Text-book of poetry; from Wordsworth, Coleridge, Burns, Beattie, Goldsmith, and Thomson. With sketches of the authors' lives, notes, and glossaries. For use in schools and classes

Front matter

ill ilH'lll^vl'tii I 'i i''>^ ill ill I

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Preface

It is really as important that people should be disposed to read what is good, as it is that they should know how to read. For the ability to converse wdth books is as liable to abuse as any other gift, and is in fact as much abused at this very time, and that too to the injury of the readers themselves, both in mind and heart. It is abundantly in proof that, of the books now appearing from day to day, the meanest and the worst, those made up of the cheapest and the foulest sensational flash, are read a great deal the most. The reason of this surely must be that, while people are taught to read, due care is not taken to plant and cherish in them right intellectual and literary tastes. In our education, therefore, it is of prime concern that such tastes should be early set or quickened in the mind; that while we are giving people the ability to converse with books, no pains should be spared to inspire them with the love of books that are good. Once possess them with a genuine, hearty love of a few first-rate authors, and then their culture in all its parts, so far as books can minister to it, is duly cared for: that love, those tastes, will become a sort of instinct, to prompt and guide them to Avhat is wholesome and pure. And in this, as in other things, the ways of purity and health are also the ways of lasting and ever-growing pleasure and delight. The abiding, uncloying sweetness, the living, un withering freshness of books in which conscience presides, truth illuminates, and genius inspires, are the proper food and delectation of a chaste and well-ordered mind; and to have a due sense and relish of those qualities, is at once the proof and the pledge of moral and intellectual health: for here it may with special fitness be afiirmed that "love is an unerring light, and joy its own security."

It is on this principle, it is with a constant view to this end, that I have worked in selecting and ordering the contents of the present volume. These are the thoughts that prompted, and have throughout governed, the undertaking. In my own teaching, I have long felt the want of such a text-book, and have supplied the lack thereof as I best could. As for the reading-books, of which so many are in common use, I neither could nor would have any thing to do with them. I have no faith in them whatsoever: the very principle of

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IV PREFACE.

them I hold to be radically vicious and wrong. Assuredly, the right way of teaching English literature, so as to develop the intellectual tastes, is by using authors, and not miscellaneous literary chips, such as the books in question are made up of. Both experience and the reason of the thing amply instruct us that a mere collection of scraps and specimens gathered from a multitude of writers is rather a hindrance than a help to the end proposed; because in such a course the pupil does not stay long enough with any one author to catch his spirit, to find his virtue, or to feel at home with him. In such a rapid flight from author to author, no true intellectual loves or taste&can possibly germinate in the mind: for these loves are like our domestic loves, which grow from long intercourse of heart with heart and soul with soul in the familiar atmosphere of home, and the companionship of faces endeared by time. In short, these current reading-books are alike tedious in the use and worthless in the result: no mental delight can spring up from their pages : for any purpose but a mere mechanical pronouncing of words and sentences, they are sheer impertinences. On the other hand, a taste for a good author is a thing of slow and silent growth, and can by no means be extemporized: to the forming and fixing of it nothing will serve, but that the author's virtue just soak into the mind from communing with him through many a studious and thoughtful hour. Such is indeed the method, such the process of all fruitful converse with intellectual and moral beauty, the only way to drink-in the efficacy thereof; a converse which Milton so well describes as "beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies."

The upshot of all which is that, for the ends of culture, instead of a course of nibbles and snatches over a wide, miscellaneous field of authorship, we should take a very few of the best authors, and then use them a great deal. A taste for Shakespeare or Wordsworth alone, once thoroughly set in the mind, will readily guide him who has it to other good authors, and will at the same time keep him away from the bad by a spontaneous disgust of them.

