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When this essay was written, a good many years ago, there was no available biography of Wordsworth except the two-volume Memoir by Bishop Christopher Wordsworth, the poet’s nephew. It is a solid work of family piety, admiring and admirable; but it must be admitted that it is dull. It is full of matters of no particular consequence, and it leaves out events in the poet’s life and traits in his character which are not only interesting in themselves but also of real importance to a vital understanding of his work.

Even while reading the Memoir, I felt sure that he was not always the tranquil, patient, wise, serenely happy sage that he appeared in his later years,—sure that a joy in peace as deep and strong as his was, could only have been won through sharp conflict,—sure that the smooth portrait drawn by the reverent hand of the bishop did not fully and frankly depict the real man who wrote the deep and moving poetry of Wordsworth.

It was about this time that the valuable studies of Wordsworth’s early life which had been made by Professor Emile Legouis, (then of the University of Lyons, now of the Sorbonne,) were published in English. This volume threw a new light upon the poet’s nature, revealing its intense, romantic strain, and making clear at least some of the causes which led to the shipwreck of his first hopes and to the period of profound gloom which followed his return from residence in France in December 1792.

Shortly after reading Professor Legouis’ book, I met by chance a gentleman in Baltimore and was convinced by what he told me, (in a conversation which I do not feel at liberty to repeat in detail,) that Wordsworth had a grand “affair of the heart” while he lived in France, with a young French lady of excellent family and character. But they were parted. A daughter was born, (whom he legitimated according to French law,) and descendants of that daughter were living.

There was therefore solid ground for my feeling that the poet was not a man who had been always and easily decorous. He had passed through a time of storm and stress. He had lost not only his political dreams and his hopes of a career, but also his first love and his joy. The knowledge of this gave his poetry a new meaning for me, brought it nearer, made it seem more deeply human. It was under the influence of this feeling that this essay was written in a farmhouse in Tyringham Valley, where I was staying in the winter of 1897, with Richard Watson Gilder and his wife.

Since then Professor George McLean Harper has completed and published, (1916,) his classic book on William Wordsworth, His Life, Works, and Influence. This is undoubtedly the very best biography of the poet, and it contains much new material, particularly with reference to his life and connections in France. But there is nothing in it to shake, and on the contrary there is much to confirm, the opinion which was first put forth in this essay: namely, that the central theme, the great significance, of Wordsworth’s poetry is the recovery of joy.

I

William Wordsworth was born in 1770 in the town of Cockermouth in Cumberland; educated in the village school of Hawkshead among the mountains, and at St. John’s College, Cambridge. A dreamy, moody youth; always ambitious, but not always industrious; passionate in disposition, with high spirits, simple tastes, and independent virtues; he did not win, and seems not to have desired, university honours. His principal property when he came of age consisted of two manuscript poems,—An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches,—composed in the manner of Cowper’s Task. With these in his pocket he wandered over to France; partly to study the language; partly to indulge his inborn love of travel by a second journey on the Continent; and partly to look on at the vivid scenes of the French Revolution. But the vast dÆmonic movement of which he proposed to be a spectator caught his mind in its current and swept him out of his former self.

Wordsworth was not originally a revolutionist, like Coleridge and Southey. He was not even a native radical, except as all simplicity and austerity of character tend towards radicalism. When he passed through Paris, in November of 1791, and picked up a bit of stone from the ruins of the Bastile as a souvenir, it was only a sign of youthful sentimentality. But when he came back to Paris in October of 1792, after a winter at Orleans and a summer at Blois, in close intercourse with that ardent and noble republican, Michael Beaupuy, he had been converted into an eager partisan of the Republic. He even dreamed of throwing himself into the conflict, reflecting on “the power of one pure and energetic will to accomplish great things.”

His conversion was not, it seems to me, primarily a matter of intellectual conviction. It was an affair of emotional sympathy. His knowledge of the political and social theories of the Revolution was but superficial. He was never a doctrinaire. The influence of Rousseau and Condorcet did not penetrate far beneath the skin of his mind. It was the primal joy of the Revolutionary movement that fascinated him,—the confused glimmering of new hopes and aspirations for mankind. He was like a man who has journeyed, half asleep, from the frost-bound dulness of a wintry clime, and finds himself, fully awake, in a new country, where the time for the singing of birds has come, and the multitudinous blossoming of spring bursts forth. He is possessed by the spirit of joy, and reason follows where feeling leads the way. Wordsworth himself has confessed, half unconsciously, the secret of his conversion in his lines on The French Revolution as it appeared to Enthusiasts at its Commencement.

