nation into the prose gloss at the side-and it is perhaps the loveliest little thought in all his writings :

"In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth toward the journeying "moon, and the stars that still sojourn yet still move onward; and "everywhere the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, "and their native country and their own natural homes, which they "enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected, and yet there " is a silent joy at their arrival."

Nor in contrast with this tropic scene and the fierce character of its landscape is the quiet harbour in the temperate zone less truly felt or less clearly expressed. Though some of the lines are weak, the whole impression is vivid :

The harbour-bay was clear as glass

So smoothly it was strewn !

And on the bay the moonlight lay

And the shadow of the moon.

The rock shone bright, the kirk no less

That stands above the rock :

The moonlight steeped in silentness
The steady weather-cock.

Then there are two other descriptions, one of the ship in a swift tropical squall in which the smallest details are true to fact, the other of the ship sailing quietly, which I throw together:

And the coming wind did roar more loud,

And the sails did sigh like sedge,

And the rain poured down from one black cloud,

The moon was at its edge.

The thick black cloud was cleft, and still

The moon was at its side,

Like waters shot from some high crag

The lightning fell with never a jag,

A river steep and wide.

And the other:

It ceased; yet still the sails made on

A pleasant noise till noon,
A noise like of a hidden brook

In the leafy month of June,

That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune.

In both these descriptions, one of the terror, the other of the softness of Nature, a certain charm, of the source of which we are not at once conscious, is given by the introduction into the lonely sea of images borrowed from the land, but which exactly fit the sounds to be described at sea; such as the noise of the brook and the sighing of the sedge. We are brought into closer sympathy with the mariner by this subtle suggestion of his longing for the land and its peace. And we ourselves enjoy the travel of thought, swept to and fro without any shock-on account of the fitness of illustration and thing-from sea to land, from land to sea.

Much more might be said on this, but it tells its own tale. The Poem illustrates still further and this gives it its special interest to us-the personal, simple religion of Coleridge. We see in it how childlike the philosophic man could be in his faith, how little was enough for him. Its religion is all contained in the phrase " He prayeth well who loveth_well Both man and bird and beast." On this the changes are rung throughout; the motiveless slaughter of the bird is a crime; the other mariners who justify the killing of the bird because of the good it seems to bring them are even worse sinners than the ancient mariner. He did the ill deed on a hasty impulse; they

deliberately agree to it for selfish reasons. They sin a second time against love by throwing the whole guilt on him, and again for selfish reasons. They are fatally punished, he lives to feel and expiate his wrong. And the turning point of his repentance is in the re-awakening of love, and is clearly marked. Left all alone on the sea, "he despiseth the creatures of the calm, and envieth that so many should live and so many lie dead," and in that temper of contempt and envy Coleridge suggests that no prayer can live. But when seven days had passed, he looked again on God's creatures of the great calm, and seeing their beauty and their happiness, forgot his own misery, and the curse, and himself in them, and blessed and loved them; and in that temper of spirit prayer became possible:

O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare :
A spring of love gushed in my heart
And I blessed them unaware.

The self-same moment I could pray.

The main thought and its details have their own beauty, and they illustrate the new love of animals in English poetry, but there is an often-noticed absurdity which injures the sense of art in the mass of machinery which is used to impress so simple a thought. It is like making use of a calculating machine to add two and two together. I have closed this lecture with the Ancient Mariner, for in some sort he resembles his creator. Like him, Coleridge's soul had been

Alone on a wide wide sea,

So lone it was, that God himself

Scarce seemed there to be.

Like him, though not as Poet, Coleridge might say now:

And like him, finally, the much adventuring man, the Poet who had adventured so far into wild seas of mental and religious thought, came home at last and found peace in simple faith in God, in childlike humility, in mercy and love of man, and in reverence for all things:

O sweeter than the marriage feast

'Tis sweeter far to me

To walk together to the kirk
With a goodly company!

To walk together to the kirk

And all together pray,

While each to his great Father bends,

Old men and babes and loving friends,

And youths and maidens gay.

He prayeth best who loveth best

All things both great and small,

For the dear God who loveth us
He made and loveth all.

It would be no unpleasant thought to compare that close with that of Tennyson's "Two Voices."

LECTURE V.

WORDSWORTH.

IN speaking of the poetry of Nature, we have at length arrived at Wordsworth, and in coming to him, we come to the greatest of the English Poets of this century; greatest not only as a Poet, but as a philosopher. It is the mingling of profound thought, and of ordered thought, with poetic sensibility and power (the power always the master of the sensibility), which places him in this high position. He does possess a philosophy, and its range is wide as the universe. He sings of God, of Man, of Nature, and, as the result of these three, of Human Life, and they are all linked by thought, and through feeling, one to another; so that the result is a complete whole which one can study as if it were a world of its own. As such, the whole of his poetry is full, not of systematic theology, but of his own theology; and to bring this out, while at the same time analysing his work as a Poet, is the object of

My first subject will

the lectures I shall deliver upon him. be the mode in which he conceives God in His relation to Nature, and necessarily what he means by Nature; the next will be the relation which Nature bears to Man, and the work of God on Man through that relation. Afterwards I shall speak fully of Wordsworth's poetry of Man