The contents of this volume, as will at once be seen, are all drawn from six authors. Nor does this list include any author now living. I set out with the determination not to admit any author who had not fairly won the rank of a classic; a thing that is seldom if ever done during an author's life : generally a hundred years is little time enough for settling so grave a question. And it is a fixed principle with me, that none but the very best authors should be taken for the use to which this volume is addressed; while, again, to be used as a text-book in school, and for setting the tastes and forming the minds of the young, is the highest honour to which any author can justly aspire. Of the several authors here

PKEFACE. V

included, I have aimed to select, if not the pieces best in themselves, such at least as seemed best fitted for the use here designed. Therewithal, except in a few cases, which are duly remarked in the notes, I have given entire poems; and this to the end that a sense of artistic completeness and harmony may be secretly quickened and fostered in the pupil's mind.

All, or nearly all, the pieces set forth in this collection are old, familiar, long-tried friends of mine : if I had not been in the habit of returning to them often, and conversing with them, for many, many years; and if I had not believed the verdure and freshness of them to be perennial, and such as no frequency of perusal can exhaust; I should not have admitted them: in a word, to my sense, "age cannot wither them, nor custom stale their infinite variety"; for I would fain have the volume so composed as to gather about

itself

•• the fixed delights of house and home, Friendships that will not break, and love that cannot roam."

It may be thought that some apology, or some explanation, is due from me for having filled so much of the volume with Wordsworth. On this point I can but say that the book contains no more of Wordsworth than I really want, and have long been in the habit of using more or less, in my own classes; nor anymore than I think may be generally used with good effect in a course of English studies. And I am thoroughly satisfied that, next after Shakespeare, Wordsworth is the best of all the English poets for such use; and this chiefly because he is apt to inspire a deeper, stronger, and more abiding enthusiasm. In my observation, no mind that has once rightly felt the touch of his hand ever shakes off or outgrows its power ; nor can I think of any thing better which the school can do for young minds than to seize them with a life-long passion for him.

Of the other authors and poems embraced in this volume, it may be enough to say that the consorting or grouping of them is by no means arbitrary. Strongly marked as the authors severally are with individual and characteristic traits, yet they naturally gravitate each to all, and all to each, by the force of mutual sympathy. To my sense, they are six highly congenial souls, and the more congenial for having each his original and independent strength. Thus the group affords a large variety of interest and attraction, while at the same time they all draw smoothly together under a common spirit, and to a common purpose; so that a right study of any one will serve to sharpen the student's relish and deepen his enjoyment of all the others.

As to what is here done in the way of notes and comments, perhaps the less said, the better. Still it may not be amiss to observe

VI PREFACE.

that I have aimed at fitness, not for recitations proper, but simply for exercises; that teacher and pupils may commune together with the beauty and wisdom and eloquence of the authors, without having their thoughts too much diverted and drawn away to irrelevant points. I have been specially desirous not to encumber pupils with excessive or superfluous help; deeming that the right way is, to bring the minds of the student and the author fairly together, to put the former in direct and free communication with the latter, — a process that may easily be defeated by thrusting too much of explanation and comment between them; — and then to leave the proper results to come in their own way and time, knowing that the more silent they are in coming, the surer they are to come, and the better when they come. In such studies, the great thing is, to get the pupils really to understand and relish what is before them, to taste its sweetness, to inhale its spirit, to catch its virtue: this done, the main end of the study is secured; this left undone, that end is missed, and the work is to be set down as a failure, whatever incidental benefits may accrue from the process. And here may be fitly applied to the study of poetry what Coleridge says in reference to his own poetical composition: '* Poetry has been to me its own ' exceeding great reward ' : it has soothed my afflictions; it has multiplied and refined my enjoyments; it has endeared solitude; and it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the Good and the Beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me."

In the sketches of the several authors' lives, I have endeavoured, with my best care and judgment, and with as much, fulness as the space would allow, to sort out and draw together such particulars of personal history and of native idiom as would best serve to impress their characteristic traits, and to illustrate the correspondences between the man and his works. In such swift biographical summaries, it is very difficult to avoid a most unattractive dryness of style; and I dare not hope that these specimens stand clear of that fault.

