From “Prose Remains.”

WORDSWORTH succeeded beyond the other poets of the time in giving a perfect expression to his meaning, in making his verse permanently true to his genius and his moral frame. Let us proceed to inquire the worth of that genius and moral frame, the sum of the real significance of his character and view of life.

	“Unless above himself he can
	Erect himself, how poor a thing is Man,”

are the words which he himself adopts from the Elizabethan poet Daniel, translated by him from Seneca, and introduces into that part of “The Excursion” which gives us what I might call his creed, the statement of those substantive enduring convictions upon which after a certain amount of fluctuation and tossing about in the world he found himself or got himself anchored.

  A certain elevation and fixity characterize Wordsworth everywhere. You will not find, as in Byron, an ebullient overflowing life, refusing all existing restrictions, and seeking in vain to create any for itself, to own in itself any permanent law or rule. To have attained a law, to exercise a lordship by right divine over passions and desires,—this is Wordsworth’s pre-eminence.

  Nor do we find, as in Scott, a free, vigorous animal nature ready to accept whatever things earth has to offer, eating and drinking and enjoying heartily; like charity, hoping all things, believing all things, and never failing; a certain withdrawal and separation, a moral and almost religious selectiveness, a rigid refusal and a nice picking and choosing, are essential to Wordsworth’s being. It has been not inaptly said by a French critic that you may trace in him, as in Addison, Richardson, Cowper, a spiritual descent from the Puritans.

  Into what Byron might have remade himself in that new and more hopeful era of his life upon which, when death cut him down at Missolonghi, he appeared to be entering, it would be over bold to conjecture. But assuredly (without passing judgment on a human soul simply according to the errors of those thirty-six years which may claim perhaps the name and palliation of an unusually protracted youth)—assuredly, to be whirled away by the force of mere arbitrary will, whose only law was its own willfulness, to follow passion for passion’s sake, and be capricious for the love of one’s own caprice—this is not the honor or the excellence of a being breathing thoughtful breath, looking before and after.

  The profounder tones of Walter Scott’s soul were never truly sounded until adversity and grief fell upon his latter days, and those old enjoyments in which he seemed to live, and move, and have his being, his natural and as it were predestined vocation, fell from him and were no more. The constancy, courage, and clear manly sense which, amid broken fortunes, severed ties, and failing health, spirits, and intellect, the extracts from his journals given in Mr. Lockhart’s life evince, constitute a picture, I think, far more affecting than any to be found in “Kenilworth” or the “Bride of Lammermoor.” But the sports and amusements of Abbotsford, the riding and coursing and fishing and feasting and entertaining of guests, etc., etc., these, it appears to me, a little disappoint, dissatisfy, displease us; and make us really thankful, while we read, for the foreknowledge that so strong and capable a soul was ere the end to have some nobler work allotted it, if not in the way of action, at any rate in that of endurance.

  More rational certainly, either than Byron’s hot career of willfulness, or Scott’s active but easy existence amidst animal spirits and out-of-door enjoyments, more dignified, elevated, serious, significant, and truly human, was Wordsworth’s homely and frugal life in the cottage at Grasmere. While wandering with his dear wagoners round his dearer lakes, talking with shepherds, watching hills and stars, studying the poets, and fashioning verses, amidst all this there was really something higher than either wild crying out to have things as one chose, or cheerfully taking the world’s good things as one found them, working to gain the means and the relish for amusement. He did not, it is true, sweep away with him the exulting hearts of youth, “o’er the glad waters of the dark blue sea”; he did not win the eager and attentive ear of the high and low, at home and abroad, with the entertainment of immortal Waverley novels; but to strive not unsuccessfully to build the lofty rhyme, to lay slowly the ponderous foundations of pillars to sustain man’s moral fabric, to fix a centre around which the chaotic elements of human impulse and desire might take solid form and move in their ordered ellipses, to originate a spiritual vitality, this was perhaps greater than sweeping over glad blue waters or inditing immortal novels.

	“Unless above himself he can
	Erect himself, how poor a thing is Man.”