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This page intentionally left blank
 CONTENTS
Preface x
Acknowledgments xvii
Prologue: Literacy for the Modern World P-1

PART ONE LOGIC AND PROBLEM SOLVING

1 THINKING CRITICALLY 2
ACTIVITY Bursting Bubble 4
1A Living in the Media Age 5
In Your World: Fact Checking on the Web 11
1B Propositions and Truth Values 14
1C Sets and Venn Diagrams 25
Brief Review: Sets of Numbers 29
1D Analyzing Arguments 40
Mathematical Insight: Deductive Proof of the Pythagorean Theorem 49
1E Critical Thinking in Everyday Life 54
In Your World: Beware of “Up to” Deals 60

2 APPROACHES TO PROBLEM SOLVING 68

ACTIVITY Global Melting 70
2A Understand, Solve, and Explain 71
Brief Review: Common Fractions 74
Brief Review: Decimal Fractions 80
Using Technology: Currency Exchange Rates 82
In Your World: Changing Money in Foreign Countries 84
2B Extending Unit Analysis 88
In Your World: Gems and Gold Jewelry 90
Brief Review: Powers of 10 92
Using Technology: Metric Conversions 95
In Your World: Save Money and Save the Earth 99
2C Problem-Solving Hints 107
Mathematical Insight: Zeno’s Paradox 110

PART TWO QUANTITATIVE INFORMATION IN EVERYDAY LIFE

3 NUMBERS IN THE REAL WORLD 120

ACTIVITY Big Numbers 122
3A Uses and Abuses of Percentages 122
Brief Review: Percentages 123
Brief Review: What Is a Ratio? 129
3B Putting Numbers in Perspective 139
Brief Review: Working with Scientific Notation 140
Using Technology: Scientific Notation 143
3C Dealing with Uncertainty 155
Brief Review: Rounding 157
Using Technology: Rounding in Excel 162

v
vi Contents

3D Index Numbers: The CPI and Beyond 166

Using Technology: The Inflation Calculator 171
In Your World: The Chained CPI and the Federal Budget 173
3E How Numbers Can Deceive: Polygraphs, Mammograms, and
More 178

4 MANAGING MONEY 190

ACTIVITY Student Loans 192
4A Taking Control of Your Finances 192
4B The Power of Compounding 206
Brief Review: Powers and Roots 207
Using Technology: Powers 208
Using Technology: The Compound Interest Formula 211
Using Technology: The Compound Interest Formula for Interest Paid
More Than Once a Year 215
Using Technology: APY in Excel 216
Using Technology: Powers of e 218
Brief Review: Four Basic Rules of Algebra 218
In Your World: Effects of Low Interest Rates 220
4C Savings Plans and Investments 225
Mathematical Insight: Derivation of the Savings Plan Formula 227
Using Technology: The Savings Plan Formula 230
Using Technology: Fractional Powers (Roots) 232
In Your World: Building a Portfolio 237
4D Loan Payments, Credit Cards, and Mortgages 244
Using Technology: The Loan Payment Formula (Installment Loans) 247
Mathematical Insight: Derivation of the Loan Payment Formula 248
Using Technology: Principal and Interest Portions of Loan
Payments 249
In Your World: Avoiding Credit Card Trouble 251
In Your World: Choosing or Refinancing a Loan 255
4E Income Taxes 262
4F Understanding the Federal Budget 275

PART THREE PROBABILITY AND STATISTICS

5 STATISTICAL REASONING 292

ACTIVITY Cell Phones and Driving 294
5A Fundamentals of Statistics 294
Using Technology: Random Numbers 298
5B Should You Believe a Statistical Study? 309
In Your World: The Gun Debate: Defensive Gun Use 314
5C Statistical Tables and Graphs 319
Using Technology: Frequency Tables in Excel 321
Using Technology: Bar Graphs and Pie Charts in Excel 325
Using Technology: Line Charts in Excel 327
5D Graphics in the Media 333
Using Technology: Graphs with Multiple Data Sets 337
5E Correlation and Causality 354
Using Technology: Scatterplots in Excel 359
 Contents vii

6 PUTTING STATISTICS TO WORK 370

ACTIVITY Are We Smarter Than Our Parents? 372
6A Characterizing Data 373
Using Technology: Mean, Median, and Mode in Excel 376
6B Measures of Variation 386
Using Technology: Standard Deviation in Excel 392
6C The Normal Distribution 397
Using Technology: Standard Scores and Percentiles in Excel 405
6D Statistical Inference 408
In Your World: Is Polling Reliable? 414

7 PROBABILITY: LIVING WITH THE ODDS 424

ACTIVITY Lotteries 426
7A Fundamentals of Probability 426
Brief Review: The Multiplication Principle 431
7B Combining Probabilities 441
7C The Law of Large Numbers 453
7D Assessing Risk 464
In Your World: Terrorism, Risk, and Human Psychology 465
7E Counting and Probability 474
Using Technology: Factorials 476
Brief Review: Factorials 476
Using Technology: Permutations 477
Using Technology: Combinations 479

PART FOUR MODELING

8 EXPONENTIAL ASTONISHMENT 488

ACTIVITY Towers of Hanoi 490
8A Growth: Linear vs. Exponential 491
8B Doubling Time and Half-Life 499
Using Technology: Logarithms 505
Brief Review: Logarithms 506
8C Real Population Growth 510
In Your World: Choosing Our Fate 517
8D Logarithmic Scales: Earthquakes, Sounds, and Acids 520
In Your World: Ocean Acidification 526

9 MODELING OUR WORLD 532

ACTIVITY Climate Modeling 534
9A Functions: The Building Blocks of Mathematical Models 536
Brief Review: The Coordinate Plane 539
9B Linear Modeling 546
Using Technology: Graphing Functions 551
In Your World: Algebra’s Baghdad Connection 554
9C Exponential Modeling 560
Brief Review: Algebra with Logarithms 563
Mathematical Insight: Doubling Time and Half-Life Formulas 565
In Your World: Changing Rates of Change 570
viii Contents

10 MODELING WITH GEOMETRY 576

ACTIVITY Eyes in the Sky 578
10A Fundamentals of Geometry 579
Mathematical Insight: Archimedes and Pi 583
In Your World: Plato, Geometry, and Atlantis 587
10B Problem Solving with Geometry 593
10C Fractal Geometry 608

PART FIVE FURTHER APPLICATIONS

11 MATHEMATICS AND THE ARTS 620

ACTIVITY Digital Music Files 622
11A Mathematics and Music 623
In Your World: Music Just for You 627
11B Perspective and Symmetry 630
11C Proportion and the Golden Ratio 643

12 MATHEMATICS AND POLITICS 654

ACTIVITY Partisan Redistricting 656
12A Voting: Does the Majority Always Rule? 657
In Your World: Counting Votes—Not as Easy as It Sounds 663
12B Theory of Voting 675
In Your World: The Electoral College and the Presidency 680
12C Apportionment: The House of Representatives and Beyond 686
12D Dividing the Political Pie 701

Credits C-1
Answers to Quick Quizzes and Odd-Numbered Exercises A-1
Index I-1
 ABOUT THE
AUTHORS

