The veracity and the ideality which are so signally combined in Wordsworth’s poetic descriptions of nature made themselves, at least, as much felt whenever nature was the theme of his discourse. In his intense reverence for nature he regarded all poetical delineations of her with an exacting severity; and if the descriptions were not true, and true in a twofold sense, the more skilfully executed they were the more was his indignation roused by what he deemed a pretence and a deceit. An untrue description of nature was to him a profaneness, a heavenly message sophisticated and falsely delivered. He expatiated much to me one day, as we walked among the hills above Grasmere, on the mode in which nature had been described by one of the most justly popular of England’s modern poets—one for whom he preserved a high and affectionate respect. “He took pains,” Wordsworth said; “he went out with his pencil and note-book, and jotted down whatever struck him most—a river rippling over the sands, a ruined tower on a rock above it, a promontory, and a mountain ash waving its red berries. He went home, and wove the whole together into a poetical description.” After a pause Wordsworth resumed with a flashing eye and impassioned voice: “But nature does not permit an inventory to be made of her charms! He should have left his pencil and note-book at home; fixed his eye, as he walked, with a reverent attention on all that surrounded him, and taken all into a heart that could understand and enjoy. Then, after several days had passed by, he should have interrogated his memory as to the scene. He would have discovered that while much of what he had admired was preserved to him, much was also most wisely obliterated. That which remained—the picture surviving in his mind—would have presented the ideal and essential truth of the scene, and done so, in a large part, by discarding much which, though in itself striking, was not characteristic. In every scene many of the most brilliant details are but accidental. A true eye for nature does not note them, or at least does not dwell on them.” On the same occasion he remarked: “Scott misquoted in one of his novels my lines on Yarrow. He makes me write,

“‘The swans on sweet St. Mary’s lake

Float double, swans and shadow.’

but I wrote,

“‘The swan on still St. Mary’s lake.’

“Never could I have written ‘swans’ in the plural. The scene when I saw it, with its still and dim lake, under the dusky hills, was one of utter loneliness; there was one swan, and one only, stemming the water, and the pathetic loneliness of the region gave importance to the one companion of that swan—its own white image in the water. It was for that reason that I recorded the swan and the shadow. Had there been many swans and many shadows, they would have implied nothing as regards the character of the scene, and I should have said nothing about them.” He proceeded to remark that many who could descant with eloquence on nature cared little for her, and that many more who truly loved her had yet no eye to discern her—which he regarded as a sort of “spiritual discernment.” He continued: “Indeed, I have hardly ever known any one but myself who had a true eye for nature—one that thoroughly understood her meanings and her teachings—except” (here he interrupted himself) “one person. There was a young clergyman called Frederick Faber,[132] who resided at Ambleside. He had not only as good an eye for nature as I have, but even a better one, and sometimes pointed out to me on the mountains effects which, with all my great experience, I had never detected.”

Truth, he used to say—that is, truth in its largest sense, as a thing at once real and ideal, a truth including exact and accurate detail, and yet everywhere subordinating mere detail to the spirit of the whole,—this, he affirmed, was the soul and essence not only of descriptive poetry, but of all poetry. He had often, he told me, intended to write an essay on poetry, setting forth this principle, and illustrating it by references to the chief representatives of poetry in its various departments. It was this twofold truth which made Shakspere the greatest of all poets. “It was well for Shakspere,” he remarked, “that he gave himself to the drama. It was that which forced him to be sufficiently human. His poems would otherwise, from the extraordinarily metaphysical character of his genius, have been too recondite to be understood. His youthful poems, in spite of their unfortunate and unworthy subjects, and his sonnets also, reveal this tendency. Nothing can surpass the greatness of Shakspere where he is at his greatest; but it is wrong to speak of him as if even he were perfect. He had serious defects, and not those only proceeding from carelessness. For instance, in his delineations of character he does not assign as large a place to religious sentiment as enters into the constitution of human nature under normal circumstances. If his dramas had more religion in them, they would be truer representations of man, as well as more elevated and of a more searching interest.” Wordsworth used to warn young poets against writing poetry remote from human interest. Dante he admitted to be an exception; but he considered that Shelley, and almost all others who had endeavored to outsoar the humanities, had suffered deplorably from the attempt. I once heard him say: “I have often been asked for advice by young poets. All the advice I can give may be expressed in two counsels. First, let nature be your habitual and pleasurable study—human nature and material nature; secondly, study carefully those first-class poets whose fame is universal, not local, and learn from them; learn from them especially how to observe and how to interpret nature.”

