And while he is always thus finding some cheerful meaning in "common things that round us lie," the larger phenomena of nature, the mountain height that parleys with the setting sun, the misty mountain winds, the solemn pomp of the clouds, the silent starry sky of midnight, all seem, as nowhere else in English poetry, to speak in their own natural tones, and to be instinct with

That sentiment of Being spread

O'er all that moves and all that seemeth still;
O'er all that, lost beyond the reach of thought
And human knowledge, to the human eye
Invisible, yet liveth to the heart.

Prelude II, 401-405.

No one can read Wordsworth without gaining some quicker sense of the beauty and cheer of the world, "in widest commonality spread"; no one can drink deeply of his spirit without feeling with reverend joy, that behind all the shows of earth and sky is some solemn Power and Presence to which our souls are akin.

CHAPTER VIII

HIS PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

If thou indeed derive thy light from heaven,
Then, to the measure of that heaven-born light,
Shine, Poet, in thy place and be content:—
The stars pre-eminent in magnitude,

And they that from the zenith dart their beams,
(Visible though they be to half the earth,

Though half a sphere be conscious of their brightness)
Are yet of no diviner origin,

No purer essence, than the one that burns,

Like an untended watch-fire, on the ridge

Of some dark mountain; or than those which seem
Humbly to hang, like twinkling winter lamps,
Among the branches of the leafless trees;
All are the undying offspring of one Sire:
Then, to the measure of the light vouchsafed,
Shine, Poet, in thy place and be content.

HIS thoughtful sonnet written as late as

TH

1832, well expresses Wordsworth's calm conviction of his mission as poet. From his earliest days the moral character and influence of poetry had been uppermost in his thought. The modern motto, "Art for art's sake," would have been to him not so much false as meaningless. As

we have seen, he had little care for any other than moral themes. Romance seemed idle to him unless somehow moralized. "A very pretty piece of paganism, sir," was the only commendation he could give young Keats for the Endymion. His early preference for humble and rustic life, too, is accounted for, not at all by that rather vulgar curiosity with reference to the homely and unfamiliar sides of life which is the motive of so much modern realism, but rather by the conviction that in humble lives the essential virtues of character can be seen without the disguises of tradition and convention. If his poetry of nature is truer and deeper than any other, it is because he felt as no other poet has, that beauty is essentially a moral power, and so could read "in nature and the language of the sense," meanings for our highest emotions. In his early manhood he had formed the determination to write some great moral poem, and tells us in the first book of The Prelude of his assurance that he did not

Lack that first, great gift, the vital soul,
Nor general Truths

out of which such a poem could be made. For Wordsworth's moral poetry is never the mere utterance of ethical sentiments. It has solid intellectual

quality. He is always striving to express those "general truths" that are the warrant for the demands of morality. He has a philosophical basis for his ethics. It was probably the great disappointment of his career that he could never realize the plan of his youth in a Philosophical poem that should have largeness and unity. But he need not have been much dissatisfied, for in his best period, when his powers were in their early maturity, he did write three shorter poems which are the noblest utterances in modern poetry upon the warrant and the nature of duty-the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, the Ode to Duty, and The Happy Warrior.

It is true that not all critics have been in agreement as to the value of the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality. Professor Knight, in his edition of the poet's works, takes it out of its chronological place and puts it at the close, as "the greatest of Wordsworth's poems, and that to which all the others lead up." Mr. Emerson found in it the highwater mark of modern poetry, and declared it to be the best essay on personal immortality. On the other hand, Mr. Matthew Arnold thinks the central thesis of the poem not true, and all the "intimations" based upon it, therefore, "no great things." But

Mr. Arnold was always inclined to be a little too loftily censorious of Wordsworth's philosophy. The Platonic doctrine of reminiscence in childhood of a pre-existent state may be only a beautiful fancy, though One wiser than Plato has said that some things divinely hidden from the wise and prudent have been divinely revealed unto babes; but it is an admitted fact that most men feel a certain freshness and charm die out of life as the quickness and confidence of early perceptions are exchanged for the slower reasoning of our maturer years. In that fact Wordsworth found a hint as to the origin of those vague but profound convictions and intuitions which lie at the foundation of our moral nature. Who does not at times have suggestions from far within the soul which he can not express, glimpses of greater thought than he can shape into speech, intuitions half thought and half feeling which will not come out and sit down in the clear light of consciousness, but

Which, be they what they may,

Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing.

We feel that our best knowledge is what we have never learned and can never teach, vision and im