Three years after this sad loss, Wordsworth himself was summoned away. On Sunday, the 10th of March, 1850, he attended at Rydal chapel for the last time, visiting, during the day, a poor old woman, who had once been his servant, and another person who was sick, and as the poet said, “never complained.”
“On the afternoon of the following day, he went towards Grasmere, to meet his two nieces, who were coming from Town End. He called at the cottage near the White Moss Quarry, and the occupant being within, he sat down on the stone seat of the porch, to watch the setting sun. It was a cold, bright day. His friend and neighbour, Mr. Roughsedge, came to drink tea at Rydal, but Mr. Wordsworth not being well, went early to bed.”
From this time he gradually grew worse; and in order to convey to him the impressions of his physicians, Mrs. Wordsworth whispered in a soft voice, full of deep devotion, “Dear William, you are going to Dora.” How delicate, how affectionate, how poetical! But the poet did not hear, or did not seem to hear; and yet, twenty-four hours after, when one of his nieces came into the room, and gently drew aside the curtains of his bed, he caught a glimpse of her figure, and asked, “Is that Dora?”
On the 23rd of April—the birth-day, and death-day of Shakspeare, the great-hearted Wordsworth went back again to God.
He was buried on the 27th, in Grasmere church-yard.
Those who would know more of the poet must go to his writings; and, I may add, that the “Memoirs” of Dr. Wordsworth are indispensable to a full understanding both of the Poet and the Man. His letters, containing his most private thoughts, are printed there with plentiful profuseness; and the “Memoranda” respecting the origin of his poems are intensely interesting and important to all students of Wordsworth. The reminiscences of various persons who knew him, set the character of the poet before us in strong relief. All agree in speaking of him as a most kindly, affectionate, and hospitable man, living with the simple tastes and manners of a patriarch, in his beautiful home. My limits prevent me from entering into an analysis of his mind and character, as I had intended to do; I must reserve this work, therefore, for another occasion, and will conclude with a few quotations from the poet’s “Table-Talk,” respecting his cotemporaries.—Speaking of Goethe, he says:—
“He does not seem to me to be a great poet in either of the classes of poets. At the head of the first I would place Homer and Shakspeare, whose universal minds are able to reach every variety of thought and feeling, without bringing his own individuality before the reader. They infuse, they breathe life into every object they approach, but you cannot find themselves. At the head of the second class, those whom you can trace individually in all they write, I would place Spenser and Milton. In all that Spenser writes, you can trace the gentle, affectionate spirit of the man; in all that Milton writes, you find the exalted, sustained being that he was. Now, in what Goethe writes, who aims to be of the first class, the universal, you find the man himself, the artificial man, where he should not be found; so that I consider him a very artificial writer, aiming to be universal, and yet constantly exposing his individuality, which his character was not of a kind to dignify. He had not sufficiently clear moral perceptions to make him anything but an artificial writer.
And again:—
“I have tried to read Goethe. I never could succeed. Mr.—— refers me to his ‘Iphigenia,’ but I there recognise none of the dignified simplicity, none of the health and vigour which the heroes and heroines of antiquity possess in the writings of Homer. The lines of Lucretius describing the immolation of Iphigenia are worth the whole of Goethe’s long poem. Again there is a profligacy, an inhuman sensuality, in his works, which is utterly revolting. I am not intimately acquainted with them generally. But I take up my ground on the first canto of ‘Wilhelm Meister;’ and as the attorney-general of human nature, I there indict him for wantonly outraging the sympathies of humanity. Theologians tell us of the degraded nature of man; and they tell us what is true. Yet man is essentially a moral agent, and there is that immortal and unextinguishable yearning for something pure and spiritual which will plead against these poetical sensualists as long as man remains what he is.”
Of Scott he says:—