,
and a deal of Wudsworth's was this sort, ye kna. You could tell fra the
man's faace his potry would niver have no laugh in it. His potry was
quite different work from li'le Hartley. Hartley 'ud goa running along
beside o' the brooks and mak his, and goa in the first oppen door and
write what he had got upo' paper. But Wudsworth's potry was real hard
stuff, and bided a deal of makking, and he'd keep it in his head for long
enough. Eh, but it's queer, mon, different ways folks hes of making
potry now. . . . Not but what Mr. Wudsworth didn't stand very high, and
was a well-spoken man enough.' The best criticism on Wordsworth that Mr.
Rawnsley heard was this: 'He was an open-air man, and a great critic of
trees.'

There are many useful and well-written essays in Professor Knight's
volume, but Mr. Rawnsley's is far the most interesting of all. It gives
us a graphic picture of the poet as he appeared in outward semblance and
manner to those about whom he wrote.

_Wordsworthiana_: _A Selection from Papers read to the Wordsworth
Society_. Edited by William Knight. (Macmillan and Co.)

MR. SWINBURNE'S _POEMS AND BALLADS_ (THIRD SERIES)
(_Pall Mall Gazette_, June 27, 1889.)

Mr. Swinburne once set his age on fire by a volume of very perfect and
very poisonous poetry. Then he became revolutionary and pantheistic, and
cried out against those that sit in high places both in heaven and on
earth. Then he invented Marie Stuart and laid upon us the heavy burden
of _Bothwell_. Then he retired to the nursery and wrote poems about
children of a somewhat over-subtle character. He is now extremely
patriotic, and manages to combine with his patriotism a strong affection
for the Tory party. He has always been a great poet. But he has his
limitations, the chief of which is, curiously enough, the entire lack of
any sense of limit. His song is nearly always too loud for his subject.
His magnificent rhetoric, nowhere more magnificent than in the volume
that now lies before us, conceals rather than reveals. It has been said
of him, and with truth, that he is a master of language, but with still
greater truth it may be said that Language is his master. Words seem to
dominate him. Alliteration tyrannizes over him. Mere sound often
becomes his lord. He is so eloquent that whatever he touches becomes
unreal.

Let us turn to the poem on the Armada:

The wings of the south-west wind are widened; the breath of hi