thought he had achieved a high place among poets; it had been the aim of his life, humanly speaking; and he had taken worthy pains to accomplish and prepare himself for the enterprise. He never would sacrifice anything he thought right on reflection, merely to secure present popularity, or avert criticism which he thought unfounded; but he was a severe critic on himself, and would not leave a line or an expression with which he was dissatisfied until he had brought it to what he liked. He thought this due to the gift of poetry and the character of the poet. . . . There is much simplicity in his character, much naïveté, but it is all generous and highly moral."

CHAPTER XXXIII

LATE ACTIVITIES

Ar this point it may be well to note some of Wordsworth's matured literary judgments. Milton, as is evident from dozens of remarks and from his frequent imitation, was the object of his deepest reverence. He less frequently mentioned Shakespeare, but hotly resented an intimation that he did not know and admire his works" this side idolatry." Chaucer, Spenser, and many of the Elizabethan dramatists, were, in the old Dove Cottage days, his constant delight. Daniel and Drayton he held in peculiar honour. He said he knew by heart many thousand lines of Dryden and Pope, though he thought the future progress of English poetry required the abandonment of their ideals of poetic diction and an advance upon their versification. We have seen how intensely interested he was in the works of even the minor eighteenth-century poets and poetesses. Of Burns he appreciated and enjoyed everything except his satirical vein—a large exception, to be sure, but one based wholly on religious, and not at all on æsthetic grounds. He honoured his greatest English contemporaries by judging them as if they had died centuries ago, and therefore judged them severely. He was also affected by his impressions of their personal characters, but not so much as has been supposed, for some of the sternest judgments he ever uttered were upon the poems of Scott, whom he respected. It would have been outside of his nature and quite inexplicable if he had liked Byron's poetry. He detested it and despised the man. That he did not say more about the poetry of Shelley and Keats is probably due to the fact

that the avowedly antichristian opinions and irregular life of the former made him unwilling to let himself go, either in enjoyment or in comment; while he no doubt inferred from the preponderance of the sensuous quality in Keats's verse that its effect would be evil, and that its author was less intellectual or less moral than a poet ought to be. It is uncharitable, if not ridiculous, to suppose that he was jealous of these rivals. In regard to the minor poets of his day, he was generous and painstaking, paying close attention to their works, encouraging and severely criticizing them when occasion offered, and showing a tendency to estimate their chances of immortality rather too highly. It is interesting to observe that many of the persons nearest and dearest to him were incited by his example to write verse-his sister, his wife, his son John (who sent him from Madeira, in 1844, a long Latin poem, “Epistola ad Patrem suum "), Quillinan, Sara Hutchinson, and at least one of her brothers.

We are indebted to Crabb Robinson for some of Wordsworth's critical remarks in 1836. On January 7 he wrote in his Diary:

"On our walk [along Windermere] Wordsworth was remarkably eloquent and felicitous in his praise of Milton. He spoke of the Paradise Regained as surpassing even the Paradise Lost in perfection of execution, though the theme is far below it, and demanding less power. He spoke of the description of the storm in it as the finest in all poetry; and he pointed out some of the artifices of versification by which Milton produces so great an effect-as in passages like this:

Pining atrophy,

Marasmus, and wide-wasting pestilence,

Dropsies, and asthmas, and joint-racking rheums, in which the power of the final rheums is heightened by the atrophy and pestilence. Wordsworth also praised, but not equally, Samson Agonistes. He concurred, he said, with Johnson in this, that it had no middle, but the beginning and end are equally sublime."

On January 29 Robinson recorded a conversation which shows that in regard to a contemporary poet,

1836]

PHYSICAL ENDOWMENTS

397

and one against whom he might have been expected to feel an antipathy based on the immense divergence of their political views, Wordsworth was not only just, but boldly generous:

"Wordsworth speaks highly of the author of Corn Law Rhymes. He says: None of us have done better than he has in his best, though there is a deal of stuff arising from his hatred of existing things. Like Byron, Shelley, etc., he looks on much with an evil eye.' Wordsworth likes his later writings the best, and mentioned the Ranter as containing some fine passages. Elliott has a fine eye for nature. He is an extraordinary man."

And two days later the diarist, who was making the most of his opportunities at Rydal, says:

"It occurs to me that I have not noticed as I ought Wordsworth's answer to the charge that he never quotes other poems than his own. In fact, I can testify to the incorrectness of the statement. But he himself remarked, You know how I love and quote not only Shakespeare and Milton, but Cowper, Burns, etc.; as to some of the later poets, I do not quote them because I do not love them. Even as works of mere taste there is this material circumstance they came too late. taste was formed, for I was forty-five when they appeared, and we cannot after that age love new things. Had I been young, I should have enjoyed much of them, I do not doubt."

My

Physical endowments and limitations must of necessity have much to do with the direction and scope of a poet's efforts. Wordsworth's eye was immeasurably superior to his ear, and he had no sense of smell. Milton was a musician, and a careful examination of his works. shows that he was more affected by sounds than by sights; his report of things seen is often vague, whereas of words and melodies he gives most precise accounts; perhaps excessive study in boyhood impaired his sight long before he subjected himself to the task of killing Salmasius at the expense of his own eyes. Wordsworth and the members of his household rarely mentioned music in their correspondence. On his visits to London

he appears rarely if ever to have gone to concerts. I can think of no musicians among his friends. There are comparatively few references to the art of music in his poems. The technical terms of it, which Shakespeare loved to repeat as if they were hung round with delicious memories, and which Milton used so exactly and withal so familiarly, hardly ever occur in Wordsworth. But what with his own gift and the priceless help of his sister, he saw things more closely and more comprehensively, in their relations with one another, than Milton or Shakespeare, and, indeed, has no equal as the poet of the eye. That he, nevertheless, had a fine ear is not to be denied. Of English poets down to his own time, it is doubtful whether more than four or five excel him in brilliancy of musical effect at their, and his, best, or if any except Shakespeare and Milton equal him in musical variety. Spenser in places is sweeter than Wordsworth ever is; Coleridge has some unmatched passages of harmony; Keats is more constantly and fully melodious; but none of these have at command Wordsworth's range of sound. Yet he was not so quick and sure in hearing as in seeing. The laborious corrections to which he submitted his works before republication were concerned largely with improper effects of sound previously unnoticed. Dowden, in the Introduction to his volume of "Selections," has made a collection of instances. I believe most readers of English poetry will agree that, next to Shakespeare, Wordsworth has filled our minds with the greatest number of distinct images, while Milton, perhaps, or Keats, has more fed the ear with concourse of sweet sound."

In the period of five years from 1833 to 1837, Wordsworth's powers of composition were exerted fitfully. The mind of a great thinker and the hand of a cunning artist were still his. What had changed was the impulse and the method. Nothing shows more plainly than this change that personality is determined less by the degree of a man's intelligence than by the nature of his desires. Wordsworth's mind by this time, and thenceforth, was fixed upon two supreme objects—one earthly,