He is a Christian only in so far as Pantheism-his own kind of Pantheism can be read into or squeezed out of Christianity; and the text on which esoteric Tolstoyism is based is not, after all, "Resist not evil," but "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you."

In that text lies the Tolstoyan sanction of morality, though not necessarily the sanction of all the detailed Tolstoyan precepts. All men are brothers because all men are manifestations of the divine. That is the central thought which pervades and animates Tolstoy's teaching. It is very precisely stated, in a very popular form, in a short tale entitled Esarhaddon, King of The Fortnightly Review.

Assyria, published for the benefit of the Jews impoverished by the Kishineff riots; but it is implied in almost everything that Tolstoy has written in recent years. It is, one cannot doubt, in their zeal for that conception of man's relations to man and to the infinite that the Tolstoyans labor so hard in apologizing for Tolstoy's impracticable code of conduct; but they have no need to do so. The conception to which they cling does not contain the conclusions which perplex them; and the premises which do contain them are not of the essence of Tolstoyism.

Francis Gribble.

On August 30, 1808, the Convention of Cintra undid the work of Vimiero and checked for a time the revolt of Portugal and Spain against Napoleon. England as a whole took the disappointment hardly; and one man-the most English of the English-was so moved that he broke what with him was, if not a rule, at least a practice of never publicly expressing his opinions on political affairs. During the following winter Wordsworth wrote a prose pamphlet; it was seen through the press by De Quincey, and published in the spring of 1809 under a title of which "The Convention of Cintra" is the fragment best known, but of which the words "those principles by which alone the independence and freedom of nations can be preserved or recovered" are the really important part. Wordsworth saw, what few men of the time appear to have seen, the essential difference between this and the other

Was there ever a people who presented themselves to the reason and the imagination, as under more holy influences than the dwellers upon the Southern Peninsula; as roused more instantaneously from a deadly sleep to a more hopeful wakefulness, as a mass fluctuates with one motion under the breath of a mightier wind; as breaking themselves up, and settling into several bodies, in more harmonious order; as reunited and embattled under a standard which was reared to the sun with more authentic assurance of final victory?

So he writes in a pamphlet which, though it had no noticeable effect (being written by an unpopular poet out of touch with practical politics), is well worth reading for its eloquence, its ideas, and the light it throws on Wordsworth's patriotic poetry. Not kings nor armies, but the "soul" of a people is what matters.

relied

On fleets and armies, and external

wealth:

But from within proceeds a Nation's health;

Which shall not fail, though poor men cleave with pride

To the paternal floor; or turn aside, In the thronged city, from the walks of gain,

As being all unworthy to detain

A Soul by contemplation sanctified. There are who cannot languish in this strife,

Spaniards of every rank, by whom the good

Of such high course was felt and understood;

ings, 'Good-morrow, Citizen!' sounded

a hollow word,

As if a dead man spake it!

At the same time, his changed feelings for England inspired him to use the sonnet as he and Milton alone have used it. The days had passed when he had

Exulted, in the triumph of my soul, When Englishmen by thousands were o'erthrown;

bound a life

Erewhile, by solemn consecration given To labor and to prayer, to nature, and to heaven.

And as the war progressed it was not the English arms he sang of, but the Peninsular heroes, Palafox, and those nameless guerillas whom in two fine sonnets he celebrated as the equals of their ancestors, who defied home and Carthage, and as "hanging like dreams around the guilty bed" of the Tyrant.

The anniversary sends one back to Wordsworth's patriotic or political poetry; and to pick it out and read it as a whole is to realize what has been said before, that here is at once the largest and most valuable body of that. kind of poetry in the English language. Its genesis and development are a familiar story. In May, 1802, a few months before his marriage, Wordsworth's sister Dorothy read him Milton's sonnets. He "took fire" at once, and he wrote immediately the sonnet "I grieved for Buonaparté." That summer the Peace of Amiens made it possible for them to go to France, and he was moved to further sonnets by the contrast between the France of 1792-"France standing at the top of golden hours"and the France which had just made Napoleon Consul for life-a France where the "two solitary greet

our victories,

I only, like an uninvited guest
Whom no one owned, sate silent, shall

I add,

Fed on the day of vengeance yet to

come.

