Like virtue have the forms

Perennial of the ancient hills; nor less

The changeful language of their countenances

Quickens the slumbering mind, and aids the thoughts,
However multitudinous, to move

With order and relation.

Prelude, Bk. vii,

And now that imagination and intellect were awakened, they could not rest content with Nature only, or their own work; they turned to seek their food in books. And in this sphere also Nature intervened. He thanks God that he was allowed to run wild, and saved by Nature from a forced and artificial education; that he was handed. over to the natural training of wild Nature and took up things as the external world woke interest in them. He lit by chance on books, and faëry tale and legend seemed more in harmony with Nature than manuals of science. She taught him not to lose her in over education, so that at least in his case old Grandame Earth had not to grieve that the

Playthings which her love designed for him

were unthought of, that the flowers and the river-sides were neglected. The pupil of Nature, his was a larger, grander teaching than that which merely trains the understanding. Books were good, he thought, yet how much less good than that invisible lesson which comes to us through the visible universe, even to the wild and careless child. But who gives that lesson, whose is the voice that works so silently? In Wordsworth's deep religion it is God:

M

A gracious spirit o'er this earth presides,
And o'er the heart of man-invisibly

It comes-to works of unreproved delight,

And tendency benign, directing those

Who care not, know not, think not what they do.

Prelude, Bk. v.

And surely he is right. When we cram our children to the throat with mere instruction, or make them move over roads of learning like machines, we are really shutting out from them God and God's teaching; we are forgetting the wisdom that is gained by freedom; we are killing originality and the poetic spirit. True force and grandeur of character have their roots in early freedom to drink in other lessons than those that instructors give, and come in the child and man, as they come in the forest tree :

Not by casting in a formal mould
But by its own divine vitality.

We have no need to trouble ourselves to give so much to our children, nor would we do so if we believed, as we ought, that God is educating them Himself, that,

In the unreasoning progress of the world
A wiser spirit is at work for us,

A better eye than theirs, most prodigal
Of blessings, and most studious of our good
Even in what seem our most unfruitful hours.

Prelude, Bk. V.

And lastly, as Wordsworth passed from childhood into youth, the books that most attracted him were naturally the Poets; and Nature stepped in here also and gave him a deeper insight into them. It is a splendid thought of his when he describes how he, who had been intimate with

Nature in his youth, sees something more in the work of the great Masters of Song than mere glittering verse: he sees in them great Nature herself. Their words are viewless winds which visionary power attends; darkness and all the host of shadowy things make their abode in their poetry. In it, things, as in Nature, weave and unweave, change in shadow and sunshine of thought. That is one of the finest thoughts of Wordsworth, and the finest thing ever said of poetry. But it was Nature who taught him to feel and say it. It completes the history of this early education of Nature, and I quote it in conclusion:

Here must we pause: this only let me add,
From heart experience, and in humblest senso
Of modesty, that he, who in his youth
A daily wanderer among woods and fields,
With living Nature hath been intimate,
Not only in that raw unpractised time
Is stirred to ecstacy, as others are,
By glittering verse; but further, doth receivo,
In measure only dealt out to himself,
Knowledge and increase of enduring joy
From the great Nature that exists in works
Of mighty Poets. Visionary power
Attends the motions of the viewless winds,
Embodied in the mystery of words:

There, darkress makes abode, and all the host
Of shadowy things work endless changes,-there,
As in a mansion like their proper home,
Even forms and substances are circumfused
By that transparent veil with light divine,
And, through the turnings intricate of verse,
Present themselves as objects recognised,
In flashes, and with glory not their own.

Prelude, Bk. v.

LECTURE VIII.

I FINISHED in my last lecture our discussion of the early education which Nature had given Wordsworth, and traced its influence on his poetry of Nature. But Wordsworth was as much, if not more, the poet of Man as of Nature, and the poetry of Man took in his hands as great a development as the poetry of Nature. My task to-day will be to show,-always taking the "Prelude" as our guide,-how the love of Man grew up in his soul.

I begin by a quotation from an Essay of Wordsworth's, in "The Friend," which resumes a great part of that which we have been saying in the two last lectures with regard to the teaching of Nature.

"We have been discoursing of infancy, childhood, boyhood, and youth, of pleasures lying in the unfolding intellect plenteously as morning dewdrops, of knowledge inhaled insensibly like a fragrance, of dispositions stealing into the spirit like music from unknown quarters, of images uncalled for arising up like exhalations, of hopes plucked like beautiful wild flowers from the ruined tombs that border the highways of antiquity, to make a garland for a living forehead; in a word, we have been treating

of Nature as a teacher of truth, through joy and through gladness, and as a creatress of the faculties by a process of smoothness and delight. We have made no mention of fear, shame, sorrow, nor of ungovernable and vexing thoughts; because, although these have been, and have done mighty service, they are overlooked in that stage of life when youth is passing into manhood, overlooked or forgotten. We now apply for succour which we need, to a faculty which works after a different course; that faculty is Reason; she gives much spontaneously, but she seeks for more; she works by thought, through feeling; yet in thoughts she begins and ends."

The way in which Nature works, then, is this: She makes an impression on the poet's mind, an impression of calm, for example. That after a time insensibly touches his sympathies, and the thought of his father's serene old age or his child's peaceful sleep is awakened in his heart; and led on in this process of soothing thought now quickened by human tenderness, he thinks of other things that belong to the sphere of calm—of the quiet balance of the powers of his own being, of the mighty rest of God; and these in turn create the resolve to attain calm of heart, to reach, through endeavour and watchfulness, the peace which passeth all understanding. "This is Nature," as Wordsworth says, for I have used a different illustration from that he uses, "teaching seriously and sweetly through the affections, melting the heart, and through that instinct of tenderness, developing the understanding."

"Let, then, the youth go back, as occasion will permit, to Nature and solitude, thus admonished by reason, and