Jeffrey Bennett served as the first director of the William Briggs was on the mathematics faculty at
program “Quantitative Reasoning and Mathemati- Clarkson University for 6 years and at the University
cal Skills” at the University of Colorado at Boulder, of Colorado at Denver for 23 years, where he taught
where he developed the groundbreaking curriculum both undergraduate and graduate courses, with
that became the basis of this textbook. He holds a BA a special interest in applied mathematics. During
in biophysics (University of California, San Diego) much of that time, he designed and taught courses
and an MS and a PhD in astrophysics (University of in quantitative reasoning. In addition to this book,
Colorado), and has focused his career on math and he has co-authored textbooks on statistical reason-
science education. In addition to co-authoring this ing and calculus, as well as monographs in com-
textbook, he is also the lead author of best-selling putational mathematics. He recently completed the
college textbooks on statistical reasoning, astronomy, book How America Got Its Guns (University of New
and astrobiology, and of more than a dozen books for Mexico Press). Dr. Briggs is a University of Colo-
children and adults. All six of his children’s books have rado President’s Teaching Scholar and the recipient
been selected for NASA’s “Story Time From Space” of a Fulbright Fellowship to Ireland; he holds a BA
(storytimefromspace.com), a project in which astro- degree from the University of Colorado and an MS
nauts on the International Space Station read books and a PhD from Harvard University.
aloud and videos are posted that anyone in the world
can watch for free. His most recent books include I,
Humanity for children and Math for Life and A Global
Warming Primer for the general public. Among his
many other endeavors, Dr. Bennett proposed and co-
led the development of the Voyage Scale Model Solar
System, which is located outside the National Air and
Space Museum on the National Mall in Washington,
DC. Learn more about Dr. Bennett and his work at
www.jeffreybennett.com.

ix
 Human history

PREFACE
becomes more and more
a race between education —H. G. Wells
and catastrophe. The Outline of History,
1920

To the Student about what mathematical content is necessary for science,

technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students—
There is no escaping the importance of mathematics in for example, these students all need to learn algebra and
the modern world. However, for most people, the impor- calculus—there’s great debate about what we should teach
tance of mathematics lies not in its abstract ideas, but in non-STEM students, especially the large majority who will not
its application to personal and social issues. This textbook make use of formal mathematics in their careers or daily lives.
is designed with such practical considerations in mind. In As a result of this debate, core mathematics courses for
particular, this book has three specific purposes: non-STEM students represent a broad and diverse range.
Some schools require these students to take a traditional,
• to prepare you for the mathematics you will encounter
calculus-track course, such as college algebra. Others have
in other college courses, particularly core courses in
instituted courses focused on some of the hidden ways in
social and natural sciences;
which contemporary mathematics contributes to society, and
• to develop your ability to reason with quantitative in- still others have developed courses devoted almost exclu-
formation in a way that will help you achieve success in sively to financial literacy. Each of the different course types
your career; and has its merits, but we believe there is a better option, largely
• to provide you with the critical thinking and quantitative because of the following fact: The vast majority (typically
reasoning skills you need to understand major issues in 95%) of non-STEM students will never take another college
your life. mathematics course after completing their core requirement.
Given this fact, we believe it is essential to teach these
We hope this book will be useful to everyone, but it is
students the mathematical ideas that they will need for their
designed primarily for those who are not planning to ma-
remaining college course work, their careers, and their
jor in a field that requires advanced mathematical skills. In
daily lives. In other words, we must emphasize those top-
particular, if you’ve ever felt any fear or anxiety about math-
ics that are truly important to the future success of these
ematics, we’ve written this book with you in mind. We hope
students, and we must cover a broad range of such topics.
that, through this book, you will discover that mathematics
The focus of this approach is less on formal calculation—
is much more important and relevant to your life than you
though some is certainly required—and more on teaching
thought and not as difficult as you previously imagined.
students how to think critically with numerical or math-
Whatever your interests—social sciences, environmental
ematical information. In the terminology adopted by MAA,
issues, politics, business and economics, art and music, or
AMATYC, and other mathematical organizations, students
any of many other topics—you will find many relevant and
need to learn quantitative reasoning and to become quanti-
up-to-date examples in this book. But the most important
tatively literate. There’s been a recent rise in the popularity
idea to take away from this book is that mathematics can help
of quantitative reasoning courses for non-STEM students.
you understand a variety of topics and issues, making you a
This book has been integral to the quantitative reasoning
more aware and better educated citizen. Once you have com-
movement for years and continues to be at the forefront as
pleted your study of this book, you should be prepared to un-
an established resource designed to help you succeed in
derstand most quantitative issues that you will encounter.
teaching quantitative reasoning to your students.

To the Instructor The Key to Success: A Context-Driven

Approach
Whether you’ve taught this course many times or are teach-
Broadly speaking, approaches to teaching mathematics can
ing it for the first time, you are undoubtedly aware that math-
be divided into two categories:
ematics courses for non-majors present challenges that differ
from those presented by more traditional courses. First and • A content-driven approach is organized by mathematical
foremost, there isn’t even a clear consensus on what exactly ideas. After each mathematical topic is presented, exam-
should be taught in these courses. While there’s little debate ples of its applications are shown.

x
 Preface xi

• A context-driven approach is organized by practical con- students at different levels. We have therefore organized the
texts. Applications drive the course, and mathematical book with a modular structure that allows instructors to
ideas are presented as needed to support the applications. create a customized course. The 12 chapters are organized
broadly by contextual areas. Each chapter, in turn, is di-
The same content can be covered through either ap-
vided into a set of self-contained units that focus on particu-
proach, but the context-driven approach has an enormous
lar concepts or applications. In most cases, you can cover
advantage: It motivates students by showing them di-
chapters in any order or skip units that are lower priority
rectly how relevant mathematics is to their lives. In con-
for your particular course. The following outline describes
trast, the content-driven approach tends to come across as
the flow of each chapter:
“learn this content because it’s good for you,” causing many
students to tune out before reaching the practical applica- Chapter Overview Each chapter begins with a two-
tions. For more details, see our article “General Education page overview consisting of an introductory paragraph
Mathematics: New Approaches for a New Millennium” and a multiple-choice question designed to illustrate an
(AMATYC Review, Fall 1999) or the discussion in the Epi- important way in which the chapter content connects with
logue of the book Math for Life by Jeffrey Bennett (Big Kid the book themes of college, career, and life. The overview
Science, 2014). also includes a motivational quote and a unit-by-unit list-
ing of key content; the latter is designed to show students
The Challenge: Winning Over how the chapter is organized and to help instructors decide
which units to cover in class.
Your Students
Perhaps the greatest challenge in teaching mathematics lies Chapter Activity Each chapter next offers an activity
in winning students over—that is, convincing them that designed to spur student discussion of some interesting
you have something useful to teach them. This challenge facet of the topics covered in the chapter. The activities
arises because by the time they reach college, many stu- may be done either individually or in small groups. A
dents dislike or fear mathematics. Indeed, the vast majority new Activity Manual containing additional activities is
of students in general education mathematics courses are available with this seventh edition in print form and also
there not by choice, but because such courses are required in MyLab Math.
for graduation. Reaching your students therefore requires
that you teach with enthusiasm and convince them that Numbered Units Each chapter consists of numbered
mathematics is useful and enjoyable. units (e.g., Unit 1A, Unit 1B, …). Each unit begins with a
We’ve built this book around two important strategies short introduction and includes the following key features:
that are designed to help you win students over: • Headings to Identify Key Topics. In keeping with the
• Confront negative attitudes about mathematics head modularity, each subtopic within a unit is clearly identified
on, showing students that their fear or loathing is so that students understand what they will be learning.
ungrounded and that mathematics is relevant to their • Summary Boxes. Key definitions and concepts are
lives. This strategy is embodied in the Prologue of this highlighted in summary boxes for easy reference.
book (pages P1–P13), which we urge you to emphasize • Examples and Case Studies. Numbered examples are
in class. It continues implicitly throughout the rest of designed to build understanding and to offer practice
the text. with the types of questions that appear in the exercises.
• Focus on goals that are meaningful to students—namely, Each example is accompanied by a “Now try …” sug-
on the goals of learning mathematics for college, career, gestion that relates the example to specific similar exer-
and life. Your students will then learn mathematics because cises. Occasional case studies go into more depth than
they will see how it affects their lives. This strategy forms the numbered examples.
the backbone of this book, as we have tried to build every • Exercises. Each unit concludes with a set of exercises,
unit around topics relevant to college, career, and life. subdivided into the following categories:
• Quick Quiz. This ten-question quiz appears at
the end of each unit and allows students to check
Modular Structure of the Book whether they understand key concepts before start-
Although we have written this book so that it can be read as ing the exercise set. Note that students are asked not
a narrative from beginning to end, we recognize that many only to choose the correct multiple-choice answer
instructors might wish to teach material in a different order but also to write a brief explanation of the reason-
than we have chosen or to cover only selected portions of ing behind their choice. Answers are included in the
the text, as time allows, for classes of different length or for back of the text.
xii Preface

• Review Questions. Designed primarily for self- students will have learned these skills previously, but
study, these questions ask students to summarize the many will need review and practice. Practice is avail-
important ideas covered in the unit and generally can able in the exercise sets, with relevant exercises iden-
be answered simply by reviewing the text. tified by a “Now try …” suggestion at the end of the
• Does It Make Sense? These questions ask students Brief Review.
to determine whether a short statement makes sense, • In Your World. These features focus on topics that
and explain why or why not. These exercises are students are likely to encounter in the world around
generally easy once students understand a particular them, whether in the news, in consumer decisions,
concept, but difficult otherwise; they are therefore an or in political discussions. Examples include how to
excellent probe of comprehension. understand jewelry purchases, how to invest money
• Basic Skills & Concepts. These questions of- in a sensible way, and how to evaluate the reliability
fer practice with the concepts covered in the unit. of pre-election polls. (Note: These features are not
They can be used for homework assignments or necessarily connected directly to the In Your World
for self-study (answers to most odd-numbered exercises, but both have direct relevance to students’
exercises appear in the back of the book). These world.)
questions are referenced by the “Now try …” sug- • Using Technology. These features give students clear
gestions in the unit. instructions in the use of various technologies for com-
• Further Applications. Through additional applica- putation, including scientific calculators, Microsoft
tions, these exercises extend the ideas and techniques Excel, and online technologies such as those built into
covered in the unit. Google. Book-specific TI Tech Tips containing instruc-
tions for performing computations with a graphing cal-
• In Your World. These questions are designed to
culator, such as the TI-83 or TI-84, are available in the
spur additional research or discussion that will help
Tools for Success section of MyLab Math.
students relate the unit content to the book themes
of college, career, and life. • Caution! New to the seventh edition, these short
notes, integrated into examples or text, highlight com-
• Technology Exercises. For units that include one
mon errors that students should be careful to avoid.
or more Using Technology features, these exercises
give students an opportunity to practice calculator • Mathematical Insight. This feature, which occurs less
or software skills that have been introduced. Some frequently than the others, builds on mathematical ideas
of these exercises are designed to be completed with in the main narrative but goes somewhat beyond the
StatCrunch ( ), which comes with the MyLab level of other material in the book. Examples of the top-
Math course. Applications using StatCrunch, power- ics covered are proof of the Pythagorean theorem, Zeno’s
ful Web-based statistical software that allows users to paradox, and derivations of the financial formulas used
collect data, perform analyses, and generate compel- for savings plans and mortgage loans.
ling results, are included in this edition for the first • Margin Features. The margins contain several types
time. of short features: By the Way, which offers interesting
notes and asides relevant to the topic at hand; Histori-
Chapter Summary Appearing at the end of each chap- cal Note, which gives historical context to the topic at
ter, the Chapter Summary offers a brief outline of the chap- hand; and Technical Note, which offers details that are
ter’s content, including page numbers, that students can important mathematically, but generally do not affect
use as a study guide. students’ understanding of the material. The margins
also contain occasional quotations.
Additional Pedagogical Features In addition to the
standard features of all chapters listed above, several other
pedagogical features occur throughout the text:
Prerequisite Mathematical Background
• Think About It. These features pose short conceptual Because of its modular structure and the inclusion of the
questions designed to help students reflect on important Brief Review features, this book can be used by students
new ideas. They also serve as excellent starting points with a wide range of mathematical backgrounds. Many
for classroom discussions and, in some cases, can be of the units require nothing more than arithmetic and
used as a basis for clicker questions. a willingness to think about quantitative issues in new
• Brief Review. This feature appears when a key ways. Only a few units use techniques of algebra or ge-
mathematical skill is first needed; topics include frac- ometry, and those skills are reviewed as they arise. This
tions, powers and roots, basic algebraic operations, book should therefore be accessible to any student who
and more. The word “review” indicates that most has completed two or more years of high school math-
 Preface xiii

ematics. However, this book is not remedial: Although presented in previous editions to create a simpler three-
much of the book relies on mathematical techniques step strategy called “Understand-Solve-Explain.” We have
from secondary school, the techniques arise in appli- found that this strategy is easier for students to remember
cations that students generally are not taught in high and therefore easier for them to put into practice.
school and that require students to demonstrate their
critical thinking skills. Chapters 3 and 4 These two chapters contain
For courses in which students do require more extensive several units that revolve around economic data such as
prerequisite review, we have created a version of the Using & demographic data, the Consumer Price Index, interest
Understanding Mathematics MyLab Math course called Using rates, taxes, and the federal budget. These data obvi-
& Understanding Mathematics with Integrated Review that in- ously required major updates given the changes that have
cludes just-in-time review of selected prerequisite topics. occurred in the U.S. economy in the four years since the
last edition. In addition, we’ve added basic ideas about
Note on “Developmental Math” We are often asked health insurance to our discussion of personal finances
whether this text can be used by students for whom place- in Unit 4A.
ment tests suggest that they belong in developmental
mathematics courses. In most cases, we believe the answer Chapters 5 and 6 These chapters focus on statistical
to be a resounding “yes.” Our experience suggests that data, which means we updated or replaced large sections of
many students who do poorly on mathematics placement the chapter content to include more current data.
tests are not really as weak as these tests may suggest.
Most students did learn basic mathematical skills at one Chapter 7 We significantly revised Section 7D on risk,
time, and if the skills arise with context (as they do in this both for greater clarity and to update data.
book), we’ve found that students can quickly relearn them.
This is especially true if you provide the students with a Chapters 8 and 9 Units 8B, 8C, and 9C all rely heavily
little bit of extra practice as offered in our Brief Review on population data, which means we revised significant
features or by the resources in MyLab Math or MyLab portions of these units to reflect the latest global demo-
Math with Integrated Review. Indeed, we believe that most graphic data.
students in this situation will learn basic mathematical
skills better by taking a quantitative reasoning course based Chapter 12 The 2016 election provided numerous new
on this textbook than they will by taking a developmental examples for our discussion of the electoral college in Unit
course. 12A. Other recent examples of the intersection of math-
ematics and politics also provide interesting new examples
and exercises throughout this chapter.
Changes in the Seventh Edition
We’ve been pleased by the positive responses from so many In Your World We’ve added seven new In Your World
users of previous editions of this text. Nevertheless, a book features, so every chapter now has at least one, further
that relies heavily on facts and data always requires a major showcasing math for college, career, and life.
updating effort to keep it current, and we are always look-
ing for ways to improve clarity and pedagogy. As a result, Caution! These short notes highlighting common errors
users of prior editions will find many sections of this book are new to this edition.
to have been substantially revised or rewritten. The changes
are too many to list here, but some of the more significant Exercise Sets We’ve thoroughly revised the exercise
changes are the following. sets: Over 30% of the exercises are changed or new.

