tury chose to idolize Wordsworth as the poet of "rapture now forever flown." Victorian writers, less and less interested in his conception of childhood memories as the "hiding-places of man's power," much less in his "rigorous inquisition" of those memories, turned the child, no longer "the Father of the Man," into a passive, incorruptible victim of adult domination. Wordsworth's subject, in The Prelude at least, was the means

Wbereby this infant sensibility,
Great birthright of our being, was in me
Augmented and sustained.

For the Romantic poets in general, innocence was "valuable for what it might become," as Peter Coveney aptly puts it. With the Victorians, however, the emphasis shifted "toward the state of innocence itself, not as a resilient expression of man's potential integrity, but as something statically juxtaposed to experience, and not so much static as actually in retreat."

This retreat found its definitive symbol in the deathbed scene, increasingly obligatory in novels aspiring to any sort of popularity, in which a child neglected, oppressed, or shamefully deserted by those who should have served as its protectors expires without a word of reproach—itself the ultimate reproach, this wordless acquiescence, both to adults directly responsible for such tragedies and to those who merely look on in sorrow. In the world of Victorian and post-Victorian melodrama, innocence had only one role: to die as heartrendingly as possible. Mrs. Henry Wood perfected the formula in East Lynne (1861), the most widely sold English

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Full soon thy soul shall have ber earthly freigbt, And custom lie upon thee with a weight Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life! than to the beginning of the next: O Joy! that in our embers Is something that doth live, That nature yet remembers What was so fugitive.

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