ever, that these volumes of Wordsworth, despite an occasional eccentricity in the choice of mean and impracticable subjects, contained a large body of true poetry of a singularly fresh and original kind. A select circle of passionate admirers, including men like Leigh Hunt, De Quincey, and Wilson, eagerly pressed the true claims of the poet; and after the publication of the Excursion, a volume of high and serious verse, gravely defective in plan, and at times heavy and tedious, but with little or no trace in it of the earlier oddi ties of the writer, it came more and more to be felt that the laughers were getting the worst of it, and that Wordsworth, however he might now and then indulge himself in whimsical tricks, was really a man of true and lofty genius, against whom ridicule could not permanently avail. Their occupation was not yet, indeed, quite done; and the sub sequent appearance, in 1819, of Peter Bell, a poem not without profound merits, but unhappily with a donkey for the hero of it. allowed them to resume their advantage a little. But, on the whole, the day of idle jeer was over; the tide of genuine appreciation had set in, and it continued to flow steadily, till, long before his death, Wordsworth found himself recognized almost nem. con. as at the head of the poetical literature of his country. His later days were passed serenely in honor. In. 1839 the university of Oxford conferred on him its honorary degree of D.C.L. In 1842 a pension of £300 per annum was assigned him by government; on receipt of which he ceded, in favor of his son, his situation as distributor of stamps; and on the death of his friend Southey, in 1843, he succeeded to the vacant laureateship. On April 23, 1850. lie peacefully closed a life so pure, serene, and priest-like in its consecration to a lofty purpose, that we must go hack to Milton in order to find its parallel. It remains only to enumerate the publi cations of Wordsworth not included above. In 1815 appeared The1Vhite Doe of Rylslone, which was followed by The Waggoner, and a series of Sonnets on the River Duddon. In 1822 lie published a volume entitled Memorials of a Tour on the Continent; some years after, his Ecclesiastical Sonnets; and in 1835, Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems, the fruit of a tour to Scotland, memorable by his mournful parting, at Abbotsford, with the dying Scott, which he records in a beautiful sonnet. In 1842 lie issued a collected edition of
his works, rearranged as we now have them, in a somewhat fanciful fashion of his own. Shortly after his death, a long autobiographical poem, in blank verse, was published, entitled The Prelude.
By remanding it to truth and simplicity of natural feeling as its basis, Wordsworth did more than perhaps any other writer of his time to forward the great revival of English poetry which distinguished the opening of the century. But lie was scarcely the originator of the movement; the new influence was, so to speak, " in the air;" already Cowper in England, as in Scotland Burns, had preluded to the melodious out burst which was to follow; and to the last of these more particularly, as his early guide and exemplar, Wordsworth has expressly recorded his obligations in a stanza which, so far as we are aware, has hitherto escaped quotation: "I mourned with thousands. but as one More deeply grieved, for he was gone Whose light I hailed when first it shone, And showed my youth How verse may build a princely throne On humble truth." With the charm of natural simplicity of manner, conunon to him with these leis pre decessors, Wordsworth, however, combined a depth of philosophic meditation peculiarly his own; there was born with him, moreover, a passionate susceptibility to effects of beauty in the material world, such as few men can ever have been gifted with; and out of these blended elements arose that mystical communion with nature which pervades the whole body of his poetry, and constitutes its truest claim to originality. By dif fusion of this, and otherwise, his influence on our subsequent poetry has perhaps been as profound as any of the kind ever exereiged, and it has been almost wholly beneficial. let we need not admire all we find in him. The early ridicule directed against him. though it sinned by excess and disproportion, was really to a great extent deserved. Had lie gone on writing nothing but the "Betty Fos" and Fells" which Jelircy laughed at, we should not have had in this place to do a biography of him. It is despite of deal of this kind of perverse drivel, besides indifferent matter otherwise, and not in the least because of it, that he continues, and must long continue, to be remelt, the memoir by his nephew, bishop Wordsworth; and criticisms by Coleridge, Shairp, Hutton, and others' .