eserves our gratitude
for it; it would not be easy to praise Shakespeare, in a single
sentence, more justly. And when a foreigner and a Frenchman writes thus
of Shakespeare, and when Goethe says of Milton, in whom there was so
much to repel Goethe rather than to attract him, that "nothing has been
ever done so entirely in the sense of the Greeks as _Samson Agonistes_,"
and that "Milton is in very truth a poet whom we must treat with all
reverence," then we understand what constitutes a European recognition
of poets and poetry as contradistinguished from a merely national
recognition, and that in favor both of Milton and of Shakespeare the
judgment of the high court of appeal has finally gone.

I come back to M. Renan's praise of glory, from which I started. Yes,
real glory is a most serious thing, glory authenticated by the
Amphictyonic Court[352] of final appeal, definite glory. And even for
poets and poetry, long and difficult as may be the process of arriving
at the right award, the right award comes at last, the definitive glory
rests where it is deserved. Every establishment of such a real glory is
good and wholesome for mankind at large, good and wholesome for the
nation which produced the poet crowned with it. To the poet himself it
can seldom do harm; for he, poor man, is in his grave, probably, long
before his glory crowns him.

Wordsworth has been in his grave for some thirty years, and certainly
his lovers and admirers cannot flatter themselves that this great and
steady light of glory as yet shines over him. He is not fully recognized
at home; he is not recognized at all abroad. Yet I firmly believe that
the poetical performance of Wordsworth is, after that of Shakespeare and
Milton, of which all the world now recognizes the worth, undoubtedly the
most considerable in our language from the Elizabethan age to the
present time. Chaucer is anterior; and on other grounds, too, he cannot
well be brought into the comparison. But taking the roll of our chief
poetical names, besides Shakespeare and Milton, from the age of
Elizabeth downwards, and going through it,--Spenser, Dryden, Pope, Gray,
Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns, Coleridge, Scott, Campbell, Moore, Byron,
Shelley, Keats (I mention those only who are dead),--I think it certain
that Wordsworth's name deserves to stand, and will finally stand, above
them all. Several of the poets named have gifts and excellences which
Wordsworth has not. But taking the performanc