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Even Matthew Arnold, whose song of Callicles tells of 'the triumph of the sweet persuasive lyre, and the 'famous final victory, in such a clear note of lyrical beauty, has not a little of it; in the troubled undertone of doubt and distress that haunts his verses, neither Goethe nor Wordsworth could help him, though he followed each in turn, and when he seeks to mourn for Thyrsis or to sing of the Scholar Gipsy, it is the reed that he has to take for the rendering of his strain.
"Very well," said the bard, "and allow me, in conclusion, one rather delicate question: Do you ever take your little porringer?" "Oh, yes," answered the child frankly "'Quite often after sunset, When all is light and fair, I take my little porringer' "I can't quite remember what I do after that, but I know that I like it." "That is immaterial," said Wordsworth.
The best thing of Haydon was a hasty dash of a sketch for a small, full-length portrait of Wordsworth, sitting on the crag of a mountain. I doubt whether Wordsworth's likeness has ever been so poetically brought out.
Something that may be in Thoreau or Wordsworth, or in another poet whose songs "breathe of a new morning of a higher life though a definite beauty in Nature" or something that will show the birth of his ideal and hold out a background of revealed religion, as a perspective to his transcendent religion a counterpoise in his rebellion which we feel Channing or Dr.
Coleridge deliberately placed Wordsworth "nearest of all modern writers to Shakespeare and Milton, yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and his own."
Michael had enough of that sort of thing in real life, and felt he could not stand the strain of modern fiction, so turned back to his Wordsworth again and found soothing and mental stimulus. But there followed other invitations, some of which he accepted and some of which he declined.
So in England, Wordsworth opened this last cycle of poetry; coming when there was a clear atmosphere, and speaking more or less clearly through it his message from the Gods. You hear a like radiant note of hope in Shelley; and something of it in Keats, who stood on the line that divides the Poet-Prophet from the Poet-Artist.
The feelings with which, as Christians, we contemplate a mixed congregation rising or kneeling before their common Maker, Mr. Wordsworth would have us entertain at all times, as men, and as readers; and by the excitement of this lofty, yet prideless impartiality in poetry, he might hope to have encouraged its continuance in real life. The praise of good men be his!
Perhaps your mother would like to go, too; it's not a dangerous expedition, is it? I was thinking of taking you on a trip through the South Seas but I suppose the Cathedral towns are just as exciting. Or we might even penetrate as far into the interior as the English lakes and read Wordsworth and Coleridge as we go."
*Ode, Intimations of Immortality. Wordsworth fought the battle of the simple word, and phrase, and thought, and won it. And the poets who came after him, and not the poets only, but the prose writer too, whether they acknowledged it or not, whether they knew it or now, entered as by right into the possession of the kingdom which he had won for them.
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