‘What beckoning ghost, besprent with April dew, Hails me so solemnly to yonder yew?’ All the gravity, all the sweetness, one might fear, must be lost in such a change as Pope makes— ‘What beckoning ghost along the moonlight shade Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?’ Yet they are not lost. Pope’s awe and ardour are authentic, and they prevail; the succeeding couplet—inimitably modulated, and of tragic dignity—proves, without delay, the quality of the poem. The poverty and coldness of the passage (towards the end), in which the roses and the angels are somewhat trivially sung, cannot mar so veritable an utterance. The four final couplets are the very glory of the English couplet. LINES ON RECEIVING HIS MOTHER’S PICTURE.—Page 213. Cowper, again, by the very directness of human feeling makes his narrowing English a means of absolutely direct communication. Of all his works (and this is my own mere and unshared opinion) this single one deserves immortality. LIFE.—Page 217. This fragment (the only fragment, properly so called, in the present collection) so pleased Wordsworth that he wished he had written the lines. They are very gently touched. THE LAND OF DREAMS.—Page 217. When Blake writes of sleep and dreams he writes under the very influence of the hours of sleep—with a waking consciousness of the wilder emotion of the dream. Corot painted so, when at summer dawn he went out and saw landscape in the hours of sleep. SURPRISED BY JOY.—Page 229. It is not necessary to write notes on Wordsworth’s sonnets—the greatest sonnets in our literature; but it would be well to warn editors how they print this one sonnet; ‘I wished to share the transport’ is by no means an uncommon reading. Into the history of the variant I have not looked. It is enough that all the suddenness, all the clash and recoil of these impassioned lines are lost by that ‘wished’ in the place of ‘turned.’ The loss would be the less tolerable in as much as perhaps only here and in that heart-moving poem, _’Tis said that some have died for love_, is Wordsworth to be confessed as an impassioned poet. STEPPING WESTWARD.—Page 243. This and the preceding two exquisite poems of sympathy are far more justified, more recollected and sincere than is that more monumental composition, the famous poem of sympathy, _Hartleap Well_. The most beautiful stanzas of this poem last-named are so rebuked by the truths of nature that they must ever stand as obstacles to the straightforward view of sensitive eyes upon the natural world. Wordsworth shows us the ruins of an aspen-wood, a blighted hollow, a dreary place forlorn because an innocent creature, hunted, had there broken its heart in a leap from the rocks above; grass would not grow, nor shade linger there— ‘This beast not unobserved by Nature fell, His death was mourned by sympathy divine.’