Morley.

One of the most beautiful of all his poems Wordsworth calls by the cumbrous name of Intimations of Immorality from recollections of Early Childhood.  This is his way of saying that when we are small we are nearer the wonder-world than when we grow up, and that when we first open our eyes on this world they have not quite forgotten the wonderful sights they saw in that eternity whence we came, for the soul has no beginning, therefore no ending.  I will give you here one verse of this poem:—­

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: 
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home: 
Heaven lies about us in our infancy! 
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily further from the east
Must travel , still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.”

Wordsworth, for the times in which he lived, traveled a good deal, and in his comings and goings he made many new friends and met all the great literary men of his day.  And by slow degrees his poetry won its way, and the younger men looked up to him as to a master.  The great, too, came to see in him a power.  Since 1813 Southey had been Laureate, and when in 1843 he died, the honor was given to Wordsworth.  He was now an old man of seventy-three, and although he still wrote a few poems, he wrote nothing as Laureate, except an ode in honor of the Prince Consort when he became Chancellor of Cambridge University.  Now, as he grew old, one by one death bade his friends to leave him—­

    “Like clouds that rake the mountain summits,
    Or waves that own no curbing hand,
    How fast has brother followed brother,
    From sunshine to the sunless land!

    “Yet I whose lids from infant slumber
    Were earlier raised, remain to hear
    A timid voice, that asks in whispers
    ‘Who next will drop and disappear?’"*

    Upon the Death of James Hogg.

At length in 1850, at the age of eighty, he too closed his eyes, and went “From sunshine to the sunless land.”

    “But where will Europe’s latter hour
    Again find Wordsworth’s healing power? 
    Others will teach us how to dare,
    And against fear our breast to steel;
    Others will strengthen us to bear—­
    But who, ah! who, will make us feel?"*

    Arnold.

BOOKS TO READ

Poems of Wordsworth, selected by C. L. Thomson.  Selections, by Matthew Arnold.