forgive him for talking as he did about Wordsworth, who "wrote six
poems and then fell asleep." And among the six are not _Tintern
Abbey_ or the _Intimations of Immortality_. Meditative poetry
is not Mr. Masefield's strongest claim to fame, and we do not go to
poets for illuminating literary criticism. Swinburne was so violent in
his "appreciations" that his essays in criticism are adjectival
volcanoes. Every man with him was God or Devil. It is rare that a
creative poet has the power of interpretation of literature possessed
by William Watson. Mr. Masefield does not denounce Wordsworth, as
Swinburne denounced Byron; he is simply blind to the finest qualities
of the Lake poet. Yet, although he carries Wordsworth's famous theory
of poetry to an extreme that would have shocked the author of it--if
Mr. Masefield does not like _Tintern Abbey_, we can only imagine
Wordsworth's horror at _The Everlasting Mercy_--the philosophy of
poetry underlying both _The Everlasting Mercy_, _The Widow in
the Bye Street_, and other works is essentially that of William
Wordsworth. Keeping _The Everlasting Mercy_ steadily in mind, it
is interesting, instructive, and even amusing to read an extract from
Wordsworth's famous Preface of 1800. "The principal object, then,
proposed in these poems was to choose incidents and situations from
common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was
possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the
same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination,
whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual
aspect; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and
situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not
ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature; chiefly, as far as
regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of
excitement. Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in
that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil