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"My minnie does constantly deave me and bids me beware o' young men; They flatter, she says, to deceive me; But wha can think sae o' Tam Glen?" But we enter on burning ground as we approach the poetry of times so near to us poetry like that of Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth of which the estimates are so often not only personal, but personal with passion.
I am not one of those who deny that Bacon might have written Hamlet "if he had the mind," as Charles Lamb said of Wordsworth. Not at all; I am the last to limit the potentialities of genius.
Remember Matthew Arnold's prophecy that at the end of the nineteenth century Wordsworth and Byron would be the two great names in Romantic poetry. We are ten years and more past that date now, and so far as Byron is concerned, at any rate, there is no sign that Arnold's prediction has come true.
Nobody now dreams of placing him so low as the Edinburgh Reviewers did, nor so high as Southey placed him when he wrote to the author of Philip van Artevelde in 1829 that a greater poet than Wordsworth there never has been nor ever will be. An extravagance of this kind was only the outburst of generous friendship.
Her admiration for Balzac he shared, and it is probable that the death of the great novelist moved him to keener regret than did the death, at no considerable distance of time, of Wordsworth.
He photographs a Gypsy camp; a common, with its geese and donkey; a salt marsh, a shabby village street, or tumble-down manse. But neither Crabbe nor Cowper has the imaginative lift of Wordsworth, The light that never was, on sea or land, The consecration, and the poet's dream.
Certain favourers of Wordsworth answer our question with a triumphant affirmative, on the strength of some ethical, or metaphysical, or theological system which they believe themselves to find in him. But is it credible that poets can permanently live by systems? Or is not system, whether ethical, theological, or philosophical, the heavy lead of poetry?
Wordsworth said finely of Shakspere, that he "could not have written an epic: he would have died of a plethora of thought." Shakspere's two narrative poems, indeed, are by no means models of their kind. The current of the story is choked at every turn, though it be with golden sand.
For the magnitude of his national labors and integrity of his personal character, Irishmen will remember him gratefully." The Daily Chronicle heads its editorial with a quotation from Wordsworth: "This is the happy warrior: this is he: That every man in arms should wish to be."
My little Dorothea was the only one of the merry crowd who cared to turn aside with me from the beaten tourist-track, and give up the sight of another English cathedral for the sake of a quiet day among the Quantock Hills. Was it the literary association of that little corner of Somersetshire with the names of Wordsworth and Coleridge that attracted her, I wonder?
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