Born, at Cockermouth, Cumberland, 7 April 1770. Early education at Hawkshead Grammar School, 1778–87. Matric. St. John’s Coll., Camb., Oct. 1787; B.A., 1791. Travelled on Continent, July to Oct. 1790. Visited Paris, Nov. 1791. Settled with his sister near Crewkerne, Dorsetshire, autumn of 1795. First visit from Coleridge, June 1797. Removed to Alfoxden, Nether Stowey, Somersetshire, July 1797. Friendship with Charles Lamb and Hazlitt begun. In Bristol, 1798. In Germany, Sept. 1798 to July 1799. Settled at Grasmere, Dec. 1799. Visit to France, July to Aug. 1802. Married Mary Hutchinson, 4 Oct. 1802. Friendship with Scott and Southey begun, 1803. Removed to Coleorton, Leicestershire, 1806. Returned to Grasmere, 1808. Contrib. to “The Friend,” 1810. Removed to Rydal Mount, spring of 1813. Distributor of stamps for Westmoreland, March 1813 to 1842. Visits to Continent, 1820, 1823, 1828, 1837. Hon. D.C.L., Durham, 1838. Hon. D.C.L., Oxford, 12 June 1839. Crown Pension, 1842. Poet Laureate, 1843. Died, at Rydal Mount, 23 April 1850. Buried in Grasmere Churchyard. Works: “An Evening Walk,” 1793; “Descriptive Sketches in Verse,” 1793; “Lyrical Ballads, with a few other Poems” (2 vols.), 1798–1800; “Poems” (2 vols.), 1807; “On the Relations of Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal to each other,” 1809; “The Excursion,” 1814; “The White Doe of Rylstone,” 1815; “Poems” (3 vols.), 1815–20; “Thanksgiving Ode,” 1816; “Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns,” 1816; “Peter Bell,” 1819; “The Waggoner,” 1819; “The River Duddon,” 1820; “The Little Maid and the Gentleman; or, We are Seven” (anon.), [1820?]; “Memorials of a Tour on the Continent,” 1822; “Ecclesiastical Sketches,” 1822; “Description of the Scenery of the Lakes in the North of England,” 1822; “Yarrow Revisited,” 1835; “Sonnets,” 1838; “Poems,” 1842; “Poems on the Loss and Rebuilding of St. Mary’s Church,” by W. Wordsworth, J. Montgomery, and others, 1842; “Ode on the Installation of Prince Albert at Cambridge” [1847]; “The Prelude,” 1850. Collected Works: “Poetical Works,” ed. by E. Dowden (7 vols.), 1892–93; “Prose Works,” ed. by W. Knight (2 vols.), 1896. Life: by C. Wordsworth, 1851; by E. P. Hood, 1856; by J. M. Sutherland, 2nd edn., 1892.

Personal

  [I visited] Alfoxden, a country seat occupied by a Mr. Wordsworth, of living men one of the greatest—at least, Coleridge, who has seen most of the great men of this country says he is; and I, who have seen Wordsworth again since, am inclined very highly to estimate him. He has certainly physiognomical traits of genius. He has a high manly forehead, a full and comprehensive eye, a strong nose to support the superstructure, and altogether a very pleasing and striking countenance.

  On Monday, 4th October 1802, my brother William was married to Mary Hutchinson. I slept a good deal of the night, and rose fresh and well in the morning. At a little after eight o’clock, I saw them go down the avenue towards the church. William had parted from me upstairs. When they were absent, my dear little Sara prepared the breakfast. I kept myself as quiet as I could, but when I saw the two men running up the walk, coming to tell us it was over, I could stand it no longer, and threw myself on the bed, where I lay in stillness, neither hearing nor seeing anything till Sara came upstairs to me, and said, “They are coming.” This forced me from the bed where I lay, and I moved, I knew not how, straight forward, faster than my strength could carry me, till I met my beloved William, and fell upon his bosom. He and John Hutchinson led me to the house, and there I stayed to welcome my dear Mary. As soon as we had breakfasted, we departed. It rained when we set off.

  A visit from Wordsworth…. His conversation was long and interesting. He spoke of his own poems with the just feeling of confidence which a sense of his own excellence gives him. He is now convinced that he never can derive emolument from them; but, being independent, he willingly gives up all idea of doing so. He is persuaded that if men are to become better and wiser, the poems will sooner or later make their way.

  Wordsworth’s residence and mine are fifteen miles asunder—a sufficient distance to preclude any frequent interchange of visits. I have known him nearly twenty years, and for about half that time intimately. The strength and the character of his mind you see in “The Excursion;” and his life does not belie his writings, for in every relation of life, and every point of view, he is a truly exemplary and admirable man. In conversation he is powerful beyond any of his cotemporaries; and as a poet—I speak not from the partiality of friendship, nor because we have been so absurdly held up as both writing upon one concerted system of poetry, but with the most deliberate exercise of impartial judgment whereof I am capable, when I declare my full conviction that posterity will rank him with Milton.

  There seemed to me, in his first appearance, something grave almost to austerity, and the deep tones of his voice added strength to that impression of him. There was not visible about him the same easy and disengaged air that so immediately charmed me in Southey—his mind seemed to require an effort to awaken itself thoroughly from some brooding train of thought, and his manner, as I felt at least, at first reluctantly relaxed into blandness and urbanity…. The features of Wordsworth’s face are strong and high, almost harsh and severe—and his eyes have, when he is silent, a dim, thoughtful, I had nearly said melancholy expression—so that when a smile takes possession of his countenance, it is indeed the most powerful smile I ever saw…. Never saw I a countenance in which Contemplation so reigns. His brow is very lofty—and his dark brown hair seems worn away, as it were, by thought, so thinly is it spread over his temples. The colour of his face is almost sallow; but it is not the sallowness of confinement or ill-health, it speaks rather of the rude and boisterous greeting of the mountain-weather.

  An extremely pleasant drive of sixteen miles … brought me to Wordsworth’s door, on a little elevation, commanding a view of Rydal water…. It is claimed to be the most beautiful spot and the finest prospect in the lake country, and, even if there be finer, it would be an ungrateful thing to remember them here, where, if anywhere, the eye and the heart ought to be satisfied. Wordsworth knew from Southey that I was coming, and therefore met me at the door and received me heartily. He is about fifty-three or four, with a tall, ample, well-proportioned frame, a grave and tranquil manner, a Roman cast of appearance, and Roman dignity and simplicity. He presented me to his wife, a good, very plain woman, who seems to regard him with reverence and affection, and to his sister, not much younger than himself, with a good deal of spirit and, I should think, more than common talent and knowledge. I was at home with them at once, and we went out like friends together to scramble up the mountains, and enjoy the prospects and scenery…. His conversation surprised me by being so different from all I had anticipated. It was exceedingly simple, strictly confined to subjects he understood familiarly, and more marked by plain good-sense than by anything else. When, however, he came upon poetry and reviews, he was the Khan of Tartary again, and talked as metaphysically and extravagantly as ever Coleridge wrote; but excepting this, it was really a consolation to hear him. It was best of all, though, to see how he is loved and respected in his family and neighborhood…. The peasantry treated him with marked respect, the children took off their hats to him, and a poor widow in the neighborhood sent to him to come and talk to her son, who had been behaving ill.

  Coming to a brotherhood of firs, a gate opens into the grounds of the Poet. The house is hung with climbing shrubs, which flower around the windows, and twist themselves together, in a mass upon the roof. We knocked at the glass door, through which I saw the Poet pass, mentioned our name to the servant, and were shown into a parlour by Mrs. Wordsworth,—a lady past the prime of womanhood, dressed in a purple silk pelisse, and straw bonnet. We seated ourselves on a sofa, and expected the appearance of him whose name had been held up to so much ridicule and praise, by the two poetical factions, in the republic of letters. He came loosely carelessly dressed, in white pantaloons and a short coat; his bosom open, a countenance dark and furrowed, a hawk’s nose, very similar to Southey’s, and drooping eyes, which seemed weak, as a green shade was lying on the table. I apologized for our intrusion, ascribing it to the desire we had of seeing the author of a work, to which we had owed many hours of pleasing and of elevated thought. He set us immediately at ease, entering directly into affable conversation on the Lakes, the birds which frequent them, the plants peculiar to them, the season favourable for visiting them and then on streams, woods, waters, mountains, clouds, fields, torrents, and all that constitute the elements of poetry. He remarked that the lapse of a river seen gleaming at a distance, harmonized with the heaven, which seemed to come down and blend with it in light and colour…. Wordsworth, in appearance and conversation, has nothing of that love of puerile simplicity, which is seen in his earlier writings. There is, on the contrary, a manly sense and vigour of conception, joined with much frankness and facility of manner.

  Wordsworth came at half-past eight, and stopped to breakfast. Talked a good deal. Spoke of Byron’s plagiarisms from him; the whole third canto of “Childe Harold” founded on his style and sentiments. The feeling of natural objects which is there expressed, not caught by B. from nature herself, but from him (Wordsworth), and spoiled in the transmission; “Tintern Abbey” the source of it all, from which same poem, too, the celebrated passage about Solitude, in the first canto of “Childe Harold,” is (he said) taken, with this difference, that what is naturally expressed by him has been worked by Byron into a laboured and antithetical sort of declamation.

  Mr. Wordsworth, in his person, is above the middle size, with marked features, and an air somewhat stately and Quixotic. He reminds one of some of Holbein’s heads, grave, saturnine, with a slight indication of sly humour, kept under by the manners of the age or by the pretensions of the person. He has a peculiar sweetness in his smile, and great depth and manliness and a rugged harmony, in the tones of his voice. His manner of reading his own poetry is particularly imposing; and in his favourite passages his eye beams with preternatural lustre, and the meaning labours slowly up from his swelling breast. No one who has seen him at these moments could go away with an impression that he was a “man of no mark or likelihood.” Perhaps the comment of his face and voice is necessary to convey a full idea of his poetry. His language may not be intelligible, but his manner is not to be mistaken. It is clear that he is either mad or inspired.

  More than all the “Excursion” and the Platonic Ode is developed in his domelike forehead. And his manner and conversation are full of the pleasant playful sincerity and kindness which are so observable in his works. The utter absence of pretension in all he says and looks is very striking. He does not say many things to be remembered; and most of his observations are chiefly noticeable for their delicate taste, strong good sense, and stout healthy diction, rather than for imagery or condensed principles of philosophy. You see in him the repose or the sport, but neither the harlequinade, nor the conflict of genius. I believe he has long turned the corner of life; and yet there is not about him the slightest tendency to be wearied or disgusted with human nature, or to be indifferent toward the common little objects, occurrences, and people round him. All his daily fireside companionable sympathies are as sensitive and good-humoured as ever.

  I must say I never saw any manifestation of small jealousy between Coleridge and Wordsworth; which … I thought uncommonly to the credit of both. I am sure they entertained a thorough respect for each other’s intellectual endowments…. Wordsworth was a single-minded man: with less imagination than Coleridge, but with a more harmonious judgment, and better balanced principles. Coleridge, conscious of his transcendent powers, rioted in a licence of tongue which no man could tame. Wordsworth, though he could discourse most eloquent music, was never unwilling to sit still in Coleridge’s presence, yet could be as happy in prattling with a child as in communing with a sage. If Wordsworth condescended to converse with me, he spoke to me as if I were his equal in mind, and made me pleased and proud in consequence. If Coleridge held me by the button, for lack of fitter audience, he had a talent for making me feel his wisdom and my own stupidity; so that I was miserable and humiliated by the sense of it.

  I enjoyed the snatches I was able to have of Wordsworth’s conversation, and I think I had quite as much as was good for me. He has a good philosophical bust, a long, thin, gaunt face, much wrinkled and weatherbeaten: of the Curwen style of figure and face, but with a more cheerful and benevolent expression.

  I am just come home from breakfasting with Henry Taylor to meet Wordsworth; the same party as when he had Southey—Mill, Elliot, Charles Villiers. Wordsworth may be bordering on sixty; hard-featured, brown, wrinkled, with prominent teeth and a few scattered gray hairs, but nevertheless not a disagreeable countenance.

  Well, when word came into the room of the splendid meteor, we all went out to view it; and, on the beautiful platform at Mount Rydale, we were all walking, in twos and threes, arm-in-arm, talking of the phenomenon, and admiring it. Now, be it remembered, that Wordsworth, Professor Wilson, Lloyd, De Quincey, and myself, were present, besides several other literary gentlemen, whose names I am not certain that I remember aright. Miss Wordsworth’s arm was in mine, and she was expressing some fears that the splendid stranger might prove ominous, when I, by ill luck, blundered out the following remark, thinking that I was saying a good thing:—“Hout, me’m it is neither mair nor less than joost a treeumphal airch, raised in honour of the meeting of the poets.” “That’s not amiss—eh? eh?—that’s very good,” said the Professor, laughing. But Wordsworth, who had De Quincey’s arm, gave a grunt, and turned on his heel, and leading the little opium-chewer aside, he addressed him in these disdainful and venomous words:—“Poets? poets? What does the fellow mean? Where are they?” Who could forgive this? For my part I never can, and never will! I admire Wordsworth; as who does not, whatever they may pretend? but for that short sentence I have a lingering ill-will at him which I cannot get rid of. It is surely presumption in any man to circumscribe all human excellence within the narrow sphere of his own capacity. The “Where are they?” was too bad! I have always some hopes that De Quincey was leeing, for I did not myself hear Wordsworth utter the words.

  North. How placid and profound the expression of the whole bard! The face is Miltonic—even to the very eyes;—for though, thank Heaven, they are not blind, there is a dimness about the orbs. The temples I remember shaded with thin hair of an indescribable color, that in the sunlight seemed a kind of mild auburn—but now they are bare—and—nothing to break it—the height is majestic. No furrows—no wrinkles on that contemplative forehead—the sky is without a cloud—

	“The image of a poet’s soul,
	How calm! how tranquil! how serene!”

It faintly smiles. There is light and motion round the lips, as if they were about to discourse “most eloquent music.”

  After a while he (Professor Wilson) digressed to Wordsworth and Southey, and asked me if I was going to return by the Lakes. I proposed doing so. “I will give you letters to both, if you haven’t them. I lived a long time in that neighborhood, and know Wordsworth perhaps as well as any one. Many a day I have walked over the hills with him, and listened to his repetition of his own poetry.”… “Did Wordsworth repeat any other poetry than his own?” “Never in a single instance to my knowledge. He is remarkable for the manner in which he is wrapped up in his own poetical life.”… “Was the story true that was told in the papers of his seeing, for the first time, in a large company some new novel of Scott’s, in which there was a motto taken from his works; and that he went immediately to the shelf and took down one of his own volumes and read the whole poem to the party, who were waiting for a reading of the new book?” “Perfectly true. It happened in this very house.”

  I went up to Oxford to the Commemoration, for the first time for twenty-one years, to see Wordsworth and Bunsen receive their degrees: and to me, remembering how old Coleridge inoculated a little knot of us with the love of Wordsworth, when his name was in general a byword, it was striking to witness the thunders of applause, repeated over and over again, with which he was greeted in the theatre by Undergraduates and Masters of Arts alike.

  Encouraged by the great inducement of seeing Mr. Bunsen and Mr. Wordsworth receive their honorary degrees at Oxford, my husband was tempted to go from Rugby to the Oxford Commemoration, and Jane and I were delighted to accompany him, though it could only be accomplished by getting up before day, and returning at night after all the excitement and fatigue of the theatre. But it was well worth while…. Mr. Bunsen was received exceedingly well, and was I should suppose remarkably well-known for a foreigner; but the thundering applause, from all quarters, when the name of Wordsworth was heard, and his venerable form was seen advancing in the procession, I cannot at all describe. It was really delightful to see such a tribute to such a man. It was the public voice for once harmoniously joining to pay homage to goodness, and to talent, consistently employed in promoting the real happiness of his fellow-creatures. To us who know him so intimately, and the true humility and simplicity of his character, it was very affecting and delightful, and I shall always rejoice that I was there.

  He was, upon the whole, not a well made man. His legs were pointedly condemned by all female connoisseurs in legs; not that they were bad in any way which would force itself upon your notice—there was no absolute deformity about them; and undoubtedly they had been serviceable legs beyond the average standard of human requisition; for I calculate, upon good data, that with these identical legs Wordsworth must have traversed a distance of 175,000 to 180,000 English miles—a mode of exertion which, to him, stood in the stead of alcohol and all other stimulants whatsoever be the animal spirits; to which, indeed, he was indebted for a life of unclouded happiness, and we for much of what is most excellent in his writings. But, useful as they have proved themselves, the Wordsworthian legs were certainly not ornamental; and it was really a pity, as I agreed with a lady in thinking, that he has not another pair for evening dress parties…. I do not conceive that Wordsworth could have been an amiable boy; he was austere and unsocial, I have reason to think, in his habits; not generous; and not self-denying. I am pretty certain that no consideration would ever have induced Wordsworth to burden himself with a lady’s reticule, parasol, shawl, or anything exacting trouble and attention. Mighty must be the danger which would induce him to lead her horse by the bridle. Nor would he, without some demur, stop to offer his hand over a stile. Freedom—unlimited, careless, insolent freedom—unoccupied possession of his own arms—absolute control over his own legs and motions—these have always been so essential to his comfort, that, in any case where they were likely to become questionable, he would have declined to make one of the party.

