Rawnsley tells us, into manhood's later day; and Mr.
Rawnsley found many proofs that the skill the poet had gained, when

Not seldom from the uproar he retired,
Into a silent bay, or sportively
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng
To cut across the reflex of a star,

was of such a kind as to astonish the natives among whom he dwelt. The
recollection of a fall he once had, when his skate caught on a stone,
still lingers in the district. A boy had been sent to sweep the snow
from the White Moss Tarn for him. 'Did Mr. Wudsworth gie ye owt?' he was
asked, when he returned from his labour. 'Na, but I seed him tumlle,
though!' was the answer. 'He was a ter'ble girt skater, was Wudsworth
now,' says one of Mr. Rawnsley's informants; 'he would put one hand i'
his breast (he wore a frill shirt i' them days), and t'other hand i' his
waistband, same as shepherds does to keep their hands warm, and he would
stand up straight and sway and swing away grandly.'

Of his poetry they did not think much, and whatever was good in it they
ascribed to his wife, his sister, and Hartley Coleridge. He wrote
poetry, they said, 'because he couldn't help it--because it was his
hobby'--for sheer love, and not for money. They could not understand his
doing work 'for nowt,' and held his occupation in somewhat light esteem
because it did not bring in 'a deal o' brass to the pocket.' 'Did you
ever read his poetry, or see any books about in the farmhouses?' asked
Mr. Rawnsley. The answer was curious: 'Ay, ay, time or two. But ya're
weel aware there's potry and potry. There's potry wi' a li'le bit
pleasant in it, and potry sic as a man can laugh at or the childer
understand, and some as takes a deal of mastery to make out what's said,
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.

* * * * *

Mary Myles is Mrs. Edmonds's first attempt at writing fiction. Mrs.
Edmonds is well known as an authority on modern Greek literature, and her
style has often a very pleasant literary flavour, though in her dialogues
she has not as yet quite grasped the difference between la langue parlee
and la langue ecrite. Her heroine is a sort of Nausicaa from Girton, who
develops into the Pallas Athena of a provincial school.