. have authorized, in my then opinion, a more frequent descent to the phrases of ordinary life, than could without an ill effect have been hazarded in the heroic couplet. It was not however the freedom from false taste, whether as to common defects, or to those more properly his own, which made so unusual an impression on my feelings immediately, and subsequently on my judgment. It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine balance of truth in observing with imaginative faculty in modifying the objects observed; and above all the original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it all the depth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew drops.1 Thus, as early as 1796, Wordsworth had attained to an austere and imaginative simplicity of style. A slight awkwardness of language was still visible, but the extraneous and exaggerated ornaments were gone. As far as can be determined, this improvement was solely on the basis of reading confined, in the field of English literature, to the poets of the eighteenth century and the three great elder bards-Milton, Spenser, and Shakespeare. Apart from these, he had been especially interested in Italian and Latin poetry. During his Cambridge days he had read Ariosto and Tasso with such enthusiasm that, when he first went to France, his mind was more often preoccupied with thoughts of Erminia and Angelica than with the philosophical dialogues of Beaupuy.2 In the years between the pub 1 The language is still a little unidiomatic. The inversions are numerous, as in 100, 159, 170, 185, 278, 330, 367, 547, etc. The article is frequently omitted, as in 99, 135, 136, 140, 142, 144, 187, etc. The auxiliary is omitted now and then, as in 3, 48, etc. There is also a large number of places in which a participle or noun in apposition is awkwardly used, as in 10, 66, 72, 148, etc. 2 Prelude 9. 437-453. Concerning Wordsworth's Italian studies, see also Memoirs 1. 14. lication of the descriptive poems and the meeting with Coleridge he had apparently turned back to the Latin authors, especially Horace and Juvenal. One of the passages added to the Evening Walk1 is based on Horace; and the special literary enterprise of this period was a translation of Juvenal which he and Wrangham were making together. Perhaps Mathews also took some interest in this; at least a copy of Juvenal was presented to Wordsworth by Mathews. But of the special literary models of the Lyrical Ballads the poetry of Chaucer, the Reliques of Ancient Poetry, and the literature before Dryden-we hear not a word. However, the source of this new influence at once becomes clear when we consider what Lamb and Coleridge had been doing up to this time. 1 1 See the final version of the Evening Walk, 72-85 (Oxford edition, p. 3). This appears in the edition of 1820 as it is here written. It was probably one of those additions 'made shortly after publication' in 1793. 2 L. W. F. 1. 87-89, 92-98. This is now in the library of Mrs. Henry St. John, Ithaca, N. Y. CHAPTER 4. COLERIDGE AND HIS CIRCLE. While Wordsworth was thus attaining to the practice of simplicity, Coleridge and Lamb had been developing the theory of it; and were religiously seeking out literary models of a style more pure and plain. The beginnings of this effort, which ended in the Lyrical Ballads, are to be found in the teaching of their doughty old schoolmaster at Christ's Hospital-the Rev. James Boyer.1 'He early moulded my taste to the preference of Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocrites to Virgil, and again of Virgil to Ovid,' writes Coleridge. 'He habituated me to compare Lucretius (in such extracts as I then read), Terence, and above all the chaster poems of Catullus, not only with the Roman poets of the, so called, silver and brazen ages; but with even those of the Augustan era; and on grounds of plain sense and universal logic to see and assert the superiority of the former in the truth and nativeness, both of their thoughts and diction. In our own English compositions, (at least for the last three years of our school education,) he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words. Lute, harp, and lyre, Muse, Muses, and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hippocrene, were all an abomination to him. In fancy I can almost hear him now, exclaiming "Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? ''Lamb speaks of himself as only a Deputy Grecian, and yet there is no doubt that he enjoyed the advantage of Boyer's tuition, even although that masterful instructor reserved his highest enthusiasm for Grecians absolute.'-Lucas, The Life of Charles Lamb 1. 74. 2 B. L. 1. 4-5. Your nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh aye! the cloister-pump, I suppose!"' Although for a time the youthful Coleridge neglected literature for philosophy, he did not forget the teaching of these early days. When the sonnets of Bowles appeared, he at once hailed them as models of simplicity and tenderness, and quite forgot the mysteries of Neoplatonism in his proselyting enthusisam for what seemed to him a new type of poetry.1 As a matter of fact, Bowles was not very new. His verse alternately echoes Milton's minor poems and the sweeter cadences of Shakespeare-not to mention his master, Warton. But his pure and slender melodies fell gratefully upon the ear after the couplets of Pope and Erasmus Darwin. Naturally Coleridge, with the conversational zeal for disseminating knowledge which marked him even then, enthusiastically recommended Bowles upon all occasions. In so doing he developed a whole theory of criticism, in which we already find dim intimations of the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. The lively discussions begun then, and continued with renewed vigor after he met Wordsworth, are best described in his own words: 'Among those with whom I conversed, there were, of course, very many who had formed their taste and their notions of poetry, from the writings of Pope and his followers; or to speak more generally, in that school of French poetry, condensed and invigorated by English understanding, which had predominated from the last century. I was not blind to the merits of this school, yet, as from inexperience of the world, and consequent want of sympathy with the general subjects of these poems, they gave me little pleasure, I doubtless undervalued the kind, and with the presumption of youth withheld from its masters the legitimate name of poets. I saw that the excellence of this kind consisted in 1B. L. 1. 7-10. 2 Ibid. 1. 11-14. just and acute observations on men and manners in an artificial state of society, as its matter and substance; and in the logic of wit, conveyed in smooth and strong epigrammatic couplets, as its form. Even when the subject was addressed to the fancy, or the intellect, as in the Rape of the Lock, or the Essay on Man; nay, when it was a consecutive narration, as in that astonishing product of matchless talent and ingenuity, Pope's translation of the Iliad; still a point was looked for at the end of each second line, and the whole was, as it were, a sorites, or, if I may exchange a logical for a grammatical metaphor, a conjunction disjunctive, of epigrams. Meantime the matter and diction seemed to me characterized not so much by poetic thoughts, as by thoughts translated into the language of poetry. On this last point, I had occasion to render my own thoughts gradually more and more plain to myself, by frequent amicable disputes concerning Darwin's Botanic Garden, which, for some years, was greatly extolled, not only by the reading public in general, but even by those, whose genius and natural robustness of understanding enabled them afterwards to act foremost in dissipating these "painted mists" that occasionally rise from the marshes at the foot of Parnassus. During my first Cambridge vacation, I assisted a friend in a contribution for a literary society in Devonshire: and in this I remember to have compared Darwin's work to the Russian palace of ice, glittering, cold, and transitory. In the same essay, too, I assigned sundry reasons, chiefly drawn from a comparison of passages in the Latin poets with the original Greek, from which they were borrowed, for the preference of Collins's odes to those of Gray; and of the simile in Shakespeare How like a younker or a prodigal, The scarfed bark puts from her native bay, |