“Then welcome fortitude, and patient cheer,
And frequent sights of what is to be borne;
Such sights, or worse, as are before me here;—
Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.”
That is manly and health-giving sorrow. It was his happiness, more than of most men, to use all that came to him for the end it was meant for. Early ideal influences from Nature, the first home affections, sorrows of mature manhood—none of them were lost. All melted into him, and did their part in educating his heart to a more feeling and tender wisdom. But they could not have done this, they could not have so deepened and purified him, had they not been received into a spirit based in firm faith on God, from whom all these things came, whose purpose for himself and others they subserved. This discipline of sorrow was increased when, a few years after the loss of his brother, he laid in Grasmere church-yard two infant children. Those trials of his home affections sank deep into him,—more and more humanized his spirit, and made him feel more distinctly the power of those Christian faiths which, though never denied by him, were present in his early poems rather as a latent atmosphere of sentiment than as expressed beliefs. It cannot be denied that in his pure, but perhaps too confident youth, the Naturalistic spirit, so to call it, is stronger in his poetry than the Christian. He expected more from the teaching of Nature, combined with the moral intuitions of his soul, than these in themselves, and unaided, can give. He did not enough see that man needs other supports than these for the trials he has to endure. This is not a matter of positive assertion or of positive denial,—rather of comparative emphasis and proportion. We may say that the Christian view of life and Nature does not at first receive the prominence which is its due. But under the pressure of sorrow, and the sense of his own weakness, he more and more turned to the Christian consolations. This change was a very gradual one, and he has left no direct record of it. Only it is perceptible here and there in his later poems, and, what is most to our purpose, it colors the eye with which he looked on Nature. This cannot, perhaps, better be illustrated than by comparing two poems composed in the same region at an interval of thirty years. In 1803, in his buoyant youth, during an evening walk by the shores of Loch Katrine, with his face toward a glowing sunset, he composed the exquisite lines “Stepping Westward,” in which the scene around him and a chance word addressed to him suggested
“The thought
Of traveling through the world that lay
Before me in my endless way.”
In the autumn of 1831, when he was in his sixty-second year, he again passed through the Trossachs, and this was the sentiment that then arose within him. It may, as he himself suggests, have been colored by the remembrance of his recent parting with Sir Walter Scott and the thought of his decay, but it is altogether in keeping with his own habitual mood at that time—
“There’s not a nook within this solemn Pass,