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spirit of humanity diffused through time and space, which he gained. It was the sense of all that had been done and suffered, was doing and suffering now in the great City and in the world, which brooded over him like a vast shadow and filled his soul with thought. A solemn, awful ideal of the majesty and power of humanity now began to replace the vague ideal of his boyhood, the shattered ideal of his youth. To him London now was thronged; and the comparison is one of those sublime flights of imagination of which Wordsworth alone among modern poets has been capable:

With impregnations like the Wilds

In which my early feelings had been nursed-
Bare hills and valleys, full of caverns, rocks,
And audible seclusions, dashing lakes,
Echoes and waterfalls, and pointed crags

That into music touch the passing wind.

And the analogy which he felt is not obscure, for Nature, like mankind, bears the traces of a suffering past. Every rock-strewn valley tells of centuries of endurance and agony from storm and frost and lightning; in the rent channels of its streams and in the shivered peaks above it. And if in the past Nature has suffered, there is no moment of the present which does not tell of its intense activity; we cannot linger by the sea or in the woods, without an impression, almost irritating, of unmitigated work and waste and reproduction. The same feelings as these were Wordsworth's in the city, when he passed through the forest, and wandered by the ocean, of humanity.

And as he had received higher ideas of God in spite of Nature, "red in tooth and claw," and seen love under

neath its awful forces and the apparent ruin that they worked; so in the city, owing to this early training, he was able, in spite of misery and guilt, to grasp the higher view of mankind, and to love mankind. He dwelt upon the real, but it led him to a new ideal. He saw what Man was, went down into the depths of his vice and guilt, and yet his trust in that which mankind might become was not overthrown. And when he turned from the darker to the lighter side, he saw that the Divine in Man was still Divine, nay, more beautiful even from the gloom through which it flashed to speak of Heaven in the hearts of men.

One more sublime idea came upon him and exalted the thought of Man. It was the idea of his unity. There was one Brotherhood held in one Father,—

One Spirit, over ignorance and vice
Predominant, in good and evil hearts:

one conscience shared by all alike, "as one eye for the sun's light." In this idea, among all the confusion of men, and whirl of good and ill, Wordsworth found rest, and in the rest and the blessedness of it, he found God, and saw Him as the Master of mankind. He had reached the third stage in our thought of Man of which I spoke, when the disappointment we suffer from the overthrow of our youthful ideal of Man is accepted and corrected. Thus from his boyhood, his thoughts,—

by slow gradations had been drawn

To human-kind and to the good and ill

Of human life——.

Nature had led him on; through her he had found the

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love of his race. But still, though the love of Man was growing day by day, it had not as yet reached that point at which it became predominant. He still was able to fly from humanity to her, to find refuge in her mighty calm from the guilt and anarchy of men.

The world of human-kind outweighed not hers
In my habitual thoughts; the scale of love
Though filling daily, still was light, compared
With that in which her mighty objects lay.

And for a short period in this year, 1791, he went to Wales and revived and sanctified his soul by communion with the hills. But the enthusiasm of Humanity, once awakened, is not a passion that goes to sleep again, and now the songs of liberty and the glory of the efforts France was making rang with a more alluring murmur in his ear. He was irresistibly drawn to the theatre of the Revolution, where the great questions which most deeply move the race and all their passions, were playing the first act in that mighty drama in whose development we are now involved. To this, and the questions it involves, I shall devote my next lecture.

LECTURE IX.

Ar the beginning of these Lectures, we traced that which is called the Poetry of Man from Pope to the close of the life of Cowper. We found in his poetry a number of new ideas on the subject of mankind, the main characteristic of which was, that they all rested on the thought of an universal mankind, which in itself supposed the equality of all men in certain realms of thought and act. The ideas were new and revolutionary, but in Cowper they took no clear form. They floated in solution, they were not crystallized; they were the product of insensible not recognised influences of the time; mere green shoots of things which were to become mighty trees; the substance in faith of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen; sparks of a kindling fire scattered only here and there, but full of a life whose first property was the will and the power to devour things too old and too corrupt to live. No one suspected then that they would burst into flame with such accumulating rapidity; but a few years only had passed by when they rose into a conflagration which, in the French Revolution, ran over the European world. In England the fire did not fall upon the State, but its inspiration, and the passionate emotion which

attended it, fell upon the poets; and out of the hearts of Coleridge and Wordsworth the poetry of universal Man, of freedom, of equal rights, of infinite promise, of the overthrow of tyranny, leaped full-grown into a manhood which has never endured decay. It is the history of its influence on Wordsworth's mind which we have now to trace and to explain.

We have seen that this development of the poetry of Man in Wordsworth was preceded by that of the poetry of Nature. I have worked out that in the previous lectures, and an astonishing growth it is-so astonishing in comparison with the work on the same subject done by Cowper, Crabbe, and Burns, that it seems, at first sight, inexplicable. But the first explanation of its rapidity is one already alluded to in the history of the growth of the poetry of natural description. It was in reality no swift creation, but the flowering of a plant that had already clothed itself with leaves and had nothing more to do but flower. It is true that the whole plant was covered almost in an instant with a mass of flowers, and their extraordinary richness of flowerage needs a further explanation. It is supplied when we realize that the long European movement, which so suddenly took form in the French Revolution had reached in Wordsworth's early life that point of expansion which only needs a touch to cause the outburst. For at such a time there is that profound but latent excitement in which the minds of the Poets, who are the first to feel excitements, become swiftly creative on all subjects within their range; when the work of a century is often done in a year. Supply a new and quickening element to the soil

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