IV THE WISDOM AND TRUTH OF WORDSWORTH'S POETRY IN early ages the term "sage was the title of the poet. Something of a prophetic office was attributed to him; he was regarded not seldom as a revealer of mysteries, and commonly as a teacher of wisdom; nor was it till after the national instinct had developed itself strongly that he was expected to clothe the halfforgotten legend in Epic or Tragic form. In the course of ages poetry has preferred variety to elevation. Our modern poets have applied their gifts to ends the most unlike. Thus Shelley has been called by his admirers the poet of liberty, Keats of beauty, Scott of chivalry, Byron of impassioned and eloquent energy. A poet who had written much before three out of those four writers had been heard of was little read until after they had passed away; and it was probably well for him that early fame did not sophisticate the purity or lessen the freedom of his genius. By many thoughtful persons Wordsworth is now regarded as the greatest modern poet; yet if his admirers were called on to name his most characteristic merit, the answer would be very various. Some would call him the Poet of Nature, and others the Poet of the Human Ties; but recent times have had many descriptive poets, and many poets of the affections, while yet between them and Wordsworth there is little resemblance. Nature and the Humanities have, indeed, a very special place in Wordsworth's poetry, which, but for what it drew from those sources, could never have existed; but he has himself told us that his paramount aim was to be a philosophic poet; and Coleridge said of him early that if he persevered in that aim he would not only succeed, but be the greatest poet who had ever worn the crown of philosophic verse. He persevered, and he succeeded, though he did not leave behind him, except in a fragmentary form, the great Philosophical Poem of his earlier aspirations. He had found it 'more animating," to use his own expression, to embody much of what had been intended for that work in the form of those numerous minor poems which he regarded as constituting a whole, but the unity of which is lost on the superficial. He sang, indeed, of Nature and of the Humanities; but, unlike Burns, who sang them also, and whom he loved so well, he was a man of high philosophic thought and high moral purpose. Had he, like the merely didactic poets of the last century, sought his philosophy chiefly from books, he would no more have been a great philosophic poet than Young or Akenside. These ac 66 complished writers produced instructive, not philosophic poetry; and by so doing they made it, notwithstanding their merits, more difficult for men to believe in the possibility of philosophic poetry, that is, of poetry embodying the highest poetic inspiration in a form wholly genial, and as such contradistinguished from that philosophic verse which but translates prose thoughts into metrical form. Had he taken for illustration the materialistic philosophy of Hartley or Hobbes, no gifts of metre or of diction, nor even that imagination which beautifies the lowest theme, could have expiated the offence of thought without truth and of sentiment without elevation. Happily for him, the love which he bore to Nature and to Humanity had ever been, not instinctive love only, but a reverential love. These are not, indeed, the only teachers; but they are great teachers, and they are authentic teachers; and his ear was ever open to the lowest whispers of these Egerian counsellors. They pointed ever towards a teaching higher than their own. The wheel had gone round, and poetry, which had been everything in turn, reappeared among the Cumberland Mountains in one of its earliest forms, that of "Divine Philosophy." I do not affirm that the whole of that philosophy which poetry can legitimately include in her wide domain was grappled with by Wordsworth's poetry; and I gladly admit that, wholly apart from its philosophy, that poetry has other and extraordinary merits; but it is certain that among its merits is pre-eminently that of its Wisdom and its Truth. That Truth is sometimes Truth actual and sometimes Truth ideal, but it is always Truth; and that Wisdom is the wisdom which stands in contrast with mere knowledge-the seasoned wisdom of a complete intellect and of a well-balanced being; the wisdom which has no pride, no littleness, and no contentiousness, and which is derived at once from experience and from something greater, without which moral experience could never have been formed. Our present theme, then, is that special characteristic of Wordsworth's poetry which may be termed its Wisdom and Truth; and I shall endeavour to illustrate those qualities successively in connection with (I.) the moral relations of man; (II.) with their political relations; (III.) with poetry, art, science, and human progress; (IV.) with the exterior universe; and (V.) with a few of those problems which concern the origin and end of man as a spiritual and immortal being. Wordsworth is not understood while he is classed among the pastoral or idyllic poets, even if among these the chief place be conceded to him. He is England's great philosophic, as Shakespeare is her great dramatic, and Milton her great epic, poet. In the old days of Greece, besides the inspiration of Apollo, of the Muses, and of Mercury, there was that of Pan. He represented that principle of life diffused throughout the universe. The woodland reed-pipe, besides those notes which charmed the shepherds and the nymphs, had its mystic strain. I. To begin with the Moral Relations. The basis VOL. I N of the Wordsworthian wisdom was laid in a profound moral faith-a faith that man has a higher nature as well as a lower, a mens melior as well as a "faculty judging according to sense." These two sections of our twofold being are not by necessity at variance; they have much apparently in common; yet one is from above, and the other lies below, and it is for man to elect whether he will live a spiritual life or content himself with its mere animal counterpart. The following short poem strikes the keynote of that philosophy Yes, full surely 'twas the echo, Answering to thee, shouting cuckoo ! Unsolicited reply To a babbling wanderer sent; Like her ordinary cry, Like-but oh how different ! Hears not also mortal life? Hear not we, unthinking creatures, Slaves of folly, love, or strife, Voices of two different natures? Have not we, too?—Yes, we have Answers, and we know not whence; Recognised intelligence! Such within ourselves we hear Ofttimes, ours though sent from far; Listen, ponder, hold them dear; For of God-of God they are! But Wordsworth's moral wisdom never hovers long in the region of allegory. It plants its feet on the |