certain awe-inspiring unapproachableness, and yet a man of warm heart and quick sympathy; not a cheerful man, but a man who, after long battle, has won the secret of peace, and walks a solitary path, clothed with silence and winning from others the reverence due to the hermit and the sage. Stiff and awkward as Wordsworth often was in conversation, yet there were times when he created a sincere admiration by his talk. Haydon says: "Never did any man so beguile the time as Wordsworth. His purity of heart, his kindness, his soundness of principle, his information, his knowledge, and the intense and eager feelings with which he pours forth all he knows affect, interest, and enchant one." But among all the various literary portraits which we possess of Wordsworth, there is none so subtle and so potent as Carlyle's. Carlyle thought little of Wordsworth's writings, but after he had met him he says: "He talked well in his way; with veracity, easy brevity, and force. His voice was good, frank, sonorous; though practically clear, distinct, forcible, rather than melodious; the tone of him business-like, sedately confident, no discourtesy, yet no anxiety about being courteous; a fine wholesome rusticity, fresh as his mountain breezes, sat well on the stalwart veteran, and on all he said and did. You would have said he was a usually taciturn man, glad to unlock himself, to audience sympathetic and intelligent, when such offered itself. His face bore marks of much, not always peaceful, meditation; the look of it not bland or benevolent so much as close, impregnable, and hard; a man multa tacere loquive paratus, in a world where he had experienced no lack of contradictions as he strode along. The eyes were not very brilliant, but they had a quiet clearness; there was enough of brow, and well shaped. He was large-boned, lean, but still firm-knit, tall, and strong-looking when he stood; a right good old steel-gray figure, with a fine rustic simplicity and dignity about him, and a veracious strength looking through him, which might have suited one of those old steel-gray Markgrafs whom Henry the Fowler set up to ward the marches and do battle with the intrusive heathen in a stalwart and judicious manner." The last phrase recalls to us Wordsworth's confession in the "Prelude" to his early love of battle histories and thirst for a life of heroic action. A man who had not had something of the fighter in him could never have defied the world as he defied it. His imaginative faculty made him a poet; but under all his intellectual life there throbbed the difficult pulse of a valorous restlessness, and he had in him the pith and sinew of the hero. Poets have too often been the victims of their own sensitiveness, but Wordsworth stands among them as a man of stubborn strength, an altogether sturdy and unsubduable man. "Out of this sense of loneliness," a friend once wrote to Harriet Martineau, "shall grow your strength, as the oak, standing alone, grows and strengthens with the storm; whilst the ivy, clinging for protection to the old temple wall, has no power of selfsupport. Doubtless the loneliness of Wordsworth's life fed his strength, and no finer image than that of the oak could be found to describe the resolute vigor of Wordsworth's character. He certainly was no weak spray of ivy clinging to a temple wall; but he never forgot the temple and its sanctities notwithstanding; and if he was an oak, it was an oak that had its roots in sacred soil and cast the shadow of its branches on the doorways of the sanctuary. QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 1. Why is the material relating to Wordsworth's personal life somewhat meager? 2. How was he regarded by the different members of the Lake school of poets? 3. What did his contemporaries say of his seriousness and intensity of character? 4. What qualities of Wordsworth are shown in his treatment of Hartley Coleridge? 5. What incidents illustrate his kindly relations with children? 6. How is his personality described by the peasantry among whom he lived? 7. What pictures are given of him by Haydon and Carlyle? 8. In what respects is the oak a fine image of Wordsworth's character? BIBLIOGRAPHY Ward's English Poets. Vol. IV. Essay by R. W. Church, and Selections. Wordsworth. F. W. H. Myers. (English Men of Letters Series.) Literary Associations of the English Lakes. H. D. Rawnsley. Studies in Poetry and Philosophy. (Wordsworth, the poet and the man.) J. C. Shairp. Biographia Literaria. Coleridge. (Bohn Library.) Recollections of Coleridge and Wordsworth. De Quincey. CHAPTER VI WILLIAM WORDSWORTH-CONCLUDING SURVEY It is evident to the reader who has followed this imperfect study of Wordsworth with any degree of care that his merits and defects are alike great, and in concluding our survey it is well to recapitulate them. In few poets are the profound and trivial found in such close proximity, and this is his chief defect. Like Browning, for many years Wordsworth had few readers, and consequently wrote more for his own pleasure than with the artistic restraint and carefulness which the sense of public praise and criticism impose. Such criticism as he received was little better than insane or spiteful vituperation, and its only effect was to increase in a man of Wordsworth's temperament a stubborn dependence on himself. It is hard to say which acts with worse effect upon a poet, the adulation of an undiscerning or the apathy of an indifferent public. It seems likely, however, that if Wordsworth had received any public encouragement early in life, it would have acted beneficially, in leading him to perceive his own faults of style, and perhaps to correct them. There are various passages in Wordsworth's letters which prove that, while he braced himself to endure public hostility with uncomplaining stoicism, yet he would not the less have valued public encouragement. But as years wore away, and his circle of readers still continued to be of the narrowest, he cared less and less to write with any definite attempt to gain the public ear. He wrote for his own delectation, and, as we have seen, often attached false values to his poems. He failed, as every solitary writer must fail, to discriminate between the perfect and imperfect work of his genius. The result is, that to-day the perfect work of Wordsworth is hampered by its association with the imperfect. His readers often fail to take a just measurement of the noble qualities of his genius, because it is so easy for them to pass from his greatest poems to passages of verse-writing which are dull, trivial, bald, and in every way unworthy of him. This fact has been amply recognized by Matthew Arnold, and he has endeavored to remedy the defect by his admirable selection from the works of Wordsworth. Few poets bear the process of selection so well, and certainly none have so much to gain by it. There is something of pathos, indeed, in the recollection of the relation which Wordsworth bore to the literature of his day. He came in the wake of Byron, and uttered a note so different that it is scarcely surprising that the multitude who read Byron had no ear for Wordsworth. For every thousand who bought "Childe Harold' there was perhaps one who bought the "Lyrical Ballads." When contempt and hostility had slowly passed into grateful recognition, his fame was menaced from another quarter. By that time Tennyson was making himself heard, and Tennyson soon passed Wordsworth in the race for fame. Wordsworth never knew the joy of unrivaled and indisputable pre-eminence. His star rose unperceived in the firmament where Byron reigned in splendor, and before the fading afterglow of Byron had left a space for his |