Volume Ii Part 24 (1/2)

[340] ”On my alluding to the line,

”'Three feet long and two feet wide,'

”and confessing that I dared not read them aloud in company, he said, 'They ought to be liked.'” (Crabb Robinson, 9th May, 1815.) His ordinary answer to criticisms was that he considered the power to appreciate the pa.s.sage criticised as a test of the critic's capacity to judge of poetry at all.

[341] Byron, then in his twentieth year, wrote a review of these volumes not, on the whole, unfair. Crabb Robinson is reported as saying that Wordsworth was indignant at the Edinburgh Review's attack on Hours of Idleness. ”The young man will do something if he goes on,” he said.

[342] The Rev. Dr. Wordsworth has enc.u.mbered the memory of his uncle with two volumes of Memoirs, which for confused dreariness are only matched by the Rev. Mark n.o.ble's ”History of the Protectorate House of Cromwell.” It is a misfortune that his materials were not put into the hands of Professor Reed, whose notes to the American edition are among the most valuable parts of it, as they certainly are the clearest. The book contains, however, some valuable letters of Wordsworth, and those relating to this part of his life should be read by every student of his works, for the light they throw upon the principles which governed him in the composition of his poems. In a letter to Lady Beaumont (May 21, 1807) he says, ”Trouble not yourself upon their present reception, of what moment is that compared with what I trust is their destiny!--to console the afflicted, to add suns.h.i.+ne to daylight by making the happy happier; to teach the young and the gracious of every age, to see, to think and feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous; this is their office, which I trust they will faithfully perform long after we (that is all that is mortal of us) are mouldered in our graves....

To conclude, my ears are stone dead to this idle buzz [of hostile criticism] and my flesh as insensible as iron to these petty stings and; after what I have said, I am sure yours will be the same I doubt not that you will share with me an invincible confidence that my writings (and among them these little poems) will co-operate with the benign tendencies in human nature and society wherever found; and that they will in their degree be efficacious in making men wiser, better, and happier.” Here is an odd reversal of the ordinary relation between an unpopular poet and his little public of admirers; it is he who keeps up their spirits, and supplies them with faith from his own inexhaustible cistern.

[343] ”Wordsworth's pamphlet will fail of producing any general effect, because the sentences are long and involved; and his friend De Quincey, who corrected the press, has rendered them more obscure by an unusual system of punctuation.” (Southey to Scott, 30th July, 1809.) The tract is, as Southey hints, heavy.

[344] The first essay in the third volume of the second edition.

[345] Wordsworth's children were,-- John, born 18th June, 1803; still living; a clergyman.

Dorothy, born 16th August, 1804; died 9th July, 1847.

Thomas, born 16th June, 1806; died 1st December, 1812.

Catharine, born 6th September, 1808; died 4th June, 1812.

William, born 12th May, 1810; succeeded his father as Stamp-Distributor.

[346] Good luck (in the sense of _Chance_) seems properly to be the occurrence of Opportunity to one who has neither deserved nor knows how to use it. In such hands it commonly turns to ill luck. Moore's Bermudan appointment is an instance of it Wordsworth had a sound common-sense and practical conscientiousness, which enabled him to fil his office as well as Dr. Franklin could have done. A fitter man could not have been found in Westmoreland.

[347]

”I am not one who much or oft delight In personal talk.”

[348] How far he swung backward toward the school under whose influence he grew up, and toward the style against which he had protested so vigorously, a few examples will show. The advocate of the language of common life has a verse in his Thanksgiving Ode which, if one met with it by itself, he would think the achievement of some later copyist of Pope:--

”While the _tubed engine_ [the organ] feels the inspiring blast.”

And in ”The Italian Itinerant” and ”The Swiss Goatherd” we find a thermometer or barometer called

”The well-wrought scale Whose sentient tube instructs to time A purpose to a fickle clime.”

Still worse in the ”Eclipse of the Sun,” 1821:--

”High on her speculative tower Stood Science, waiting for the hour When Sol was destined to endure That darkening.”

So in ”The Excursion,”