He died at eighty, and general fame did not come to him till about fifteen years before his death. This perhaps might have been fifteen years too soon, if he had set any inordinate value on it. But it was not so. Shelley tells us that' Fame is love disguised;' and it was intellectual sympathy that Wordsworth had always valued far more than reputation. 'Give me thy love; I claim no other fee,' had been his demand on his reader. When Fame had laid her tardy garland at his feet he found on it no fresher green than his 'Rydalian laurels' had always worn. Once he said to me, 'It is indeed a deep satisfaction to hope and believe that my poetry will be, while it lasts, a help to the cause of virtue and truth—especially among the young. As for myself, it seems now of little moment how long I may be remembered. When a man pushes off in his little boat into the great seas of Infinity and Eternity, it surely signifies little how long he is kept in sight by watchers from the shore.'
Such are my chief recollections of the great poet, whom I knew but in his old age, but whose heart retained its youth till his daughter Dora's death. He seemed to me one who from boyhood had been faithful to a high vocation; one who had esteemed it his office to minister, in an age of conventional civilisation, at Nature's altar, and who had in his later life explained and vindicated such life-long ministration, even while he seemed to apologise for it, in the memorable confession,
'But who is innocent? By grace divine,
Not otherwise, O Nature, are we thine.'[272]
It was to Nature as first created, not to Nature as corrupted by 'disnatured' passions, that his song had attributed such high and healing powers. In singing her praise he had chosen a theme loftier than most of his readers knew—loftier, as he perhaps eventually discovered, than he had at first supposed it to be. Utterly without Shakspeare's dramatic faculty, he was richer and wider in the humanities than any poet since Shakspeare. Wholly unlike Milton in character and in opinions, he abounds in passages to be paralleled only by Milton in solemn and spiritual sublimity, and not even by Milton in pathos. It was plain to those who knew Wordsworth that he had kept his great gift pure, and used it honestly and thoroughly for that purpose for which it had been bestowed. He had ever written with a conscientious reverence for that gift; but he had also written spontaneously. He had composed with care—not the exaggerated solicitude which is prompted by vanity, and which frets itself to unite incompatible excellences; but the diligence which shrinks from no toil while eradicating blemishes that confuse a poem's meaning, and frustrate its purpose. He regarded poetry as an art; but he also regarded Art not as the compeer of Nature, much less her superior, but as her servant and interpreter. He wrote poetry likewise, no doubt, in a large measure, because self-utterance was an essential law of his nature. If he had a companion, he discoursed like one whose thoughts must needs run on in audible current; if he walked alone among his mountains, he murmured old songs. He was like a pine grove, vocal as well as visible. But to poetry he had dedicated himself as to the utterance of the highest truths brought within the range of his life's experience; and if his poetry has been accused of egotism, the charge has come from those who did not perceive that it was with a human, not a mere personal interest that he habitually watched the processes of his own mind. He drew from the fountain that was nearest at hand what he hoped might be a refreshment to those far off. He once said, speaking of a departed man of genius, who had lived an unhappy life and deplorably abused his powers, to the lasting calamity of his country, 'A great poet must be a great man; and a great man must be a good man; and a good man ought to be a happy man.' To know Wordsworth was to feel sure that if he had been a great poet, it was not merely because he had been endowed with a great imagination, but because he had been a good man, a great man, and a man whose poetry had, in an especial sense, been the expression of a healthily happy moral being.
AUBREY DE VERE.
Curragh Chase, March 31, 1875.
P.S. Wordsworth was by no means without humour. When the Queen on one occasion gave a masked ball, some one said that a certain youthful poet, who has since reached a deservedly high place both in the literary and political world, but who was then known chiefly as an accomplished and amusing young man of society, was to attend it dressed in the character of the father of English poetry, grave old Chaucer. 'What,' said Wordsworth, 'M. go as Chaucer! Then it only remains for me to go as M.!'
PART II.
SONNET—RYDAL WITH WORDSWORTH.