That every day should leave some part
Free for a sabbath of the heart.
On the death of Southey, Wordsworth was appointed Poet Laureate. The latter years of his life were passed in undisturbed serenity, and he appears to have retained his faculties to the last. His old age, like his youth and mature manhood, illustrated the truth of his poetic teachings, and proves that poetry had taught him the true theory of life. One cannot contemplate him during the last ten years of his existence, without being forcibly impressed with his own doctrine regarding the lover of nature:
Thy thoughts and feelings shall not die,
Nor leave thee when old age is nigh
A melancholy slave;
But an old age serene and bright,
And lovely as a Lapland night,
Shall lead thee to thy grave.
The predominating characteristic of Wordsworth’s poetry is thoughtfulness, a thoughtfulness in which every faculty of his mind and every disposition of his heart meet and mingle; and the result is an atmosphere of thought, giving a softening charm to all the objects it surrounds and permeates. This atmosphere is sometimes sparklingly clear, as if the airs and dews and sunshine of a May morning had found a home in his imagination; but, in his philosophical poems, where he penetrates into a region of thought above the ken of ordinary mortals, this atmosphere is touched by an ideal radiance which slightly obscures as well as consecrates the objects seen through it, and occasionally it thickens into mystical obscurity. No person can thoroughly enjoy Wordsworth who does not feel the subtle spirit of this atmosphere of thought, as it communicates an air of freshness and originality even to the commonplaces of his thinking, and apparels his loftier conceptions in celestial light—