There was another “bliss,” keener even than the dreams of political enthusiasm, that thrilled him in this momentous year,—the rapture of romantic love. Into this he threw himself with ardour and tasted all its joy. We do not know exactly what it was that broke the vision and dashed the cup of gladness from his lips. Perhaps it was some difficulty with the girl’s family, who were royalists. Perhaps it was simply the poet’s poverty. Whatever the cause was, love’s young dream was shattered, and there was nothing left but the painful memory of an error, to be atoned for in later years as best he could.

His political hopes and ideals were darkened by the actual horrors which filled Paris during the fall of 1792. His impulse to become a revolutionist was shaken, if not altogether broken. Returning to England at the end of the same year, he tried to sustain his sinking spirits by setting in order the reasons and grounds of his new-born enthusiasm, already waning. His letter to Bishop Watson, written in 1793, is the fullest statement of republican sympathies that he ever made. In it he even seems to justify the execution of Louis XVI, and makes light of “the idle cry of modish lamentation which has resounded from the court to the cottage” over the royal martyr’s fate. He defends the right of the people to overthrow all who oppress them, to choose their own rulers, to direct their own destiny by universal suffrage, and to sweep all obstacles out of their way. The reasoning is so absolute, so relentless, the scorn for all who oppose it is so lofty, that already we begin to suspect a wavering conviction intrenching itself for safety.

The course of events in France was ill fitted to nourish the joy of a pure-minded enthusiast. The tumultuous terrors of the Revolution trod its ideals in the dust. Its light was obscured in its own sulphurous smoke. Robespierre ran his bloody course to the end; and when his head fell under the guillotine, Wordsworth could not but exult. War was declared between France and England, and his heart was divided; but the deeper and stronger ties were those that bound him to his own country. He was English in his very flesh and bones. The framework of his mind was of Cumberland. So he stood rooted in his native allegiance, while the leaves and blossoms of joy fell from him, like a tree stripped bare by the first great gale of autumn.

The years from 1793 to 1795 were the period of his deepest poverty, spiritual and material. His youthful poems, published in 1793, met with no more success than they deserved. His plans for entering into active life were feeble and futile. His mind was darkened and confused, his faith shaken to the foundation, and his feelings clouded with despair. In this crisis of disaster two gifts of fortune came to him. His sister Dorothy took her place at his side, to lead him back by her wise, tender, cheerful love from the far country of despair. His friend Raisley Calvert bequeathed to him a legacy of nine hundred pounds; a small inheritance, but enough to protect him from the wolf of poverty, while he devoted his life to the muse. From the autumn of 1795, when he and his sister set up housekeeping together in a farmhouse at Racedown, until his death in 1850 in the cottage at Rydal Mount, where he had lived for thirty-seven years with his wife and children, there was never any doubt about the disposition of his life. It was wholly dedicated to poetry.

II

But what kind of poetry? What was to be its motive power? What its animating spirit? Here the experience of life acting upon his natural character became the deciding factor.

Wordsworth was born a lover of joy, not sensual, but spiritual. The first thing that happened to him, when he went out into the world, was that he went bankrupt of joy. The enthusiasm of his youth was dashed, the high hope of his spirit was quenched. At the touch of reality his dreams dissolved. It seemed as though he were altogether beaten, a broken man. But with the gentle courage of his sister to sustain him, his indomitable spirit rose again, to renew the adventure of life. He did not evade the issue, by turning aside to seek for fame or wealth. His problem from first to last was the problem of joy,—inward, sincere, imperishable joy. How to recover it after life’s disappointments, how to deepen it amid life’s illusions, how to secure it through life’s trials, how to spread it among life’s confusions,—this was the problem that he faced. This was the wealth that he desired to possess, and to increase, and to diffuse,—the wealth

None of the poets has been as clear as Wordsworth in the avowal that the immediate end of poetry is pleasure. “We have no sympathy,” said he, “but what is propagated by pleasure, ... wherever we sympathise with pain, it will be found that the sympathy is produced and carried on by subtle combinations with pleasure. We have no knowledge, that is no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone.” And again: “The end of Poetry is to produce excitement, in co-existence with an over-balance of pleasure.”