Chapter 1 We significantly revised Units 1A and 1E StatCrunch StatCrunch has been newly integrated into
with the particular goal of helping students evaluate media the MyLab Math course and relevant Technology Exercises.
information and recognize “fake news.”
Video Program The seventh edition is accompanied
Chapter 2 We reorganized and significantly rewrote this by an all-new video program consisting of both familiar
entire chapter to introduce a basic problem-solving strategy lecture-style videos for every example and innovative
in Unit 2A. Moreover, we modified the four-step strategy concept videos.
 Resources for Success
MyLab Math Online Course for Using &
Understanding Mathematics: A Quantitative
Reasoning Approach, 7th edition
by Jeffrey Bennett and William Briggs
MyLab™ Math is available to accompany Pearson’s market-leading text offerings.
To give students a consistent tone, voice, and teaching method, each text’s flavor
and approach are tightly integrated throughout the accompanying MyLab Math
course, making learning the material as seamless as possible.

NEW! Lecture Videos

Brand-new lecture videos for every
example are fresh and modern and
are accompanied by assessment
questions that give the instructor the
ability to not just assign the videos but
gauge student understanding.

NEW! Concept Videos

Dynamic lightboard videos focus on some
of the most interesting and challenging
concepts so students can better grasp
them. Exciting visuals are used to
explain concepts such as comparisons of
quantities, student loans, and percentages
in the world around us.

NEW! StatCrunch Integration

StatCrunch is powerful web-based statistical
software that allows users to collect data,
perform analyses, and generate compelling
results. For this seventh edition, StatCrunch
questions have been added to relevant
Technology Exercises and access to the software
has been integrated into the MyLab Math
course.

pearson.com/mylab/math
Resources for Success
Instructor Resources The following resources are ONLINE ONLY and are
available for download from the Pearson Higher
Education catalog at www.pearson.com/us/sign-in
MyLab Math with Integrated Review .html or within your MyLab Math course.
This MyLab Math course option can be used in
co-requisite courses, or simply to help students
who enter the quantitative reasoning course Instructor’s Solution Manual
lacking prerequisite skills or a full understanding James Lapp
of ­prerequisite­concepts. This manual includes answers to all of the text’s
Think About It features, Quick Quizzes, Review
• For relevant chapters, students begin with a Questions, and Does It Make Sense? questions
Skills Check assignment to pinpoint which and detailed, worked-out solutions to all of the
prerequisite developmental topics, if any, they Basic Skills & Concepts, Further Applications, and
need to review. Technology Exercises (including StatCrunch
• Those who require additional review proceed exercises).
to a personalized homework assignment that
focuses on the specific prerequisite topics on
which they need remediation.
Instructor’s Testing Manual
Dawn Dabney
• Students can also review the relevant prereq-
The Testing Manual provides four alternative tests
uisite concepts using videos and Integrated
per chapter, including answer keys.
Review Worksheets in MyLab Math. The Inte-
grated Review Worksheets are also available
in printed form as part of the Activity Manual TestGen
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 Acknowledgments xvii

Acknowledgments Jill DeWitt, Baker College of Muskegon

Greg Dietrich, Florida Community College at Jacksonville
A textbook may carry its authors’ names, but it is the result
Marsha J. Driskill, Aims Community College
of hard work by hundreds of committed individuals. This
book has been under development for more than 30 years, John Emert, Ball State University
and even its beginnings were a group effort, as one of the Kathy Eppler, Salt Lake Community College
authors was a member of a committee at the University of Kellie Evans, York College of Pennsylvania
Colorado that worked to establish one of the nation’s first
Fred Feldon, Coastline Community College
courses in quantitative reasoning. Since that beginning, the
book has benefited from input and feedback from many Anne Fine, East Central University
faculty members and students. David E. Flesner, Gettysburg College
First and foremost, we extend our thanks to Bill Poole Pat Foard, South Plains College
and Elka Block, whose faith in this project from the be-
Brian Gaines, University of Illinois
ginning allowed it to grow from class notes into a true
textbook. We’d also like to thank other past and present *Jose Gimenez, Temple University
members of our outstanding publishing team at Pear- Shane Goodwin, Brigham Young University–Idaho
son Education, including Greg Tobin, Anne Kelly, Marnie Barbara Grover, Salt Lake Community College
Greenhut, Patty Bergin, Barbara Atkinson, Kyle DiGiannan-
Louise Hainline, Brooklyn College
tonio, Stacey Miller, Hannah Lafferty, and Nick Sweeny. We
thank Rhea Meyerholtz and Paul Lorczak for an excellent Ward Heilman, Bridgewater State University
job on accuracy checking, and Shane Goodwin of BYU– Peg Hovde, Grossmont College
Idaho for his help in preparing the Using Technology boxes Andrew Hugine, South Carolina State University
(and for many other suggestions he has made as well).
Lynn R. Hun, Dixie College
We’d like to thank the following people for their help
with one or more editions of this book. Those who as- Hal Huntsman, University of Colorado, Boulder
sisted with this seventh edition have an asterisk before their Joel Irish, University of Southern Maine
names. David Jabon, DePaul University
*Merri Jill Ayers, Georgia Gwinnett College Melvin F. Janowitz, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Lou Barnes, Premier Mortgage Group Craig Johnson, Brigham Young University–Idaho
Carol Bellisio, Monmouth University Vijay S. Joshi, Virginia Intermont College
Bob Bernhardt, East Carolina University Anton Kaul, University of South Florida
Terence R. Blows, Northern Arizona University Bonnie Kelly, University of South Carolina
*Loi Booher, University of Central Arkansas William Kiley, George Mason University
W. Wayne Bosché, Jr., Dalton College *Donna Kirk, The College of Saint Scholastica
Kristina Bowers, University of South Florida Jim Koehler, University of Colorado, Denver
Michael Bradshaw, Caldwell Community College and *Charlotte Koleti, Georgia Gwinnett College
Technical Institute
Robert Kuenzi, University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh
Shane Brewer, Utah State University–Blanding Campus
Erin Lee, Central Washington University
W. E. Briggs, University of Colorado, Boulder
R. Warren Lemerich, Laramie County Community College
Annette Burden, Youngstown State University
Deann Leoni, Edmonds Community College
Ovidiu Calin, Eastern Michigan University
Linda Lester, Wright State University
Susan Carr, Oral Roberts University
Paul Lorczak, MathSoft, Inc.
*Henry Chango, Community College of Rhode Island
Jay Malmstrom, Oklahoma City Community College
Margaret Cibes, Trinity College
*Howard Mandelbaum, John Jay College
Walter Czarnec, Framingham State College
Erich McAlister, University of Colorado, Boulder
Adrian Daigle, University of Colorado, Boulder
*Meghan McIntyre, Wake Technical Community College
Andrew J. Dane, Angelo State University
Judith McKnew, Clemson University
*Dr. Amit Dave, Georgia Gwinnett College
Lisa McMillen, Baker College
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
Ferguson, and the unknown singers of the native ballads, and
especially of the popular songs, of his country. Proud and self-reliant
as Burns was, he everywhere speaks of Ramsay and Ferguson as
his models and superiors. From these he took the forms of his
poems, though into these forms he poured a new and stronger
inspiration. Burns’s “Halloween” is framed on a model of Ferguson’s
poem called “Leith Races,” and “The Cottar’s Saturday Night” is
evidently suggested by Ferguson’s “Farmer’s Ingle;” but poor
Ferguson’s very mundane view of happiness is, at least in the
“Cottar’s Saturday Night,” by Burns, transfigured by a purer and
nobler sentiment. Besides these Burns knew the English poets, such
as Pope and Shenstone, but well for the world that he did not come
too early under their influence, else we had probably lost much of
what is most native and original in him. Somewhere in his later years
he marvels at his own audacity in having ventured to use his native
Scotch as the vehicle for poetry, and speaks as if, had he earlier
known more English literature, he would not have dared to do so. Yet
when he does essay to write pure English his poetry becomes only
of third or fourth-rate excellence, just as nothing can be more
mawkish and vapid than Ferguson, when he makes Damon and
Alexis discourse in his purely English pastorals. Only in one poem,
written in pure English, does Burns attain high excellence, and that
one is the “Lines to Mary in Heaven.” Perhaps in nothing, except it
may be in humorous or pathetic feeling, is the Scottish dialect more
in place than in describing the native scenery. For, in truth, the
features of every county, if possible of each district, ought to be
rendered in the very words by which they are known to the natives.
When instead of this they are transferred into the literary language,
they have lost I know not how much of their life and individuality. If in
Scottish scenery, for instance, you speak of a brook and a grove,
instead of a burn or a shaw or wood, you have really robbed the
locality described of all that belongs to it. The same thing holds still
more of mountain scenery, in which, unless you adopt the words
which the country people apply to their own hills, you had better
leave them undescribed. This feeling has at last forced both poets,
and all who attempt to render Highland scenery, to use the Celtic
words by which the mountain lineaments are described. We must, if
we would name these features at all, speak of the “corrie,” the
“lochan,” the “balloch,” and the “screetan” or “sclidder,” for the book-
English has no words for these things. Hence it is that Scottish
Lowland scenery is never so truly and vividly described, as when
Burns uses his own vernacular. And yet Burns was no merely
descriptive poet. It would be difficult to name one of his poems in
which description of Nature is the main object. Everywhere with him,
man, his feelings and his fate, stand out in the front of his pictures,
and Nature comes in as the delightful background—yet Nature loved
with a love, beheld with a rapture, all the more genuine, because his
pulses throbbed in such intense sympathy with man. Every one can
recall many a wonderful line, sometimes whole verse, in his love-
songs, in which the surrounding landscape is flashed on the mind’s
eye. In that longer poem, so full of sagacious observation on life and
character, “The Twa Dogs,” how graphically rendered is the evening
with which the poem closes!—

