Thy cradle decks;—to chant thy birth, thou hast
No meaner Poet than the whistling blast,
And desolation is thy Patron-Saint!—
She guards thee, ruthless Power! who would not spare
Those mighty forests, once the bison’s screen,
Where stalked the huge deer to his shaggy lair
Through paths and alleys roofed with sombre green;
Thousands of years before the silent air
Was pierced by whizzing shaft of hunter keen!
The first two lines of the second of these sonnets furnish an instance of the prime defect in Wordsworth’s philosophy and poetry, namely, his affected (for it cannot be real), contempt for, and his perpetually recurring sneer at, what he here calls sordid industry. I say this contempt cannot be real, because Wordsworth, though a great Poet, possesses quite an average share of ordinary unpoetical prudence and discernment, and though in earnest, no doubt, in his worship of “unprofaned nature” holds in due appreciation those commonplace comforts of civilized life, which, without the aid of the sordid industry, would scarcely be attainable. Moreover, to meet him on his own ground, this wild locality is by no means very “remote from every taint of sordid industry”—these hills are devoted to sheep farming, and though I am far from stigmatizing stock farmers as being more sordid than other classes, yet is their ordinary employment as essentially sordid in its nature, and as coarse, unromantic and disagreeable in its details, as any other common mode of money-making, notwithstanding all that has been said, or sung, to the contrary.