  Gurney Hoare brought us the good news that William Wordsworth was staying at old Mrs. Hoare’s; so thither he took us. He is a man of middle height and not of very striking appearance; the lower part of the face retreating a little; his eye of a somewhat French diplomatic character, with heavy eyelids, and none of the flashing which one connects with poetic genius. When speaking earnestly, his manner and voice become extremely energetic; and the peculiar emphasis, and even accent, he throws into some of his words, add considerably to their force. He evidently loves the monologue style of conversation but shows great candor in giving due consideration to any remarks which others may make. His manner is simple, his general appearance that of the abstract thinker, whom his subject gradually warms into poetry.

	Just for a handful of silver he left us,
	Just for a riband to stick in his coat—
	Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us,
	Lost all the others she lets us devote;
	They, with gold to give, doled him out silver,
	So much was theirs who so little allowed:
	How all our copper had gone for his service!
	Rags—were they purple, his heart had been proud!
	We that had loved him so, followed him, honored him,
	Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,
	Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,
	Made him our pattern to live and to die!
	Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us,
	Burns, Shelley, were with us—they watch from their graves!
	He alone breaks from the van and the freemen,—
	He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves!

  There is, perhaps, no residence in England better known than that of William Wordsworth. Rydal Mount, where he has now lived for more than thirty years, is as perfectly poetical in its location as any poet could possibly conceive in his brightest moment of inspiration…. The immediate grounds in which his house stands are worthy of the country and the man. It is, as its name implies, a mount. Before the house opens a considerable platform, and around and beneath lie various terraces and descend various walks, winding on amid a profusion of trees and luxuriant evergreens. Beyond the house, you ascend various terraces, planted with trees now completely overshadowing them; and these terraces conduct you to a level above the house-top, and extent your view of the enchanting scenery on all sides. Above you tower the rocks and precipitous slopes of Nab-scar; and below you, embosomed in its trees, lies the richly ornate villa…. The poet’s house, itself, is a proper poet’s abode. It is at once modest, plain, yet tasteful and elegant. An ordinary dining-room, a breakfast-room in the center, and a library beyond, form the chief apartments. There are a few pictures and busts, especially those of Scott and himself, a good engraving of Burns, and the like, with a good collection of books, few of them very modern.

	… the sweet songs,
	Simple and beautiful as Truth and Nature,
	Of him whose whitened locks on Rydal Mount
	Are lifted yet by morning breezes blowing
	From the green hills, immortal in his lays.

  Walter Scott said that the eyes of Burns were the finest he ever saw. I cannot say the same of Mr. Wordsworth; that is, not in the sense of the beautiful, or even of the profound. But certainly I never beheld eyes that looked so inspired or supernatural. They were like fires half burning, half smouldering, with a sort of acrid fixture of regard, and seated at the further end of two caverns. One might imagine Ezekiel or Isaiah to have had such eyes.

  They (Dr. and Mrs. Davy) were both much struck by the likeness of the countenance, in the deep repose of death, to that of Dante. The expression was much more feminine than it had been in life—very like his sister. She bears this sad loss with unexpected calmness. She is drawn about as usual in her chair. She was heard to say, as she passed the door where the body lay, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”… It has … been a great privilege to have seen this great and good man so nearly. I think it may be said of him “that he did justly, loved mercy, and walked humbly with his God.” The funeral is to be very private—only Dr. Davy invited from this house.

  He reposes, according to his own wish, beneath the green turf, among the dalesmen of Grasmere, under the sycamores and yews of a country churchyard by the side of a beautiful stream, amid the mountains which he loved; and a solemn voice seems to breathe from his grave, which blends its tones in sweet and holy harmony with the accents of his poetry, speaking the language of humility and love, of adoration and faith, and preparing the soul, by a devout contemplation of natural beauty, for translation to a purer, and nobler, and more glorious state of existence, and for a fruition of heavenly felicity.

	To the Memory of WILLIAM WORDSWORTH,
	a true Philosopher and Poet,
	who by special gift and calling of Almighty God,
	whether he discoursed on Man or Nature,
	failed not to lift up the heart to holy things,
	tired not of maintaining the cause of the Poor and Simple,
	and so, in perilous times, was raised up to be
	a chief Minister not only of the noblest Poesy,
	but of high and sacred Truth.
	———
	This memorial is placed here by his friends and neighbors
	in testimony of respect, affection, and gratitude.
	Anno 1851.

  Among convivial spirits no one could be more joyous than Wordsworth; no one could enter more heartily and readily into the humours of the passing hour; and among eminent authors no one could ever be found more willing than he was to make allowances for the faults of others, or to afford instruction whenever he met with a pupil whose attachment to literature was not founded on vanity or affectation.

  At length I reached the head of the lake, and then the church which was my destination. Once more I stood at the grave of Wordsworth, that sacred spot which, as I believe, many generations will visit, and whence a voice, we may hope, will ever speak to men of the beauty of this fair earth and the higher glory of which it is the shadow. The great poet lies by the side of his daughter, Dora Quillinan; next to her lies Dorothy Wordsworth, his sister; then Edward Quillinan and his first wife; and there is space left for Mrs. Wordsworth. Sarah Hutchinson, Mrs. Wordsworth’s sister, also lies here: on the stone which marks her grave is the following:

	“Near the graves of two young children,
	Removed from a family to which through life she was devoted,
	Here lies the body
	of
	SARAH HUTCHINSON,
	The beloved sister and faithful Friend
	Of Mourners, who have caused this Stone to be erected,
	With an earnest wish that their own Remains
	May be laid by her side, and a humble hope,
	That through CHRIST, they may together
	Be made Partakers of the same Blessed Resurrection.”

Here follow the dates of her birth and death, and then—

	“In fulfillment of the wish above expressed
	here repose
	the remains of
	William Wordsworth,
	Dorothy Wordsworth.”

  He told [1845] me I should find visitors a great expense, and that I must promise him,—(and he laid his hand on my arm to enforce what he said) I must promise him to do as he and his sister had done, when, in their early days, they had lived at Grasmere. “When you have a visitor,” said he, “you must do as we did;—you must say ‘if you like to have a cup of tea with us, you are very welcome: but if you want any meat,—you must pay for your board.’ Now promise me that you will do this.” Of course, I could promise nothing of the sort…. He insisted: I declined promising; and changed the subject. The mixture of odd economies and neighborly generosity was one of the most striking things in the old poet. At tea there, one could hardly get a drop of cream with any ease of mind, while he was giving away all the milk that the household did not want to neighboring cottagers.

  He led me out into his garden, and showed me the gravel walk in which thousands of his lines were composed…. He had just returned from a visit to Staffa, and within three days had made three sonnets on Fingal’s Cave, and was composing a fourth, when he was called in to see me. He said, “If you are interested in my verses, perhaps you will like to hear these lines.” I gladly assented, and he recollected himself for a few moments, and then stood forth and repeated, one after the other, the three entire sonnets with great animation…. This recitation was so unlooked-for and surprising—he, the old Wordsworth, standing apart, and reciting to me in a garden-walk, like a schoolboy declaiming,—that I at first was near to laugh; but recollecting myself, that I had come thus far to see a poet, and he was chanting poems to me, I saw that he was right and I was wrong, and gladly gave myself up to hear.

  Wordsworth was, if possible, more unlike what he must appear in the fancy of those who have read his poetry and have never seen the author. He was a perfect antithesis to Coleridge—tall, wiry, harsh in features, coarse in figure, inelegant in looks. He was roughly dressed in a long brown surtout, striped duck trousers, fustian gaiters, and thick shoes. He more resembled a mountain farmer than a “lake poet.” His whole air was unrefined and unprepossessing. This was incontestably the first impression made on others as well as on me. But, on after observation, and a little reflection, I could not help considering that much that seemed unfavourable in Wordsworth might be really placed to his advantage. There was a total absence of affectation, or egotism; not the least effort at display, or assumption of superiority over any of those who were quite prepared to concede it to him. He seemed satisfied to let his friend and fellow-traveller take the lead, with a want of pretension rarely found in men of literary reputation far inferior to his; while there was something unobtrusively amiable in his bearing towards his daughter. There were several gentlemen of the party. Coleridge talked much, and indiscriminately, with those next him, or about him. He did not appear to talk for effect, but purely for talking’s sake. He seemed to breathe in words. Wordsworth was at times fluent, but always commonplace; full of remark, but not of observation. He spoke of scenery as far as its aspect was concerned; but he did not enter into its associations with moral beauty. He certainly did not talk well. But in fact he had no encouragement. He had few listeners; and what seemed rather repulsive in him was perhaps chiefly from its grating contrast to the wonderful attraction of Coleridge. His was a mild, enthusiastic flow of language; a broad, deep stream, carrying gently along all that it met with on its course—not a whirlpool that drags into its vortex and engulfs what it seizes on. Almost everything he talked about became the subject of a lecture of great eloquence and precision.

  In the country he would walk with you, talk with you, and seem gratified with your society; but, somehow or other, it seemed to me as if he were ready to relapse, become wrapt up in speculation, and would rather prefer being left to commune with himself…. On his visits to town, the recluse of Rydal Mount was quite a different creature. To me it was demonstrated, by his conduct under every circumstance, that De Quincey … had done him gross injustice in the character he loosely threw upon the public, viz., that “he was not generous or self-denying,” and farther, that he was “slovenly and regardless in dress.” I must protest that there was no warrant for this caricature; but, on the contrary, that it bore no feature of resemblance to the slight degree of eccentricity discoverable in Cumberland, and was utterly contradicted by the life in London. In the mixed society of the great Babylon, Mr. Wordsworth was facile and courteous; dressed like a gentleman, and with his tall, commanding figure—no mean type of the superior order, well trained by education and accustomed to good manners—shall I reveal that he was often sportive, and could even go the length of strong (whatever invidiousness might say, not vulgar) expressions in the off-hand mirth of his observations and criticisms?

  Wordsworth was about five feet ten inches in height. His figure was not graceful, but in his countenance there was a fine mixture of poet and philosopher. He resembled the portraits of Locke; his eyes burned with an inward glare, and looked as if they saw things (which they did) in nature not revealed to ordinary vision. His manners were grave and rather austere; but never, even when his poetical fortunes were at their lowest ebb, was he, in the smallest degree, a soured or disappointed man; for nature had given him a sanguine temperament, equable, indeed elastic, spirits; and he had moreover an unshaken faith in the genuineness of his own genius, and a correct appreciation of the value of his own writings, which he was sure would be finally rated at their proper worth, whatever vicissitudes they might meanwhile undergo.

  For the rest, he talked well in his way; with veracity, easy brevity, and force; as a wise tradesman would of his tools and work-shop,—and as no unwise one could. His voice was good, frank and sonorous, though practically clear, distinct and forcible, rather than melodious; the tone of him business-like, sedately confident, no discourtesy, yet no anxiety about being courteous; a fine wholesome rusticity, fresh as his mountain breezes, sat well on the stalwart veteran, and on all he said and did. You would have said he was a usually taciturn man; glad to unlock himself, to audience sympathetic and intelligent, when such offered itself. His face bore marks of much, not always peaceful, meditation; the look of it not bland nor benevolent, so much as close, impregnable and hard: a man multa tacere loquive paratus, in a world where he had experienced no lack of contradictions as he strode along! The eyes were not very brilliant, but they had quite a clearness; there was enough of brow, and well-shaped; rather too much of cheek (“horse-face,” I have heard satirists say), face of squarish shape and decidedly longish, as I think the head itself was (its “length” going horizontal): he was large-boned, lean but still firm-knit, tall, and strong-looking when he stood; a right good old steel-gray figure, with a fine rustic simplicity and dignity about him, and a veracious strength looking through him which might have suited one of those old steel-gray Markgrafs (Graf=Grau, “Steel-gray”) whom Henry the Fowler set up toward the “marches,” and to do battle with the intrusive Heathen, in a stalwart and judicious manner.

  Though they rest by the Lakes they loved so well, Southey’s bust looks down upon us from over the shoulder of Shakspeare; and Wordsworth, by the sentiment of a kinsman, is seated in the Baptistry—not unsuited to the innocent presence of childhood at the sacred font—not unworthy to make that angle of the Nave the nucleus of a new Poets’ Corner of future years. Beside him, by a like concord of ideas, will be the tablet of Keble, author of the “Christian Year,” who himself wrote the reverential epitaph on Wordsworth’s monument at Grasmere.

  Wordsworth and Dickens did not take to each other. Indeed, there was a mutual contempt between them, although they met only once. This was about the year 1843. Some days after, the gentleman whose guest Wordsworth was, in the suburbs of London, asked the Poet, how he liked the great Novelist? Wordsworth had a great contempt for young men, and, after pursing up his lips in a fashion peculiar to him, and swinging one leg over the other, the bare flesh of his ankles appearing over his socks, slowly answered: “Why, I am not much given to turn critic on people I meet; but, as you ask me, I will candidly avow that I thought him a very talkative, vulgar young person,—but I dare say he may be very clever. Mind, I don’t want to say a word against him, for I have never read a line he has written.” Some time after this, the same querist guardedly asked Dickens how he had liked the Poet Laureate?—“Like him? Not at all. He is a dreadful Old Ass.”

  I thought there was something prophet-like in the tones of his voice, as well as in his whole appearance, and there was a noble tranquility about him that almost awed one, at first, into silence. As the day was cold and wet, he proposed we should sit down together in the only room in the house where there was a fire, and he led the way to what seemed a common sitting or dinning room. It was a plain apartment, the rafters visible, and no attempt at decoration noticeable. Mrs. Wordsworth sat knitting at the fireside, and she rose with a sweet expression of courtesy and welcome as we entered the apartment…. I noticed that Mrs. Wordsworth listened as if she were hearing him speak for the first time in her life, and the work on which she was engaged lay idle in her lap, while she watched intently every movement of her husband’s face. I also was absorbed in the man and in his speech. I thought of the long years he had lived in communion with nature in that lonely but lovely region. The story of his life was familiar to me, and I sat as if under the influence of a spell…. Now and then I stole a glance at the gentle lady, the poet’s wife, as she sat knitting silently by the fireside. This, then, was the Mary whom in 1802 he had brought home to be his loving companion through so many years. I could not help remembering too, as we all sat there together, that when children they had “practiced reading and spelling under the same old dame at Penrith,” and that they had always been lovers. There sat the woman, now gray-haired and bent, to whom the poet had addressed those undying poems, “She was a phantom of delight,” “Let other bards of angels sing,” “Yes, thou art fair,” and “O, dearer far than life and light are dear.” I recalled, too, the “Lines written after Thirty-six Years of Wedded Life.”

  Accustomed for many years to unsparing ridicule (which he had learned to endure with philosophical equanimity), the standing target for reviewers (from the formidable Jeffery of the Edinburgh to the anonymous scribbler for the Monthly), and the butt of literary and social circles, he lived long enough to exchange contempt for honours, and excessive depreciation for equally extravagant laudation.

  Mr. Crabb Robinson told me the following story more than once. He was at Charles Lamb’s chambers in the Temple when Wordsworth came in, with the new Edinburgh Review in his hand, and fume on his countenance. “These reviewers,” said he, “put me out of patience. Here is a young man—they say he is a lord—who has written a volume of poetry, and these fellows, just because he is a lord, set upon him, laugh at him, and sneer at his writing. The young man will do something, if he goes on as he has begun. But these reviewers seem to think that nobody may write poetry, unless he lives in a garret.” Crabb Robinson told this long after to Lady Byron, who said, “Ah! if Byron had known that, he would never have attacked Wordsworth. He went one day to meet Wordsworth at dinner; when he came home I said, ‘Well, how did the young poet get on with the old one?’ ‘Why, to tell you the truth,’ said he, ‘I had but one feeling from the beginning of the visit to the end, and that was—reverence!’”

  The latter part of his life was cheered by a redundance of that admiration which before had been confined to a few, and which he certainly did not undervalue. The phrase which Quintilian applies to Ovid, “nimium amator ingenii sui,” had its close application to Wordsworth. He frequently and fondly referred to his own poems, as if feeling that they had opened a new poetical era to the world.

  Wordsworth was a tall and ungainly man; with a grave and severe face, and a manner that indicated tranquility and independence rather than high breeding. For many years previous to his death he dwelt at Rydal in Westmoreland. His mode of life was favorable to the object that he had in view; doing nothing but what it was a delight for him to do, and doing this only when he was disposed to labor. His “sole ambition and serene employ” was to write verses, to convince the world that his poems were better than all others; and so “finally array his temples with the Muse’s diadem.” From all accounts that have reached me, Wordsworth entertained small tenderness for persons beyond those who were nearest to him. In that innermost circle his affections were concentrated; and there he dwelt supreme.

  Old “Daddy Wordsworth,” as he was sometimes called, I am afraid, from my Christening, he is now, I suppose, passing under the Eclipse consequent on the Glory which followed his obscure Rise. I remember fifty years ago at our Cambridge, when the Battle was fighting for him by the Few against the Many of us who only laughed at “Louisa in the Shade” &c. His brother was then Master of Trinity College; like all Wordsworths (unless the drowned Sailor) pompous and priggish. He used to drawl out the Chapel responses so that we called him the “Mēēserable Sinner” and his brother the “Mēēserable Poet.”