“By this, the sun was out o’ sight,

An’ darker gloamin brought the night:
The bum-clock humm’d wi’ lazy drone,
The kye stood rowtin i’ the loan;
When up they gat, an’ shook their lugs,
Rejoiced they were na men but dogs;
An’ each took aff his several way,
Resolved to meet some ither day.”

“The kye stood rowting in the loan,” what a picture is that of an old-
fashioned Lowland farm, with the loane or lane, between two dikes,
leading up to the out-field or moor! All who have known the reality
will at once recognize the truth of the picture, in which the kye, as
they come home at gloamin’, stop and low, ere they enter the byre:
to others it is uncommunicable.
Or take that description in “Halloween” of the burn and the
adventure there:—

“Whyles owre a linn the burnie plays,

As thro’ the glen it wimpl’t;
Whyles round a rocky scaur it strays
Whyles in a wiel it dimpl’t;
Whyles glitter’d to the nightly rays,
Wi’ bickering, dancing dazzle;
Whyles cookit underneath the braes
Below the spreading hazel,
Unseen that night.

“Amang the brachens on the brae,

Between her an’ the moon,
The Deil, or else an outler Quey,
Gat up an’ gae a croon:
Poor Leezie’s heart maist lap the hool;
Near lav’rock-height she jumpit,
But mist a fit, an’ in the pool
Out-owre the lugs she plumpit,
Wi’ a plunge that night.”

Would any one who can feel the force of that description allow that it
could be expressed in literary English without losing much of its
charm?
I have said that Burns’s glances at Nature are almost all incidental,
and, by the way, and this enhances their value. There is, however, a
passage in an Epistle to William Simpson, in which he addresses
Nature directly, and speaks out more consciously the feeling with
which she inspired him:—

“O, sweet are Coila’s haughs an’ woods,

When lintwhites chant amang the buds,
And jinkin hares, in amorous whids,
Their loves enjoy,
While thro’ the braes the cushat croods
Wi’ wailfu’ cry!

“Ev’n winter bleak has charms to me

When winds rave thro’ the naked tree;
Or frosts on hills of Ochiltree
 Are hoary gray;
Or blinding drifts wild-furious flee,
Dark’ning the day!

“O Nature a’ thy shews and forms

To feeling, pensive hearts hae charms!
Whether the summer kindly warms
Wi’ life an’ light,
Or winter howls, in gusty storms,
The lang, dark night!

“The Muse, nae Poet ever fand her,

Till by himsel he learn’d to wander,
Adown some trottin burn’s meander,
An’ no think lang;
O sweet, to stray an’ pensive ponder
A heart-felt sang!”

Three things may be noted as to the influence of Burns on men’s

feeling for Nature.
First, he was a more entirely open-air poet than any first-rate
singer who had yet lived, and as such he dealt with Nature in a more
free, close, intimate way than any English poet since the old ballad-
singers. He did more to bring the hearts of men close to the outer
world, and the outer world to the heart, than any former poet. His
keen eye looked directly, with no intervening medium, on the face
alike of Nature and of man, and embraced all creation in one large
sympathy. With familiar tenderness he dwelt on the lower creatures,
felt for their sufferings, as if they had been his own, and opened
men’s hearts to feel how much the groans of creation are needlessly
increased by the indifference or cruelty of man. In Burns, as in
Cowper, and in him perhaps more than in Cowper, there was a large
going forth of tenderness to the lower creatures, and in their poetry
this first found utterance, and in no poet since their time, so fully as
in these two.
Secondly, his feeling in Nature’s presence was not, as in the
English poets of his time, a quiet contemplative pleasure. It was
nothing short of rapture. Other more modern poets may have been
thrilled with the same delight, he alone of all in last century
expressed the thrill. In this, as in other things, he is the truest herald
of that strain of rejoicing in Nature, even to ecstasy, which has
formed one of the finest tones in the poetry of this century.
Thirdly, he does not philosophize on Nature or her relation to man;
he feels it, alike in his joyful moods and in his sorrowful. It is to him
part of what he calls “the universal plan,” but he nowhere reasons
about the life of Nature as he often does so trenchantly about that of
man.

THE BALLADS.
But another affluent to the growing sentiment, besides Burns, was
the ballad-poetry rediscovered, we may say, towards the end of last
century. The most decisive mark of this change in literary taste was
the collection by Bishop Percy of the “Reliques of Ancient Poetry” in
1765; and this production did much to deepen and expand the taste
out of which itself arose. The impulse which began with Bishop
Percy may be said to have culminated when Scott gave to the world
his “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,” in the opening years of the
present century.
The ballads of course are mainly engaged with human incidents,
heroic and legendary. Yet they contain many side-glances at Nature,
as it interwove itself with the actions or the sufferings of men, which
are very affecting. This is the way that the sight of Ettrick Forest
struck the king and his men as they marched against the outlaw who
“won” there—

“The king was cuming thro’ Caddon Ford,

And full five thousand men was he;
They saw the derke Foreste them before,
They thought it awsome for to see.”

Or take again the impression made on the traveling knight as he

comes on Clyde in full flood:—
“As he gaed owre yon high high hill
And doun yon dowie den,
There was a roar in Clyde water,
Had fear’d a hundred men.”

Or that other gentler pathetic touch, where the maiden says—

“Yestreen I dreamed a dolefu’ dream

I fear there will be sorrow,
I dreamed I pu’d the heather green
Wi’ my true love, on Yarrow.

“O gentle wind, that bloweth south,

From where my love repaireth,
Convey a kiss from his dear mouth,
And tell me how he fareth!”

In verses such as these, which abound throughout the popular

ballads and songs, we see the outer world, not as it appeared to the
highly educated poet, seeking to express it in artistic phrase, but as it
showed itself to the eyes and hearts of country-people, living quite
familiarly among its sights and sounds. Much more might be said of
the natural imagery of the ballads, and of the feeling toward the outer
world indicated by it. Suffice it to note that the simplicity and pathos,
both of sentiment and of expression, which the ballads contained,
entering, with other influences, into the minds of the young
generation which first welcomed them, called up another view of
Nature than that which the literary poets had expressed, and
affected most deeply both the feeling and the form of the new poetry
of Nature which this century brought in.

