keenest joy, now into some exquisite agony, now into love, now into horror or into hate. What gives to Wordsworth his characteristic place among idealists is that he was much more than an idealist; underneath the poet lay a north-country statesman; and instead of transforming his being, as did Shelley, into a single energy, all diverse energies blended in Wordsworth's nature into a harmonious whole. The senses were informed by the soul and became spiritual; passion was conjoined with reason and with conscience; knowledge was vivified by emotion; a calm passivity was united with a creative energy; peace and excitation were harmonized; and over all brooded the imagination. Wordsworth is never intense, for the very reason that he is spiritually massive. The state which results from such consentaneous action of diverse faculties is one not of pure passion, not of pure thought; it is one of impassioned contemplation. To those who are strangers to this state of impassioned contemplation, Wordsworth's poetry, or all that is highest in it, is as a sealed book. But one who is in any true sense his disciple must yield to Wordsworth, so .long as he is a disciple, the deep consent of his total being.

Now what appearance will the world present to senses which are informed with spirit? It will itself appear spiritual, and as the gazer still contemplates what is around and within him, and his tranquillity ascends into a calm ecstasy, he will become conscious of all things and himself among them, as in a state of vital interaction, God and man and nature communicating with one another, playing into and through one another :

"And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man :
A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."

But

Coleridge and Wordsworth are alike commended, or condemned, as having contributed to bring about the Oxford High Church movement. There is no doubt that Coleridge did help to summon to life things which had been dead or sleeping, and which even now seem to walk about wound hand and foot with grave-clothes, and bound about the face with a napkin. And Wordsworth in his later years lost, as he expresses it, courage, the spring-like hope and confidence which enables a man to advance joyously towards new discovery of truth. the poet of "Tintern Abbey" and the "Ode on Intimations of Immortality" and the "Prelude" is Wordsworth in his period of highest energy and imaginative light; the writer of the "Ecclesiastical Sonnets" is Wordsworth declined into poetical ways of use and wont, when he had acquired a habit of writing at will in his characteristic manner, but without his characteristic inspiration. He valued, moreover, very deeply all permanent feelings, and he came to regard with reverent affection all objects with which permanent feelings have associated themselves. Then again the analytic processes of science, the worship of useful knowledge, the pushing materialism, the utilitarian philosophy of our century repelled him, and in the

Church he found faith in something spiritual, in God and immortality. Keble admired and honoured the venerable poet, and transfused into his "Christian Year" a certain quantity of dilute Wordsworthian sentiment, sanctified to purposes of religious edification. One of the writers of the Series of Lives of the Saints, originated by Dr Newman, reprints the "Stanzas suggested in a Steamboat off St. Bees' Head," with a comment on the affectionate reverence of the poet for the Catholic past, which presents an edifying contrast to the "half-irreverent sportiveness of Mr Southey's pen." Nevertheless it remains true, that the tendencies of Wordsworth as a master, when he was indeed a master, are essentially adverse to those of Anglo-Catholicism. The difference is that between the natural and the manufactured, the reign of spiritual law and the reign of ecclesiastical miracle. And the true representatives of Wordsworth among the younger minds of Oxford were precisely those who have contributed nothing towards the Catholic movement; but have rather acted in opposition to it, such young men among others as Mr Shairp, Mr Matthew Arnold, and A. H. Clough.

As to Coleridge's relations with the High Church movement, it might have given pause to those who would exhibit him as an undeveloped Anglo-Catholic if they had remembered his enthusiastic admiration of Luther and of Milton.*

*

Dr Newman, when claiming Coleridge as a

Clough, writing from Oxford, 1838, says: "It is difficult here even to obtain assent to Milton's greatness as a poet. Were it not for the happy notion that a man's poetry is not at all affected by his opinions, . . . I fear the 'Paradise Lost' would be utterly unsaleable, except for waste paper, in the university."

philosophical initator of High Church opinions, admits that he "indulged a liberty of speculation which no Christian can tolerate, and advocated conclusions which were often heathen rather than Christian." Perhaps if the matter were capable of being set at rest by authority, the highest authority adducible would be that of one who devoted, it may be sacrificed, a mind of high and original powers and of admirable culture to the study and elucidation of the great thinker's writings Coleridge's learned daughter. "My own belief is," she wrote, "that although an unripe High Church theology is all that some readers have found or valued in my father's writings, it is by no means what is there: and that he who thinks he has gone a little way with Coleridge, and then proceeded with Romanizing teachers further still, has never gone with Coleridge at all."

The Transcendental and the Catholic movements had, however, one important point in common-both were antagonistic to the Puritan religion of England, which laboured to effect an irreparable breach between the invisible and the visible, the internal and the external, between body and spirit. The sole ritual evolved from the religious consciousness of the preceding dominant party seems to have been the mysterious ceremony of praying into one's beaver hat. To Wordsworth the senses, themselves sacred, and hardly more to be named senses than soul, are ministers to what is highest in man, "subservient still to móral purposes, auxiliar to divine." There was for him an unceasing ritual of sensible forms appealing to the heart, the imagination, and the moral will-a grand function was in perpetual progress while

V

seed-time and harvest and summer and winter endure. The High Church rector was not ill pleased to find that a philosophical view of religion authorized the gratification of an English gentleman's taste for mild æsthetic pleasures. The designs of the elder Pugin-attenuated in structure (perhaps symbolically) and successful in decorative elements-began to replace those grim AngloGrecian temples, so vividly described by Mr Eastlake in his "Gothic Revival," where the beauty of holiness was made visible through the pseudo-classic portico, the "jury-boxes in which the faithful were impanelled, the three-decker pulpit, and the patent warming-apparatus.' To deliberate over a mural diaper, to compare the patterns for altar furniture, afforded a gentle stimulant in the midst of parochial dulness. The taste for melodrama and martyrdom was not at that early date developed.

We can

To Coleridge a far more kindred spirit than that of any High Churchman was Mr F. D. Maurice. imagine the pain with which Mr Maurice would have heard himself styled "transcendental," but presently that most sympathetic of adversaries would doubtless have discovered that you were right, only in his sense, not your own; "transcendental," yes, because before all else needing some realities, some abiding facts, and not theories about facts; "transcendental," then, because above everything a realist. Mr Maurice's theology, as a recent critic, the Rev. James Martineau, has observed, is at once an effort to oppose the pantheistic tendency, and is itself reached and touched by that tendency. How to connect the human and the divine had been a question since the transition from eighteenth century thought had