Mr. Black's Last Lecture.

Last evening Mr. E. Charlton Black delivered the concluding lecture of the series he has given during the year.

The subject was Wordsworth, and he showed in opening that the eighteenth century, though one of criticism and diminution, had yet forces in it which gave the tendency to Wordsworth's poetry. Particularly was this exemplified in the person of Robert Burns from whom Wordsworth says he first learned the power of song in humble themes.

The life and poems of Wordsworth are, as it were, bracketed. To know the poet it is necessary to see the man. His boyhood was passed in close contact with nature, he came to have an intimate acquaintance with all the lake country, and to love it with the healthy love of a country boy without moody self-consciousness or sentimental effusiveness. It was the all important period of his life when his philosophy of life and poetry was determined.

He passed three years at Cambridge, but found himself out of the spirit of the place. He then went to France and found his soul stirred by the revolution then in progress, but the extreme to which it was carried, disgusted him and he returned to England to lead the simple, sturdy life of an English conservative.

It was the encouragement of Coleridge that brought out his first poems, and in the company of Coleridge much of his earlier poetry was written. His poetry was essentially the product of English soil, it showed the resolute, energetic spirit of the author, and his pure, simple life. However much his poetry lacked in sense of humor or proportion, it shows the most sympathetic interpretation of nature and the sublimest imagination. His ambition was to be a teacher, and that he has certainly succeeded in being. Not only is his position assigned high in the roll of English fame, but he has become the teacher of teachers, and no one more than he can open to all minds the beauties of the poetic ideals.