Those who knew Wordsworth only from his poetry might have supposed that he dwelt ever in a region too serene to admit of human agitations. This was not the fact. There was in his being a region of tumult as well a higher region of calm, though it was almost wholly in the latter that his poetry lived. It turned aside from mere personal excitements; and for that reason, doubtless, it developed more deeply those special ardors which belong at once to the higher imagination and to the moral being. The passion which was suppressed elsewhere burned in his “Sonnets to Liberty,” and added a deeper sadness to the “Yew-trees of Borrowdale.” But his heart, as well as his imagination, was ardent. When it spoke most powerfully in his poetry, it spoke with a stern brevity unusual in that poetry, as in the poem, “There is a change, and I am poor,” and the still more remarkable one, “A slumber did my spirit seal”—a poem impassioned beyond the comprehension of those who fancy that Wordsworth lacks passion, merely because in him passion is neither declamatory nor, latently, sensual. He was a man of strong affections—strong enough on one sorrowful occasion to withdraw him for a time from poetry.[133] Referring once to two young children of his who had died about forty years previously, he described the details of their illnesses with an exactness and an impetuosity of troubled excitement such as might have been expected if the bereavement had taken place but a few weeks before. The lapse of time appeared to have left the sorrow submerged indeed, but still in all its first freshness. Yet I afterwards heard that at the time of the illness, at least in the case of one of the two children, it was impossible to rouse his attention to the danger. He chanced to be then under the immediate spell of one of those fits of poetic inspiration which descended on him like a cloud. Till the cloud had drifted he could see nothing beyond. Under the level of the calm there was, however, the precinct of the storm. It expressed itself rarely but vehemently, partaking sometimes of the character both of indignation and sorrow. All at once the trouble would pass away and his countenance bask in its habitual calm, like a cloudless summer sky. His indignation flamed out vehemently when he heard of a base action. “I could kick such a man across England with my naked foot,” I heard him exclaim on such an occasion. The more impassioned part of his nature connected itself especially with his political feelings. He regarded his own intellect as one which united some of the faculties which belong to the statesman with those which belong to the poet; and public affairs interested him not less deeply than poetry. It was as patriot, not poet, that he ventured to claim fellowship with Dante.[134] He did not accept the term “reformer,” because it implied an organic change in our institutions, and this he deemed both needless and dangerous; but he used to say that, while he was a decided conservative, he remembered that to preserve our institutions we must be ever improving them. He was, indeed, from first to last, pre-eminently a patriot—an impassioned as well as a thoughtful one. Yet his political sympathies were not with his own country only, but with the progress of humanity. Till disenchanted by the excesses and follies of the first French Revolution, his hopes and sympathies associated themselves ardently with the new order of things created by it; and I have heard him say that he did not know how any generous-minded young man, entering on life at the time of that great uprising, could have escaped the illusion. To the end his sympathies were ever with the cottage hearth far more than with the palace. If he became a strong supporter of what has been called “the hierarchy of society,” it was chiefly because he believed the principle of “equality” to be fatal to the well-being and the true dignity of the poor. Moreover, in siding politically with the crown and the coronets, he considered himself to be siding with the weaker party in our democratic days.

The absence of love-poetry in Wordsworth’s works has often been remarked upon, and indeed brought as a charge against them. He once told me that if he had avoided that form of composition, it was by no means because the theme did not interest him, but because, treated as it commonly has been, it tends rather to disturb and lower the reader’s moral and imaginative being than to elevate it. He feared to handle it amiss. He seemed to think that the subject had been so long vulgarized that few poets had a right to assume that they could treat it worthily, especially as the theme, when treated unworthily, was such an easy and cheap way of winning applause. It has been observed also that the religion of Wordsworth’s poetry, at least of his earlier poetry, is not as distinctly “revealed religion” as might have been expected from this poet’s well-known adherence to what he has called emphatically “The lord, and mighty paramount of truths.” He once remarked to me himself on this circumstance, and explained it by stating that when in youth his imagination was shaping for itself the channel in which it was to flow, his religious convictions were less definite and less strong than they had become on more mature thought; and that, when his poetic mind and manner had once been formed, he feared that he might, in attempting to modify them, have become constrained. He added that on such matters he ever wrote with great diffidence, remembering that if there were many subjects too low for song, there were some too high. Wordsworth’s general confidence in his own powers, which was strong, though far from exaggerated, rendered more striking and more touching his humility in all that concerned religion. It used to remind me of what I once heard Mr. Rogers say, viz.: “There is a special character of greatness about humility; for it implies that a man can, in an unusual degree, estimate the greatness of what is above us.” Fortunately, his diffidence did not keep Wordsworth silent on sacred themes. His later poems include an unequivocal as well as beautiful confession of Christian faith; and one of them, “The Primrose of the Rock,” is as distinctly Wordsworthian in its inspiration as it is Christian in its doctrine. Wordsworth was a “High-Churchman,” and also, in his prose mind, strongly anti-Roman Catholic, partly on political grounds; but that it was otherwise as regards his mind poetic is obvious from many passages in his Christian poetry, especially those which refer to the monastic system and the Schoolmen, and his sonnet on the Blessed Virgin, whom he addresses as

“Our tainted nature’s solitary boast.”