der the influence of that best kind of
patriotism which ennobles local attachments by associating them with
the lasting elements of moral grandeur and heroism it is needless to
speak. They have long taken their place as something higher even than
literary classics. As years began to dull the old penetration of a
mind which had once approached, like other youths, the shield of human
nature from the golden side, and had been eager to "clear a passage
for just government," Wordsworth lost his interest in progress.
Waterloo may be taken for the date at which his social grasp began to
fail, and with it his poetic glow. He opposed Catholic emancipation as
stubbornly as Eldon, and the Reform Bill as bitterly as Croker. For
the practical reforms of his day, even in education, for which he
had always spoken up, Wordsworth was not a force. His heart clung to
England as he found it. "This concrete attachment to the scenes about
him," says Mr. Myers, "had always formed an important element In his
character. Ideal politics, whether in Church or State, had never
occupied his mind, which sought rather to find its informing
principles embodied in the England of his own day." This flowed, we
may suppose, from Burke. In a passage in the seventh Book of the
_Prelude_, he describes, in lines a little prosaic but quite true,
how he sat, saw, and heard, not unthankful nor uninspired, the great
orator

"While he forewarns, denounces, launches forth
Against all systems built on abstract rights."

The Church, as conceived by the spirit of Laud, and described by
Hooker's voice, was the great symbol of the union of high and stable
institution with thought, faith, right living, and "sacred religion,
mother of form and fear." As might be expected from such a point of
view, the church pieces, to which Wordsworth gave so much thought,
are, with few exceptions, such as the sonnet on _Seathwaite Chapel_,
formal, hard, and very thinly enriched with spiritual graces or
unction. They are ecclesiastical, not religious. In religious
poetry, the Church of England finds her most affecting voice, not in
Wordsworth, but in the _Lyra Innocentium_ and the _Christian Year_.
Wordsworth abounds in the true devotional cast of mind, but less than
anywhere else does it show in his properly ecclesiastical verse.

It was perhaps natural that when events no longer inspired him,
Wordsworth should have turned with new feelings towards the classic,
and discovered a v