HIS POETRY ESSENTIALLY CHRISTIAN

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sions about man's being to be the result of his own. insight, when in fact they are unconscious plagiarisms from the Christian revelation. We have followed that torch through the recesses of the cavern, and only for that reason are we now able to find our way through them alone. The interpretation of nature, as well as the interpretation of man, is an exclusively Christian achievement. The wisdom and love of God were never seen in nature, until Christ himself had been revealed as the Lord of nature and yet as the Redeemer of man.

There are those who refuse to call Wordsworth a great poet, for the reason that there are so many commonplace and prosaic pages in his collected works. But there are two reasons for calling him great which these critics overlook: First, the large body of genuine poetry which these works contain; and, secondly, the new bent and insight which these works have communicated to literature. The sonnets of Wordsworth constitute of themselves our noblest collection after those of Shakespeare and Milton, and there is a grave and serious beauty even in poems so long as the "Prelude" and the "Excursion." His chief claim to greatness, however, is this, that he has not only apprehended and expressed the divinity of nature as it had never been apprehended and expressed before, but that he has done this in such a way as to mold and change the poetry of his country and of the world, and to begin a new epoch in the history of literature.

His belief in this divinity of nature was so utter that the homeliest things were to him transfigured. The roughest aspects of humanity and the boldest scenes

Y

of the physical world were full of interest, because they conveyed some thought of God. They seemed to him so interesting in themselves that they needed no artistic charms of verse: let the poetry that described them be as bare as the rocks, and it still would have power to move the heart of man. Yes, we say, but only if the heart of man be prepared to receive it. The clew must first be given; the taste must first be formed; the love of nature must first be implanted.

It is no wonder that the admirers of mechanical verse and the devotees of fashion and convention had no ears to hear the sober and solemn music of Wordsworththey even denied that there was music there. Jeffrey, of the "Edinburgh Review," read "The Excursion," and declared that it would never do. It took almost forty years to convince the English-speaking world that a new poetic luminary had risen upon the horizon. But when the degree of Doctor of Civil Law was conferred upon the poet by the University of Oxford, and the whole auditory of England's picked and sifted scholars rose as one man with shouts and cheers to do him reverence; when Sir Robert Peel overbore his modesty and well-nigh entreated him to accept the poet-laureateship, not because England gave him anything more to do but because England demanded the privilege of rewarding what he had done; it became clear that the tide had forever turned and that his name was to be inscribed upon the rolls of everlasting fame as the first and greatest poet of nature and of common life. And Tennyson, when he succeeded to the office, only did just honor to the spirit of Wordsworth's verse when he congratulated himself upon receiving

RECOGNITION OF WORDSWORTH'S CLAIMS

The laurel greener from the brows
Of him who uttered nothing base.

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It is not possible to concede supreme merit to more than a few, and those by no means the longest, of Wordsworth's poems. But no poet is to be judged by his worst. Let Wordsworth be judged by his best, and he takes the rank of a great poet-the greatest poet who had appeared since Milton. Browning and Tennyson have eclipsed his fame, but only because they have drawn into their own writings much of his peculiar light. He has added a permanent element to the world's thought; he has given us a new method of regarding the world of nature and of man; he has increased the calmness, the comfort, the hope, of humanity. William Watson has given proof of his critical, as well as of his poetic, genius in his lines upon "Wordsworth's Grave," and his estimate may fitly close this essay :

Not Milton's keen, translunar music thine ;

Not Shakespeare's cloudless, boundless, human view, Not Shelley's flush of rose on peaks divine;

Nor yet the wizard twilight Coleridge knew.

What hast thou that could make so large amends
For all thou hadst not and thy peers possessed-
Motion and fire, swift means to radiant ends?
Thou hadst, for weary feet, the gift of rest.

From Shelley's dazzling glow or thunderous haze,
From Byron's tempest-anger, tempest-mirth,
Men turned to thee and found-not blast and blaze,
Tumult of tottering heavens-but peace on earth.

Not peace that grows by Lethe, scentless flower,
There in white languors to decline and cease ;

But peace whose names are also rapture, power,
Clear sight, and love: for these are parts of peace.

It may be that his manly chant, beside

More dainty numbers, seems a rustic tune;
It may be thought has broadened, since he died,
Upon the century's noon; . . .

Enough that there is none since risen who sings
A song so gotten of the immediate soul,
So instant from the vital fount of things

Which is our source and goal;

And though at touch of later hands there float

More artful tones than from his lyre he drew, Ages may pass ere trills another note

So sweet, so great, so true.

BROWNING