| The still sad music of humanity, |
or
| the fierce confederate storm Of Sorrow, barricadoed evermore Within the walls of cities; |
or
| Amid the groves, under the shadowy hills, The generations are prepared; the pangs, The internal pangs, are ready; the dread strife Of poor humanity’s afflicted will Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny; |
for, although such quotations could be multiplied, isolated expressions, even when not dramatic,[14] would prove little. But I repeat the remark already made, that if we review the subjects of many of Wordsworth’s famous poems on human life,—the subjects, for example, of The Thorn, The Sailor’s Mother, Ruth, The Brothers, Michael, The Affliction of Margaret, The White Doe of Rylstone, the story of Margaret in Excursion, i., half the stories told in Excursion, vi. and vii.—we find ourselves in the presence of poverty, crime, insanity, ruined innocence, torturing hopes doomed to extinction, solitary anguish, even despair. Ignore the manner in which Wordsworth treated his subjects, and you will have to say that his world, so far as humanity is concerned, is a dark world,—at least as dark as that of Byron. Unquestionably then he saw the cloud of human destiny, and he did not avert his eyes from it. Nor did he pretend to understand its darkness. The world was to him in the end ‘this unintelligible world,’ and the only ‘adequate support for the calamities of mortal life’ was faith.[15] But he was profoundly impressed, through the experience of his own years of crisis, alike by the dangers of despondency, and by the superficiality of the views which it engenders. It was for him (and here, as in other points, he shows his natural affinity to Spinoza) a condition in which the soul, concentrated on its own suffering, for that very reason loses hold both of its own being and of the reality of which it forms a part. His experience also made it impossible for him to doubt that what he grasped
| At times when most existence with herself Is satisfied, |
—and these are the times when existence is most united in love with other existence—was, in a special sense or degree, the truth, and therefore that the evils which we suffer, deplore, or condemn, cannot really be what they seem to us when we merely suffer, deplore, or condemn them. He set himself to see this, as far as he could, and to show it. He sang of pleasure, joy, glee, blitheness, love, wherever in nature or humanity they assert their indisputable power; and turning to pain and wrong, and gazing at them steadfastly, and setting himself to present the facts with a quiet but unsparing truthfulness, he yet endeavoured to show what he had seen, that sometimes pain and wrong are the conditions of a happiness and good which without them could not have been, that no limit can be set to the power of the soul to transmute them into its own substance, and that, in suffering and even in misery, there may still be such a strength as fills us with awe or with glory. He did not pretend, I repeat, that what he saw sufficed to solve the riddle of the painful earth. ‘Our being rests’ on ‘dark foundations,’ and ‘our haughty life is crowned with darkness.’ But still what he showed was what he saw, and he saw it in the cloud of human destiny. We are not here concerned with his faith in the sun behind that cloud; my purpose is only to insist that he ‘fronted’ it ‘fearlessly.’
4.
After quoting the lines from A Poet’s Epitaph, and Arnold’s lines on Wordsworth, I asked how the man described in them ever came to write the Ode on Immortality, or Yew-trees, or why he should say,