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There is a masculine and imposing medium between youthful vigour and decay, in which the leading features of the former man may be distinctly traced; as in Wordsworth's beautiful description of the old knight of Rylstone, and Sir Walter Scott's fine portraiture of Archibald Bell-the-Cat: and I think the analogy holds good in classical remains.
Criticism in Wordsworth's day was both less competent and less conscientious, and the famous "This will never do" of Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review was by no means an extreme specimen of the general tone in which the work was received. The judgment of the reviewers influenced popular taste; and the book was as decided a pecuniary failure as Wordsworth's previous ventures had been.
Coleridge's description of Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction in the Biographia Literaria is famous. Walt Whitman's An American Primer, first published in the Atlantic for April, 1904, is a highly interesting contribution to the subject. No theoretical discussion, however, can supply the place of a close study, word by word, of poems in the classroom.
Wordsworth's longer poems, since they contain much that is prosy and uninteresting, may well be left till after we have read the odes, sonnets, and short descriptive poems that have made him famous.
Wordsworth's garden." I looked about and saw troops of flowers, and sought for the white fox-glove, which was a favorite of his, and found it; and the air was loaded with a fine perfume, which I discovered to be from large beds of mignonette. In those paths he walked and watched and tended his plants and shrubs.
Wordsworth's publications, and having studied them with a full feeling of the author's genius, would not at once claim as Wordsworthian the little poem on the rainbow? "The Child is father of the Man, etc." Or in the LUCY GRAY? "No mate, no comrade Lucy knew; She dwelt on a wide moor; The sweetest thing that ever grew Beside a human door." Or in the IDLE SHEPHERD-BOYS?
Dicey's is that, in accepting its defence of Wordsworth's maturity, we may come to disparage his splendid youth. Mr. Dicey's book, however, is exceedingly interesting in calling attention to the great part politics may play in the life of a poet.
Accordingly, after taking rooms at Brown's Hotel, we drove back in our return car, and, reaching the head of Rydal Water, alighted to walk through this familiar scene of so many years of Wordsworth's life. We ought to have seen De Quincey's former residence and Hartley Coleridge's cottage, I believe, on our way, but were not aware of it at the time.
"From Nature and her overflowing soul I had received so much, that all my thoughts Were steeped in feeling." If we compare Wordsworth's line "This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon," with Tennyson's line from The Princess "A full sea glazed with muffled moonlight," we may easily decide which shows more feeling and which, more art.
We approached by paths so winding that I hardly know how the house stands in relation to the road; but, after much circuity, we really did see Wordsworth's residence, an old house with an uneven ridge-pole, built of stone, no doubt, but plastered over with some neutral tint, a house that would not have been remarkably pretty in itself, but so delightfully situated, so secluded, so hedged about with shrubbery, and adorned with flowers, so ivy-grown on one side, so beautified with the personal care of him who lived in it and loved it, that it seemed the very place for a poet's residence; and as if, while he lived so long in it, his poetry had manifested itself in flowers, shrubbery, and ivy.
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