perfect upon earth.
On this Landor remarks, putting the words into Porson's mouth:
How unseasonable is the allusion towitnessandsecondbirth, 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 moodRevived, 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.
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 skiesfresh, 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.Jeffreylooked 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.
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 thoseWhich 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, thinAnd 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 brimAbove 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 lightAs the pearly car of Amphitrite,That sportive dolphins draw.And as a Coracle that bravesOn 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 vainAnd an unthinking grief! The vital bloodOf that Man's mind, what can it be? What foodFed his first hopes? What knowledge could he gain?
In 1815 we find the passage rewritten as follows:
I grieved for Buonaparte, with a vainAnd an unthinking grief! for, who aspiresTo 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 moodOf 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 gayIn 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 worksIn 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 hourA 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 hourA 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 graveIs but a lonely bed without the sense or sightOf 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, prevailingO'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 theFarewell! those forms that in thy noontide shadeyourRest near their little plots of oaten glade,DarkThose stedfast eyes, that beating breasts inspire,To throw the "sultry rays" of young Desire;softThoselips whose ^ tides of fragrance come and goAccordant to the cheek's unquiet glow;Ye warmThose shadowy breasts In love's soft light array'dAnd rising by the moon of passion sway'd."[G]
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 breedHis children up to waste and pillage:I wish the press-gang or the drumWith 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 Æschylus, 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 formsOf 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 contemptFor any living thing, hath facultiesWhich he has never used: that thought with himIs 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—thatbeing 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 andcheerful, and no longer readThe 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'dSo still an image of tranquillity,So calm and still, and look'd so beautifulAmid the uneasy thoughts which fill'd my mind,That what we feel of sorrow and despairFrom ruin and from change, and all the griefsThe passing shows of Being leave behind,Appear'd an idle dream, that could not liveWhere 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: