lar and Parson. Wordsworth
apparently felt that this would be so, and accordingly never saw his
way clear to finishing the poem. But the treatment, whether a panacea
or not, is certainly wholesome inasmuch as it inculcates abstinence,
exercise, and uncontaminate air. I am not sure, indeed, that the
Nature-cure theory does not tend to foster in constitutions less
vigorous than Wordsworth's what Milton would call a fugitive and
cloistered virtue at a dear expense of manlier qualities. The ancients
and our own Elizabethans, ere spiritual megrims had become
fashionable, perhaps made more out of life by taking a frank delight
in its action and passion and by grappling with the facts of this
world, rather than muddling themselves over the insoluble problems of
another. If they had not discovered the picturesque, as we understand
it, they found surprisingly fine scenery in man and his destiny, and
would have seen something ludicrous, it may be suspected, in the
spectacle of a grown man running to hide his head in the apron of the
Mighty Mother whenever he had an ache in his finger or got a bruise in
the tussle for existence.

But when, as I have said, our impartiality has made all those
qualifications and deductions against which even the greatest poet may
not plead his privilege, what is left to Wordsworth is enough to
justify his fame. Even where his genius is wrapped in clouds, the
unconquerable lightning of imagination struggles through, flashing out
unexpected vistas, and illuminating the humdrum pathway of our daily
thought with a radiance of momentary consciousness that seems like a
revelation. If it be the most delightful function of the poet to set
our lives to music, yet perhaps he will be even more sure of our
maturer gratitude if he do his part also as moralist and philosopher
to purify and enlighten; if he define and encourage our vacillating
perceptions of duty; if he piece together our fragmentary
apprehensions of our own life and that larger life whose unconscious
instruments we are, making of the jumbled bits of our dissected map of
experience a coherent chart. In the great poets there is an exquisite
sensibility both of soul and sense that sympathizes like gossamer
sea-moss with every movement of the element in which it floats, but
which is rooted on the solid rock of our common sympathies. Wordsworth
shows less of this finer feminine fibre of organization than one or
two of his contemporaries, notably than