Contents

WORDSWORTH.

Page.

Ruth 13

Book Ninth 486 OOLEKIDGE

Genevieve. Love 509

The Ancient Mariner 510

Christabel • ^l*?

CONTEl!fTS. IX

Page.

Ode to the Departing Year . 525

France. An Ode 529

Fears in Solitude 531

Hymn to Mont Blanc 537

The Eolian Harp 539

Eeflections, &c 540

This Lune-Tree Bower, &c 542

To William Wordsworth . . 544

The Nightingale 547

Frost at Midnight 549

Dejection: An Ode 551

Miscellaneous 554

BUKNS.

The Cotter's Saturday Night 561

To the Owl . 566

The Twa Dogs 567

Tarn o' Shanter 569

Address to the Deil 572

The Vision 574

On Pastoral Poetry . . . . . . . . . 577

To a Mouse 578

Bruar Water 578

Castle-Gordon 579

To Miss Cruikshanks 580

Poor Mailie's Elegy 580

Auld Mare Maggie 581

To a Louse 582

A Bard's Epitaph 682

To a Mountain Daisy 583

To the Shade of Thomson 583

To Miss Logan 584

A Prayer, &c 584

Elegy on Captain Henderson 584

On Sensibility 585

X TEXT -BOOK OF POETRY.

Page.

Lincluden Abbey 586

To the Guidwife, &c 586

A Vision 587

Epistle to Davie 588

Epistle to Lapraik . " 588

To William Simpson 590

Epistle to a Young Friend 591

Epistle to James Smith 592

To Dr. Blacklock 594

Songs 595

BEATTIE.

GOLDSMITH.

THOMSON.

Glossary t:94

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

SKETCH OF HIS LIFE.

The birth-place of William Wordsworth is in Cumberland, a county lying in the north-west corner of England, and separated from Scotland by Sol way Frith. That region is specially distinguished in having numerous small lakes cradled among its hills and mountains, all of which have now been crowned with classic honours by the poet's hand. His father, John Wordsworth, was an attorney, and, having been engaged as law-agent by the Earl of Lonsdale, was set over the western portion of the wide domain of Lowther, and lived at Cockermouth, in a manorhouse belonging to that family. There William was born on the 7th of April, 1770, the second of four sons. There was only one daughter in the family, Dorothy, who came next after the poet. Cockermouth stands on the Derwent, called by the poet " the fairest of all rivers," and looks back to the Borrowdale mountains, among which that river is born. The voice of that stream, he tells us, flowed along his dreams while he was a child.

His mother, a wnse and pious woman, told a friend that William was the only one of her children about whom she felt anxious, and that he would be " remarkable either for good or evil." This was probably from what he himself calls bis " stiff, moody, and violent temper." Of this, which made him a wayward and headstrong boy, all that he seems afterAvards to have retained was that resoluteness of character which stood him in good stead when he became a man.

Of his mother, who died when he Avas eight years old, the poet retained a faint but tender recollection. At the age of nine, he, along with his elder brother Eichard, left home for school. It would be hard to conceive a better school-life for a future poet than that in which Wordsworth was reared at Hawkshead. High-pressure was then unknown ; nature and freedom had full swing. Bounds and locking-up hours they had none. The boys lived in the cottages of the village dames, in a natural, friendly way, like their own children. Their play-gounds were the fields, the lake, the woods, the hillsides, far as their feet could carry them. Their games were crag-climbing for ravens' nests, skating on Esthwaite Lake, setting springes for woodcocks.

In Wordsworth's fourteenth year, when he and his brother were at home for the Christmas holidays, their father, who had never recovered heart after the death of his wife, followed her to the grave. The old home at Cockermouth was broken up, and the orphans were but poorly provided for. Large arrears were indeed due to their father from the strange, self-willed Earl of Lonsdale ; but these his lordship never chose to make good. Nevertheless the boys returned to school, and William remained there till his eighteenth year, when he left for Cambridge.