  An excitement which vents itself in bodily exercise carries its own sedative with it. And in comparing Wordsworth’s nature with that of other poets whose career has been less placid, we may say that he was perhaps not less excitable than they, but that it was his constant endeavour to avoid all excitement save of the purely poetic kind; and that the outward circumstances of his life—his mediocrity of fortune, happy and early marriage, and absence of striking personal charm—made it easy for him to adhere to a method of life which was, in the truest sense of the term, stoic—stoic alike in its practical abstinences and in its calm and grave ideal.

  Tall, somewhat slender, upright, with a sort of rude grace, his movements suggestive of rustic independence tempered by the delicacy of high intellect—such was Wordsworth to outward seeming when I knew him. I wish it had been among the lovely lakes and quiet dales of Westmoreland; but, as I have said, I only visited them after the poet had been removed by the only power that could have compelled him to quit them—death. He loved every stick and stone in the Lake District: mountain and dale, tarn and ghyll, placid mere and running brook, were all his dear friends: if dumb to the multitude, they had tongues for him, and inspired his own with much of the eloquent music in which he discoursed to the world of the sermons they had taught. Accustomed to gaze with a reverent and discerning eye on the beauties of Nature, he became her great high-priest, the interpreter of a book that is ever open for the whole world to read. He has left millions upon millions his debtors for benefits incalculable conferred on the whole human family. To him, perhaps, more than to any other poet who ever lived, may be applied his own expressive lines, commending those who were of his high calling:

	“Blessings be with them and eternal praise,
	Who gave us nobler lives and nobler cares,
	The poets, who on earth have made us heirs
	Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays.”

  Wordsworth’s was a face which did not assign itself to any class. It was a hardy, weather-beaten old face, which might have belonged to a nobleman, a yeoman, a mariner, or a philosopher; for there was so much of a man that you lost sight of superadded distinctions. For my own part I should not, judging by his face, have guessed him to be a poet. To my eyes there was more of strength than refinement in the face.

  It was then and there that I was first presented to the illustrious Wordsworth. The great poet sat in state, surrounded by young and enthusiastic admirers. His conversation was very like the “Excursion” turned into vigorous prose. The natural force fitted for new poetical creations was there in abundance, wanting only the “accomplishment of verse.” I met him again at a mixed dinner party, where he was less at home. A voluble young woman full of animal spirits, and wanting a good deal more than “the accomplishment of verse,” wanting, for instance, reverence and sympathy, talked him down. So that the author of the “Ode to Immortality,” and of “Tintern Abbey,” gradually became a silent gentleman in a black coat, eating an indifferent dinner like other black-coated gentlemen, to my great disappointment.

  Wordsworth used to come to me when I lived as a young man in the Albany, and my recollections of him are very pleasing. His simplicity, kindness, and freedom from the worldly type, mark their general character.

  “The Bard of Rydal Mount,” “The Blockhead,” “The Clownish Sycophant,” “The Converted Jacobin,” “The Cumberland Poet,” “The Farmer of a Lay,” “The Great God Pan,” “The Great Laker,” “The Little Boatman,” “The Lost Leader,” “Old Ponder,” “The Poet of Nature,” “The Poet of the Excursion,” “Poet Wordy,” “This Poetical Charlatan,” “This Political Parasite,” “That Windemere Treasure.”

  I did listen with much pleasure when Wordsworth recited his own lines descriptive of Little Langdale. He gave them really exquisitely. But his manner in conversation was not impressive. He sat continuously looking down with a green shade over his eyes even though it was twilight; and his mode of speech and delivery suggested to me the epithet “maudering,” though I was ashamed of myself for the thought with reference to such a man. As we came away I cross-examined my mother much as to the subject of his talk. She said it had been all about himself and his works, and that she had been interested. But I could not extract from her a word that had passed worth recording. I do not think that he was popular with his neighbors generally. There were stories current, at Lowther among other places, which imputed to him a tendency to outstay his welcome when invited to visit in a house.

  Wordsworth, too, lies amid the scenes he so revered during his long life. At the foot of his own yews in Grasmere churchyard, where his loved Rothay ever whispers its sweet secrets close to his last bed, he lies surrounded by his loved ones: Mary (his wife), Dora, Dorothy, Hartley Coleridge, and all his little circle. Truly he is at home here, at the foot of Nab Scar, in the beautiful Grasmere Vale where he spent so many happy years as Nature’s own interpreter. No need of the medallion and tablet graven upon the wall of yonder pretty stone church that was his sanctuary for so many years. The rocks, mountains, and vales of all that beautiful Lake Country are his ineffaceable monuments. He haunts them still. No crag or hidden corner, no group of yews, or tender heather-bed, or rippling water-fall, but belonged to him, and was consecrated by his verse to all humanity.

  And here is the impression that Wordsworth made upon the yeomen and peasants in the dales. “Nivver a man of many words ye kna, but quite monstrable wi’ his own barns at times; I darsay he wud take em out in a string and nivver say nowt to nin on em at others, but then he was quite a ‘object man,’ quite a ‘ken-speckled,’ an as we saay ratherly rough feaced an aw girt big faace wi’ out much plesser i’ it and vara plaainly drest at best o’ times. Nivver a man as laughed not to saay laugh right owt, but a decent quiet man, well spokken on by his sarvants at t’ Mount, terble kind to fowlks as was badly and very highly thowt on, paid his way reglar, vara particle an awe about his accounts, and that was Mrs. Wordsworth’s doing ye kna, for she was a reglar manasher. Turble fond o’ study ont’ rwoads, specially at night time, and wi’ a girt voice bumming awaay fit to flayte aw the childer to death ameaast, not but what Miss Dorothy did best part o’ pitting his potry togidder. He let i fa’ and she cam efter and gethered it oop fur him ye kna. Quite yan o’ us ye kna, not a bit o’ pride in him for o quality thowte ot warld on ’im. But he wasn’t a man as was thowte a deal o’ for his potry when he was hereabout. It hed no laugh in it same as Lile Hartley’s bided a deal o makkin I darsay. It was kept oer long in his head mappen. But then for aw that, he had best eye to mountains and trees, and buildings in the daale, notished ivvry stean o’ the fellside, and we nin on us durst bang a bowder stean a bit or cut a bit coppy or raase an old wa’ doon when he was astir.”

  Wordsworth,… cared little for books; his library was a small one, embracing hardly more than five hundred volumes. He drew his inspiration not from books, but from Nature. From all that I have heard of him I judge him to have been a very dull man. Allibone relates of him that he once remarked that he did not consider himself a witty poet. “Indeed,” quoth he, “I don’t think I ever was witty but once in my life.” His friends urged him to tell them about it. After some hesitation, he said: “Well, I will tell you. I was standing some time ago at the entrance of Rydal Mount. A man accosted me with the question: ‘Pray, sir, have you seen my wife pass by?’ Whereupon I retorted, ‘Why, my good friend, I didn’t know till this moment that you had a wife.’” Illustrative of Wordsworth’s vanity, it is told that when it was reported that the next Waverley novel was to be “Rob Roy,” the poet took down his “Ballads” and read to the company “Rob Roy’s Grave.” Then he said gravely: “I do not know what more Mr. Scott can have to say on the subject.”

  I did go around next morning—being Sunday—to the little chapel on the heights of Rydal, where he was to worship; and from my seat saw him enter; knowing him on the instant; tall (to my seeming), erect, yet with step somewhat shaky; his coat closely buttoned; his air serious, and self-possessed; his features large, mouth almost coarse; hair white as the driven snow, fringing a dome of baldness; an eye with a dreamy expression in it, and seeming to look—beyond, and still beyond. He carried, too, his serious air into his share of the service, and made his successive responses of “Good Lord deliver us!” and “Amen!” with an emphasis that rung throughout the little chapel.

  Can a man be reckoned a favourite of fortune when he has lost his mother during his eighth year, and his father at sixteen; when he has been arbitrarily deprived of his inheritance, has had to endure a humiliating existence under the roof of stern and narrow-minded grandparents, and for years has been coldly treated by his relations on account of his indolence, his obstinacy, and his refusal to embark upon any of the safe careers suggested to him; when he is kept apart from the sister whom he loves beyond everything else, apparently from fear that she may become contaminated by his disobedience and his subversive opinions; when he entrusts all his dreams of happiness to the French Revolution, only to see them borne under in the tempest, and loses not only his respect and love for his native country, but all hope of progress as well; when, meanwhile, his existence is so straitened, so penurious even, and so utterly without promise for the morrow, that he is compelled to postpone indefinitely his union with his sister’s friend, that maiden, chosen long ago, and now beloved, whom he knows not whether he can ever make his wife?

  I passed several days under Wordsworth’s roof, which I regard as the greatest honour of my life. We rose early, and went to bed early. Each night prayers were read by Mrs. Wordsworth in a voice full of reverence and sweetness. He knelt near her with his face hidden in his hands. That vision is often before me.

  Some readers of Wordsworth are misled in their judgment of the poet by the vulgar error that he was before all else tranquil, mild, gentle, an amiable pastoral spirit. He sang of the daisy and the celandine, the linnet and the lamb; and therefore he must have been always a serene, tender, benign contemplator of things that make for peace. There can be no greater mistake; at the heart of his peace was passion; his benignity was like the greensward upon a rocky hillside. As a boy, Wordsworth was violent and moody; in his early manhood he was stern, bold, worn by exhausting ardors.

  He could go to the cemetery and look at the tombstones a few hours after his wedding, and that in spite of the fact that the exquisite poem, “She was a Phantom of Delight,” was written for his bride. His sister did much to correct this austerity. And though, like Milton, he did not greatly devote himself to his sister or to his wife, he has recognized his debt to Dorothy in his poems.

Descriptive Sketches in Verse, 1793

  During the last year of my residence at Cambridge, 1794, I became acquainted with Mr. Wordsworth’s first publication, entitled “Descriptive Sketches;” and seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon more evidently announced. In the form, style, and manner of the whole poem, and in the structure of the particular lines and periods, there is a harshness and acerbity connected and combined with words and images all a-glow, which might recall those products of the vegetable world, where gorgeous blossoms rise out of a hard thorny rind and shell, within which the rich fruit is elaborating. The language is not only peculiar and strong, but at times knotty and contorted, as by its own impatient strength; while the novelty and struggling crowd of images, acting in conjunction with the difficulties of the style, demands always a greater closeness of attention than poetry,—at all events, than descriptive poetry—has a right to claim.

  Wordsworth’s first poetical ventures, which were published three years before Scott’s translations from Bürger, were “An Evening Walk”—an attempt to paint a series of landscape views in his own country, and “Descriptive Sketches,” an attempt to paint the scenery of the Alps, among which he had lately made a pedestrian tour with a college friend. The most that can be said of these productions is that they are fairly well written, and that there are touches of natural description in them which could only have been the result of actual observation.

The Borderers, 1795–96–1842

  I must be allowed to observe that however unjust and however absurd it would be to cite this play of “The Borderers,” completed by Wordsworth at the age of twenty-six and published by Wordsworth at the age of seventy-two, as an adequate and important specimen of his work, it is a hundred times more unjust and it is a thousand times more absurd to cite the poem of Queen Mab as an adequate and important specimen of Shelley’s. And none but a very rash and very ignorant partisan will venture to deny that if this burlesque experiment in unnatural horror had been attempted by any poet of less orthodox and correct reputation in ethics and theology than Wordsworth’s, the general verdict of critical morality would almost certainly have described it and dismissed it as the dream of a probably incurable and possibly a criminal lunatic. I am very far from thinking that this would have been a justifiable or a reasonable verdict: but I have no manner of doubt that it would have been a popular one.

  The “Borderers” had no success, and it deserved none.

  Taking the piece upon its own claim to merit as a study in the genesis of sin and in the inequalities of justice, it is not altogether a success. Its characterisation is unclear, and its treatment is unconvincing. With the most amenable disposition to the didactic purpose of the play, the reader is left perplexed. Wordsworth was grappling with a great idea, but the form which he chose was neither suitable to it nor consistent with itself.

Lyrical Ballads, 1798–1800

  The principal object, then, which I proposed to myself in these Poems was to chuse incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement. Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from these elementary feelings; and from the necessary character of rural occupations, are more easily comprehended, and are more durable; and, lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.

  A careful and repeated examination of these confirms me in the belief, that the omission of less than a hundred lines would have precluded nine-tenths of the criticism on this work. I hazard this declaration, however, on the supposition, that the reader has taken it up, as he would have done any other collection of poems purporting to derive their subjects or interests from the incidents of domestic or ordinary life, intermingled with higher strains of meditation which the poet utters in his own person and character; with the proviso, that these poems were perused without knowledge of, or reference to, the author’s peculiar opinions, and that the reader had not had his attention previously directed to those peculiarities…. In the critical remarks, therefore, prefixed and annexed to the Lyrical Ballads, I believe, we may safely rest, as the true origin of the unexampled opposition which Mr. Wordsworth’s writings have been since doomed to encounter.

  His Muse … is a levelling one…. Fools have laughed at, wise men scarcely understand them. He takes a subject or a story merely as pegs or loops to hang thought and feeling on; the incidents are trifling, in proportion to his contempt for imposing appearances; the reflections are profound, according to the gravity and the aspiring pretensions of his mind.

  This volume contained several poems which have been justly blamed for triviality—as “The Thorn,” “Goody Blake,” “The Idiot Boy;” several in which, as in “Simon Lee,” triviality is mingled with much real pathos; and some, as “Expostulation and Reply” and “The Tables Turned,” which are of the very essence of Wordsworth’s nature. It is hardly too much to say that, if these two last-named poems—to the careless eye so slight and trifling—were all that had remained from Wordsworth’s hand, they would have “spoken to the comprehending” of a new individuality, as distinct and unmistakable in its way as that which Sappho has left engraven on the world forever in words even fewer than these. And the volume ended with a poem which Wordsworth composed in 1798, in one day, during a tour with his sister to Tintern and Chepstow. The “Lines written above Tintern Abbey” have become, as it were, the locus classicus, or consecrated formulary of the Wordsworthian faith. They say in brief what it is the work of the poet’s biographer to say in detail.

  The tribute which the Poet paid [in “Tintern Abbey”] to his sister is the highest which one soul can pay to another: he was never weary of singing her praise, nor was she ever tired of trying to make herself worthy of his praise. Endowed with faculties capable of gaining distinction in the same sphere of work, she nevertheless chose to let him sing of what she felt and saw. To those familiar with the close of her life these words seem prophetic; for she lingered a few years after her brother’a death, and her chief solace seemed to be the remembrance of days passed in his companionship. More has been written of this poem than of any other of his unless it be the “Platonic Ode.”

  There was, indeed, one poem in the volume, the “Lines written above Tintern Abbey,” in which a fresh theme was handled with a power that nobody could be insensible to. If all had been like this, the acknowledgment of Wordsworth’s greatness would not have been checked and held back by astonishment at the grotesque strangeness of the lyrical ballads, to which the title of the volume challenged special attention…. This poem is characteristic of the loftiest side of Wordsworth’s genius. In it he struck for the first time the sublime note that has drawn men after him as the prophet of a new delight, a full-voiced speaker of things that all feel dimly and vaguely, but which no poet before him had expressed with such force.

Peter Bell, 1798–1819

  Lent “Peter Bell” to Charles Lamb. To my surprise, he does not like it. He complains of the slowness of the narrative, as if that were not the art of the poet. He says Wordsworth has great thoughts, but has left them out here.

	Wordsworth informs us he was nineteen years
	Considering and re-touching Peter Bell;
	Watering his laurels with the killing tears
	Of slow, dull care, so that their roots to hell
	Might pierce, and their wide branches blot the spheres
	Of heaven with dewy leaves and flowers; this well
	May be, for heaven and earth conspire to foil
	The ever-busy gardener’s blundering toil.

  None of Wordsworth’s productions are better known by name than “Peter Bell,” and yet few, probably, are less familiar, even to convinced Wordsworthians. The poet’s biographers and critics have commonly shirked the responsibility of discussing this poem, and when the Primrose stanza has been quoted, and the Parlour stanza smiled at, there is usually no more said about “Peter Bell.” A puzzling obscurity hangs around its history. We have no positive knowledge why its publication was so long delayed; nor, having been delayed, why it was at length determined upon. Yet a knowledge of this poem is not merely an important, but, to a thoughtful critic, an essential element in the comprehension of Wordsworth’s poetry. No one who examines that body of literature with sympathetic attention should be content to overlook the piece in which Wordsworth’s theories are pushed to their furthest extremity.

  The world, the worldly world, so to speak, has never quite swallowed Peter Bell. A reserve of self-consciousness has stood in his way. The unheightened simplicity of his story touches the fringe of bathos. Poetry, it is felt, has not been dignified in him, but degraded. The mark of the tract is upon him, and the means of his conversion savour of the revivalist meeting. I cannot but think that such criticism convicts itself. There are indeed inadequacies of expression in the poem, less to-day than when it was first published, but they occur in its business portions, always so difficult to Wordsworth, in its technical setting in the middle of a conversation, and in the narrating of the bare events, as such…. It is by his matter that Wordsworth must primarily be judged, and, fortunately, when it was not complicated by technicalities in the telling, his style was always equal to it. The material of Peter Bell’s story does not fall below the level of the best of Wordsworth’s work. Its theme is true. As knowledge widens, it is recognised more and more that man is not divorced from the rest of nature.

Intimations of Immortality, 1803–06

  It is for every one who takes thought of the deep things of his nature, the mysteries of his being, memories of early innocence and yearnings for eternity, that Wordsworth struck his lofty lyric the most sublime ode in this and, perhaps, any language, on the birth—the life—the undying destiny of the soul of man.

  His “Ode on Immortality” is the high-water mark which the intellect has reached in this age. New means were employed, and new realms added to the empire of the muse, by his courage.

  What is valuable in Wordsworth’s poetry is very valuable indeed; and I think a true lover of what is highest and best in poetic expression, would rather have written his “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality” than any other existing piece of the same length.

  Produced that noble Ode, in right of which he stands well-nigh supreme even where Milton and Dryden are his rivals. Such inspirations come, indeed, but once in a life, being, as they are, the quintessence of its deepest emotions and its most heavenward thoughts, which in a happy hour run themselves into moulds on immortal beauty.

  That grandest ode that has ever been written.

  That famous, ambitious, and occasionally magnificent poem—which by the way is no more an ode than it is an epic—reveals the partiality and inequality of Wordsworth’s inspiration as unmistakably as its purity and its power. Five stanzas or sections—from the opening of the fifth to the close of the ninth—would be utterly above all praise, if the note they are pitched in were sustained throughout: but after its unspeakably beautiful opening the seventh stanza falls suddenly far down beneath the level of those five first lines, so superb in the majesty of their sweetness, the magnificence of their tenderness, that to have written but the two last of them would have added glory to any poet’s crown of fame. The details which follow on the close of this opening cadence do but impair its charm with a sense of incongruous realism and triviality, to which the suddenly halting and disjointed metre bears only too direct and significant a correspondence. No poet, surely, ever “changed his hand” with such inharmonious awkwardness, or “checked his pride” with such unreasonable humility, as Wordsworth.

  In the famous “Ode on Intimations of Immortality,” the poet doubtless does point to a set of philosophic ideas, more or less complete; but the thought from which he sets out, that our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting, and that we are less and less able to perceive the visionary gleam, less and less alive to the glory and the dream of external nature, as infancy recedes farther from us, is, with all respects for the declaration of Mr. Ruskin to the contrary, contrary to notorious fact, experience, and truth.

The White Doe of Rylstone, 1807–10–15

  The “White Doe” is not in season; venison is not liked in Edinburgh. It wants flavor; a good Ettrick wether is preferable. Wordsworth has more of the poetical character than any living writer, but he is not a man of first-rate intellect; his genius oversets him.

  This, we think, has the merit of being the very worst poem we ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume; and though it was scarcely to be expected, we confess, that Mr. Wordsworth, with all his ambition, should so soon have attained to that distinction, the wonder may perhaps be diminished when we state, that it seems to us to consist of a happy union of all the faults, without any of the beauties, which belong to his school of poetry. It is just such work, in short, as some wicked enemy of that school might be supposed to have devised, on purpose to make it ridiculous; and when we first took it up, we could not help suspecting that some ill-natured critic had actually taken this harsh method of instructing Mr. Wordsworth, by example, in the nature of those errors, against which our precepts had been so often directed in vain. We had not gone far, however, till we felt intimately that nothing in the nature of a joke could be so insupportably dull;—and that this must be the work of one who earnestly believed it to be a pattern of pathetic simplicity, and gave it out as such to the admiration of all intelligent readers. In this point of view, the work may be regarded as curious at least, if not in some degree interesting; and, at all events, it must be instructive to be made aware of the excesses into which superior understandings may be betrayed, by long self-indulgence, and the strange extravagances into which they may run, when under the influence of that intoxication which is produced by unrestrained admiration of themselves.

  We talked of Wordsworth’s exceedingly high opinion of himself; and she (Lady Davy) mentioned that one day, in a large party, Wordsworth, without anything having been previously said that could lead to the subject, called out suddenly from the top of the table to the bottom, in his most epic tone, “Davy!” and on Davy’s putting forth his head in awful expectation of what was coming, said, “Do you know the reason why I published he ‘White Doe’ in quarto?” “No, what was it?” “To show the world my own opinion of it.”

  The poem has no definite end, but passes off, as it were, into the illimitable. It rises out of the perturbations of time and transitory things, and, passing upward itself, takes our thoughts with it, to calm places and eternal sunshine.

The Excursion, 1814

  This will never do! It bears no doubt the stamp of the author’s heart and fancy: But unfortunately not half so visibly as that of his peculiar system. His former poems were intended to recommend that system, and to bespeak favour for it by their individual merit;—but this, we suspect, must be recommended by the system—and can only expect to succeed where it has been previously established. It is longer, weaker, and tamer, than any of Mr. Wordsworth’s other productions; with less boldness of originality, and less even of that extreme simplicity and lowliness of tone which wavered so prettily, in the “Lyrical Ballads,” between silliness and pathos. We have imitations of Cowper, and even of Milton here; engrafted on the natural drawl of the Lakers—and all diluted into harmony by that profuse and irrepressible wordiness which deluges all the blank verse of this school of poetry, and lubricates and weakens the whole structure of their style.

  Jeffrey, I hear, has written what his admirers call a crushing review of “The Excursion.” He might as well seat himself upon Skiddaw and fancy that he crushed the mountain.

  The causes which have prevented the poetry of Mr. Wordsworth from attaining its full share of popularity are to be found in the boldness and originality of his genius. The times are past when a poet could securely follow the direction of his own mind into whatever tracts it might lead…. If from living among simple mountaineers, from a daily intercourse with them, not upon the footing of a patron, but in the character of an equal, he has detected, or imagines that he has detected, through the cloudy medium of their unlettered discourse, thoughts and apprehensions not vulgar; traits of patience and constancy, love unwearied, and heroic endurance, not unfit (as he may judge) to be made the subject of verse, he will be deemed a man of perverted genius by the philanthropist who, conceiving of the peasantry of his country only as objects of a pecuniary sympathy, starts at finding them elevated to a level of humanity with himself, having their own loves, enmities, cravings, aspirations, &c., as much beyond his faculty to believe, as his beneficence to supply…. Those who hate the “Paradise Lost” will not love this poem. The steps of the great master are discernible in it; not in direct imitation or injurious parody, but in the following of the spirit, in free homage and generous subjection.

  This week I finished Wordsworth’s poem. It has afforded me less intense pleasure on the whole, perhaps, than I had expected, but it will be a source of frequent gratification. The wisdom and high moral character of the work are beyond anything of the same kind with which I am acquainted, and the spirit of the poetry flags much less frequently than might be expected. There are passages which run heavily, tales which are prolix, and reasonings which are spun out, but in general the narratives are exquisitely tender. That of the courtier parson, who retains in solitude the feelings of high society, whose vigor of mind is unconquerable, and who, even after the death of his wife, appears able for a short time to bear up against desolation and wretchedness, by the powers of his native temperament, is most delightful.

	And Wordsworth, in a rather long “Excursion”
	(I think the quarto holds five hundred pages),
	Has given a sample from the vasty version
	Of his new system to perplex the sages;
	’Tis poetry—at least by his assertion,
	And may appear so when the dog-star rages—
	And he who understands it would be able
	To add a story to the Tower of Babel.

  North. Wordsworth—with his eternal—here we go up, up, and up, and here we go down, down, and here we go roundabout, roundabout! Look at the nerveless laxity of his “Excursion!” What interminable prosing! The language is out of condition; fat and fozy, thick winded, purified and plethoric. Can he be compared with Pope? Fie on’t! no, no, no!

  It affects a system without having an intelligible clue to one; and, instead of unfolding a principle in various and striking lights, repeats the same conclusions till they become flat and insipid…. The “Excursion,” we believe, fell still-born from the press. There was something abortive, and clumsy, and ill-judged in the attempt. It was long and laboured. The personages, for the most part, were low, the fare rustic: the plan raised expectations which were not fulfilled, and the effect was like being ushered into a stately hall and invited to sit down to a splendid banquet in the company of clowns, and with nothing but successive courses of apple-dumpling served up. It was not even toujours perdrix!

  The views of man, nature, and society, which this truly philosophical poem contains, are the offspring of deep thought and extensive observation.

  To show how completely Wordsworth’s system is a system of poetical Quakerism, I should be obliged to take his “Excursion,” and collate the whole with passages from the writings of the early Friends, Fox, Penn, Barclay, Pennington, and others. The “Excursion” is a very bible of Quakerism. Every page abounds with it. It is, in fact, wholly and fervently permeated by the soul of Quaker theology.

  The Imagination is a faculty that flouts at foreordination, and Wordsworth seemed to do all he could to cheat his readers of her company by laying out paths with a peremptory Do not step off the gravel! at the opening of each, and preparing pitfalls for every conceivable emotion, with guide-boards to tell each when and where it must be caught. But if these things stood in the way of immediate appreciation he had another theory which interferes more seriously with the total and permanent effect of his poems. He was theoretically determined not only to be a philosophic poet, but to be a great philosophic poet, and to this end he must produce an epic…. In point of fact, the one element of greatness which “The Excursion” possesses indisputably is heaviness. It is only the episodes that are universally read, and the effect of these is diluted by the connecting and accompanying lectures on metaphysics. Wordsworth has his epic mould to fill, and, like Benvenuto Cellini in casting his Perseus, was forced to throw in everything, debasing the metal lest it should run short. Separated from the rest, the episodes are perfect poems in their kind, and without example in the language.

  Although Jeffrey completely failed to recognize Wordsworth’s real greatness, he was yet not wrong in saying of the “Excursion” as a work of poetic style, “This will never do.”

  Through the “Excursion” Wordsworth dealt with the problem of our common life as it stood after the failure of those who had aimed at a reconstruction of society by Revolution. Wordsworth still maintained the loftiest ideal of a humanized society. He used poetically the characters drawn in the “Excursion” as so many factors in working out his own solution of the problem. The Wanderer represents shrewd, natural sense, strengthened in youth by homely and religious education and in manhood by wide intercourse with men. The Solitary represents one in whom faith seems dead, enthusiasm for the best aims of the Revolution being quelled by the apparent failure of the effort. Talk between Wanderer and Solitary, and all the associated incidents, maintain one flow of thought, until the Pastor, representing culture and religion in acquaintance with the daily lives of men, adds his part to the argument. The full course of reasoning leads to expression of the faith which is at the heart of Wordsworth’s poetry. It there first found distinct expression. It is now the faith of all who look for a full civilization.

  Judged by ordinary standards the “Excursion” appears an epic without action, and with two heroes, the Pastor and the Wanderer, whose characters are identical. Its form is cumbrous in the extreme, and large tracts of it have little claim to the name of poetry. Wordsworth compares the “Excursion” to a temple of which his smaller poems form subsidiary shrines; but the reader will more often liken the small poems to gems, and the “Excursion” to the rock from which they were extracted. The long poem contains, indeed, magnificent passages, but as a whole it is a diffused description of scenery which the poet has elsewhere caught in brighter glimpses; a diffused statement of hopes and beliefs which have crystallized more exquisitely elsewhere round moments of inspiring emotion. The “Excursion,” in short, has the drawbacks of a didactic poem as compared with lyrical poems; but, judged as a didactic poem, it has the advantage of containing teaching of true and permanent value.

  Unless a man’s imagination is inspired from without, and his design is conceived when the mind is in that excited state, he will do wrong to choose metre as his instrument of expression. Hence it is that so much of Wordsworth’s verse seems to be written in violation of the laws of poetical art. In the “Excursion,” for instance, though it is full of the most noble incidental passages, evidently written under the influence of direct inspiration, yet, as the design of the whole poem is certainly formed by a process of cool meditation, we are constantly haunted by a sense that we are in an atmosphere unfavourable to the movement of metre.

  The performance where we best see the whole poet, and where the poet most absolutely identifies himself with his subject.

  In reading “The Excursion” after a long interval, I feel so much how good it would have been for Wordsworth to have gone to Oxford. He is a thorough Cantab, has no philosophical vocabulary, and really rather bores one with his constant philosophizing, which is under difficulties and often only half intelligible. Some periods, all involved and crude of phrase, I can’t construe.

  Besides these there were standard volumes of poetry, published by Phillips & Sampson, from worn-out plates; for a birthday present my mother got me Wordsworth in this shape, and I am glad to think that I once read the “Excursion” in it, for I do not think I could do so now, and I have a feeling that it is very right and fit to have read the “Excursion.” To be honest, it was very hard reading even then, and I could not truthfully pretend that I have ever liked Wordsworth except in parts, though for the matter of that, I do not suppose that any one ever did. I tried hard enough to like everything in him, for I had already learned enough to know that I ought to like him, and that if I did not, it was a proof of intellectual and moral inferiority in me.

  Natural description of Wordsworth amounted to little. “The Excursion,” nominally descriptive, is only diversified by “sunny spots of greenery,” curiously few and far between; the poem takes its rank chiefly because of the searching natural metaphysics with which it is permeated and infused from the first line to the last. Nature to Wordsworth has its fascination as revealing an Invisible Power, in whose Presence abides the ultimate grandeur or beauty of man’s reverence.

  Wordsworth’s “Excursion” was published in 1814, in a two guinea quarto volume, but it took six years to exhaust an edition of five hundred copies.

The Prelude, 1850

	Friend of the wise! and teacher of the good!
	Into my heart have I received that lay
	More than historic, that prophetic lay
	Wherein (high theme by thee first sung aright)
	Of the foundations and the building up
	Of a Human Spirit thou hast dar’d to tell
	What may be told, to the understanding mind
	Revealable; and what within the mind
	By vital breathings secret as the soul
	Of vernal growth, oft quickens in the heart
	Thoughts all too deep for words!

  We have finished Wordsworth’s “Prelude.” It has many lofty passages. It soars and sinks, and is by turns sublime and commonplace. It is Wordsworth as he was at the age of thirty-five or forty.

  I brought home, and read, the “Prelude.” It is a poorer “Excursion;” the same sort of faults and beauties; but the faults greater, and the beauties fainter, both in themselves, and because faults are always made more offensive, and beauties less pleasing, by repetition. The story is the old story. There are the old raptures about mountains and cataracts; the old flimsy philosophy about the effect of scenery on the mind; the old crazy mystical metaphysics; the endless wilderness of dull, flat, prosaic twaddle; and here and there fine descriptions and energetic declamations interspersed. The story of the French Revolution, and of its influence on the character of a young enthusiast, is told again at greater length, and with less force and pathos, than in the “Excursion.” The poem is to the last degree Jacobinical, indeed Socialist. I understand perfectly why Wordsworth did not choose to publish it in his lifetime.

  At the time when the “Prelude” was fresh from the press, he [Macaulay] was maintaining against the opinion of a large and mixed society that the poem was unreadable. At last, overborne by the united indignation of so many of Wordsworth’s admirers, he agreed that the question should be referred to the test of personal experience: and on inquiry it was discovered that the only individual present who had got through the “Prelude” was Macaulay himself.

  There were many who knew Wordsworth’s poetry well while he was still alive, who felt its power, and the new light which it threw on the material world. But though they half-guessed they did not fully know the secret of it. They got glimpses of part, but could not grasp the whole of the philosophy on which it was based. But when, after his death, “The Prelude” was published, they were let into the secret, they saw the hidden foundations on which it rests, as they had never seen them before. The smaller poems were more beautiful, more delightful, but “The Prelude” revealed the secret of their beauty. It showed that all Wordsworth’s impassioned feeling towards Nature was no mere fantastic dream, but based on sanity, on a most assured and reasonable philosophy. It was as though one who had been long gazing on some building grand and fair, admiring the vast sweep of its walls, and the strength of its battlements, without understanding their principle of coherence, were at length to be admitted inside by the master builder, and given a view of the whole plan from within, the principles of the architecture, and the hidden substructures on which it was built. This is what “The Prelude” does for the rest of Wordsworth’s poetry.

  In Wordsworth’s case, the posthumous decline may have been owing in part to disappointment occasioned by “The Prelude,” which was given to the public a few months after the author’s death. For myself, I must confess that I was greatly taken back on first reading that work; it disappointed me sadly: but Coleridge’s grand poem in its praise had raised very high expectations in me; which were so far from being met, and indeed so badly dashed, that I did not venture upon a second reading for several years. But I still remembered Coleridge’s poem, still had faith in his judgment, and so committed the rather unusual folly of suspecting that the fault, after all, might be in myself. So, at length, I gave it a second perusal, and was then even more disappointed than I had been at first, but disappointed just the other way; and so repented my hasty dislike, that I soon after tried it a third time: this led to a fourth trial, and this to a fifth. Thus its interest kept mounting higher and higher on every fresh perusal; and now for some eighteen years I have not been able to let a year pass without reading it at least twice. And it still keeps its hold on me, still keeps pulling me back to it.

