templation to lecture us upon matters of prudence or practise, upon education, or the poor-laws, or the reform bill, as he was frequently inclined to do in his later years, he can be quite as dull and prosaic as any sensible Tory of the early Victorian period. But when he turns from a consideration of those laws which parliaments may make to the laws which God has made, he may be obscure, but he is never quite commonplace. His language may be severely plain and bald-he was always fearful of the disguises of rhetoric; but his thought is not shallow or trite. As for his occasional obscurity, that perhaps was inevitable when he attempted to put into speech those intimations and conjectures, those divine half-seen truths that will not be shaped into clear form. Wordsworth had no desire or liking for mysticism. He was impatient of whatever is vague or ambiguous in speech. Even when skirting the verge of possible knowledge he is intent on calm ordered statement before the intellect. But in that effort, as he himself says,

The intellectual power, through words and things
Goes sounding on, a dim and perilous way

often without reaching clear utterance. Language

at best is able merely to suggest the deepest or subtlest experience; and Wordsworth, not content with mere suggestion, sometimes passed into positive obscurity in the very endeavor to be plain. But let us make all reasonable concessions to his critics. There will still be few to dispute the claim that of all English poets no one has embodied in his work more profound spiritual truths, or opened to faith a calmer and loftier outlook.

He was not a genial man. He lived in the quietude of thought. His poetry will never speak to the busy crowd. But it can render us better service than that. It can take us out of all passionate striving, away from the dreary intercourse of life, and set us in the solitude of nature as in a sanctuary filled with "the breathing balm, the silence and the calm of mute insensate things"; it can infuse a healthy sympathy for the essential virtues of men, however homely; and it can dilate the soul with thoughts as lofty and as pure as the naked open sky.

THE END

INDEX