OSSIAN.
One more poetic influence, born of last century, must be noticed
before we close. I mean the Celtic or Ossianic feeling about Nature.
I am not going now to discuss whether Macpherson composed the
Gaelic poems which still pass for Ossian’s, or whether he only
collected songs which had been floated down by tradition from a
remote antiquity. Whichever view we take, it cannot be questioned
that the appearance of this poetry gave to the English-speaking mind
the thrill of a new and strange emotion about mountain scenery.
Whether the poetry was old, or the product of last century, it
describes, as none other does, the desolation of dusky moors, the
solemn brooding of the mists on the mountains, the occasional
looking through them of sun by day, of moon and stars by night, the
gloom of dark cloudy Bens or cairns, with flashing cataracts, the
ocean with its storms as it breaks on the West Highland shores or on
the headlands of the Hebrides. Wordsworth, though an unbeliever in
Ossian, felt that the fit dwelling for his spirit was

“Where rocks are rudely heaped and rent

As by a spirit turbulent,
Where sights are rough and sounds are wild
And everything unreconciled,
In some complaining dim retreat,
For fear and melancholy meet.”

And such are the scenes which the Ossianic poetry mainly dwells
on. Here is a description of a battle—

“As hundred winds ’mid oaks of great mountains,

As hundred torrents from lofty hills,
As clouds in darkness rushing on,
As the great ocean tumbling on the shore,
So vast, so sounding, dark and stern,
Met the fierce warriors on Lena.
The shout of the host on the mountain height
Was like thunder on a night of storms,
When bursts the cloud on Cona of the glens,
And thousand spirits wildly shriek
On the waste whirlwind of the hills.”

And yet, though this is the prevailing tone, it is broken at times by

gleams of tender light—
“Pleasing to me are the words of songs,
Pleasing the tale of the time that is gone;
Soothing as noiseless dew of morning mild
On the brake and knoll of roes,
When slowly rises the sun
On the silent flank of hoary Bens—
The loch, unruffled, far away,
Lies calm and blue on the floor of the glens.”[16]

Whatever men may now think of them, there cannot be a doubt

but these mountain monotones took the heart of Europe with a new
emotion, and prepared it for that passion for mountains which has
since possessed it.
Cowper, Burns, the Ballads, Ossian, all these had entered into the
minds that were still young when this century opened, and added
each a fresh element of feeling, and opened a new avenue of vision
into the life of Nature. When the great earthquake of the Revolution
had shaken men’s souls to their centre, and brought up to the
surface thoughts and aspirations for humanity never known till then,
the deepened and expanded hearts of men opened themselves to
receive Nature into them in a way they had never done before, and
to love her with a new passion. But original as this impulse in the
present century has been, we must not forget how much it owed,
both in itself and in its manifold forms of expression, to the poetry of
Nature which the eighteenth century bequeathed. Of that poetry
there were two main streams, a literary and a popular. Of these the
popular one was probably the most powerful in moulding the Poetry
that was about to be.
 CHAPTER XIV.
WORDSWORTH AS AN INTERPRETER OF
NATURE.