  The “Prelude,” in which Wordsworth gives an account of his own spiritual development, is one of the numerous echoes of the “Confessions” of Rousseau; but it is an echo in which the morbid and unhealthy self-analysis of the “Confessions” has all but disappeared, and in which the interest of the reader is claimed on grounds which are all but independent of the mere individual. Wordsworth seeks to exhibit to us, not so much of his own personal career, as the way in which, amid the difficulties of the time, a human soul might find peace and inward freedom.

  The system of general spiritual education which is both explicitly and implicitly set forth in “The Prelude,” makes this great autobiographical poem one of the most valuable productions in English Literature; and teachers capable of bringing its informing spirit home to their students (capable by virtue of their own assimilation of it), might do great things in the way of a spiritual quickening of their students.

  No autobiography, however, is so free from the taint of vanity as “The Prelude.” There are no theatrical attitudes, no arrangements of drapery for the sake of effect. The poet takes no pains to give statuesque beauty to his gestures, or dramatic sequence to his actions. Wordsworth had too much pride—if the word may be used to denote justifiable self-confidence—to be vain. He felt, he knew, that he was a great poet, and did not disguise the fact. He was unconscious of any obligation to wrap himself in the detestable cloak of false modesty.

  “The Prelude,” though long and occasionally prosaic, is an invaluable record. The poet has there disclosed himself more perfectly than Dante or Milton ever did.

Sonnets

  The difficulty of the sonnet metre in English is a good excuse for the dull didactic thoughts which naturally incline towards it: fellows know there is no danger of decanting their muddy stuff ever so slowly: they are neither prose nor poetry. I have rather a wish to tie old Wordsworth’s volume about his neck and pitch him into one of the deepest holes of his dear Duddon.

	Wordsworth, in sonnet, is a classick too,
	And on that grass-plot sits at Milton’s side.

  To Wordsworth has been vouchsafed the last grace of the self-denying artist: you think neither of him nor his style, but you cannot help thinking of—you must recall—the exact phrase, the very sentiment he wished. Milton’s purity is more eager. In the most exciting parts of Wordsworth—and these sonnets are not very exciting—you always feel, you never forget, that what you have before you is the excitement of a recluse. There is nothing of the stir of life; nothing of the brawl of the world.

  Wordsworth, the greatest of modern poets, is perhaps the greatest of English sonnet writers. Not only has he composed a larger number of sonnets than any other of our poets; he has also written more that are of first-rate excellence. There is no intensity of passion in Wordsworth’s sonnets; and herein he differs from Shakespeare, and from Mrs. Browning, for whose sonnets the reader may feel an enthusiastic admiration that Wordsworth’s thoughtful and calm verse rarely excites; neither has he attained the “dignified simplicity” which marks the sonnets of Milton; but for purity of language, for variety and strength of thought, for the curiosa felicitas of poetical diction, for the exquisite skill with which he associates the emotions of the mind and the aspects of nature, we know of no sonnet writer who can take precedence of Wordsworth. In his larger poems his language is sometimes slovenly, and occasionally, as Sir Walter Scott said, he chooses to crawl on all-fours; but this is rarely the case in the sonnets, and though he wrote upwards of four hundred, there are few, save those on the “Punishment of Death” and some of those called Ecclesiastical (for neither argument nor dogma find a fitting place in verse) that we could willingly part with. Wordsworth’s belief that the language of the common people may be used as the language of poetry was totally inoperative when he composed a sonnet. He wrote at such times in the best diction he could command, and the language like the thought is that of a great master.

  Wordsworth’s predilection for the sonnet, and the success wherewith he has cultivated a kind which might seem somewhat artificial for a poet of nature and of the fields, are things to be observed, and important to take account of in the final estimate. He has really excelled in it, and many of his sonnets approach perfection. Although English literature is singularly rich in poetical jewels of this kind, Wordsworth, to my taste, has in this respect rivals, but no superiors. The piece on the sonnet itself, that composed on Westminster Bridge, that addressed to Milton, and half a hundred others (he wrote four hundred), show that combination of ingenious turn and victorious final touch which is the triumph of the kind.

  He had a right to think highly of his sonnets; for when they are good they surpass those of his contemporaries; but, unfortunately, the number of his good sonnets is small. He has written hundreds (say five hundred in round figures), of which it would be difficult to name twenty that substantiate his poetic greatness. He wrote upon all occasions, and many of his occasions, it must be confessed, are of the slightest. To stub his toe was to set his poetic feet in motion, and to evolve a train of philosophical musings upon toes in particular and things in general. His prime defect (me judice) is his stupendous egotism, which dwarfed that of Milton, great as it was, and which led him to worship himself, morning, noon, and night. Sacred in his own eye, he could not be otherwise in the eyes of others. That he was, or could be tedious, never entered into his calculation. I honor his memory this side of idolatry, as Ben Jonson wrote of Shakspere, but when I read his sonnets I am constrained to say, with the wicked Jeffrey, “This will never do.”

  Wordsworth’s sonnets are among his most perfect productions, from the artistic point of view. He brought the sonnet into fashion after it had been neglected since Milton’s death. He had the feeling for rhetorical expression as well as the rhyming power requisite to bring this form to its finish and perfection. Many of his sonnets, like the one beginning, “The world is too much with us,” and, “Scorn not the sonnet, critic,” have a permanent lodgment in the general memory.

  Every good sonnet of Wordsworth’s is like a mirror wherein we see his poetic nature reflected; and is there another man who would so well stand the test of such a multitude of mirrors? His fatal habit of rhyming upon everything resulted, in his sonnet work, in the many more or less indifferent productions to be found in the “Duddon,” and more especially in the Ecclesiastical Series: but speaking generally, his sonnets are freer from his besetting sins than one would naturally expect. He is, and must always be, considered one of the greatest of English sonneteers. At his very best he is the greatest. His sonnets are mostly as beautiful and limpid as an amber tinted stream, and the thoughts which are their motives as clear as the large pebbly stones in the shallows thereof. In a word, he, at his best, knew what he wanted to say, and could say it in his own manner supremely well.

  Nowhere, except in a very few of Milton’s, in a very few of Shakespeare’s, does that crystallization of thought, the sonnet, carry such largeness and illumination as in Wordsworth’s sonnets.

  The greatest of English Sonneteers.

  On the response of the common conscience of men Wordsworth’s sonnets may rely for their perpetual justification.

  In the sonnets, on the other hand, we find much of Wordsworth’s finest work, alike in substance and in form. “The sonnet’s scanty plot of ground” suited him so well because it forced him to be at once concise and dignified, and yet allowed him to say straight out the particular message or emotion which was possessing him…. Taking them at their best you will find that nowhere in his work has he put so much of his finest self into so narrow a compass. Nowhere are there so many splendid single lines, lines of such weight, such imaginative ardour. And these lines have nothing to lose by their context, as almost all the fine lines which we find in the blank verse poems have to lose.

General

  Wordsworth will … leave behind him a name unique in his way. He will rank among the very first poets, and probably possesses a mass of merits superior to all, except only Shakspeare. This is doing much, yet would he be a happier man if he did more.

  Southey’s “Madoc” is in the press, I understand, and will make its appearance the beginning of winter. Wordsworth’s Poems, for he has two great ones, that is, long ones, will not be published so soon. One of these is to be called the “Recluse,” and the other is to be a history of himself and his thoughts; this philosophy of egotism and shadowy refinements really spoils a great genius for poetry. We shall have a few exquisite gleams of natural feeling, sunk in a dull ugly ground of trash and affectation. I cannot forgive your expression, “Wordsworth & Co.;” he merits criticism, but surely not contempt; to class him with his imitators is the greatest of all contempt. I thought our perusal of the “Lyrical Ballads” in the Temple would have prevented this; we found much to admire, but you will not admire. Sharp, however, is in the other extreme, I admit; but I insist it is the better of the two: he has been living at the Lakes, with these crazed poets; Wordsworth read him some thousand lines, and he repeated to me a few of these one day, which I could not worship as he wished me.

  Trouble not yourself about their present reception; of what moment is that compared with what I trust is their destiny? To console the afflicted; to add sunshine to daylight, by making the happy happier; to teach the young, and the gracious of every age, to see, to think, and feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous—this is their office, which I trust they will faithfully perform, long after we (that is, all that is mortal of us) are mouldered in our graves.

  I have just got, by a most lucky chance, Wordsworth’s new Poems. I owe them some most delightful hours of abstraction from the petty vexations of the little world where I live, and the horrible dangers of the great world, to which my feelings are attached. I applied to him his own verses:—

	Blessings be with them, and eternal praise,
	Who gave us nobler loves and nobler cares—the Poets.

The Sonnets on Switzerland and on Milton are sublime. Some of the others are in a style of severe simplicity, sometimes bordering on the hardness and dryness of some of Milton’s Sonnets. Perhaps it might please him to know, that his poetry has given these feelings to one at so vast a distance: it is not worth adding, to one who formerly had foolish prejudices against him.

	Next comes the dull disciple of thy school,
	That mild apostate from poetic rule,
	The simple Wordsworth, framer of a lay
	As soft as evening in his favourite May,
	Who warns his friend “to shake off toil and trouble,
	And quit his books, for fear of growing double;”
	Who, both by precept and example, shows
	That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose:
	Convincing all, by demonstration plain,
	Poetic souls delight in prose inane;
	And Christmas stories, tortured into rhyme,
	Contain the essence of the true sublime.

Wordsworth, whose porcelain was taken for delf.

  We do not want Mr. Wordsworth to write like Pope or Prior, nor to dedicate his muse to subjects which he does not himself think interesting. We are prepared, on the contrary, to listen with a far deeper delight to the songs of his mountain solitude, and to gaze on his mellow pictures of simple happiness and affection, and his lofty sketches of human worth and energy; and we only beg, that we may have these noble elements of his poetry, without the debasement of childish language, mean incidents, and incongruous images.

  My Dear Jeffrey,—I am much obliged to you for the Review, and shall exercise the privilege of an old friend in making some observations upon it. I have not read the review of Wordsworth, because the subject is to me so very uninteresting; but, may I ask, do not such repeated attacks upon a man wear in some little degree the shape of persecution?

  Great being, who will hereafter be ranked as one who had a portion of the spirit of the mighty ones, especially Milton; but who did not possess the power of using that spirit otherwise than with reference to himself, and so as to excite a reflex action only.

	He of the cloud, the cataract, the lake,
	Who on Helvellyn’s summit, wide awake,
	Catches his freshness from Archangel’s wing.

  First; an austere purity of language, both grammatically and logically; in short, a perfect appropriateness of the words to the meaning…. The second characteristic excellence of Mr. Wordsworth’s work is: a correspondent weight and sanity of the Thoughts and Sentiments,—won, not from books; but—from the poet’s own meditative observation. They are fresh and have the dew upon them…. Even throughout his smaller poems there is scarcely one, which is not rendered valuable by some just and original reflection…. Third;… the sinewy strength and originality of single lines and paragraphs; the frequent curiosa felicitas of his diction…. Fourth; the perfect truth of nature in his images and descriptions, as taken immediately from nature, and proving a long and genial intimacy with the very spirit which gives the physiognomic expression to all the works of nature…. Fifth; a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with sensibility; a sympathy with man as man,—the sympathy of a contemplator, rather than a fellow-sufferer or co-mate (spectator, hand particeps), but of a contemplator, from whose views no difference of rank conceals the sameness of nature; no injuries of wind or weather, or toil, or even of ignorance, wholly disguise the human face divine…. Here the man and Poet find themselves in each other…. Last, and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of Imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word. In the play of fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is not always graceful, and sometimes recondite. The likeness is occasionally too strange, or demands too peculiar a point of view, or is such as appears the creature of predetermined research, rather than spontaneous presentation. Indeed, his fancy seldom displays itself, as mere and unmodified fancy. But in imaginative power he stands nearest of all modern writers to Shakspeare and Milton; and yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and his own. To employ his own words, which are at once an instance and an illustration, he does indeed to all thoughts and to all objects—

	Add the gleam,
	The light that never was, on sea or land,
	The consecration, and the poet’s dream.

  Mr. Wordsworth is the most original poet now living. He is the reverse of Walter Scott in all his defects and excellences. He has nearly all that the other wants, and wants all that the other possesses. His poetry is not external, but internal; it does not depend upon tradition, or story, or old song; he furnishes it from his own mind and is his own subject. He is the poet of mere sentiment…. He has produced a deeper impression, and on a smaller circle, than any other of his contemporaries. His powers have been mistaken by the age, nor does he exactly understand them himself. He cannot form a whole. He has not the constructive faculty. He can give only the fine tones of thought, drawn from his mind by accident or nature, like the sounds drawn from the Æolian harp by the wandering gale. He is totally deficient in all the machinery of poetry.

	He had a mind which was somehow
	At once circumference and centre
	Of all he might or feel or know;
	Nothing went ever out, although
	Something did ever enter.
	He had as much imagination
	As a pint-pot;—he never could
	Fancy another situation,
	From which to dart his contemplation,
	Than that wherein he stood.
	Yet his was individual mind,
	And new-created all he saw
	In a new manner, and refined
	Those new creations, and combined
	Them by a master-spirit’s law.
	Thus—although imaginative—
	An apprehension clear, intense,
	Of his mind’s work, had made alive
	The things it wrought on; I believe
	Wakening a sort of thought in sense.

  And first—in the great walk of poesy—is Wordsworth, who, if he stood alone, would vindicate the immortality of his art. He has, in his works, built up a rock of defense for his species, which will resist the mightiest tides of demoralizing luxury. Setting aside the varied and majestic harmony of his verse—the freshness and the grandeur of his descriptions—the exquisite softness of his delineations of character—and the high and rapturous spirit of his choral songs—we may pronounce his “divine philosophy” as unequaled by any preceding bard. And surely it is no small proof of the infinity of the resources of genius, that, in this late age of the world, the first of all philosophic poets should have arisen, to open a new vein of sentiment and thought, deeper and richer than yet had been laid bare to mortal eyes.

  The descriptive poetry of the present day has been called by its cultivators a return to nature. Nothing is more impertinent than this pretension. Poetry cannot travel out of the regions of its birth, the uncultivated lands of semi-civilised men. Mr. Wordsworth, the great leader of the returners to nature, cannot describe a scene under his own eyes without putting into it the shadow of a Danish boy or the living ghost of Lucy Gray, or some similar phantastical parturition of the moods of his own mind.

  I do not know a man more to be venerated for uprightness of heart and loftiness of genius. Why he will sometimes choose to crawl upon all fours, when God has given him so noble a countenance to lift to heaven, I am as little able to account for, as for his quarrelling (as you tell me) with the wrinkles which time and meditation have stamped his brow withal.

  The Muse of this poet is of a singular cast and temperament. Objects the most simple, and themes the most familiar, are treated by her in a style peculiarly her own: but if these objects and these themes have been such, as, with a great number of readers, to excite surprise and provoke ridicule, this must have arisen rather in compliance with the tone of what is called fashionable criticism, than from an impartial perusal of the poems themselves. The purest moral strain, and the loftiest feelings of humanity, pervade the productions of Mr. Wordsworth: and these, at times, are united with so much sweetness of diction, and with such just and powerful views of religion that that bosom must be taxed with insensibility which is impervious to their impression.

  The highest quality of art is to conceal itself: these peasants of Schiller’s are what every one imagines he could imitate successfully; yet in the hands of any but a true and strong-minded poet they dwindle into repulsive coarseness or mawkish insipidity. Among our own writers, who have tried such subjects, we remember none that has succeeded equally with Schiller. One potent but ill-fated genius has, in far different circumstances and with far other means, shown that he could have equalled him: the “Cotter’s Saturday Night” of Burns is, in its own humble way, as quietly beautiful, as simplix munditiis, as the scenes of Tell. No other has even approached them; though some gifted persons have attempted it. Mr. Wordsworth is no ordinary man; nor are his pedlars, and leech-gatherers, and dalesmen, without their attractions and their moral; but they sink into whining drivellers beside “Rösselmann the Priest,” “Ulric the Smith,” “Hans of the Wall,” and the other sturdy confederates of Rütli.

  Next to Byron, there is no poet whose writings have had so much influence on the taste of the age as Wordsworth. Byron drove on through the upper air till the thunder of his wheels died on the ear. Wordsworth drove to Parnassus by the lower road, got sometimes lost in bushes and lowland fogs, and was much molested by mosquito critics.

Wordsworth, whose thoughts acquaint us with our own.

  In spite of the reverence which we feel for the genius of Mr. Wordsworth, we cannot but think that the minuteness of his descriptions often diminishes their effect. He has accustomed himself to gaze on nature with the eye of a lover—to dwell on every feature, and to mark every change of aspect. Those beauties which strike the most negligent observer, and those which only a close attention discovers, are equally familiar to him, and are equally prominent in his poetry.

