Personally, I became a member of the order of Wordsworthians in the historic year 1891, when Matthew Arnold's "Selections" were issued to the public at the price of half a crown. I suppose that Matthew Arnold and Sir Leslie Stephen were the two sanest Wordsworthians of us all. And Matthew Arnold put Wordsworth above all modern poets except Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Milton, and Molière. The test of a Wordsworthian is the ability to read with pleasure every line that the poet wrote. I regret to say that, strictly, Matthew Arnold was not a perfect Wordsworthian; he confessed, with manly sincerity, that he could not read "Vaudracour and Julia" with pleasure. This was a pity and Matthew Arnold's loss. For a strict Wordsworthian, while utterly conserving his reverence for the most poetic of poets, can discover a keen ecstasy in the perusal of the unconsciously funny lines which Wordsworth was constantly perpetrating. And I would back myself to win the first prize in any competition for Wordsworth's funniest line with a quotation from "Vaudracour and Julia." My prize-line would assuredly be:
Yea, his first word of greeting was,—
"All right....
It is true that the passage goes on:
Is gone from me....
But that does not impair the magnificent funniness.
From his tenderest years Wordsworth succeeded in combining the virtues of Milton and of Punch in a manner that no other poet has approached. Thus, at the age of eighteen, he could write:
Now while the solemn evening shadows sail,
On slowly-waving pinions, down the vale;
And fronting the bright west, yon oak entwines
Its darkening boughs....
Which really is rather splendid for a boy. And he could immediately follow that, speaking of a family of swans, with:
While tender cares and mild domestic loves
With furtive watch pursue her as she moves,
The female with a meeker charm succeeds....