R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

Critics and Criticism in the 'Seventies 199Thus in one of the most effective sections of the volume,Brooke shows that while Cowper's personal theology'fixed its talons in his heart' and drove him to madness,his poetical theology saw God as the deliverer and avengerof the oppressed, and contributed distinctly new elementsto our poetry, 'above all new in their tremendouspower of awakening and maintaining the human emotionswhich most create a human poetry'.But the major part of the book, nine out of the sixteenlectures, is devoted to Wordsworth. His spiritualconception of Nature, his poetic realisation of the divineimmanence in the universe were in conformity withBrooke's own attitude. His exposition of the centralelements of Wordsworth's poetic creed is remarkablylucid and sympathetic, and went far to gain for the bookits immediate popularity and its place as a standardwork. The editor of the Everyman reprint of the lecturesgoes so far as to say that' a nobler appreciation of Wordsworthis not to be found anywhere'. This is a high claimto which I am not prepared to subscribe without reserve.Brooke has not the arresting pregnancy of phrase ofHutton, nor does he flash sudden illumination like F. W.H. Myers and Walter Raleigh in their monographs onWordsworth. M. Legouis in his La Jeunesse de Wordsworthand Professor de Selincourt in his textual editionof The Prelude have opened vistas unknown to Brooke.But he would have rejoiced to know that Wordsworth'spoetic theology, of which he was the ardent interpreter,was even more explicit in the original manuscripts thanin the printed version of 1850, where it had been in partaccommodated to current orthodoxy.Stopford Brooke's gifts of popular exposition found astill wider appeal in 1876 in his Primer of EnglishLiterature. In some 200 pages he gave a masterly bird'seyeview of the poetry and prose of what he calls the