Be his the natural silence of old age!”
Though we have quoted Wordsworth's poetry, it is not as a poet but as a man that we speak of him here, not desiring to criticise his verse or to enter into discussions concerning the judgment given of it by critics of his own time. In the Lake Country his personality strikes you with the same sense of reality and continued presence as do the everlasting hills and the changeless lakes themselves. He died only a quarter of a century ago, though his principal poems all belonged to the first and second decades of this century. In 1814 The Excursion was published, and the poem which has made his chief fame was so severely criticised at the time that one of the reviewers boasted that he had crushed it. A brother poet, Southey, exclaimed: “He crush The Excursion! He might as well fancy he could crush Skiddaw!” If his verse was coldly received at first, it was chiefly because emotional, passionate poetry, such as Byron's, Moore's, Scott's, and Campbell's, was the fashion then. [pg 802] Wordsworth's was calm as nature herself, and concerned itself little with man's history, past or present. When he did mingle the deeds of men with the loving touches of his scenery descriptions, he would choose pure, white lives, such as would not jar with the calmness of lake and fell, of opal sky and shimmering water. Here is what the legend of the ruined hermitage on S. Herbert's Island, on Lake Derwentwater, suggested to him. The story of the holy friends is told also in Montalembert's Monks of the West.
“This island, guarded from profane approach
By mountains high and waters widely spread,
Is that recess to which S. Herbert came
In life's decline, a self-secluded man,
After long exercise in social cares
And offices humane, intent t' adore
The Deity with undistracted mind,
And meditate on everlasting things.