The result of that August in France was the famous apology to his country:

When I have borne in memory what has tamed

Great Nations, how ennobling thoughts depart

When men change swords for ledgers, and desert

The student's bower for gold, some fears unnamed

I had, my Country!-am I to be blamed?

Now, when I think of thee, and what thou art,

Verily, in the bottom of my heart,
Of those unfilial fears I am ashamed.
For dearly must we prize thee; we who
find

In thee a bulwark for the cause of

men:

And I by my affection was beguiled: What wonder if a Poet now and then, Among the many movements of his

mind,

Felt for thee as a lover or a child!

To it we owe also the sonnet "Fair Star of Evening," which we only refrain from quoting because most people know it by heart; the sonnet "Here on our native soil," with its sextet:

pass,

Thought for another moment. Thou

art free,

My Country! And 'tis joy enough and pride

For one hour's perfect bliss, to tread the grass

Of England once again, and hear and see,

With such a dear Companion at my side;

and a third sonnet which is essential to the subject:

It is not to be thought of that the Flood Of British freedom, which, to the open

sea

Of the world's praise, from dark antiquity

Hath flowed, "with pomp of waters, unwithstood,"

Roused though it be full often to a mood

Which spurns the check of salutary bands,

That this most famous Stream in bogs and sands

Should perish; and to evil and to good Be lost for ever. In our halls is hung Armory of the invincible Knights of old;

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue

That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold

Which Milton held.-In everything we

are sprung

Of Earth's first blood, have titles manifold.

On his return, he was struck by the wealth and luxury of England contrasted with the "quiet and desolation" of the Calais which rejoiced so soberly over Napoleon's new honor; and-still clinging to the sonnet-he wrote the apology quoted above, the lines which include the much-quoted "Plain living and high thinking" and "Pure religion breathing household laws," the famous sonnet to Milton, and another which will appear valuably characteristic of his thought, as well as less valuably so of his expression:

It is hard to understand to-day how Wordsworth ever came to be regarded as a renegade. Not to mention his own very clear explanations of his mental processes, in "The Prelude" and elsewhere, only one who saw things with the eyes of a Hazlitt could fail to admit that his was a consistent, the only consistent, path. It is abundantly clear that Wordsworth's passion, like Milton's, was for that liberty in order which is the result of the justice of God and the laws which free man makes for himself. Napoleon, in his opinion, acted in defiance of both, and, after 1793, still more after 1802, Wordsworth could be nothing but an antiBonapartist. This is not the place to discuss how far Napoleon's "plebiscitary despotism stood for the Revolution." In Wordsworth's day the Napoleonic legend was not born, and he may be pardoned for not seeing what is not sharply clear to those who have known it for nearly a century. And as for Napoleon's "defence of nationality," what Wordsworth-no lover of

the old order thought about that is clear from another of the 1810 sonnefs -the "Indignation of a high-minded Spaniard":

We can endure that He should waste

our lands,

Despoil our temples, and by sword and flame

Return us to the dust from which we

came;

Such food a Tyrant's appetite demands: And we can brook the thought that by his band,

Spain may be overpowered, and he possess,

For his delight, a solemn wilderness Where all the brave lie dead. But, when of bands

Which he will break for us he dares to speak,

Of benefits, and of a future day When our enlightened minds shall

bless his sway;

Then, the strained heart of fortitude proves weak;

Our groans, our blushes, our pale cheeks declare

That he has power to inflict what we lack strength to bear.

Napoleon, to Wordsworth, was always the Tyrant; and that phrase, "no master mind," is the keynote of his view of Consul and Emperor. "It was a high satisfaction," he writes in his pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra, "to behold demonstrated . . . to what a narrow domain of knowledge the intellect of a Tyrant must be confined.

To the eyes of the very peasant in the field, this sublime truth was laid open-not only that a Tyrant's domain of knowledge is narrow, but melancholy as narrow; inasmuch as-from all that is lovely, dignified, or exhilarating in the prospect of human nature -he is inexorably cut off; and therefore he is inwardly helpless and forlorn."

