९ You can't here use brow for the hair upon it, because a white brow or forehead is a beautiful characteristic of youth. Sickly ardor o'er' was at first reading to me unintelligible. I took 'sickly' to be an adjective joined with 'ardor,' whereas you mean it as a portion of a verb, from Shakespeare - 'Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.' But the separation of the parts, or decomposition of the word, as here done, is not to be endured.1 III. WORDSWORTH TO WILLIAM ROWAN The poem you were so kind as to inclose gave me much pleasure, nor was it the less interesting for being composed upon a subject you had touched before. The style in this latter is more correct, and the versification more musical. Where there is so much of sincerity of feeling, in a matter so dignified as the renunciation of Poetry for Science, one feels that an apology is necessary for verbal criticism. I will therefore content myself with observing that joying for joy, or joyance, is not to my taste; indeed, I object to such liberties upon principle. We should soon have no language at all if the unscrupulous coinage of the present day were allowed to pass, and become a precedent for the future. One of the first duties of a writer is to ask himself whether his thought, feeling, or image cannot be expressed by existing words or phrases, before he goes about creating new terms, even when they are justified by the analogies of the language. . . . 1 Letters of the Wordsworth Family 2. 312–313. Your sister must practise her mind in severer logic; for example, the first words of the first poem: 'Thou most companionless.' In strict logic, being companionless is a positive condition, not admitting of more or less, though in poetic feeling it is true that the sense of it is deeper as to one object than to another; and the day moon is an object eminently calculated for impressing certain minds with that feeling. Therefore the expression is not faulty in itself absolutely, but faulty in its position, coming without preparation, and therefore causing a shock between the common sense of the words and the impassioned imagination of the speaker. This may appear to you frigid criticism, but, depend upon it, no writings will live in which these rules are disregarded. In the next line: Walking the blue but foreign fields of day; the meaning here is, walking blue fields which, though common to see in our observation by night, are not so by day, even to accurate observers. Here, too, the thought is just; but again there is an abruptness; the distinction is too nice, or refined, for the second line of a poem. 'Weariness of that gold sphere.' Silver is frequently used as an adjective by our poets; gold, as I should suppose, very rarely, unless it may be in dramatic poetry, where the same delicacies are not indispensable. 'Gold watch,' 'gold bracelet,' etc., are shop language. 'Gold sphere' is harsh in sound, particularly at the close of a line. 'Faint, as if weary of my golden sphere,' would please me better. Greets thy rays.' You do not greet the ray by daylight; you greet the moon; there is no ray. 'Daring flight' is wrong; the moon, under no mythology that I am acquainted with, is represented with wings; and though on a stormy night, when clouds are driving rapidly along, the word might be applied to her apparent motion, it is not so here. Therefore 'flight' is here used for unusual or unexpected ascent, a sense, in my judgment, that cannot be admitted. The slow motion by which this ascent is gained is at variance with the word. The rest of this stanza is very pleasing, with the exception of one word — 'thy nature's breast.' Say 'profane thy nature'; how much simpler and better! 'Breast' is a sacrifice to rhyme, and is harsh in expression. We have had the brow and the eye of the moon before, both allowable; but what have we reserved for human beings, if their features and organs, etc., are to be lavished on objects without feeling and intelligence? You will, perhaps, think this observation comes with an ill grace from one who is aware that he has tempted many of his admirers into abuses of this kind; yet, I assure you, I have never given way to my own feelings in personifying natural objects, or investing them with sensation, without bringing all that I have said to a rigorous after-test of good sense, as far as I was able to determine what good sense is. Your sister will judge, from my being so minute, that I have been much interested in her poetical efforts. . . . She will probably write less in proportion as she subjects her feelings to logical forms, but the range of her sensibilities, so far from being narrowed, will extend as she improves in the habit of looking at things through the steady light of words; and, to speak a little metaphysically, words are not a mere vehicle, but they are powers either to kill or to animate.1 1 Letters of the Wordsworth Family 2. 397 ff. IV. WORDSWORTH TO LORD LONSDALE As to teaching belles-lettres, languages, law, political economy, morals, etc., by lectures, it is absurd. Lectures may be very useful in experimental philosophy, geology, and natural history, or any art or science capable of illustration by experiments, operations, and specimens; but in other departments of knowledge they are, in most cases, worse than superfluous. Of course I do not include in the above censure college lectures, as they are called, when the business consists not of haranguing the pupils, but in ascertaining the progress they have made.1 V. WORDSWORTH TO WILLIAM ROWAN HAMILTON ་ Again and again I must repeat that the composition of verse is infinitely more of an art than men are prepared to believe, and absolute success in it depends upon innumerable minutiae. . . . Milton [speaks] of pouring 'easy' his 'unpremeditated verse.' It would be harsh, untrue, and odious to say there is anything like cant in this; but it is not true to the letter, and tends to mislead. I could point out to you five hundred passages in Milton upon which labor has been bestowed, and twice five hundred more to which additional labor would have been serviceable; not that I regret the absence of such labor, because no poem contains more proof of skill acquired by practice [than Paradise Lost].2 1 Letters of the Wordsworth Family 2. 259–260. 2 Ibid. 2. 470. IV ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE PRACTICE OF GREAT WRITERS IN COMPOSING I. PROFESSOR LOCKWOOD ON MILTON'S Masson, in his 'General Introduction to the Minor Poems,' speaks of 'Milton's habits of composition, and the critical fastidiousness with which, in each revision of his poems, he sought improvements in words or in sound.' Again he says: 'Milton erased and changed so much in the act of writing that it is impossible to give an adequate idea of his habits in this respect except by actual reproduction of the Cambridge manuscript in facsimile.' In 1899 this much desired reproduction was made, at the request of the Council of Trinity College, and under the excellent supervision of Mr. William Aldis Wright. The pages of this facsimile are of great value, because they reveal to us something of Milton's workshop, something of the struggles he had in molding this often stubborn English language to the expression of his thought and the needs of his verse. Is it true that he was fastidious, and that he changed much? If so, what was he seeking by these changes clearness of thought, beauty of expression, or the flowing music of his verse? What were his habits of correction; |