[9] ‘’Tis past, that melancholy dream,’—so he describes his sojourn in Germany.
[10] Wordsworth’s Letter to Major-General Pasley (Prose Works, i.) contains an excellent statement both of his views on this duty and of his hostility to mere militarism.
[11] I am writing of the years of the Napoleonic War. Later, he lost courage, as he himself said. But it is not true that he ever ceased to sympathise with the cause of national independence in Europe.
[12] [This great line, as I am reminded, refers to the Welsh (Comus, 33); but it does not seem necessary to change the quotation.]
[13] In saying that what Wordsworth could not bear was torpor, of course I do not mean that he could bear faithlessness, ingratitude, cruelty, and the like. He had no tolerance for such things, either in his poetry or in his life. ‘I could kick such a man across England with my naked foot,’ the old poet burst forth when he heard of a base action. This reminds one of Browning, whose antinomian morality was not so very unlike Wordsworth’s. And neither poet would have found it difficult to include the worst vices under the head of torpor or ‘the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin.’
[14] The third quotation is from a speech by the Solitary (Excursion, vi.).
[15] The second half of this sentence, true of the Wordsworth of the Excursion, is perhaps not quite true of his earlier mind.
[16] This is just the opposite of the ‘wise passiveness’ of imaginative but unreflective feeling.
[17] Nature.
[18] I add here some notes which would have disturbed the lecture, but may be of use to the student of Wordsworth’s mind who cares to return to them.