  In describing external nature as she is, no poet perhaps has excelled Wordsworth—not even Thomson; in imbuing her and making her pregnant with spiritualities, till the mighty mother teems with “beauty far more beauteous” than she had ever rejoiced in till he held communion with her—therein lies his own especial glory, and therein the immortal evidences of the might of his creative imagination. All men at times “muse on nature with a poet’s eye,”—but Wordsworth ever—and his soul has grown religious from worship. Every rock is an altar—every grove a shrine. We fear that there will be sectarians even in this Natural Religion till the end of time. But he is the High Priest of Nature—or, to use his own words, or nearly so, he is the High Priest “in the metropolitan temple built by Nature in the heart of mighty poets.”

  I have only a single remark to make on the poetry of Wordsworth, and I do it because I never saw the remark made before. It relates to the richness of his works for quotations. For these they are a mine that is altogether inexhaustible. There is nothing in nature that you may not get a quotation out of Wordsworth to suit, and a quotation too that breathes the very soul of poetry. There are only three books in the world that are worth the opening in search of mottos and quotations, and all of them are alike rich. These are, the Old Testament, Shakspeare, and the poetical works of Wordsworth, and, strange to say, the “Excursion” abounds most in them.

  Although by his position standing aloof, as it were, from man, he had nothing in him foreign to humanity. His contemplative habits led him to scrutinize his species with a philosophic eye, and by levelling in his own mind the artificial distinctions of society, extended his sympathies to the humblest of his fellow-creatures. A holy calm is shed over his writings, whose general purpose seems to be to reconcile man with himself and his destiny, by furnishing him with a key to the mysteries of his present condition. Wordsworth’s soul is instinct with such a pure love of nature, so much simplicity, or as the French call it, loyalty of purpose, that had he not entangled himself in an unlucky theory, he might have shared the popularity of Cowper, whom he must be admitted to surpass in the general elevation, as well as the benevolence of his sentiments. As it is, there are few who read, and fewer still who relish him.

	’Tis thine to celebrate the thoughts that make
	The life of souls, the truths for whose sweet sake
	We to ourselves and to our God are dear.
	Of nature’s inner shrine thou art the priest,
	Where most she works when we perceive her least.

  Among living authors, not one has shown greater command of diction than Mr. Wordsworth; suiting his style to his subjects with consummate address, though sometimes with unhappy effect, from the difficulty, not to say the impossibility, of making general readers partakers, by direct sympathy, with his peculiar experiences and imaginings,—that is, see with his eyes, hear with his ears, feel with his heart, and think with his mind,—possess them wholly with his own spirit, or for the time being absorb each of them into himself. In an age of poetical innovations, Mr. Wordsworth has undoubtedly been one of the boldest and most successful adventurers.

  I shall never forget with what feeling my friend Bryant, some years ago, described to me the effect produced upon him by his meeting for the first time with Wordsworth’s Ballads. He lived, when quite young, where but a few works of poetry were to be had; at a period, too, when Pope was still the great idol in the Temple of Art. He said that, upon opening Wordsworth, a thousand springs seemed to gush up at once in his heart, and the face of Nature, of a sudden, to change into a strange freshness and life. He had felt the sympathetic touch from an according mind; and you see how instantly his powers and affections shot over the Earth and through his kind.

  Wordsworth is the poet of nature and man—not of humble life, as some have said—but of noble emotions, lofty feelings, and whatever tends to exalt man and elevate him on the table land of honour, morality, and religion. His style is worthy of his topics—simple, unaffected, and vigorous: he occasionally becomes too minute in his delineations, and some of the subjects which he treats of, are too homely for inspiration. His poetry is making its way, as true feeling and impassioned thought ever will.

	… that reverend Priest of Poesy,
	Whose presence shines upon these twilight times,
	Hath, in “The Churchyard in the Mountains,” done
	One sacrifice whose scent shall fill the world.

  I have been so self-indulgent as to possess myself of Wordsworth at full length, and I thoroughly like much of the contents of the first three volumes, which I fancy are only the low vestibule of the three remaining ones. I never before met with so many of my own feelings expressed just as I could like them.

  Genius is not a creator, in the sense of fancying or feigning what does not exist. Its distinction is, to discern more of truth than common minds. It sees under disguises and humble forms everlasting beauty. This it is the prerogative of Wordsworth to discern and reveal in the walks of life, in the common human heart. He has revealed the loveliness of the primitive feelings, of the universal affections, of the human soul. The grand truth which pervades his poetry is that the beautiful is not confined—the rare, the new, the distant,—to scenery and modes of life open only to the few; but that it is poured forth profusely on the common earth and sky, that it gleams from the loneliest flower, that it lights up the humblest sphere, that the sweetest affections lodge in lowly hearts, that there is sacredness, dignity, and loveliness in lives which few eyes rest on,—that, even in the absence of all intellectual culture, the domestic relations can quietly nourish that disinterestedness which is the element of all greatness, and without which intellectual power is a splendid deformity. Wordsworth is the poet of humanity; he teaches reverence for our universal nature; he breaks down the fictitious barriers between human hearts.

  As the chief of the movement, the Xenophon of the return, we are bound to acknowledge this great Wordsworth, and to admire how, in a bravery bravest of all because born of love, in a passionate unreservedness sprung of genius, and to the actual scandal of the world which stared at the filial familiarity, he threw himself not at the feet of Nature, but straightway and right tenderly upon her bosom. And so, trustfully as child before mother, self-renouncingly as child after sin, absorbed away from the consideration of publics and critics as child at play-hours, with a simplicity startling to the blasé critical ear as inventiveness, with an innocent utterance felt by the competent thinker to be wisdom, and with a faithfulness to natural impressions acknowledged since by all to be the highest art,—this William Wordsworth did sing his “Lyrical Ballads” where the “Art of criticism” had been sung before, and “the world would not let them die.”

	Thro’ clouds and darkness to meridian height
	Of glory, thou hast upward climbed, and now
	In empyrean blue, with cloudless brow
	Look’st o’er a prospect clear and infinite—
	Rejoicing by, rejoicing in, thy light!
	The vapours, which at first would not allow
	Full view of thee, are gone, we know not how;
	Absorbed into thy splendour, and thy might!
	And now, great spirit, thou unto thy close
	Art hastening, and trails of glory make
	The heavens gorgeous for thy repose—
	Thou hast made day for all men to partake,
	And having thought of others and their woes,
	Shalt be remembered now for thy own sake.

  When Mr. Wordsworth first stood before the world as a poet, he might as well, for the sorriness of his reception, have stood before the world as a prophet. In some such position, perhaps, it may be said he actually did stand; and he had a prophet’s fare in a shower of stones…. Mr. Wordsworth began his day with a dignity and determination of purpose, which might well have startled the public and all its small poets and critics, his natural enemies. He laid down fixed principles in his prefaces, and carried them out with rigid boldness, in his poems; and when the world laughed, he bore it well, for his logic apprized him of what should follow: nor was he without the sympathy of Coleridge and a few other first-rate intellects.

  To estimate the degree of longevity which will attach to Wordsworth’s poetry might be difficult; but as he has built upon the enduring rock as well as the shifting sand, we cannot tolerate the idea that he will be swept away with things forgotten. As we pause thoughtfully before some of the majestic fabrics of his genius, they seem to wear the look of eternity. And when we consider the vast debt of delight we owe to him, the new inspiration he poured into poetry, and his delivery of it from the bondage of a hundred and fifty years,—the many teasing persecutions he has endured for humanity and literature;—when we think of the consecrations he has shed upon our present existence, and the splendor of the vistas he has opened beyond the grave,—his desire to bring the harsh domain of the actual into closer vicinity to the sunny land of the ideal,—his kindling strains for freedom and right,—his warm sympathy with all that elevates and ennobles our being, and the sway he has displayed over its holiest and tenderest affections,—and the many images of beauty and grace with which he has brightened our daily life;—when we consider these, his faults and errors seem to dwindle into insignificance; reverence and love leap to our lips, and warm from the heart and brain springs our benison.

	“Blessings be on him, and eternal praise,
	Who gave us nobler loves and nobler cares.”

  Subsequently to Shakspere, these notices, as of all phenomena whatsoever that demanded a familiarity with nature in the spirit of love, became rarer and rarer. At length, as the eighteenth century was winding up its accounts, forth stepped William Wordsworth; of whom, as a reader of all pages in nature, it may be said that, if we except Dampier, the admirable buccaneer, the gentle flibustier, and some few professional naturalists, he first and he last looked at natural objects with the eye that neither will be dazzled from without nor cheated by preconceptions from within. Most men look at nature in the hurry of a confusion that distinguishes nothing; their error is from without. Pope, again, and many who live in towns, make such blunders as that of supposing the moon to tip with silver the hills behind which she is rising, not by erroneous use of their eyes (for they use them not at all), but by inveterate preconceptions. Scarcely has there been a poet with what could be called a learned eye, or an eye extensively learned, before Wordsworth. Much affectation there has been of that sort since his rise, and at all times much counterfeit enthusiasm; but the sum of the matter is this,—that Wordsworth had his passion for nature fixed in his blood; it was a necessity, like that of the mulberry-leaf to the silkworm; and through his commerce with nature did he live and breathe. Hence it was—viz. from the truth of his love—that his knowledge grew; whilst most others, being merely hypocrites in their love, have turned out merely sciolists in their knowledge. This chapter, therefore, of sky-scenery may be said to have been revivified amongst the resources of poetry by Wordsworth—rekindled, if not absolutely kindled.

  My admiration of Wordsworth is composed of two different elements, namely, my admiration of what is peculiar to his genius, and my admiration of what he has in common with other first-class poets; I must therefore adjust the balance between these two admirations; and therefore I cannot agree with those who admire even the inferior poems of his earlier and most characteristic manner more than the best poems written in his later style…. Without what is absolutely peculiar to his genius, and to it alone, Wordsworth would not have been a very great, that is, an original poet; but if this, his special merit, had been his only merit, he would have lacked several of those perfections which, in their aggregate alone, make up a first-class poet, as well as an original poet.

	Others, perchance, as keenly felt,
	As musically sang as he;
	To Nature as devoutly knelt,
	Or toil’d to serve humanity:
	But none with those ethereal notes,
	That star-like sweep of self-control;
	The insight into worlds unseen,
	The lucid sanity of soul.
	The fever of our fretful life,
	The autumn poison of the air,
	The soul with its own self at strife,
	He saw and felt, but could not share:
	With eye made clear by pureness, pierced
	The life of Man and Nature through;
	And read the heart of common things,
	Till new seem’d old, and old was new.

  Wordsworth, I am told, does not care for music! And it is very likely, for music (to judge from his verses) does not seem to care for him. I was astonished the other day, on looking in his works for the first time after a long interval, to find how deficient he was in all that may be called the musical side of a poet’s nature,—the genial, the animal-spirited or bird-like,—the happily accordant. Indeed he does not appear to me, now, more than half the man I once took him for, when I was among those who came to the “rescue” for him, and exaggerated his works in the heat of “reaction.”… Wordsworth is indeed “cold and diffuse,” notwithstanding “all the fine things” which, you justly add, he contains. He seems to like nothing heartily, except the talking about it; and is in danger of being taken by posterity (who will certainly never read two-thirds of him) for a kind of puritan retainer of the Establishment, melancholy in his recommendations of mirth, and perplexed between prudence and pragmaticalness, subserviency and ascendency, retrospection and innovation. I should infallibly (or far as lay in my power) have deposed the god I helped to set up, and put Coleridge in his stead (I mean in the last edition of the “Feast of the Poets”), but I did not like to hurt his feelings in his old age.

  He is not a Shakspeare, but he is the greatest poet of the day; and this is more remarkable, as he is, par excellence, a didactic poet.

	He, too, upon a wintry clime
	Had fallen—on this iron time
	Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears.
	He found us when the age had bound
	Our souls in its benumbing round;
	He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears.
	He laid us as we lay at birth
	On the cool flowery lap of earth;
	Smiles broke from us and we had ease.
	The hills were round us, and the breeze
	Went o’er the sun-lit fields again;
	Our foreheads felt the wind and rain.
	*        *        *        *        *
	Others will teach us how to dare,
	And against fear our breast to steel;
	Others will strengthen us to bear—
	But who, ah who, will make us feel?
	The cloud of mortal destiny,
	Others will front it fearlessly—
	But who, like him, will put it by?

  That we would assign to Wordsworth a high place among the poets of England the whole tenor of our observations hitherto will have made clear. At the same time, that he falls short of the very highest rank, that he does not stand on the very top of oar English Parnassus, where Chaucer, Milton, and Spenser keep reverent company with Shakespeare, but rather on that upper slope of the mountain whence these greatest are visible, and where various other poets hold perhaps as just, if not so fixed, a footing: this also we have sought to convey as part of our general impression. We do not think, for example, that Wordsworth was so great a poet as Burns; and, if it is only in respect of general mental vigour and capacity, and not in respect of poetic genius per se, that Dryden, Pope, and Coleridge, could be justly put in comparison with Wordsworth, and, being so put in comparison, preferred to him on the whole, yet there are others in our list of poets for whom, even after the ground of competition has been thus restricted, we believe it would be possible to take up the quarrel. With all the faults of Byron, both moral and literary, the poetic efflux in him came from greater constitutional depths, and brought, if less pure, at least more fervent, matter with it than the poetry of Wordsworth: had Keats and Shelley lived longer, even those that sneer at the Byronic might have seen poets comparable, in their estimation, to the Patriarch of the Lakes; and, should our noble Tennyson survive as a constant writer till his black locks have grown grey, one sees qualities in him that predict for him more than a Wordsworth’s fame.

	This laurel greener from the brows
	Of him that utter’d nothing base.

  Tennyson says of the laureate wreath which he so deservedly wears, that it is

	“Greener from the brows
	Of him who uttered nothing base.”

And this, which seems at first sight negative praise, is, in reality, a proof of exquisite discernment; for it is just that which constitutes the marked distinction between Wordsworth and the other really original poets who are likely to share with him the honour of representing poetically to posterity the early part of the nineteenth century. In their crowns there is alloy, both moral and intellectual. His may not be of so imperial a fashion; the gems that stud it may be less dazzling, but the gold is of a ethereal temper, and there is no taint upon his robe. Weakness, incompleteness, imperfection, he had, for he was a mortal man of limited faculties, but spotless purity is not to be denied him—he uttered nothing base.

	A breath of the mountains, fresh born in the regions majestic,
	That look with their eye-daring summits deep into the sky.
	The voice of great Nature; sublime with her lofty conceptions,
	Yet earnest and simple as any sweet child of the green lowly vale.

  Never, perhaps, in the whole range of literary history, from Homer downwards, did any individual, throughout the course of a long life, dedicate himself to poetry with a devotion so pure, so perfect, and so uninterrupted, as he did. It was not his amusement, his recreation, his mere pleasure—it was the main, the serious, the solemn business of his being…. It was his morning, noon, and evening thought, the object of his out-of-door rambles; the subject of his in-door reflections; and, as an art, he studied it as severely as ever Canova did sculpture, or Michael Angelo painting.

	How welcome to our ears, long pained
	By strife of sect and party noise,
	The book-like murmur of his song
	Of nature’s simple joys!
	The violet by its mossy stone,
	The primrose by the river’s brim,
	And chance-sown daffodil, have found
	Immortal life through him.
	The sunrise on his breezy lake,
	The rosy tints his sunset brought,
	World-seen, are gladdening all the vales
	And mountain-peaks of thought.

  Little attended to as works of that stamp generally are in the outset, they gradually, but unceasingly, rose in public estimation; they took a lasting hold of the highly educated youth of the next generation; and he now numbers among his devout worshippers many of the ablest men, profound thinkers, and most accomplished and discriminating women, of the age. Indeed, great numbers of persons whose mental powers, cultivated taste, and extensive acquirements entitle their opinion to the very highest consideration, yield him an admiration approaching to idolatry, and assign him a place second only to Milton in English poetry. He is regarded by them in much the same light that Goethe is by the admiring and impassioned multitudes of the Fatherland.

	We know a poet rich in thought, profuse
	In bounty; but his grain wants winnowing;
	There hangs much chaff about it, barndoor dust,
	Cobwebs, small insects: it might make a loaf,
	A good large loaf, of household bread; but flour
	Must be well bolted for a dainty roll.

  Wordsworth is more like Scott, and understands how to be happy, but yet cannot altogether rid himself of the sense that he is a philosopher, and ought always to be saying something wise. He has also a vague notion that Nature would not be able to get on well without Wordsworth; and finds a considerable part of his pleasure in looking at himself as well as at her.

  The exceptional fact of the period is the genius of Wordsworth. He had no master but nature and solitude. “He wrote a poem,” says Landor, “without the aid of war.” His verse is the voice of sanity in a worldly and ambitious age. One regrets that his temperament was not more liquid and musical. He has written longer than he was inspired. But for the rest, he has no competitor.

  He’s good, you know, but unbearable.

  Byron’s merits are on the surface. This is not the case with Wordsworth. You must love Wordsworth ere he will seem worthy of your love.

  His fame has slowly climbed from stage to stage until now his influence is perceived in all the English poetry of the day. If this were the place to criticise his poetry, I should say, of his more stately poems in blank verse, that they often lack compression,—that the thought suffers by too great expansion. Wordsworth was unnecessarily afraid of being epigrammatic. He abhorred what is called a point as much as Dennis is said to have abhorred a pun. Yet I must own that even his most diffuse amplifications have in them a certain grandeur that fills the mind.