But it may be clearly read in his poetry that what he means by “pleasure” is really an inward, spiritual joy. It is such a joy, in its various forms, that charms him most as he sees it in the world. His gallery of human portraits contains many figures, but every one of them is presented in the light of joy,—the rising light of dawn, or the waning light of sunset. Lucy Gray and the little maid in We are Seven are childish shapes of joy. The Highland Girl is an embodiment of virginal gladness, and the poet cries

Wordsworth regards joy as an actual potency of vision:

Joy is indeed the master-word of his poetry. The dancing daffodils enrich his heart with joy.

The kitten playing with the fallen leaves charms him with pure merriment. The skylark’s song lifts him up into the clouds.

He turns from the nightingale, that creature of a “fiery heart,” to the Stock-dove:

He thinks of love which grows to use

He speaks of life’s disenchantments and wearinesses as

When autumn closes around him, and the season makes him conscious that his leaf is sere and yellow on the bough, he exclaims

Temperate rejoicing,—that is the clearest note of Wordsworth’s poetry. Not an unrestrained gladness, for he can never escape from that deep, strange experience of his youth. Often, in thought, he

But even while he hears these sounds he will not be “downcast or forlorn.” He will find a deeper music to conquer these clashing discords. He will learn, and teach, a hidden joy, strong to survive amid the sorrows of a world like this. He will not look for it in some far-off unrealized Utopia,

To this quest of joy, to this proclamation of joy, he dedicates his life.

And herein he becomes a prophet to his age,—a prophet of the secret of joy, simple, universal, enduring,—the open secret.

The burden of Wordsworth’s prophecy of joy, as found in his poetry, is threefold. First, he declares with exultation that he has seen in Nature the evidence of a living spirit in vital correspondence with the spirit of man. Second, he expresses the deepest, tenderest feeling of the inestimable value of the humblest human life,—a feeling which through all its steadiness is yet strangely illumined by sudden gushes of penetration and pathos. Third, he proclaims a lofty ideal of the liberty and greatness of man, consisting in obedience to law and fidelity to duty.

I am careful in choosing words to describe the manner of this threefold prophesying, because I am anxious to distinguish it from didacticism. Not that Wordsworth is never didactic; for he is very often entirely and dreadfully so. But at such times he is not at his best; and it is in these long uninspired intervals that we must bear, as Walter Pater has said, “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 peculiar power.” Wordsworth’s genius as a poet did not always illuminate his industry as a writer. In the intervals he prosed terribly. There is a good deal of what Lowell calls “Dr. Wattsiness,” in some of his poems.

But the character of his best poems was strangely inspirational. They came to him like gifts, and he read them aloud as if wondering at their beauty. Through the protracted description of an excursion, or the careful explanation of a state of mind, he slowly plods on foot; but when he comes to the mount of vision, he mounts up with wings as an eagle. In the analysis of a character, in the narration of a simple story, he often drones, and sometimes stammers; but when the flash of insight arrives, he sings. This is the difference between the pedagogue and the prophet: the pedagogue repeats a lesson learned by rote, the prophet chants a truth revealed by vision.

III

Let me speak first of Wordsworth as a poet of Nature. The peculiar and precious quality of his best work is that it is done with his eye on the object and his imagination beyond it.

Nothing could be more accurate, more true to the facts than Wordsworth’s observation of the external world. There was an underlying steadiness, a fundamental placidity, a kind of patient, heroic obstinacy in his character, which blended with his delicate, almost tremulous sensibility, to make him rarely fitted for this work. He could look and listen long. When the magical moment of disclosure arrived, he was there and ready.

Some of his senses were not particularly acute. Odours seem not to have affected him. There are few phrases descriptive of the fragrance of nature in his poetry, and so far as I can remember none of them are vivid. He could never have written Tennyson’s line about

Nor was he especially sensitive to colour. Most of his descriptions in this region are vague and luminous, rather than precise and brilliant. Colour-words are comparatively rare in his poems. Yellow, I think, was his favourite, if we may judge by the flowers that he mentioned most frequently. Yet more than any colour he loved clearness, transparency, the diaphanous current of a pure stream, the light of sunset

But in two things his power of observation was unsurpassed, I think we may almost say, unrivalled: in sound, and in movement. For these he had what he describes in his sailor-brother,

In one of his juvenile poems, a sonnet describing the stillness of the world at twilight, he says:

At nightfall, while he is listening to the hooting of the owls and mocking them, there comes an interval of silence, and then

At midnight, on the summit of Snowdon, from a rift in the cloud-ocean at his feet, he hears

Under the shadows of the great yew-trees of Borrowdalek he loves

What could be more perfect than the little lyric which begins

How poignant is the touch with which he describes the notes of the fiery-hearted Nightingale, singing in the dusk:

But at sunrise other choristers make different melodies:

Wandering into a lovely glen among the hills, he hears all the voices of nature blending together:

Wordsworth, more than any other English poet, interprets and glorifies the mystery of sound. He is the poet who sits oftenest by the Ear-Gate listening to the whispers and murmurs of the invisible guests who throng that portal into “the city of Man-Soul.” Indeed the whole spiritual meaning of nature seems to come to him in the form of sound.

