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 as 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 ardours 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.[270]
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.[271] 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, preëminently 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 vulgarised, 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.'
He used to say that the idea of one who was both Virgin and Mother had sunk so deep into the heart of Humanity, that there it must ever remain.
Wordsworth's estimate of his contemporaries was not generally high. I remember his once saying to me, 'I have known many that might he called very clever men, and a good many of real and vigorous abilities, but few of genius; and only one whom I should call "wonderful." That one was Coleridge. At any hour of the day or night he would talk by the hour, if there chanced to be any sympathetic listener, and talk better than the best page of his writings; for a pen half paralysed his genius. A child would sit quietly at his feet and wonder, till the torrent had passed by. The only man like Coleridge whom I have known is Sir William Hamilton, Astronomer Royal of Dublin.' I remember, however, that when I recited by his fireside Alfred Tennyson's two political poems, 'You ask me why, though ill at ease,' and 'Of old sat Freedom on the heights,' the old bard listened with a deepening attention, and when I had ended, said after a pause, 'I must acknowledge that those two poems are very solid and noble in thought. Their diction also seems singularly stately.' He was a great admirer of Philip van Artevelde. In the case of a certain poet since dead, and never popular, he said to me, 'I consider his sonnets to be the best of modern times;' adding, 'Of course I am not including my own in any comparison with those of others.' He was not sanguine as to the future of English poetry. He thought that there was much to be supplied in other departments of our literature, and especially he desired a really great History of England; but he was disposed to regard the roll of English poetry as made up, and as leaving place for little more except what was likely to be eccentric or imitational.
In his younger days Wordsworth had had to fight a great battle in poetry, for both his subjects and his mode of treating them were antagonistic to the maxims then current. It was fortunate for posterity, no doubt, that his long 'militant estate' was animated by some mingling of personal ambition with his love of poetry. Speaking in an early sonnet of
'The poets, who on earth have made us heirs
Of truth, and pure delight, by heavenly lays,'
he concludes,
'Oh! might my name be numbered among theirs,
Then gladly would I end my mortal days.'