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It might have been foreseen that, in the rotations of mind, the province of poetry in prose would find its assertor; and, a century after Dryden, amid very different intellectual needs, and with the need therefore of great modifications in literary form, the range of the poetic force in literature was effectively enlarged by Wordsworth.
'mid the wreck of Time, Preserve thy charge with confidence sublime," said Wordsworth; but this sublime charge is committed to frail keeping. It is itself a sepulchre of the dead; and the tragedies of the Dacian war are inscribed upon tragedies that took place long ages before there was any human eye to witness them.
Brutal sports among boys are much less indulged than formerly, and the worrying of domestic animals almost invariably denotes a bad boy, in the worst sense of the phrase, likely to make a bad man; "so true to nature is the admirable aphorism of Wordsworth: The boy's the father of the man."
I am sure that you would not have sympathized with Wordsworth. I do hope that you will see Beranger when in Paris. In the first place, I think him by far the greatest of living poets, the one who unites most completely those two rare things, impulse and finish. In the next, I admire his admirable independence and consistency, and his generous feeling for fallen greatness.
These two poets, Coleridge and Wordsworth, best represent the romantic genius of the age in which they lived, though Scott had a greater literary reputation, and Byron and Shelley had larger audiences. The second characteristic of this age is that it is emphatically an age of poetry.
"He's not w-w-worth it," said the host. "He's one of the g-g-ghouls; eh, Bruce ha! ha! ha!" "And here was Labour his own bond slave; Hope That never set the pains against the prize; Idleness halting with his weary clog, And poor misguided Shame and witless Fear And simple Pleasure foraging for Death." Wordsworth. The Prelude.
An American friend of mine, a cultured gentleman, who loved poetry well enough for its own sake, told me that he had obtained a more correct and more satisfying idea of the Lake district from an eighteenpenny book of photographic views than from all the works of Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth put together.
But Wordsworth, with his tiny bookshelf of odd tattered volumes, with pages of manuscript interleaved to supply missing passages, alone kept his heart and imagination active, by deliberate leisure, elaborate sauntering, unashamed idleness. The reason why very few uneducated persons have been writers of note, is because they have been unable to take up the problem at the right point.
For, if we except some occasional lapses in his sonnets a metrical form in which, at his best, he is quite "out of the running" with Wordsworth his melody never fails him. He is a singer always, as Wordsworth is not always, and Byron almost never.
Here was a rose from Eve's bridal bower, and all those red and white roses which were plucked in the garden of the Temple by the partisans of York and Lancaster. Here was Halleck's Wild Rose of Alloway. Cowper had contributed a Sensitive Plant, and Wordsworth an Eglantine, and Burns a Mountain Daisy, and Kirke White a Star of Bethlehem, and Longfellow a Sprig of Fennel, with its yellow flowers.
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