  Does it not sometimes come over one (just the least in the world) that one would give anything for a bit of nature pure and simple, without quite so strong a flavor of W. W.? W. W. is, of course, sublime and all that—but! For my part, I will make a clean breast of it, and confess that I can’t look at a mountain without fancying the late laureate’s gigantic Roman nose thrust between me and it, and thinking of Dean Swift’s profane version of Romanos rerum dominos into Roman nose! a rare un! dom your nose!

  A new Cowper, with less talent and more ideas than the other, was essentially an interior man, that is, engrossed by the concerns of the soul…. He saw a grandeur, a beauty, lessons in the trivial events which weave the woof of our most common-place days. He needed not for the sake of emotion, either splendid sights or unusual actions. The dazzling glare of the lamps, the pomp of the theatre, would have shocked him; his eyes are too delicate, accustomed to sweet and uniform tints. He was a poet of the twilight. Moral existence in common-place existence, such was his object—the object of his preference. His paintings are cameos with a grey ground, which have a meaning: designedly he suppresses all which ought to please the senses, in order to speak solely to the heart…. Half of his pieces are childish, almost foolish; dull events described in a dull style, one nullity after another, and that on principle.

  What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in all by human beings, which had no connexion with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed. And I felt myself at once better and happier as I came under their influence.

  Wordsworth, it is true, is probably now, by most cultivated and intellectual men, admitted to be a great and original writer; a writer whose compositions it is right to be acquainted with as a part of literary history and literary education. Few men would now venture to deny him genius or to treat his poetry with contempt. No one probably would dare to echo or even to defend the ribald abuse of the Edinburgh Review. But he is not generally appreciated even now; he is far too little read; and, as I think, for the idlest and weakest of all reasons. He suffers still from the impression produced by attacks made upon him by men who, I should suppose, if they had tried, were incapable of feeling his beauty and his grandeur, but who seem to me never to have had the common honesty to try. Fastening upon a few obvious defects, seizing upon a few poems (poems admitting of complete defence, and, viewed rightly, full of beauty, yet capable no doubt of being presented in a ridiculous aspect), the critics of the Edinburgh Review poured out on Wordsworth abuse, invective, malignant personality, which deterred the unreflecting mass of men from reading for themselves and finding out, as they must have found out, the worthlessness of the criticism. They destroyed his popularity and blighted his reputation, though they have had no power whatever over his fame.

  Wordsworth has dug out of nature the stones and moss and crumbling matters which common men tread upon, and contemplated them through his intellectual microscope, until they have yielded up all their beauty and meaning, and shown on what their motion and vitality depend. And all this knowledge he has kneaded and intermingled with such human matter as is allied to the earthy materials of his themes. The peasant, the beggar, the wagoner, the idiot and his mother, become the actors in his dramas, and we are moved by them and the common objects around them, instead of by those fierce internal throes and terrible disasters which make up the stature and grandeur of antique tragedy.

  Those who wish to understand his influence, and experience his peculiar savour, must bear with patience the presence of an alien element in Wordsworth’s work, which never coalesced with what is really delightful in it, nor underwent his special power. Who that values his writings most has not felt the intrusion there, from time to time, of something tedious and prosaic?… And this duality there—the fitfulness with which the higher qualities manifest themselves in it, gives the effect in his poetry of a power not altogether his own, or under his control, which comes and goes when it will, lifting or lowering a matter, poor in itself; so that that old fancy which made the poet’s art an enthusiasm, a form of divine possession, seems almost literally true of him…. He meets us with the promise that he has much, and something very peculiar, to give us, if we will follow a certain difficult way, and seems to have the secret of a special and privileged state of mind. And those who have undergone his influence, and followed this difficult way, are like people who have passed through some initiation, a disciplina arcani, by submitting to which they become able constantly to distinguish in art, speech, feeling, manners, that which is organic, animated, expressive, from that which is only conventional, derivative, inexpressive.

  He sings of God, of Man, of Nature, and, as the result of these three, of Human Life, and they are all linked by thought, and, through feeling, one to another; so that the result is a complete whole which we can study as if it were a world of his own.

  Some of Wordsworth’s poetry is, as his person was, too gaunt; it wants a fuller clothing of flesh.

  I gladly take for granted—what is generally acknowledged—that Wordsworth in his best moods reaches a greater height than any other modern Englishman. The word “inspiration” is less forced when applied to his loftiest poetry than when used of any of his contemporaries. With defects too obvious to be mentioned, he can yet pierce furthest behind the veil; and embody most efficiently the thoughts and emotions which come to us in our most solemn and reflective moods. Other poetry becomes trifling when we are making our inevitable passages through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Wordsworth’s alone retains its power. We love him the more as we grow older and become more deeply impressed with the sadness and seriousness of life; we are apt to grow weary of his rivals when we have finally quitted the regions of youthful enchantment. And I take the explanation to be that he is not merely a melodious writer, or a powerful utterer of deep emotion, but a true philosopher. His poetry wears well because it has solid substance. He is a prophet and a moralist as well as a mere singer. His ethical system, in particular, is as distinctive and capable of systematic exposition as that of Butler. By endeavoring to state it in plain prose, we shall see how the poetical power implies a sensitiveness to ideas which, when extracted from the symbolical embodiment, fall spontaneously into a scientific system of thought.

  You have, I think, a more religious regard for him than we on this side of the water: he is not so much honoured in his own country, I mean, his Poetry. I, for one, feel all his lofty aspiration, and occasional Inspiration, but I cannot say that, on the whole, he makes much of it; his little pastoral pieces seem to me to be his best: less than a Quarter of him.

  There is the select circle of lovers of Wordsworth—yearly widening—and there are the far-off multitudes of the future to whom WILLIAM WORDSWORTH will be the grand name of the 18th–19th century, and all that SHAKESPEARE and MILTON are now; and consequently the letters of one so chary in letter-writing ought to be put beyond the risks of loss, and given to Literature in entirety and trueness. WORDSWORTH had a morbid dislike of writing letters, his weak eyes throughout rendering all penmanship painful; but the present Editor, while conceding that his letters lack the charm of style of COWPER’S and the vividness and passion of BYRON’S, finds in them, even the hastiest, matter of rarest biographic and interpretative value. He was net a great sentence-maker; in a way prided himself that his letters were so (intentionally) poor as sure to be counted unworthy of publication; and altogether had the prejudices of an earlier day against the giving of letters to the world; but none the less are his letters informed with his intellect and meditative thoughtfulness and exquisiteness of feeling.

  The Prodigal Son said to his Father, “Make me as one of thy hired servants.” If we transfer this conception from the region of morals or religion to that of poetry, and imagine the poetic son of Father Apollo, overwhelmed with the privileges and heights of sonship, petitioning his parent to be “as one of his hired servants,” and, taken at his word, we have a tolerable image of Wordsworth. He is a son of Apollo; he works with exquisite humility, and at the same time with a lofty filial feeling, and a self-respect all the more vital through its outward abnegation: yet the work which he produces is not absolutely son’s work, but partly servant’s work, and would look wholly so at times, but that other portions of it keep us better informed.

  Confined himself almost exclusively to the confection of primrose pudding and flint soup, flavored with the lesser celandine, and only now and then a beggar-boy boiled down in it to give it a color. The robins and drowned lambs which he was wont to use, when an additional piquancy was needed, were employed so sparingly that they did not destroy in the least the general vegetable tone of his productions; and these form in consequence an unimpeachable Lenten diet.

  There is no possibility of exhausting Wordsworth, any more than of exhausting Plato. When the time comes for the world to believe that the last word has been said about the great idealist of antiquity, men may perhaps think that Wordsworth also is exhausted. Plato, indeed, moves in a sphere, and speaks in a dialect, that is philosophically more profound; but he never soars into a more ethereal region. He does not interpret Nature or human Life more adequately, nor does the student of his works breathe a more untroubled air, than that in which Wordsworth lived and had his being…. I claim for Wordsworth a clear knowledge of the profoundest problems, with which the human mind has grappled, from Heraclitus to Immanuel Kant. He seems to have penetrated to the very core of philosophical ideas, not by laboured argumentation, but by intuitive discernment—both intellectual and moral—which began early and developed rapidly, keeping pace with the growth of his imagination. By that consummate vision, which is superior to all processes of reasoning, he reached the ultimate data of speculative Philosophy and Theology…. There is no poet after Shakespeare more worthy of prolonged, careful, and even reverential study, and especially of study by women. There is none whose influence on character is more ennobling, and from contact with whose spirit you can draw a serener inspiration.

  I firmly believe that the poetical performance of Wordsworth is, after that of Shakspeare and Milton, of which all the world now recognises the worth, undoubtedly the most considerable in our language from the Elizabethan age to the present time…. If it is a just claim, if Wordsworth’s place among the poets who have appeared in the last two or three centuries is after Shakspeare, Molière, Milton, Goethe, indeed, but before all the rest, then in time Wordsworth will have his due. We shall recognise him in his place, as we recognise Shakspeare and Milton; and not only we ourselves shall recognise him, but he will be recognised by Europe also…. His best work is in his shorter pieces, and many indeed are there of these which are of first-rate excellence. But in his seven volumes the pieces of high merit are mingled with a mass of pieces very inferior to them; so inferior to them that it seems wonderful how the same poet should have produced both.

  Wordsworth was, and felt himself to be, a discoverer, and like other great discoverers, his victory was in seeing by faith things which were not yet seen, but which were obvious, or soon became so, when once shown. He opened a new world of thought and enjoyment to Englishmen; his work formed an epoch in the intellectual and moral history of the race. But for that very reason he had, as Coleridge said, like all great artists, to create the taste by which he was to be relished, to teach the art by which he was to be seen and judged. And people were so little prepared for the thorough and systematic way in which he searched out what is deepest or highest or subtlest in human feeling under the homeliest realities, that not being able to understand him they laughed at him. Nor was he altogether without fault in the misconceptions which occasioned so much ridicule and scorn.

  Taking him where he is pure and without blemish—that is to say, somewhere half-way between his deliberate simplicity, between his propensities of a somewhat didactic kind, and between the lyrism, also too conscious and slightly declamatory, of the great odes—you find something of altogether superior quality. Wordsworth is a very great poet, and at the same time one of those who lend themselves best to everyday intercourse—a puissant and beneficent writer who elevates us and makes us happy. We must not be astonished if his renown has passed through vicissitudes of admiration and disdain, for his work is certainly unequaled. But we must also not be astonished if, after these vicissitudes, he is in the way of taking rank among the classics of his country; for his beauties are of those which time consecrates instead of aging them. I should not be surprised if the selection of his poems published by Mr. Matthew Arnold, and the attention thus recalled to him, serve to fix his place definitely in the heaven of British glories. If Shakespeare, as I hold, remains absolutely and forever peerless, Wordsworth seems to me to come after Milton; decidedly, I think, below him, but still first after him. He is of the stuff whereof the immortals are made.

  Of sluggish or unmusical rhythm there are abundant specimens, especially in his earlier works. In reading Wordsworth, I often feel about his rhythm as if I were wading against a stream instead of floating along with it. This would never be so were the feeling of form in the poet’s soul as sensitive as his thought. We could dispense with much profundity of thought, were we only borne along by a musical motion which wedded itself spontaneously to the idea. A perfect poem demands a fine accord between the body and the soul of thought. We are often moved by the soul of Wordsworth’s thought; not often, I think, by the soul in intimate conjunction of form with his thought.

  In the first place, we may say that his happiness was as wholly free from vulgar or transitory elements as a man’s can be. It lay in a life which most men would have found austere and blank indeed; a life from which not Crœsus only but Solon would have turned in scorn; a life of poverty and retirement, of long apparent failure, and honour that came tardily at the close; it was a happiness nourished on no sacrifice of other men, on no eager appropriation of the goods of earth, but springing from a single eye and a loving spirit, and wrought from those primary emotions which are the innocent birthright of all.

  I should suppose that any ordinary educated man could, if asked, describe Wordsworth as a poet of nature, and he has with the utmost emphasis described himself as a “worshipper of nature;” nevertheless it would seem that Wordsworth is essentially the poet of Man. He is in fact less of a poet than of a Seer. It is man whom he chiefly busies himself about. It is the emotions and thoughts of men which fill his thoughts. Nature is the type of permanence and reality, man is transient and ever changing; nevertheless nature is ever subservient to man. Seen by man’s intellect inanimate nature becomes “an ebbing and a flowing mind.” It is intellect projected upon the bleak side of some tall peak “familiar with forgotten years,” that gave to it its “visionary character.” It was the transitory nature of the being that stood upon its bank that gave to the flowing stream its lesson of “life continuous—being unimpair’d.”

  Is acknowledged to be one of the chief glories of English poetry, and to have exercised a greater, purer, healthier, and more elevating influence upon the thought-currents and literature of the age, than any poet who has appeared in the world since the days of Shakspere and Milton. Goethe, among European moderns, has by some been deemed “a larger and more splendid luminary;” but, from his want spirituality and deficiency in clear moral perception, he belongs to a lower circle. Goethe knew more than Wordsworth of the world, as developed in the various phases of artificial society—more, unfortunately, than was for his own higher good. As an all-sided artist, he occupied a wider surface of earth; but, with greater spontaneity and naturalness, although more circumscribed in such directions, our great poet was, otherwise, both higher and deeper than Goethe, and from his habitual height, actually commanded wider horizons of time space; while, for absolute purity of aim and moral worth, the two men are not, for one instant, to be named together.

  Turn to “Yarrow Revisited,” which was written twenty-eight years later, in 1831. The rhythm is the same, but how different the movement; how much sweeter and slower, how many more the syllables on which you must dwell, sometimes with what the ear admits to be an over-emphasis; how much richer the music, when it is music; how much more hesitating, not to say vacillating, the reflection; and how the versification itself renders all this, with its sedate pauses,—pauses, to use another poet’s fine expression, “as if memory had wept,”—its amplitude of tender feeling, its lingerings over sweet colours, its anxious desire to find compensations for the buoyancy of youth in wise reflection!

  And to this consecration—“the silent influences of the morning poured upon his head by the Invisible Hand”—he remained faithful as few priests have ever been to their calling, a priest of nature, a priest of God.

  It was the vast number of these “harmonious apposites” united in Wordsworth, and the closeness with which they were interfused, which imparted to his poetry those characteristics of magnanimity, of large-hearted humanity, and of vastness in unity, which, taken together, constitute what is felt as the personal character of Wordsworth’s poetry.

  No other English poet has touched me quite so closely as Wordsworth. All classes of men delight in Shakspere; he is the universal genius; but Wordsworth’s poetry has more the character of a message, and a message special and personal to a few readers. He stands for a particular phase of human thought and experience, and his service to certain minds is like an initiation into a new order of mysteries. His limitations make him all the more private and precious, like the seclusion of one of his mountain dales. He is not and can never be the world’s poet, but the poet of those who love solitude and solitary communion with nature.

  He is the most spiritual, and the most spiritualizing of all the English poets, not Shakespeare, no, nor even Milton, excepted: indeed, so far as I know or believe, the world has no poetry outside the Bible that can stand a comparison with his in this respect. And, with all his surpassing spirituality of thought, he carries a genius so powerful and so penetrating, his poetry breathes a music so deep and so sweet, that even the hardest-headed science is constrained to recognize it, to feel and own its power, and to draw refreshment from it; or, to speak more fairly, the two seem drawn, at length, to a recognition of each other; and both are now working apparently, to a mutual interchange of services…. A considerable portion of Wordsworth’s matter, a fourth at least, perhaps a third, may well be set down as little better than worthless; mere slag, for the most part, with a few grains, here and there, and sometimes a small nugget, of pure gold.

  The vague pantheism of the “Excursion” implies rather a lack of distinctive dogma than any fresh insight into religious problems or capacity of co-ordinating them in a new manner. And so soon as the need of definite religious conceptions came to the poet, the Church in her customary theology became his satisfactory refuge. The “Ecclesiastical Sonnets” mark this definite stage in his spiritual development. Wordsworth did for the religious thought of his time something more and better, perhaps, than giving it any definite impulse. While leaving it in the old channels he gave it a richer and deeper volume. He showed with what vital affinity religion cleaves to humanity in all its true and simple phases when uncontaminated by conceit or frivolity. Nature and man alike were to him essentially religious, or only conceivable as the outcome of a Spirit of Life, “The Soul of all the worlds.” Wordsworth in short remained, as he began, a poet. He did not enter into the sphere of religious thought or busy himself with its issues.

  There is no pathos profounder than his…. It is a kind of inarticulate, still-life pathos. That of the episode of Margaret in the “Excursion” would be crushing but for the old narrator’s own calm faith…. Certainly Wordsworth is one of the very great poets, for he can both soar with dignity, and stoop with grace. His good and enduring work is not only ample in quantity, but varied in scope…. One may be sorry indeed, but one ought hardly to be surprised that Mr. Rossetti should have told his biographer that he grudged Wordsworth “every vote he got.” For, although he himself has done some very fine work, yet he was the head of a school which is the natural enemy of Wordsworth.