No less wonderful is his sense of the delicate motions of nature, the visible transition of form and outline. How exquisite is the description of a high-poising summer-cloud,

He sees the hazy ridges of the mountains like a golden ladder,

He sees the gentle mists

He watches the swan swimming on Lake Lucarno,—

He catches sight of the fluttering green linnet among the hazel-trees:

He looks on the meadows sleeping in the spring sunshine:

He beholds the far-off torrent pouring down Ben Cruachan:

Now in such an observation of Nature as this, so keen, so patient, so loving, so delicate, there is an immediate comfort for the troubled mind, a direct refuge and repose for the heart. To see and hear such things is peace and joy. It is a consolation and an education. Wordsworth himself has said this very distinctly.

But the most perfect expression of his faith in the educating power of Nature is given in one of the little group of lyrics which are bound together by the name of Lucy,—love-songs so pure and simple that they seem almost mysterious in their ethereal passion.

The personification of Nature in this poem is at the farthest removed from the traditional poetic fiction which peopled the world with Dryads and Nymphs and Oreads. Nor has it any touch of the “pathetic fallacy” which imposes the thoughts and feelings of man upon natural objects. It presents unconsciously, very simply, and yet prophetically, Wordsworth’s vision of Nature,—a vision whose distinctive marks are vitality and unity.

It is his faith that “every flower enjoys the air it breathes.” It is also his faith that underlying and animating all this joy there is the life of one mighty Spirit. This faith rises to its most magnificent expression in the famous Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey:

The union of this animating Spirit of Nature, with the beholding, contemplating, rejoicing spirit of man is like a pure and noble marriage, in which man attains peace and the spousal consummation of his being. This is the first remedy which Wordsworth finds for the malady of despair, the first and simplest burden of his prophecy of joy. And he utters it with confidence,

IV

Side by side with this revelation of Nature, and interwoven with it so closely as to be inseparable, Wordsworth was receiving a revelation of humanity, no less marvellous, no less significant for his recovery of joy. Indeed he himself seems to have thought it the more important of the two, for he speaks of the mind of man as

And again he says that he will set out, like an adventurer,

The discovery of humble life, of peasant character, of lowly, trivial scenes and incidents, as a field for poetry, was not original with Wordsworth. But he was the first English poet to explore this field thoroughly, sympathetically, with steady and deepening joy. Burns had been there before him; but the song of Burns though clear and passionate, was fitful. Cowper had been there before him; but Cowper was like a visitor from the polite world, never an inhabitant, never quite able to pierce gently, powerfully down to the realities of lowly life and abide in them. Crabbe had been there before him; but Crabbe was something of a pessimist; he felt the rough shell of the nut, but did not taste the sweet kernel.

Wordsworth, if I may draw a comparison from another art, was the Millet of English poetry. In his verse we find the same quality of perfect comprehension, of tender pathos, of absolute truth interfused with delicate beauty that makes Millet’s Angelus, and The Gleaners and The Sower and The Sheepfold, immortal visions of the lowly life. Place beside these pictures, if you will, Wordsworth’s Solitary Reaper, The Old Cumberland Beggar, Margaret waiting in her ruined cottage for the husband who would never return, Michael, the old shepherd who stood, many and many a day, beside the unfinished sheepfold which he had begun to build with his lost boy,

place these beside Millet’s pictures, and the poems will bear the comparison.

Coleridge called Wordsworth “a miner of the human heart.” But there is a striking peculiarity in his mining: he searched the most familiar places, by the most simple methods, to bring out the rarest and least suspected treasures. His discovery was that there is an element of poetry, like some metal of great value, diffused through the common clay of every-day life.

It is true that he did not always succeed in separating the precious metal from the surrounding dross. There were certain limitations in his mind which prevented him from distinguishing that which was familiar and precious, from that which was merely familiar.

