wer, the end of all." The waving lights and shadows, the varied
loopholes of view, the shiftings and fluctuations of feeling, the growing,
broadening interest of the drama, have no charm for him. His mind, from
its gigantic size, contracts a gigantic stiffness. It "moveth altogether,
if it move at all." Hence, some of his smaller poems remind you of the
dancing of an elephant, or of the "hills leaping like lambs." Many of the
little poems which he wrote upon a system, are exceedingly tame and
feeble. Yet often, even in his narrow bleak vales, we find one "meek
streamlet--only one"--beautifying the desolation; and feel how painful it is
for him to become poor, and that, when he sinks, it is with "compulsion
and laborious flight." But, having subtracted such faults, how much
remains--of truth--of tenderness--of sober, eve-like grandeur--of purged
beauties, white and clean as the lilies of Eden--of calm, deep reflection,
contained in lines and sentences which have become proverbs--of mild
enthusiasm--of minute knowledge of nature--of strong, yet unostentatious
sympathy with man--and of devout and breathless communion with the Great
Author of all! Apart altogether from their intellectual pretensions
Wordsworth's poems possess a moral clearness, beauty, transparency, and
harmony, which connect them immediately with those of Milton: and beside
the more popular poetry of the past age--such as Byron's, and Moore's--they
remind us of that unplanted garden, where the shadow of God united all
trees of fruitfulness, and all flowers of beauty, into one; where the
"large river," which watered the whole, "ran south," toward the sun of
heaven--when compared with the gardens of the Hesperides, where a dragon
was the presiding deity, or with those of Vauxhall or White Conduit-house,
where Comus and his rabble rout celebrate their undisguised orgies of
miscalled and miserable pleasure.

[Illustration.]

Wordsworth's Home at Rydal Mount.

To write a great poem demands years--to write a great undying example,
demands a lifetime. Such a life, too, becomes a poem--higher far than pen
can inscribe, or metre make musical. Such a life it was granted to
Wordsworth to live in severe harmony with his verse--as it lowly, and as it
aspiring, to live, too, amid opposition, obloquy, and abuse--to live, too,
amid the glare of that watchful observation, which has become to public
men far more keen and f