From The Fortnightly Review.
THE PROSE WORKS OF WORDSWORTH.[1]
The prose works of Wordsworth, now for the first time collected, and some of which are now first published, form a gift for which all who have ever truly listened to Wordsworth, and learned from him, will be grateful with no common gratitude. To some men now in middle life, the poetry of Wordsworth in its influence upon their early years has been somewhat like a lofty mountain,
An eminence, of these our hills
The last that parleys with the setting sun,
which rose as chief presence and power near the home of their boyhood, which was the resort of their solitary walks, which kindled their most ardent thoughts, which consecrated their highest resolves, which created moods of limitless aspiration, which strengthened and subdued, from which came forth clear yet mysterious echoes, against whose front the glories of dawns that were sacred had been manifested, and on whose edges stars, like kindling watchfires, had paused at night for a moment in their course. Not less than this Wordsworth's poetry was to them, as they can remember now. But for such men the Wanderjahre, the years of travel, needful and inevitable, came; they went hither and thither; they took gifts from this one and from that; they saw strange ways and strange faces of men; they parted, it may be, too cheaply with old things that had been dear; they looked, or seemed to look, at truth askance and strangely. And now, if they are drawn back once more into the haunts of early years, they return not without dread and foreboding and tender remorse; to pass the barriers and re-enter the solitude seems as though it needed preparatory discipline and penance and absolution; having entered it, however, the consciousness of one's own personality and its altering states ceases; the fact which fills the mind is the permanence of that lofty, untroubled presence. "There it is," we say, "the same as ever," the same, though to us, who have ranged, it cannot continue quite the same, but seems now a little more abrupt and rigid in its outlines, and, it may be, seems a narrow tract of elevation in contrast with the broad bosom of common earth, the world of pasture-land and city and sea which we have traversed, and which we shall not henceforth forsake.
That three substantial volumes could be collected of Wordsworth's prose writings will be to some readers a surprise. The contents of the volumes are miscellaneous, but upon almost every page we find impressed the unity of a common origin; all that is here, or nearly all, essentially belongs to Wordsworth's mind. Now, a quarter of a century after the writer's death, these pieces have been brought together, under the authority of the Wordsworth family, by the indefatigable zeal and care of Mr. Grosart. Students of our older English poetry owe a large debt to the erudite enthusiasm of the editor of the Fuller Worthies' Library. This service now rendered to a great poet of our own century deserves a word of earnest gratitude. The editor has done his work accurately, judiciously, and without obtruding himself between the reader and the author. Some of these intended "alms for oblivion," which he has recovered from the wallet on Time's back, make richer in spiritual possessions the life of each of us, and of our century.
The contents, miscellaneous as they are, fall into certain principal groups: first, the political writings, which represent three periods in the growth of Wordsworth's mind, that of his ardent, youthful republicanism (represented by the "Apology for the French Revolution"), that of the patriotic enthusiasm of his manhood (represented by his pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra), and lastly, that of his uncourageous elder years.[2] Certain essays and letters upon education, together with a deep-thoughted letter of "Advice to the Young," reprinted from " he Friend," lie nearest to the political writings, having
- ↑ "The Prose Works of William Wordsworth." Edited with Preface, etc., by the Rev. A. B. Grosart. 3 vols. Loudon: Edward Moxon, Son, & Co., 1875.
- ↑ "Years have deprived me of courage, in the sense the word bears when applied by Chaucer to the animation of birds in spring-time."—"Prose Works," vol. iii. p. 317.