From HaAvkshead Woi'dsworth took several good things with him. In book-learning, there was Latin enough to enable him to read the Roman poets with pleasure in after-years ; of mathematics, more than enough to start him on equality with the average of Cambridge freshmen; of Greek, probably not much, — ai least we never heard of it afterwards. It was here that he began that intimacy with the English poets which he afterwards perfected : but neither at school nor in after-life was he a devourer of books.

2 WORDSWORTH I

Of verse-making, his earliest attempts date from Hawksliead. A long copy of verses, written on the second centenary of the foundation of the school, Avas much admired; but he himself afterwards pronounced them but a " tame imitation of Pope." But more than any book-lore, more than any skill in verse-making, or definite thoughts about poetry, was the free, natural life he led at Hawkshead. It was there that he was smitten to the core with that love of Nature which became the prime necessity of his being. Not that he Avas a moody or peculiar boy, nursing his own fancies apart from his companions : so far from this, he was foremost in all schoolboy adventures, — the sturdiest oar, the hardiest cragsman at the harrying of ravens' nests. Weeks and months, he tells us, passed in a round of school tumult. No life could have been every way more unconstrained and natural. But, school tumult though there was, it was not in a made play-ground at cricket or rackets, but in haunts more fitted to form a poet, — on the lakes and the hillsides. All through his school-time, he says that in pauses of the " giddy bliss " he felt " gleams like the flashing of a shield." And as time went on, and common school pursuits lost their novelty, these visitations grew deeper and more frequent.

In October, 1787, at the age of eighteen, Wordsworth passed from Hawkshead School to St. John's College, Cambridge. College life, so important to those whose minds are mainly shaped by books and academic influences, produced on him but little impression. The stripling of the hills had not been trained for college competitions : he felt that he " was not for that hour, nor for that place." The range of scholastic studies seemed to him narrow and timid. As for college honours, he thought them dearly purchased at the price of the evil rivalries and the tame standard of excellence which they fostered in the eager few who entered the lists. No doubt he was a self-suflficient, presumptuous you.th, so to judge of men and things in so famous a university : but there wCre qualities of a rarer kind latent in him, which in time justified him in thus taking his own course.

When arrived in Cambridge, a northern villager, he tells us there were other poor, simple schoolboys from the North, now Cambridge men, ready to welcome him, and introduce him to the ways of the place. So, leaving to others the competitive race, he let himself, in the company of these^ drop quietly down the stream of the usual undergraduate jollities. In The Prelude he tells us how in a friend's room in Christ's College, once occupied by Milton, he toasted the memory of the abstemious Puritan, till the fumes of wine took his brain ; — the first and last time that the future water-drinker experienced that sensation. During the earlier part of his college course he did just as others did, lounged and sauntered, boated and rode, enjoyed wines and supper-parties, " days of mirth and nights of revelry ; " yet kept clear of vicious excess.

When the first novelty of college life was over, growing dissatisfied with idleness, he withdrcAV somewhat from promiscuous society, and kept more by himself. Jj Living in quiet, the less he felt of reverence for those elders whom he saw. the '' more his heart was stirred with high thoughts of those whom he could not see. ! He read Chaucer under the hawthorn by Trompington Mill, and made inti- ■ i mate acquaintance with Spenser. Milton he seemed to himself almost to see i moving before him, as, clad in scholar's gown, that young poet had once walked i those same cloisters in the angelic beauty of his youth.

