ity is
proved.

To exhibit this body of Wordsworth's best work, to clear away
obstructions from around it, and to let it speak for itself, is what
every lover of Wordsworth should desire. Until this has been done,
Wordsworth, whom we, to whom he is dear, all of us know and feel to be
so great a poet, has not had a fair chance before the world. When once
it has been done, he will make his way best, not by our advocacy of him,
but by his own worth and power. We may safely leave him to make his way
thus, we who believe that a superior worth and power in poetry finds in
mankind a sense responsive to it and disposed at last to recognize it.
Yet at the outset, before he has been duly known and recognized, we may
do Wordsworth a service, perhaps, by indicating in what his superior
power and worth will be found to consist, and in what it will not.

Long ago, in speaking of Homer, I said that the noble and profound
application of ideas to life is the most essential part of poetic
greatness[Transcriber's note: no punctuation here] I said that a great
poet receives his distinctive character of superiority from his
application, under the conditions immutably fixed by the laws of poetic
beauty and poetic truth, from his application, I say, to his subject,
whatever it may be, of the ideas

"On man, on nature, and on human life,"[368]

which he has acquired for himself. The line quoted is Wordsworth's own;
and his superiority arises from his powerful use, in his best pieces, his
powerful application to his subject, of ideas "on man, on nature, and on
human life."

Voltaire, with his signal acuteness, most truly remarked that "no nation
has treated in poetry moral ideas with more energy and depth than the
English nation." And he adds; "There, it seems to me, is the great merit
of the English poets." Voltaire does not mean by treating in poetry
moral ideas, the composing moral and didactic poems;--that brings us
but a very little way in poetry. He means just the same thing as was
meant when I spoke above "of the noble and profound application of ideas
to life"; and he means the application of these ideas under the
conditions fixed for us by the laws of poetic beauty and poetic truth.
If it is said that to call these ideas _moral_ ideas is to introduce a
strong and injurious limitation, I answer that it is to do nothing of
the kind, because moral ideas are really so main a part of human life.
The question, _how to live_, is itsel