One of these limitations was his lack of a sense of humour. At a dinner-party he announced that he was never witty but once in his life. When asked to narrate the instance, after some hesitation he said: “Well, I will tell you. I was standing some time ago at the entrance of my cottage at Rydal Mount. A man accosted me with the question, ‘Pray, sir, have you seen my wife pass by?’ Whereupon I said, ‘Why, my good friend, I didn’t know till this moment that you had a wife!’” The humour of this story is unintentional and lies otherwhere than Wordsworth thought. The fact that he was capable of telling it as a merry jest accounts for the presence of many queer things in his poetry. For example; the lines in Simon Lee,

the stanza in Peter Bell, which Shelley was accused of having maliciously invented, but which was actually printed in the first edition of the poem,

the couplet in the original version of The Blind Highland Boy which describes him as embarking on his voyage in

It is quite certain, I think, that Wordsworth’s insensibility to the humourous side of things made him incapable of perceiving one considerable source of comfort and solace in lowly life. Plain and poor people get a great deal of consolation, in their hard journey, out of the rude but keen fun that they take by the way. The sense of humour is a means of grace.

I doubt whether Wordsworth’s peasant-poetry has ever been widely popular among peasants themselves. There was an old farmer in the Lake Country who had often seen the poet and talked with him, and who remembered him well. Canon Rawnsley has made an interesting record of some of the old man’s reminiscences. When he was asked whether he had ever read any of Wordsworth’s poetry, or seen any of his books about in the farmhouses, he answered:

“Ay, ay, time or two. But ya’re weel aware there’s potry and potry. There’s potry wi’ a li’le bit pleasant in it, and potry sic as a man can laugh at or the childer understand, and some as takes a deal of mastery to make out what’s said, and a deal of Wordsworth’s was this sort, ye kna. You could tell fra the man’s faace his potry would niver have no laugh in it.”

But when we have admitted these limitations, it remains true that no other English poet has penetrated so deeply into the springs of poetry which rise by every cottage door, or sung so nobly of the treasures which are hidden in the humblest human heart, as Wordsworth has. This is his merit, his incomparable merit, that he has done so much, amid the hard conditions, the broken dreams, and the cruel necessities of life, to remind us how rich we are in being simply human.

Like Clifford, in the Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle,

and thenceforth his chosen task was to explore the beauty and to show the power of that common love.

He found the best portion of a good man’s life in

In The Old Cumberland Beggar he declared

And then he went on to trace, not always with full poetic inspiration, but still with many touches of beautiful insight, the good that the old beggar did and received in the world, by wakening among the peasants to whose doors he came from year to year, the memory of past deeds of charity, by giving them a sense of kinship with the world of want and sorrow, and by bestowing on them in their poverty the opportunity of showing mercy to one whose needs were even greater than their own; for,—the poet adds—with one of those penetrating flashes which are the surest mark of his genius,—

Nor did Wordsworth forget, in his estimate of the value of the simplest life, those pleasures which are shared by all men.

He sees a Miller dancing with two girls on the platform of a boat moored in the river Thames, and breaks out into a song on the “stray pleasures” that are spread through the earth to be claimed by whoever shall find them. A little crowd of poor people gather around a wandering musician in a city street, and the poet cries,

He describes Coleridge and himself as lying together on the greensward in the orchard by the cottage at Grasmere, and says

It was of such simple and unchartered blessings that he loved to sing. He did not think that the vain or the worldly would care to listen to his voice. Indeed he said in a memorable passage of gentle scorn that he did not expect his poetry to be fashionable. “It is an awful truth,” wrote he to Lady Beaumont, “that there neither is nor can be any genuine enjoyment of poetry among nineteen out of twenty of those persons who either live or wish to live in the broad light of the world,—among those who either are, or are striving to make themselves, people of consideration in society. This is a truth, and an awful one, because to be incapable of a feeling of poetry, in my sense of the word, is to be without love of human nature and reverence for God.” He did not expect that his poetry would be popular in that world where men and women devote themselves to the business of pleasure, and where they care only for the things that minister to vanity or selfishness,—and it never was.

But there was another world where he expected to be welcome and of service. He wished his poetry to cheer the solitary, to uplift the downcast, to bid the despairing hope again, to teach the impoverished how much treasure was left to them. In short, he intended by the quiet ministry of his art to be one of those

—and so he was.