During the Summer vacations Wordsworth and his sister, who had been | much separated since their childhood, met once more under the roof of their '( mother's kindred in Penrith. With her he then had the first of those rambles — ] by the streams of Lowthef and Emont — which Avere afterwards renewed Avith i so happy resiilts. Then, too, he first met Mary Hutchinson, his cousin, and his I wife to be. It Avas during his second or third year at Cambridge, that he first seriously formed the purpose of being a poet, and dared to hope that he might leave behind him something that Avould Ua'C. His last long vacation A\-as de- ■ voted to a walking-tour on the Continent along Avith a college friend from Whales. For himself, he had long cast college studies and their rewards behind him ; but friends at home could not see this without imeasy forebodinf^s. What was to become of a penniless lad Avho thus played ducks and drakes with youth's golden opportunities 1 But he had as yet no misgivings ; he Avas athirst only for Nature and freedom. So, with his friend Jones, staff in hand, he walked for fourteen Avceks through France, SAvitzerland, and the north of Italy. With four shillings each daily they paid their Avay. They landed at Calais on the eve of tbe day Avhen the King Avas to SAvear to the ncAV constitution. All through France, as tbey trudged along, they saAV a people rising Avith jubilee to Avelconiein the dawn, as they thought, of a ncAV era for mankind. Nor Avere they onlookers only, but sympathizers in the intoxication of the time, joining in village revels and dances Avith the frantic multitude. But these sights did not detain them, for they Avere bent rather on seeing Nature than man. Over the Alps and along the Italian lakes they passed Avith a kind of aAvful joy.

In January, 1791,AVordsworth took a common degree, and quitted Cambridge. The crisis of his life lay betAveen this time and his settling doAA^n at Grasmere. He had resolved to be a poet ; but CA'en poets must be housed, clothed, and fed ; and poetry has seldom done this for any of its deA'otees, least of all such poetry as Wordsworth AA'as minded to AArite. But it Avas not the question of bread alone, but one much Avider and more complex, which noAv pressed upon him, — the question, What next 1 And the difficulty of meeting this Avas much enhanced to him from the circumstance of his being turned loose upon a AAorld just heaving Avith the first throes of the French Kevolution. He had seen that event AA'hile it still Avore its earliest auroral hues, Avhen the people Avere mad Avith joy, as at the daAvn of a renovated Earth. That he should have staked his Avhole hope on it, looked for all good things from it, Avho shall Avonder'? Coleridge, Southey, almost every high-minded young man of that time, hailed it Avith fervour. Wordsworth Avould not have been the man he Avas, if he coiild have stood proof against the contagion. On leaving Cambridge he had gone to London. The Spring and early Summer months he spent there, not mingling in society, but AA'andering about the streets, noting all sights, obserA^ant of men's faces and Avays, haunting the open book-stalls. During these months he tells us he was preserved from the cynicism and contempt for human nature Avhich the deformities of croAvded life often breed, by remembrance of the kind of men he had first lived amongst, in thcmseh-es a manly, simple, uncontaminated race, and inA-ested Avith added interest and dignity by living in the same hereditary fields Avhere their forefathers had lived, and by moving about among the grand accompaniments of mountain storms and sunshine. The good had come first, and the evil, Avlien it came, did not stamp itself into the groundAAork of his imagination. The folloAving Summer he visited his traA^elling companion Jones in Wales, and made a Avalking-tour in that country.

In November, 1791, he visited Paris, and there heard the speeches that Avere made in the Hall of the National Assembly, Avhile the Brissotins Avere in the ascendant. A fcAv days he Avandered about the city, surveyed the scenes rendered famous by recent events, and CA^en picked up a stone as a relic from the site of the demolished Bastile. This rage for historic scenes he hoAA'ever confesses to have been in him more affected than genuine. From Paris he Avent to Orleans, and sojourned there for some time to learn the language. When, in the Fall of 1792, he returned to Paris, the September massacre had taken place but a month before ; the ^ving and his family Avere in prison ; the Eepublic A\-as proclaimed, and Robespierre in poAver. The young Englishman ranged through the city, passed the prison Avhere the King lay, visited the Tuileries, lately stormed, and the Place de Carrousel, a month since heaped Avith the dead. As he lay in the gan-et of a hotel hard by, sleepless, and filled with thoughts of Avhat had just occurred, he seemed to hear a voice that cried aloud to the Avhole city, " Sleep no more." Years after, those scenes still troubled him in dreams. He had ghastly A'isions of scaffolds hung with innocent victims, or of croAvds ready tor butchery, and mad AA^th the levity of despair. In his sleep he seemed to be pleading in vain for the life of friends, or for his OAvn, before a savage tribunal.

