Studies in Literature | Page 7

accidents of political opinion. In his young days he had sent Fox a copy
of the _Lyrical Ballads_, with a long letter indicating his sense of Fox's
great and generous qualities. Pitt he admits that he could never regard
with complacency. "I believe him, however," he said, "to have been as
disinterested a man, and as true a lover of his country, as it was
possible for so ambitious a man to be. His first wish (though probably
unknown to himself) was that his country should prosper under his
administration; his next that it should prosper. Could the order of these
wishes have been reversed, Mr. Pitt would have avoided many of the
grievous mistakes into which, I think, he fell." "You always went away
from Burke," he once told Haydon, "with your mind filled; from Fox
with your feelings excited; and from Pitt with wonder at his having had
the power to make the worse appear the better reason."
Of the poems composed under the influence of that best kind of
patriotism which ennobles local attachments by associating them with
the lasting elements of moral grandeur and heroism it is needless to
speak. They have long taken their place as something higher even than
literary classics. As years began to dull the old penetration of a mind
which had once approached, like other youths, the shield of human
nature from the golden side, and had been eager to "clear a passage for
just government," Wordsworth lost his interest in progress. Waterloo
may be taken for the date at which his social grasp began to fail, and

with it his poetic glow. He opposed Catholic emancipation as
stubbornly as Eldon, and the Reform Bill as bitterly as Croker. For the
practical reforms of his day, even in education, for which he had
always spoken up, Wordsworth was not a force. His heart clung to
England as he found it. "This concrete attachment to the scenes about
him," says Mr. Myers, "had always formed an important element In his
character. Ideal politics, whether in Church or State, had never
occupied his mind, which sought rather to find its informing principles
embodied in the England of his own day." This flowed, we may
suppose, from Burke. In a passage in the seventh Book of the
_Prelude_, he describes, in lines a little prosaic but quite true, how he
sat, saw, and heard, not unthankful nor uninspired, the great orator
"While he forewarns, denounces, launches forth Against all systems
built on abstract rights."
The Church, as conceived by the spirit of Laud, and described by
Hooker's voice, was the great symbol of the union of high and stable
institution with thought, faith, right living, and "sacred religion, mother
of form and fear." As might be expected from such a point of view, the
church pieces, to which Wordsworth gave so much thought, are, with
few exceptions, such as the sonnet on _Seathwaite Chapel_, formal,
hard, and very thinly enriched with spiritual graces or unction. They are
ecclesiastical, not religious. In religious poetry, the Church of England
finds her most affecting voice, not in Wordsworth, but in the Lyra
Innocentium and the Christian Year. Wordsworth abounds in the true
devotional cast of mind, but less than anywhere else does it show in his
properly ecclesiastical verse.
It was perhaps natural that when events no longer inspired him,
Wordsworth should have turned with new feelings towards the classic,
and discovered a virtue in classic form to which his own method had
hitherto made him a little blind. Towards the date of Waterloo, he read
over again some of the Latin writers, in attempting to prepare his son
for college. He even at a later date set about a translation of the Aeneid
of Virgil, but the one permanent result of the classic movement in his
mind is Laodamia. Earlier in life he had translated some books of
Ariosto at the rate of a hundred lines a day, and he even attempted
fifteen of the sonnets of Michael Angelo, but so much meaning is
compressed into so little room in those pieces that he found the

difficulty insurmountable. He had a high opinion of the resources of the
Italian language. The poetry of Dante and of Michael Angelo, he said,
proves that if there be little majesty and strength in Italian verse, the
fault is in the authors and not in the tongue.
Our last glimpse of Wordsworth in the full and peculiar power of his
genius is the Ode Composed on an evening of extraordinary splendour
and beauty. It is the one exception to the critical dictum that all his
good work was done in the decade between 1798 and 1808. He lived
for more than thirty years after this fine composition. But he added
nothing more