  Neither in the presence of his fellow-men, whatever their myriad march, nor of Nature, how countless soever her worlds, can the indestructible personality of Wordsworth forget itself. His spirit, like that of Shelley, is divine; but it is no mere fragment of a vast divinity; backwards into the illimitable past, forwards into the illimitable future, now and for ever in the face of man and Nature, it dwells, has dwelt, shall dwell like a star apart in an individuality unmade, unmakable, unchangeable. Before this profound sense of personality, partially Platonic, partially Christian, but most of all awakened by the physical and social conditions of the poet’s age, Nature assumes a depth of meaning which only beings of Wordsworthian mould may feel. Byron’s descriptive powers, Shelley’s musical communion with the sounds of Nature, give place to a realisation of Nature’s being all the more terribly significant because the observer refuses to reconcile its conflict with his own personality either by material or immaterial unity; and while the associations of his childhood, youth, and age become consecrated as the earthly dress of an eternal being—not the melancholy entirety of one made of such stuff as dreams are made of—Wordsworth fears not to be materialised by the companionship of Nature, because he has neither deified her being at the expense of his own, nor denied her divinity in order to make himself eternal.

  What was it, first and foremost, and most important, which one learned from Wordsworth? One learned, I say, more about Man, and more about Nature, and more about the union of the two, than is to be learned anywhere else. That was the lesson which I learned. The sympathy, the intelligence with which man is regarded and portrayed and put before his fellow-men throughout the works of Wordsworth is, I think, something unique in all literature.

  Devotion to Wordsworth, if it has a tendency to exalt, has also a tendency to infatuate the judicial sense and spirit of his disciples; to make them, even as compared with other devotees, unusually prone to indulgence in such large assertions and assumptions on their master’s behalf as seem at least to imply claims which it may be presumed that their apparent advocates would not seriously advance or deliberately maintain. It would in some instances be as unreasonable to suppose that they would do so as to imagine that Mr. Arnold really considers the dissonant doggerel of Wordsworth’s halting lines to a skylark equal or superior to Shelley’s incomparable transfusion from notes into words of the spirit of a skylark’s song. Such an instance is afforded us by the most illustrious—with a single exception—of all Wordsworth’s panegyrists…. If Wordsworth’s claims as a poet can only be justified on grounds which would prove him a deeper student of nature, a saner critic of life, a wiser man and a greater poet than Shakespeare, the inference is no less obvious than inevitable: Wordsworth’s claims as a poet must in that case go by the board altogether, and at once, and for ever…. Meditation and sympathy, not action and passion, were the two main strings of his serene and stormless lyre. On these no hand ever held more gentle yet more sovereign rule than Wordsworth’s. His command of all qualities and powers that are proper to the natural scope and adequate to the just application of his genius was as perfect as the command of those greater than he—of the greatest among all great poets—over the worlds of passion and of action.

  Of great English writers, the one that held the most powerful sway over my early years was Wordsworth. He, in fact, along with Goethe and my other German gods, held out an effective arm to redeem me from that “whirling gulf of fantasy and flame” into which the violent sweep of Lord Byron’s indignant muse had a tendency to plunge his admirers. From the day that I became acquainted with Wordsworth, I regarded Byron only as a very sublime avatar of the devil, and would have nothing to do with him. What influenced me in Wordsworth was the kindly spirit with which he tried to bind the highest and the lowest in one bond of reverential sympathy, the truly evangelical as well as profoundly philosophical insight with which he set forth in so many attractive forms the superiority of a wise humility to a wilful pride, and his habitual subjection of delicate fancy and purified passion to the legitimate sway of reason.

  On reaching the age of twenty-one, I published a book of verse, and was considered to be a pupil of Wordsworth. In fact, however, I did not possess a copy of Wordsworth’s poems, and had read very little of him, admiring only short pieces here and there. I afterwards bought a complete edition of the poems and read them, with the same result. The love of nature that Wordsworth expressed, laboriously and at great length, was in harmony with my own feelings, but there was something in the poet that I found repellent, perhaps his belief in his own moral and intellectual excellence.

  Every one has been influenced by Wordsworth, and it is hard to tell precisely how. A certain innocence, a rugged austerity of joy, a sight of the stars, “the silence that there is among the hills,” something of the cold thrill of dawn, cling to his work and give it a particular address to what is best in us. I do not know that you learn a lesson; you need not—Mill did not agree with any one of his beliefs; and yet the spell is cast.

  Wordsworth has exercised more influence over English poetry than any other man of this century. He has done so mainly by virtue of his originality, for he is pre-eminently original. It is, of course, true that we find among his predecessors, and especially in Burns, anticipations of his style, and, at times, of his mode of thought. It is also true that the spirit of Wordsworth is simply the spirit of his time poetically expressed. Wordsworth gives a poetic exposition of the cry of Rousseau for a return to nature, and in making it less a theory makes it much more profoundly true. But it is just in this that his originality consists. He gives a clear expression to tendencies which before his day had been vague and undefined. To do so he breaks boldly with the past, and enters upon a path of his own, a path which had been missed just because it is so very obvious. Wordsworth’s great principle is to be in all things natural, natural in thought, natural in language; to avoid far-fetched ingenuities of fancy and expression, and to trust for success to the force of simple truth.

  Wordsworth, though he rarely attains that bold, easy execution which is so habitual with Shelley, always evinces a health and integrity of feeling which make our sympathy complete. Actuality, fact—a sufficient rendering united to inner validity of thought—are of far more moment with him. When, therefore, we are satisfied, we are abundantly satisfied, and rest on intellectual soundness as well as on emotional tenderness. While, then, I should put Shelley and Wordsworth together as giving habitually the higher pleasures of spiritual art, taking but one of them, I should take Wordsworth without hesitation.

  We are not called upon to place great men of his stamp as if they were collegians in a class-list. It is best to take with thankfulness and admiration from each man what he has to give. What Wordsworth does is to assuage, to reconcile, to fortify. He has not Shakespeare’s richness and vast compass, nor Milton’s sublime and unflagging strength, nor Dante’s severe, vivid, ardent force of vision. Probably he is too deficient in clear beauty of form and in concentrated power to be classed by the ages among these great giants. We cannot be sure. We may leave it to the ages to decide. But Wordsworth, at any rate, by his secret of bringing the infinite into common life, as he evokes it out of common life, has the skill to lead us, so long as we yield ourselves to his influence, into inner moods of settled peace, to touch “the depth and not the tumult of the soul,” to give us quietness, strength, steadfastness, and purpose, whether to do or to endure. All art of poetry that has the effect of breathing into men’s hearts, even if it be only for a space, these moods of settled peace, and strongly confirming their judgment and their will for good,—whatever limitations may be found besides, however prosaic may be some or much of the details,—is great art and noble poetry, and the creator of it will always hold, as Wordsworth holds, a sovereign title to the reverence and gratitude of mankind.

  If I were to seek to express the main characteristic of the poetic mood of Wordsworth at its highest reach, I should say that his mind was open equally to the world of sense—the infinite, and to the sphere of the infinite which borders and surrounds this world of ours…. The Transcendent Power which held Wordsworth through life was not discovered by him, or got through a process of dialectical exercise; it was revealed to him as a Being external to himself, which laid its hand upon him absolutely, overpoweringly. The light which shone and the voice which called from heaven on Saul of Tarsus were not more distinctly influences which unconditionally seized and swayed the apostle than was the Power in the outward world which surrounded, revealed itself, and made the poet-seer its own, its daily vassal and its impassioned voice.

	From Shelley’s dazzling glow or thunderous haze,
	From Byron’s tempest-anger, tempest-mirth,
	Men turned to thee and found—not blast and blaze,
	Tumult of tottering heavens, but peace on earth.
	Nor peace that grows by Lethe, scentless flower,
	There in white langours to decline and cease;
	But peace whose names are also rapture, power,
	Clear sight, and love: for these are parts of peace.

  Wordsworth, working apart from his contemporaries, expressed man’s affinity to nature and man’s dependence on the cosmic order with greater reserve. Still, it is difficult to go farther in nature-worship than Wordsworth did in those sublimely pathetic lines written above Tintern Abbey; and nothing indicates the difference between the Victorian and the Elizabethan touch on the world better than his blank verse fragment describing a pedestrian journey through the Simplon Pass.

  The forty years which have elapsed since his death have not brought to light one disgraceful action, one single utterance or incident that need shrink from day. Words with him were as sacred as things; his life was an absolutely consistent whole, the poet was the man. And it is this veracity and uprightness of moral character which makes us derive such invigoration from his poetry. The vision in the temple is made real to our minds by the fact that the prophet has shown his sincerity and trustworthiness in matters of which we ourselves can judge. In like manner also Wordsworth’s spiritual insight, his strong and unchanging moral convictions, come to us with imperative force because his eye for outward nature is so true, and his readiness to contemplate even her lowliest aspects is so unfailing. He stands out, with his steadfast countenance, his unshrinking gaze, his unfaltering utterance, his noble directness and singleness of purpose, in the midst of a perplexed and vacillating crowd; his voice gives no uncertain sound, his purpose is fixed, his faith is clear, he has looked Truth in the face, he has vowed himself to the service of Duty.

  The influence of Wordsworth upon his time has been the influence of the Gulfstream; it has flowed silently and surely, and has conquered…. We shall forgive him that his poetry has so little of passion in it, and upon the whole we shall be thankful for it. There are many other poets who can give us passion; but who else can give us peace?… If poetry is, as some one has beautifully described it, the Sabbath influence of literature, Wordsworth breaths upon us the very Sabbath of poetry—its rest, its devotion, and its healing calm…. The gift, then, that Wordsworth brings to us is serenity, and the message he delivers is simplicity. We do not go to him to be excited but to be strengthened. He, in his turn, does not pose before us in a dramatic attitude, as a suppliant for sentimental pity; he stands before us as a wise teacher, on whose lips are the words of everlasting life. Those who do not love him must revere him; but, for my part, I find it easy to do both. If poetry be something more than a pool of chaotic sentiment, that gives forth iridescent vapors, brilliant films and bubbles; if it be a healing stream, flowing clear as crystal from the throne of God and bordered by the trees of life; if it be an inspired voice, “a vision and a faculty divine,” then in Wordsworth I recognize the noblest poet of our century.

  Wordsworth, with his narrow intellect and wide emotions,—he had patrons; the cloth took him up, and the public followed suit, an act they could only have performed for a third-rate poet, the first and second-rate being much above their comprehension.

  Wordsworth tried the moral lesson, and spoiled some of his best work with botany and the Bible. A good many smaller men than he have tried the same thing since, and have failed. Perhaps “Cain,” and “Manfred” have taught the human heart more wisdom than “Matthew” or the unfortunate “idiot boy” over whom Byron was so mercilessly merry. And yet Byron probably never meant to teach any one anything in particular, and Wordsworth meant to teach everybody, including and beginning with himself.

  The zealous fault-hunter, to be sure, is not a critic; no more is the fault-dodger. I like to read Sainte-Beuve; but I lay at his door and Wordsworth’s much of the insignificance of literary art at this moment. The conception of art in the body of Wordsworth’s poetry and the notion of criticism in Sainte-Beuve’s essays have easily formed the whey of commonplace and the curd of “appreciation.”

	In the hottest crowd, when grace
	Seems to hide her maiden face,
	Here you’ll find a mystic voice
	Full of heaven’s supernal noise:
	*        *        *        *        *
	And a breath of mountain wind
	Rustling in the leaves you’ll find:
	In the world’s seducing clan
	It shall be your talisman.

  There was nobody to revolt against when Wordsworth appeared; the throne was vacant, open to any comer powerful enough to establish his right by poetic might.

  Probably few men have ever lived more loyally with their minds than Wordsworth. Fame found him a recluse and left him solitary; crowds had no charms for him, and at dinner-tables he had no gifts. He was at his best pacing his garden walk and carrying on that long colloquy with his mind which was his one consuming passion. The critics speak of him as an isolated, often as a cold, nature; but no man of his time, not even Byron, put more passion into his work: only his passion was not for persons, it was for ideas.

  Blessed be William Wordsworth among teachers, and rectifiers of the human spirit.

  It is Wordsworth’s meditative rapture, spiritual passion, sane imagination and serenity, his power of bringing the infinite into everyday life, that enthrall me; but, for myself, all Wordsworth’s best could be collected into a thin volume. I care little for his “Laodamia.”

  Wordsworth’s place is a very high one; some things he has done are incomparable; some altitudes of thought he has reached range among the Miltonic heights. But he has printed—as so many people have—too much…. If Wordsworth had possessed Browning’s sense of humor, he would have withdrawn an eighth of his published works; if he had possessed Hood’s sense of humor, I think he would have withdrawn a third.

  Take him for all in all, in his spiritual history as well as his poetic achievement, Wordsworth is probably a better exponent than Shelley of the democratic ideal in all its length and breadth. In spite of “The Warning,” his conservatism was pure matter of surface opinion. He grew despondent over the political tendencies of the day; but his very despondency, however misguided, had its deep source in the love of the common people. The radiance of his democratic faith did indeed as he grew older fade into the light of common day; yet those first affections, those shadowy recollections of a divine glory once shed on human life, remained to the end the master-light of all his seeing, a power to cherish and to uphold. His poetry made incursions into stupid regions as he grew older, and we miss the old concentrated intensity of phrase. But through mistaken dissertation on politics, as through his glorified contemplation of human life, pulses the same unwavering interest and faith in men and women as they are.

  On the merits of this famous writer the world has long ago made up its mind, and Coleridge, more than any other man, has helped the world to truly appreciate his gifted friend. No poet ever had a nobler purpose in his work than Wordsworth. He was a good man as well as a wise one. Those who read seriously his work must love and venerate the memory of a man whose purpose was so pure and whose life so consistently fulfilled it.

  Wordsworth’s example redeemed his theories, and Coleridge had no theories to redeem. The latter’s influence was therefore the earlier in its operation, while that of the former has been perhaps the greater in the long run. Yet, by a somewhat ironical fate, it has turned out that Coleridge, who concerned himself rather with the matter than the mechanism of poetry, has taken rank as one of the greatest English masters of poetic form, while Wordsworth, who believed himself to be the inventor of a new, or at any rate the restorer of the true, language of poetry, owes his place in our literature to a force and depth of poetic feeling which even his many defects of form have proved unable to outweigh. The matchless music of the one singer has enriched the note, as the inspired vision of the other has enlarged the outlook, of all English poetry since their day.

  The noblest products in the field of pure literature which the Napoleonic wars have left us are Wordsworth’s political sonnets, his poem “The Happy Warrior,” and his pamphlet on the “Convention of Cintra.” The sonnets are records of the most impassioned moments in the history of Wordsworth’s imagination, as it dealt with public events from 1802 to the battle of Waterloo.

  According to Mr. Hall Caine, as quoted by Mr. W. M. Rossetti, “Rossetti thought Wordsworth was too much the high priest of Nature to be her lover.” Mr. Caine speaks also of “Rossetti’s grudging Wordsworth every vote he gets.” His indifference to the beautiful poet was perhaps due to his having spent all his childhood and youth, and most of his manhood, in London.

  Wordsworth is the master of moral beauty. He is never swayed by a licentious passion for the beautiful for its own sake. He does not long to pass into a Nirvana of sensuous and imaginative delight, to be lapped in soft Lydian airs; but he elevates his soul to high and ennobling activity. Nor does he, like Goethe, speak experience for Art’s sake. Wordsworth valued Art only as strengthening and elevating Life; Goethe sought experience merely as a stimulant to art expression. Wordsworth cultivated Art for Life, Goethe Life for Art; and this antipodal relation explains the invincible repugnance which Wordsworth always manifested to Goethe and his works. With Wordsworth it was not Art for Art’s sake, but Art for Life’s sake, and he had neither understanding of nor sympathy with pure Art or pure Science. He sought the Beautiful and the True only as a means of purifying, ennobling, and sanctifying character. He was early convinced that a mine of moral beauty, unheeded and unsuspected by literary artists, lay hid in the commonest and humblest objects, and he devoted himself to disclosing and exhibiting this treasure with a strenuousness and perseverance perhaps unparalleled in the history of poetry. He elicits a wealth of spiritual beauty from the most unlikely things, and reveals the heaven which lies beneath our feet.

  It is his power of interpreting the elementary feelings common to all mortals that has made Wordsworth the poet of humanity; and he is destined to live as a poet because he is natural, pure, and true to his ideal of nature and humanity,—an ideal based upon a sympathetic knowledge of the visible outward world and of man. We find no artificiality in Wordsworth.

  He shuts off his light and heat, and leaves us chilly and stumbling among common-place perhaps for pages, when suddenly we meet again the light that never was on land or sea.

  He felt instinctively, and his feeling was nature’s. But thought, coming to him thus immediately as it did, and representing the thinking part of himself with unparalleled fidelity, spoke out of an intellect by no means so responsive to the finer promptings of that supreme intellectual energy of which we are a part. It is thus often when he is most solemnly satisfied with himself that he is really showing us his weakness most ingenuously: he would listen to no external criticism, and there was no inherent critical faculty to stand at his mind’s elbow and remind him when he was prophesying in the divine language and when he was babbling like the village idiot…. When one has said that he wrote instinctively, without which there could be no poetry, one must add that he wrote mechanically, and that he wrote always.