Returning to England at the close of 1792, he spent some time in London in great mental perplexity. He was horrified with the excesses in which the Revolution had landed ; yet not the less he clung to his republican faith, and his hope in the revolutionary cause. When every month brought tidings of fresh enormities in France, and opponents taunted him with these results of equality and popular government, he retorted that these were but the overflow of a reservoir of guilt, which had been filling up for centuries by the wrongdoings of kings and nobles. Soon France entered on a war of conquest, and he was doomed to see his last hopes of liberty betrayed. Still striving to hide the wounds of mortified presumption, he clung, as he lells us, more firmly than ever to his old tenets, while the friends of old institutions goaded him still further by their triumphant scorn. Overwhelined with shame and despondency at the shipwreck of his golden dreams, he turned to probe the foundations on which all society rests. Not only institutions, customs,, law, but even the grounds of moral obligation and distinctions of right and wrong disappeared. Demanding formal proof, and finding none, he abandoned moral questions in despair.

The nether gloom into which he was plunged, and the steps by which he won his way back to upper air, are set forth m the concluding Books of The Prelude, and partly in the character of the Solitary in The Excursion. These self-descriptions are well worth attention for the light they throw on Wordsworth's own mental history, and as illustrating by what exceptional methods one of the greatest minds of that time floated clear of the common wreck in which so many were entangled. His moral being had received such a shock that, as regards both man and Nature, he tried to close his heart against the sources of his former strength. The whole past of history, he believed, was one great mistake, and the best hope of the human race was to cut itself off even from all sympathy with it. Even the highest creations of the old poets lost their charm for him. They seemed to him mere products of passion and prejudice, wanting altogether in the nobility of reason. He tried by narrow syllogisms, he says, to unsoul those mysteries of being which have been thi-ough all ages the bonds of man's brotherhood ; that is, he grew sceptical of all those higher faiths which cannot be demonstrably proved. This moral state reacted on his feelings about the visible universe. It became to him less spiritual than it iised to be. He fell for a time under a painful tyranny of the eye, that craves ever new combinations of form, uncorrected by the reports of the other senses, uninformed by that finer influence that streams from the soul into the eye.

In this sickness of the soul, this " obscuration of the master-vision," his sole sister came, like his better angel, to his side. Convinced that his otfice on Earth was to be a poet, not to break his heart against the hard problems of political philosophy, she led him away from perplexing theories and crowded cities into the open air of heaven. Together they visited, travelling on foot, many of the most interesting districts of England, and mingled freely with the country people and the poor. There, amid the freshness of Nature, his fevered spirit was cooled down. Earth's " first diviner influence " returned, he saw things again as he had seen them in his boyhood. This free intercourse with Nature in time brought him back to his true self, so that he began to look on life and the framework of society with other eyes, and to seek there for that Avhich is permanenl and intrinsically good. At this time, as he and his sister wandered about in various out-of-the-way parts of England, where they were strangers, he found not delight only, but instruction, in conversing with all whom he met. The lonely roads were open schools to him. There, as he entered into conversation with the poorest, and heard from diem their own histories, he got a new insight into human souls, discerned in them a depth and a worth where none appeared to careless eyes. The perception of these things made him loathe the thought of those ambitious projects which had lately deceived him. He ceased to admire strength detached from moral purpose, and learned to prize unnoticed worth, the meek virtues and lowly charities. Settled judgments of right and wrong returned, but they were essential, not conventional, judgments.