The death of this eminent poet, after an honorable and useful life, prolonged to eighty years, will doubtless provoke a new conflict of opinions regarding the nature and influence of his great and peculiar mind. The universal feeling among all lovers of what is deep, and delicate, and genuine in poetry, must be—
“That there has passed away a glory from the earth;”
and not until literature receives an original impulse from a nature equally profound and powerful, will it be called upon to mourn such a departure “from the sunshine into the Silent Land.” His death was worthy of an earthly career consecrated by devout and beautiful meditations to a life beyond life—his soul, so long the serene guest of his mortal frame, meekly withdrawing itself at the end to a world not unfamiliar to his raised vision here.
We confess, at the outset, to an admiration for Wordsworth’s genius bordering on veneration, but we trust that we can speak of it without substituting hyperbole for analysis, without burying the essential facts of his mental constitution under a load of panegyric. It appears to us that these facts alone convict his depreciating critics of malice or ignorance; that the kind of criticism to which he was originally subjected, and which even now occasionally reappears with something of the sting of its old flippancy, is essentially superficial and untenable, failing to cover the ground it pretends to occupy, and disguising nonsense under a garb of shrewdness and discrimination. The opinion of a man of ability on subjects which he understands, and on objects he really discerns, is entitled to respect, and we do not deny that Jeffrey’s opinions on many important matters are sound and valuable; but, in relation to Wordsworth, whom he perversely misunderstood, he appears presumptuously incompetent and undiscerning throughout his much vaunted criticisms; in every case missing the peculiarities which constituted Wordsworth’s originality, and satirizing himself in almost every sarcasm he launched at the poet. The usual defense set up for such a critic is, that he judges by the rules of common sense; but every poet who deserves the name is to be judged by the common sense of the creative imagination, not by the common sense of the practical understanding; and thus judged, thus removed from the jurisdiction of the mere police of letters, we imagine that Wordsworth will readily assume his place as the greatest of English poets since Milton.
In claiming for him a position in that line of English poets which contains no other names than those of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton, we imply that he is not only great as an individual writer, but that he is the head and founder of a new school of poets; that he is the point from which the future historian of English letters will consider the poetry of the age; that he introduced into English literature new elements, whose inspiration has not yet spent itself, but continues to influence almost every poet of the day; that
“Thither, as to their fountain, other stars
Repairing, in their golden urns draw light.”
This fact can be chronologically proved. In the “Lines on Revisiting Tintern Abbey,” written as far back as 1798, and in which we have the key-note of Wordsworth’s whole system of viewing nature and man, we perceive not only a new element of thought added to English poetry, but an element which appears afterward in Shelley and Byron—modified, of course, by their individuality—and still appears, with decreasing force, in Tennyson and Browning. Plato and Lord Bacon are not more decidedly originators of new scientific methods than Wordsworth is the originator of a new poetical method. Even if we dislike him, and neglect his poetry, we cannot emancipate ourselves from his influence, as long as we are thrilled by the most magnificent and etherial passages in Shelley and Byron. We may be offended at the man, but we cannot escape from his method, unless our reading of the poets stops with Goldsmith and Cowper.
The vital poems of Wordsworth—those which are really inspired with his spirit and life, and not mere accretions attached to his works—form a complete whole, pervaded by one living soul, and, amid all their variety of subject, related to one leading idea—the marriage of the soul of man to the external universe, whose “spousal hymn” the poet chants. They constitute together the spiritual body of his mind, exhibiting it as it grew into beautiful and melodious form through thirty years of intense contemplation. To a person who has studied his works with sufficient care to obtain a conception of the author’s personality, every little lyric is alive with his spirit, and is organically connected with the long narrative and didactive poems. This body of verse is, we think, a new creation in literature, differing from others not only in degree but in kind—an organism, having its own interior laws, growing from one central principle, and differing from Spenser and Milton as a swan does from an eagle, or a rose from a lily.
We need hardly say that the central power and principle of this organic body of verse is Wordsworth himself. He is at its heart and circumference, and through all its veins and arteries, as the vivifying and organizing force—coloring every thing with his peculiar individuality, representing man and nature through the medium of his own original and originating genius, and creating, as it were, a new world of forms and beings, idealized from hints given by the actual appearances of things. This world is not so various as that of Shakspeare or Scott, nor so supernatural as that of Milton, but it is still Wordsworth’s world, a world conceived by himself, and in which he lived and moved and had his being. A true criticism of his works, therefore, would be a biography of his mind, exhibiting the vital processes of its growth, and indicating the necessary connection between its gradual interior development and the imaginative forms in which it was expressed. This we cannot pretend to do, having neither the insight nor the materials for such a task, and we shall be content with attempting a faint outline of his mental character, with especial reference to those qualities which dwelt near the heart of his being, and which seem to have been woven into the texture of his mind at birth.