There are at least three distinct stages in men’s attitude towards

the external world. First comes the unconscious love of children—of
those at least whose home is in the country—for all rural things, for
birds and beasts, for the trees and the fields. The next stage is that
of youth and early manhood, which commonly gets so absorbed in
trade, and business, politics, literature, or science,—that is, in the
practical world of man, that the early caring for Nature disappears
from the heart, perhaps never again to revisit it. The third and last
stage is that of—some at least, perhaps of many—men, who, after
much intercourse with the world, and after having, it may be,
suffered in it, return to the calm, cool places of Nature, and find there
a solace, a refreshment, something in harmony with their best
thoughts, which they have not discovered in their youth, it may be
because they then less needed it.
Something like this takes place in the history of the race. Not to
mention the savage state, men in the primeval era, when history first
finds them, are affected by the visible world around them much as
we see children and boys now are. Nature is almost everything to
them. They use the forces, and receive the influences of it, if not in a
wholly animal way, yet in a quite unconscious, unreflecting way.
Then advancing civilization creates city life and affairs, in which man,
with his material, social, and mental interests, takes the place of
Nature, which then retires into the background. The love of it either
wholly disappears or becomes a very subordinate matter. So it has
been, so it still is, with whole populations, which know nothing
beyond the purlieus of great cities. But probably the intensest feeling
for Nature is that which is engendered out of the heart of the latest,
perhaps over-refined, civilization. Ages that have been over-civilized
turn away from their too highly-strung interests, their too feverish
excitements, to find a peculiar relish in the calm, the coolness, the
equability of Nature. Vinet has well said that “the more the soul has
been cultivated by social intercourse, and especially the more it has
suffered from it, the more, in short, society is disturbed and
agonized, the more rich and profound Nature becomes,”—
mysteriously eloquent for the one who comes to her from out the
ardent and tumultuous centre of civilization.
Towards the end of last century Europe had reached this third
stage. In all the foremost nations it showed itself by this as one
among many new symptoms, that there was an awakening to the
presence of Nature, and to the power of it, with an intimacy and
vividness unknown before. Men became aware of the presence of
the visible world, and, almost startled by it, they asked what it meant.
What was so old and familiar came home to them as if it were now
for the first time discovered. Here and there were men who, having
had their fevered pulses stimulated almost to madness by the throes
that preceded or accompanied the Revolution, turned instinctively to
find repose in the eternal freshness that is in the outer world. This
tendency showed itself in different ways in different countries, and
expressed itself variously, according to the nature of the men who
were the organs of it. In France this new passion for Nature found a
representative in Rousseau, as early as 1759, in whose writings, in
spite of their mawkish sentiment, their morbid “self-torturing,” their
false politics and distorted morality, all men of taste have felt the
fascination of their eloquence and the picturesqueness with which
the shores of the Leman Lake are described. Later in the century,
Goethe, in Germany, expressed the same feeling with all the
difference there is between the Teutonic and the Gallic genius. More
than any poet before him, or any since, he combined the scientific
with the poetic view of Nature, or rather he studied the facts and
laws of Nature with the eye of a physicist, and saw the beauty that is
in these with the eye of a poet. It has been said of him that he
worshiped God in Nature. It would be more true to say, that
perceiving intelligently the unity that pervades all things, he felt
intensely the beauty of that unity, he delighted in the wide views of
the Universe which science had recently unfolded. But as the moral
side of things, as duty and self-surrender hardly entered into his
thoughts, it is misleading to speak of merely scientific contemplation
and æsthetic delight as worship or devotion. Worship implies a
personal relation to a personal being, and this was hardly in
Goethe’s thoughts at all. But whatever may be the true account of
his ultimate views, he is the German representative of the great
wave of feeling of which I speak.
It was a fortunate thing for England that when the time had come
when she was to open and expand her heart towards Nature, as she
had never before done, the function of leading the new movement
and of expressing it was committed to a soul like Wordsworth’s,—a
soul in which sensibility, far healthier than that of Rousseau, and
deeper than that of Goethe, was based on a moral nature, simple,
solid, profound. It is the way in all great changes of every kind. When
the change is to come, the man who is by his nature predestined to
make it comes too. So it was in history and in art. Contemporary with
Wordsworth’s movement, a change in these was needed. Men ever
since the Reformation had got so absorbed in the new order of
things, that they had quite forgotten the old, and had become
ignorant of and unsympathetic to the past. So history, art,
architecture, and many other things, had become meagre and
starved. Men’s minds, in this country at least, had to be made aware
that there had lived brave men before Cromwell, good men before
Luther and Knox. And Walter Scott was born into the world to teach it
this lesson, and to let in the sympathies of men in full tide on the
buried centuries. The change which Scott wrought in men’s way of
apprehending history was not greater than that which Wordsworth
wrought in their feelings towards the world of Nature, with which, not
less than with the world of History, their lives are encompassed. If
Scott taught men to look with other eyes on the characters of the
past, Wordsworth not the less taught them to do the same towards
the present earth around them, and the heavens above them. This
was indeed but half of Wordsworth’s function. For he had moral truth
to communicate to his generation, not less than naturalistic truth. It
is, however, with the latter order of truth that we have now to do. Yet
in him each kind of truth was so interpenetrated with the other, they
were balanced in such harmony, that it is not possible in any study of
him to dissever them.
Thus it seems that two poets were the chief agents in letting in on
men’s minds two great bodies of sentiment, the one historical, the
other naturalistic, which have leavened all modern society, and even
visibly changed the outward face of things. Sir W. Stirling Maxwell, at
the Scott Centenary, remarked that the mention of any spot by Scott,
in his poems or romances, has increased the market value of the
surrounding acres more than the highest farming could do. And there
is not an inn or small farm-house in all the Lake country which does
not reap every summer in hard coin the results of Wordsworth’s
poetry. Can even the stoutest utilitarian, seeing these things, say that
Poetry is mere sentimental moonshine, with no power on men’s lives
an actions?
To understand what Wordsworth did as an interpreter of Nature,
we must bear in mind the experience through which he passed, the
natural gifts and the mental discipline which fitted him to be so. He
was sprung from a hardy North of England stock that had lived for
generations in Yorkshire, afterwards in Cumberland, in a social place
intermediate between the squires and the yeomen, and from both his
parents he had received the inheritance of a moral nature that was
healthy, frugal, and robust. Early left an orphan, with three brothers
and one sole sister, his childish recollections attached themselves
rather to school than to home. At the age of eight he went with his
brothers to Hawkshead, “an antique village, standing a little way to
the west of Windermere, on its own lake of Esthwaite, and
possessing an ancient and once famous grammar school.” There he
boarded with a humble village dame, and attended the school by
day; but it was a school in which our modern high-pressure system
was unknown, and which left the boys ample leisure to wander late
and early by the lake-margins, through the copses, and on the
mountain-sides. Of the village dame under whose roof he lodged he
has left a pleasing portrait in “The Prelude.” The early and not the
least beautiful part of that poem, and many of his most delightful
shorter poems, refer to things seen and felt at that time. For, as the
late Arthur Clough has truly said, “it was then and there beyond a
doubt, that the substantive Wordsworth was formed; it was then and
there that the tall rock and sounding cataract haunted him like a
passion, and that his genius and whole being united and identified
itself with external Nature.” From this primitive village school, he
passed like other north-country lads, to Cambridge, where he spent
three years, the least profitable years of his life, if any years are
unprofitable to a man like him. More profit he got from summer visits
to his own country, Hawkshead, and his mother’s relations, and
especially from a walking tour through France, Switzerland, and the
Italian lakes,—regions then but little trod by Englishmen. After
graduating at Cambridge he gladly left it in 1791 to plunge headlong
into the first fervor of the French Revolution.
The high hopes which that event awoke in him, as in many
another enthusiast, the dreams that a new era was about to dawn on
down-trodden man, these things are an oft-told tale. When the
revolutionary frenzy culminated in bloodshed and the Reign of Terror,
Wordsworth’s faith in it remained for long unshaken and unchanged.
On the scenes which appalled others he looked undismayed, and
even seriously pondered himself becoming a leader in the business.
Luckily for himself and the world, he was recalled from France
towards the close of 1792 by some stern home-measures, probably
the cutting short of his always scanty supplies. In 1793 he published
an “Apology for the French Revolution,” in which he rails against all
the most cherished institutions of England, and recommends the
Utopia of absolute democracy as the one remedy for all the ills which
afflict the world. Not even the murder of Louis XVI., nor the
bloodshed and horrors which followed, shook him. The fall of
Robespierre in July, 1794, gave him new heart to believe that his
golden dreams would yet be realized. But when from the struggle he
saw emerge, not freedom, peace, and universal brotherhood, but the
First Consul with his armies, his high hopes at last gave way.
Despairing of the destinies of mankind, he wandered about the
country aimless, dejected, almost in despondency. Public affairs
never appear so dark as when a man’s own private affairs are
getting desperate. And such was Wordsworth’s case at that time. He
had no profession, no aim in life, was almost entirely destitute of
funds. From absolute want he was relieved in 1795 by the bequest of
nine hundred pounds left to him by his friend Raisley Calvert. This
enabled his sister—a soul hardly less gifted, and altogether as noble
as himself—from whom he had been much separated, to take up
house with him, and to minister not only to his bodily but much more
to his mental needs. Seeing that his office on earth was to be a poet,
she turned him away from brooding over dark social and moral
problems, and led him to look once more on the open face of Nature,
and to mingle familiarly with humble men. They made themselves a
home, first in Dorsetshire, then in Somersetshire, where Coleridge
joined them. Then it was that, warmed by the society of his sister
and his poet friend, and wandering freely among the hills of
Quantock, the fountain of his poetic heart was opened, which was to
flow on for years. Soon followed the final settlement, in the last days
of last century, in the small cottage at the Townhead of Grasmere,
which became their home for more than eight years, and will forever
continue to be identified with the most splendid era of Wordsworth’s
genius. For it was during the years immediately preceding
Grasmere, and during the eight Grasmere years, that he attained to
embody in one poem after another the finest effluence of his spirit.
It was almost entirely at Grasmere, between the years 1800 and
1805, that he composed “The Prelude,” an autobiographic poem on
the growth of his own mind. It is for the purpose of better
understanding this poem that I have given the foregoing brief
framework of the outward facts of Wordsworth’s life on which “The
Prelude” comments from within. The poem consists of fourteen
books in blank verse, probably the most elaborate biographic poem
ever composed. Readers of Lord Macaulay’s Life may perhaps
remember his remarks on it: “There are,” he says, “the old raptures
about mountains and cataracts; the old flimsy philosophy about the
effects of scenery on the mind; the old crazy mystical metaphysics;
the endless wildernesses of dull, flat, prosaic declamations
interspersed.” No one need be astonished at this estimate by Lord
Macaulay. We see but as we feel. To him, being such as he was, it
was not given to feel or to see the things which Wordsworth most
cared for. No wonder, then, that to him the poem that spoke of these
things was a weariness. Doubtless much may be said against such a
subject for a poem—the growth of a poet’s mind from childhood to
maturity: much too against the execution, the sustained self-analysis,
the prolixity of some parts, the verbosity and sometimes the
vagueness of the language. But after making full deduction for all
these things, it still remains a wonderful and unique poem, most
instructive to those who will take the trouble required to master such
a work. If after a certain acquaintance with Wordsworth’s better-
known and more attractive poems, a person will but study “The
Prelude,” he will return to the other poems with a new insight into
their meaning and their truth.
How highly Coleridge esteemed it those know who remember the
poem in which he describes the impression made on himself by
hearing Wordsworth read it aloud for the first time after its
completion:—

“An Orphic song indeed,

A song divine, of high and passionate thoughts,
To their own music chanted.”