Wisdom doth live with children round her knees:

Books, leisure, perfect freedom, and the talk

Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk

Of the mind's business: these are the degrees

By which true Sway doth mount; this is the stalk

True Power doth grow on; and her rights are these.

He was never deluded for a moment into thinking Napoleon either a great or an enviable man. To Wordsworth a tyrant could not be great; and when he was almost at the height of his power, this is all the poet has to say for him: that he had

Gained at length a prosperous height, Round which the elements of worldly might

Beneath his haughty feet, like clouds, are laid.

O joyless power that stands by lawless force!

Curses are his dire portion, scorn, and hate,

Internal darkness and unquiet breath.

Such was his attitude towards the man whom every one else in Europe was pursuing with either fulsome adulation or violent hatred. Wordsworth did not hate him. While he wept or thundered over his successes or exulted in his overthrow, he looked down upon the man from a height where personal hatred could not breathe. And twenty years later he seems to include Napoleon in the pity he evidently felt for Trajan, as he looked upon the Pillar in Rome. But he followed his career with intense interest, and the suppressed excitement characteristic of him found vent in a series of sonnets that commemorate nearly every event in the story. So early as 1802 he wrote the great sonnet on Toussaint l'Ouverture and the greater still on Venice; and another on Gustavus IV. of Sweden, who seemed to him no tyrant, but a true patriot, because he resisted Napoleon. In 1803 he defeated in imagination the French invaders. In 1806

he sang of "The Happy Warrior," that perfect product of so strange a fusion as the character of Nelson and John Wordsworth, and wrote also the sonnet after Jena, and the great lines, "Loud is the vale," on the expected death of Fox. The next year he celebrated the German rising, and wrote the sonnet on the "Two Voices"; and from 1808 to 1811, spurred by the Spanish rising and deeds of the Tyrolese, he composed that set of sonnets on Spain and Palafox, on Schill and Hofer, on honor, greatness and war, which mark those years as some of the most choicely fruitful in his career. When that burst was over he wrote little on these subjects until Napoleon had fallen, and the General Thanksgiving of January 18, 1816, called forth the three Odes and the Invocation to the Earth. Reminiscent poems on the fatal 1812 and Waterloo followed; and Haydon's pictures of Napoleon and Wellington and certain histories of the French Revolution brought from him echoes of the departed passion.

As we look back over the body of his patriotic poetry, it is easy to see the qualities which give it its permanence, its value, and-when the nature of the poet's mind is taken into consideration -its beauty. In the first place, there is no insularity, no mere "Rule, Britannia!" about his patriotism. True, having never seen Parnassus, he could write, at the age of thirty-one:

Display august of man's inheritance, Of Britain's calm felicity and power!

But the very rarity of this note of satisfaction is one of the explanations of his supremacy among our patriotic poets. The youth who had been ready to hate his England when she had appeared to him an enemy of liberty and justice, was ready to love her only in so far as she lived up to his ideals, and was ready to admonish her severely and warn her gravely even while she followed the path he held to be right. He loved nothing English merely because it was English and he was English: he loved what was English because, being English, it held a part in the glory which England had won for herself

It cannot be that Britain's social frame,

The glorious work of time and Providence,

Before a flying season's rash pretence, Should fail; that She, whose virtue put to shame,

When Europe prostrate lay, the Conqueror's aim,

Should perish, self-subverted.

and dense

Black

The cloud is; but brings that a day of doom

To Liberty? Her sun is up the while, That orb whose beams round Saxon

Alfred shone;

Then laugh, ye innocent Vales! ye Streams, sweep on,

Nor let one billow of our heaven-blest Isle

Toss in the fanning wind a humbler plume.

Those lines were written about the Reform Bill; but it is useful to trace the same feeling to his later years because that reasoned consistency, which separates him by a whole world of thought from the patriotism of the street and the music-hall, was one of the secrets of his greatness as a patriotic poet. Wordsworth, his mind and emotions ruled by a reasoned creed, kept his