the Eternal Word, how gladly, triumphantly, he links the outmost sign with the inmost revelation :

"Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears;
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

Wordsworth's perceptions are so real, so indisputable, that he is not afraid to repeat a thought; indeed, the recurrence comes as it comes in nature, linking itself with fresh time and circumstance. For instance, in the Ode he reminds us that

"those obstinate questionings

Of sense and outward things,

Fallings from us, vanishings,

Blank misgivings of a creature

Moving about in worlds not realized,

those first affections,

Those shadowy recollections,

...

have power to make

Our noisy years seem moments in the being

Of the eternal silence."

And then, when in his other noble song of "Sound" he questions Silence, declaring the everlasting speech of "day unto day,” and that there shall be a Voice always, of which

all lesser voices are the concurrent breathings, he rounds and complements the same great thought:

"A voice to light gave being;

To time, and man his earth-born chronicler;

A voice shall finish doubt and dim foreseeing,
And sweep away life's visionary stir.

O Silence! are man's noisy years

No more than moments of thy life?

Is Harmony.

Thy destined bondslave? No! though earth be dust,
And vanish, though the heavens dissolve, her stay
Is in the Word, that shall not pass away!"

It is a jubilance, an exultation, to discover these identities and completions of the thought of a wise, sweet thinker. They make the truth more clear and sure to us; they give us the round and complement of a reality; they show to us that unity which is in the worldmeanings; they are the fullness and satisfying of Holy Scripture itself, which is the signmanual of Deity to the declarations of His works.

VI

ABOUT SPIRIT AND FORM IN POETRY

I WISH, dear friends, to write to you very simply. It is impossible in these brief letters to treat their subjects discursively, exhaustively. They are so very broad. They expand illimitably into variation of instance, relation, and particular. To follow them into their wideness of ramification would be like trying to trace great tree-growths from centre to each outmost twig and leaf tip, through endless branching and veining. We must needs keep close to the heart of things. We must learn the secret of the manifold in the nature of the single. But these close, original simplicities are often hard to discover and define; they demand some precise analysis, some exact and searching thought and statement. If I ever seem too introspective, too difficult in careful phrasing, too remote in endeavor after cause and meaning, remember

that it is simpleness I want to get to and lay hold of; but that absolute simpleness is the most inclusive thing there is!

We have come to one assurance that is single, central: that in all that exists there is a soul and a body, an interior meaning and an outward expression. There is the word of God and the speech of it.

The office of the poet is to find the word and the sign, and to declare the one by the other. His work is a re-making, or, rather, a re-presentation.

Whatever the fall of man was, in especial fact, the result has been a dislocation, a break, between the real and the actual. It needs a new word to set them together again in a vital unity. This is revelation. I suppose if everything were as vital to us as it was meant to be, words need not, perhaps, have been invented at all. We might have talked in light and music. As it is, revelation has had to be reduced to syllables. Poetry has had to be set in form as poesy.

Into this revelation, this illustration, God has sent, from time to time, as into all others, a new impulse, a grander power, a deeper in

Uor M

spiration. All along the line of its tradition have come chosen witnesses of high epiphanies, -commissioned messengers of the intrusted word. There have been successive dispensations of insight, knowledge, utterance.

As in all continuous developments of truth, we can discern, looking back upon the movement and advance, where have been some haltings and departures, wanderings from the way, intrusions of the false and the mistaken among the earnest and the sure. We can trace the thought-pilgrimage and see where it has made a real march onward, marking out more of the beautiful path to be followed; where it has merely loitered, or idly and selfdelightedly disported and tarried; where it has gone back, merely to discover old footprints and tread them over with servility and pretense, not caring to be led by them any whither.

But we need not trouble ourselves with the confusions and obliterations of the trail. We need not let the blind guides hinder us nor tumble us into the ditch.

In short, to leave all figure, we must be aware that there is a great deal in print which