It is impossible to exaggerate the value of such a service. Measured by any true and vital standard Wordsworth’s contribution to the welfare of mankind was greater, more enduring than that of the amazing Corsican, Bonaparte, who was born but a few months before him and blazed his way to glory. Wordsworth’s service was to life at its fountain-head. His remedy for the despair and paralysis of the soul was not the prescription of a definite philosophy as an antidote. It was a hygienic method, a simple, healthful, loving life in fellowship with man and nature, by which the native tranquillity and vigour of the soul would be restored. The tendency of his poetry is to enhance our interest in humanity, to promote the cultivation of the small but useful virtues, to brighten our joy in common things, and to deepen our trust in a wise, kind, over-ruling God. Wordsworth gives us not so much a new scheme of life as a new sense of its interior and inalienable wealth. His calm, noble, lofty poetry is needed to-day to counteract the belittling and distracting influence of great cities; to save us from that most modern form of insanity, publicomania, which sacrifices all the sanctities of life to the craze for advertising; and to make a little quiet space in the heart, where those who are still capable of thought, in this age of clattering machinery, shall be able to hear themselves think.

V

But there is one still deeper element in Wordsworth’s poetry. He tells us very clearly that the true liberty and grandeur of mankind are to be found along the line of obedience to law and fidelity to duty. This is the truth which was revealed to him, slowly and serenely, as a consolation for the loss of his brief revolutionary dream. He learned to rejoice in it more and more deeply, and to proclaim it more and more clearly, as his manhood settled into firmness and strength.

Fixing his attention at first upon the humblest examples of the power of the human heart to resist unfriendly circumstances, as in Resolution and Independence, and to endure sufferings and trials, as in Margaret and Michael, he grew into a new conception of the right nobility. He saw that it was not necessary to make a great overturning of society before the individual man could begin to fulfil his destiny. “What then remains?” he cries—

If we would hear this message breathed in tones of lyric sweetness, as to the notes of a silver harp, we may turn to Wordsworth’s poems on the Skylark,—

If we would hear it proclaimed with grandeur, as by a solemn organ; or with martial ardour, as by a ringing trumpet, we may read the Ode to Duty or The Character of the Happy Warrior, two of the noblest and most weighty poems that Wordsworth ever wrote. There is a certain distinction and elevation about his moral feelings which makes them in themselves poetic. In his poetry beauty is goodness and goodness is beauty.

But I think it is in the Sonnets that this element of Wordsworth’s poetry finds the broadest and most perfect expression. For here he sweeps upward from the thought of the freedom and greatness of the individual man to the vision of nations and races emancipated and ennobled by loyalty to the right. How pregnant and powerful are his phrases! “Plain living and high thinking.” “The homely beauty of the good old cause.” “A few strong instincts and a few plain rules.” “Man’s unconquerable mind.” “By the soul only, the Nations shall be great and free.” The whole series of Sonnets addressed to Liberty, published in 1807, is full of poetic and prophetic fire. But none among them burns with a clearer light, none is more characteristic of him at his best, than that which is entitled London, 1802.

This sonnet embraces within its “scanty plot of ground” the roots of Wordsworth’s strength. Here is his view of nature in the kinship between the lonely star and the solitary soul. Here is his recognition of life’s common way as the path of honour, and of the lowliest duties as the highest. Here is his message that manners and virtue must go before freedom and power. And here is the deep spring and motive of all his work, in the thought that joy, inward happiness, is the dower that has been lost and must be regained.

Here then I conclude this chapter on Wordsworth. There are other things that might well be said about him, indeed that would need to be said if this were intended for a complete estimate of his influence. I should wish to speak of the deep effect which his poetry has had upon the style of other poets, breaking the bondage of “poetic diction” and leading the way to a simpler and more natural utterance. I should need to touch upon his alleged betrayal of his early revolutionary principles in politics, and to show, (if a paradox may be pardoned), that he never had them and that he always kept them. He never forsook liberty; he only changed his conception of it. He saw that the reconstruction of society must be preceded by reconstruction of the individual. Browning’s stirring lyric, The Lost Leader,—

may have been written with Wordsworth in mind, but it was a singularly infelicitous suggestion of a remarkably good poem.

All of these additions would be necessary if this estimate were intended to be complete. But it is not, and so let it stand.

If we were to choose a motto for Wordsworth’s poetry it might be this: “Rejoice, and again I say unto you, rejoice.” And if we looked farther for a watchword, we might take it from that other great poet, Isaiah, standing between the fierce radicals and sullen conservatives of Israel, and saying,

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