tenderness which his poetry expresses towards what, by a narrow phrase, we call Nature. — Frequent journeys through Great Britain or on the Continent,Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy; the education of children, amongst whom the death of one, Dora, was the single great sorrow of his age (1847); the publication of some miscellaneous poems, founded in part upon his journeys; "honour and troops of friends," with the assured blessings of home, such euthanasia, in a word, as human life admits of: these, and similar circumstances, accompanied his later days to a calm and Christian death-bed (April 23, 1850). He had overlived the chilling want of sympathy which original genius never fails to arouse among commonplace minds; he had out-lived the mis-estimation of some nobler spirits, and the overpartiality of undiscriminating worshippers; his work for his countrymen, wherever scattered over the world, was at length fairly judged, and found to rank in quality with the best to which England has given birth; and he now rests from his labours in the quiet churchyard of Grasmere, among neighbours and kinsmen, within the bosom of the hills he loved so heartily, and the Rotha running at his feet with a music hardly sweeter than his own. Beati . . . ut requiescant à laboribus suis; opera enim illorum sequuntur illos.—This life would not have been worth recounting unless Wordsworth had left some work behind him of the kind which men do not willingly let die. What is the speciality of that work? He has told us that "Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge, it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science." How far has the poet himself conformed to this high ideal? Wordsworth somewhere has expressed what he thought or hoped might be the destiny of his poems: "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." And again, "There is scarcely one which does not aim to direct the attention to some moral sentiment, or to some general principle, or law of thought or of our intellectual constitution." Or we might give another application to a line in the "Prelude," and sum up his desire as one, "to Nature's self to oppose a deeper Nature;" or speak of The light that never was on sea or land, The consecration, and the poet's dream:— 66 or take the phrase of his only distinguished follower in poetry, and, with the author of the "Christian Year," say that Wordsworth's work was to raise us to holier things."-But Wordsworth, like his fellows in immortal verse, may not be compressed within the bounds of a definition. It can be only through the aid of such suggestive expressions as have been quoted, or such circumstances of his life as have been here traced; but, most of all, by the faithful study of his poetry, that a true image of what he was, by a happy natural growth, will form itself within the heart of the reader. F. T. PALGRAVE SEP.: 1865 |