The lowliest duties on herself did lay.”
This sonnet embraces within its “scanty plot of ground” the roots of Wordsworth’s strength. Here is his view of nature in the kinship between the lonely star and the solitary soul. Here is his recognition of life’s common way as the path of honour, and of the lowliest duties as the highest. Here is his message that manners and virtue must go before freedom and power. And here is the deep spring and motive of all his work, in the thought that joy, inward happiness, is the dower that has been lost and must be regained.
Here then I conclude this chapter on Wordsworth. There are other things that might well be said about him, indeed that would need to be said if this were intended for a complete estimate of his influence. I should wish to speak of the deep effect which his poetry has had upon the style of other poets, breaking the bondage of “poetic diction” and leading the way to a simpler and more natural utterance. I should need to touch upon his alleged betrayal of his early revolutionary principles in politics, and to show, (if a paradox may be pardoned), that he never had them and that he always kept them. He never forsook liberty; he only changed his conception of it. He saw that the reconstruction of society must be preceded by reconstruction of the individual. Browning’s stirring lyric, The Lost Leader,—
“Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a ribbon to stick in his coat,”—
may have been written with Wordsworth in mind, but it was a singularly infelicitous suggestion of a remarkably good poem.
All of these additions would be necessary if this estimate were intended to be complete. But it is not, and so let it stand.
If we were to choose a motto for Wordsworth’s poetry it might be this: “Rejoice, and again I say unto you, rejoice.” And if we looked farther for a watchword, we might take it from that other great poet, Isaiah, standing between the fierce radicals and sullen conservatives of Israel, and saying,
“In quietness and confidence shall be your strength,