This poem, read to Coleridge in 1805, was not given to the world
till July, 1850, a few months after the author’s death. The reason why
I shall now dwell on it at some length is because no other production
of Wordsworth’s gives us so deep and sustained a view of his feeling
about Nature, and of the relation which he believed to exist between
Nature and the soul of man.
In Wordsworth’s mental history two periods are especially
prominent. The first was his school-time at Hawkshead, by Esthwaite
Lake, eight years in all. The second was the mental crisis through
which he passed after his return from France till he settled with his
sister in the south of England, and ultimately at Grasmere. The first
was the spring-time of his soul—a fair spring-time, in which all the
young impulses and intuitions were first awakened, when the colors
were laid in and deeply engrained into every fibre of his being. The
second was the trial time, the crisis of his spirit, in which all his early
impulses, impressions, intuitions, were brought out into distinct
consciousness, questioned and tested—vindicated by reason, and
embraced by will as his guiding principles for life—in which, as one
may say, all that had hitherto existed inwardly in fluid vapor was
gathered up, condensed, solidified into deliberate substance and
permanent purpose.
A healthful, happy, blissful school-time was that which Wordsworth
spent by Esthwaite Lake—natural, blameless, pure, as ever boy
spent. School rules were few, discipline was light, school hours were
short, and, these over, the boys were free to roam where they willed,
far or near, high and low, early and late, sometimes far into the frosty
starlight. Then it was that Nature first

“Peopled his mind with forms sublime and fair,”

came to him like instincts unawares, as he went about his usual

sports with his companions. Rowing on the lake, snaring woodcocks
among the hill copses by night, skating by starlight on the frozen
lake, climbing crags to harry the raven’s nest, scudding on
horseback over Furness Sands:—

“From week to week, from month to month, we lived

A round of tumult.”

In all this there was not anything lackadaisical, nor any maundering
about Nature, but only the life you might expect in a hardy mountain-
bred boy, with robust body and strong animal spirits. These things he
shared with other boys. There was nothing special in them. But what
was peculiar, eminently his own, was this—the feelings that
sometimes came to him in the very midst of the wild hill sports—in
the pauses of the boisterous games. There were times when,
detached from his companions, alone in lonely places, he felt from
within

“Gleams like the flashing of a shield, the earth

And common face of Nature spake to him
Rememberable things.”

During his later school years he tells us that he would walk alone
under the quiet stars, and
 “Feel whate’er there is of power in sound
To breathe an elevated mood, by form
Or image unprofaned, and I would stand,
In the night blackened with a coming storm,
Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are
The ghostly language of the ancient earth,
Or make their dim abode in distant winds,
Thence did I drink the visionary power.”

He speaks, too, of a morning when he had stolen forth before

even the birds were astir,

“And sate among the woods

Alone upon some jutting eminence,
At the first gleam of dawnlight, when the vale,
Yet slumbering, lay in utter solitude.
How shall I seek the origin? where find
Faith in the marvelous things which then I felt?
Oft in these moments such a holy calm
Would overspread my soul, that bodily eyes
Were utterly forgotten, and what I saw
Appeared like something in myself, a dream,
A prospect in the mind.”

These were his supreme moments of existence, when the vision

first dawned upon his soul, when without knowing it he was baptized
with an effluence from on high, consecrated to be the poet-priest of
Nature’s mysteries. The light that then came to him was in after
years “the master-light of all his seeing,” the fountain-head of his
highest inspirations. From this was drawn that peculiar ethereal
gleam which rests on his finest after productions—the ode to the
Cuckoo, the poems on Matthew, Tintern Abbey, the Intimations of
Immortality, and many another poem. Not that he knew in these
accesses of soul what he was receiving. He felt them at the time,
and passed on. Only long afterwards, when

“The eagerness of infantine desire”

was over, in hours of tranquil thought, the remembrance of those
bright moments recurred, with a sense of distance from his present
self so remote, that

“Often did he seem

Two consciousnesses, conscious of himself,
And of some other being.”

The Prelude contains nothing more beautiful Of instructive than

the whole account of that Hawkshead school-time. It portrays the
wonderful boyhood of a wonderful boy, though neither he himself nor
others then thought him the least wonderful. Reflecting on it long
afterwards, Wordsworth saw, and every student of his poetry will
see, that in that time lay the secret of his power, by the impulses
then received his whole philosophy of life and of poetry was
determined. Natural objects, he tells us, then came home to him
primarily through the human affections and associations of which
they are the outward framework,—just as the infant when he first
comes to know sensible objects, learns to associate them with the
interventions of the touch, the look, the tenderness of its mother.
Gradually, even before school-time was past, Nature had come to
have a meaning and an attraction for him, by herself, without the
need of such intervening agents.
Further, he tells us, that while for him at that time each individual
rock, tree, and flower, had an interest of its own, he came deeply to
feel the great living whole which Nature is. All his thoughts, he says,
were steeped in feeling.

“I was only then

Contented, when with bliss ineffable
I felt the sentiment of being spread
O’er all that moves, and all that seemeth still;
O’er all that lost beyond the reach of thought
And human knowledge, to the human eye
Invisible, yet liveth to the heart;
O’er all that leaps, and runs, and shouts, and sings,
Or beats the gladsome air; o’er all that glides
Beneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself
And mighty depth of waters. Wonder not
If high the transport, great the joy I felt,
Communing in this sort through earth and heaven
With every form of creature, as it looked
Towards the Uncreated with a countenance
Of adoration, with an eye of love.”

“Towards the Uncreated,”—the looking thitherward through both

Nature and his own moral being, so as to find both based on one
Divine order, witnessing to one Eternal Being, this is one of
Wordsworth’s deepest tendencies. This is his teaching in many
forms, emphatically in the “Ode to Duty,” of which, after recognizing
duty as the law of his own being, he exclaims,

“Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;

And the eternal heavens through thee are fresh and strong.”

The passage last quoted from “The Prelude” has the same
meaning, and testifies that from and through his communing with
Nature he had learnt, even in boyhood, a true and real natural
religion—had felt his soul come into contact with Him who is at once
the author and upholder of Nature and of man. Not perhaps that, in
his school days, he was fully aware of what he then learnt. He felt at
the time, he learnt to know what he felt afterwards. At Cambridge,
when surrounded by trivial and uncongenial interests, he became
aware that he had brought with him from the mountains powers to
counterwork these—

“Independent solaces,
Incumbencies more awful, visitings
Front the Upholder of the tranquil soul.”

What then was the spiritual nutriment he had gathered from that
boyhood passed in Nature’s immediate presence? He had felt, and
after reflection had made the feelings a rooted and habitual
conviction, that the world without him, the thing we call Nature, is not
a dead machine, but something all pervaded by a life—sometimes
he calls it a soul; that this living Nature was a unity; that there was
that in it which awoke in him feelings of calmness, awe, and
tenderness; that this infinite life in Nature was not something which
he attributed to Nature, but that it existed external to him,
independent of his thoughts and feelings, and was in no way the
creation of his own mind; that, though his faculties in nowise created
those qualities in Nature, they might go forth and aspire towards
them, and find support in them; that even when he was withdrawn
from the presence of that Nature and these qualities, yet that they
subsist quite independent of his perceptions of them. And the
conviction that Nature there was living on all the same, whether he
heeded her or not, imparted to his mind kindred calm and coolness,
and fed it with thoughts of majesty. This, or something like it, is the
conviction which he tries to express in “The Prelude.” Those vague
emotions, those visionary gleams which came to him in the happier
moments of boyhood, before which the solid earth was all
unsubstantialized and transfigured—these he held to be, though he
could not prove it, intimations coming to his soul direct from God. In
one of these moments, a glorious summer morning, when he was
spending a Cambridge vacation by the Lakes, he for the first time
consciously felt himself to be a dedicated spirit, consecrated to truth
and purity and high unworldly endeavor.
Again, the invisible voice that came to him through the visible
universe was not in him, as has often been asserted, a Pantheistic
conception. Almost in the same breath he speaks of

“Nature’s self, which is the breath of God,”

and

“His pure word by miracle revealed.”

He tells us that he held the speaking face of earth and heaven to be

an organ of intercourse with man,—

“Established by the sovereign intellect

Who through that bodily image hath diffused,