Grasmere, which is the first book of The Recluse, was not published till 1888, long after the poet’s death. The Excursion (1814) is the second book of The Recluse; and the third was never completed, though Wordsworth intended to include most of his shorter poems in this third part, and so make an immense personal epic of a poet’s life and work.  It is perhaps just as well that the work remained unfinished.  The best of his work appeared in the Lyrical Ballads (1798) and in the sonnets, odes, and lyrics of the next ten years; though “The Duddon Sonnets” (1820), “To a Skylark” (1825), and “Yarrow Revisited” (1831) show that he retained till past sixty much of his youthful enthusiasm.  In his later years, however, he perhaps wrote too much; his poetry, like his prose, becomes dull and unimaginative; and we miss the flashes of insight, the tender memories of childhood, and the recurrence of noble lines—­each one a poem—­that constitutes the surprise and the delight of reading Wordsworth.

    The outward shows of sky and earth,
      Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
    And impulses of deeper birth
      Have come to him in solitude. 
    In common things that round us lie
      Some random truths he can impart—­
    The harvest of a quiet eye
      That broods and sleeps on his own heart.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834)

    A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,
      A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
    Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
      In word, or sigh, or tear.

In the wonderful “Ode to Dejection,” from which the above fragment is taken, we have a single strong impression of Coleridge’s whole life,—­a sad, broken, tragic life, in marked contrast with the peaceful existence of his friend Wordsworth.  For himself, during the greater part of his life, the poet had only grief and remorse as his portion; but for everybody else, for the audiences that were charmed by the brilliancy of his literary lectures, for the friends who gathered about him to be inspired by his ideals and conversation, and for all his readers who found unending delight in the little volume which holds his poetry, he had and still has a cheering message, full of beauty and hope and inspiration.  Such is Coleridge, a man of grief who makes the world glad.

LIFE.  In 1772 there lived in Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, a queer little man, the Rev. John Coleridge, vicar of the parish church and master of the local grammar school.  In the former capacity he preached profound sermons, quoting to open-mouthed rustics long passages from the Hebrew, which he told them was the very tongue of the Holy Ghost.  In the latter capacity he wrote for his boys a new Latin grammar, to mitigate some of the difficulties of traversing that terrible jungle by means of ingenious bypaths and short cuts.  For instance, when his boys found