ridiculous or profane, since it is absurd to pride oneself on a deficiency, and irreverent to believe that the universe is so odiously contrived that those who suffer are more worthy on that account than those who dwell in comfort. If happiness is identical with truth and goodness, man's first business is to acquire it, or to develop it within himself; for whatever of mystery may attach to the origin of the feelings of man, they are all, doubtless, capable of cultivation. Neither joy nor sorrow exists unalloyed in any man; the classification of men into the happy and the unhappy is merely a misleading_exaggeration due to the necessities of language. Each individual soul is no essence of pure joy or unmingled sadness, but an assemblage, as it were, of feelings, in which those of joy and those of sadness are in changing equilibrium, and the individual is happy or unhappy according as the majority is with the one class or with the other. Between the two is a throng of indeterminate feelings (including almost every emotion inspired by nature), which is subject to the direction. of the will, and inclines to happiness or to sorrow according to the influence exerted by volition. On the behaviour of these neutral feelings hangs the fate of the soul, and to enlist this wavering mass on the side of happiness is, in Wordsworth's view, the duty of the presiding will. Observe that if at times he seems to employ artful methods of persuasion, or to repel these feelings by the iteration of his appeals, he has at least the excuse of aiming at the health of the mind. Others during the same period, were employing spells of a contrary nature to propagate and promote the triumph of disease. The whole age, to tell the truth, witnessed an almost uninterrupted succession of wonderfully ingenious efforts to lead men to despair, efforts which would pass our comprehension did we not know that with many this despair was but a disguised yet exquisite form of intoxication, more coveted than health. Among numerous instances which present themselves, it will be sufficient if we take the case of one of the greatest among Wordsworth's contemporaries, who was chiefly responsible for the spread of melancholy in France at the very time when Wordsworth was striving to withstand it in England. Is it beside the truth to say that in an epitome of life, such as Chateaubriand's René, by an intentional and artful abstraction from the various component elements of existence, those of a gloomy tendency are carefully selected to the exclusion of others? What is it but a marvellous endeavour to extract the essence of melancholy from objects; a process whereby that essence is rendered a hundred times more powerful to blight and canker, through being isolated instead of diffused and blended as it is in reality? Collecting and condensing all our thoughts of sorrow and fatality, it mingles them in one bitter draught. It is inevitable that, however sincere and real in its origin, all grief thus dealt with should be artificially rendered more absolute and distinct, that its form should become stronger and darker in outline. For the purposes of art, neutral and insignificant actions, and sensations in themselves neither pleasurable nor painful, are in René artistically made to contribute to the general effect of melancholy. Nature is represented by its sombre features alone. What we are allowed to see is "the wandering cloud, and the rain pattering among the foliage, autumn's sullen moan and the rustle of withered leaves"; or, elsewhere, the crater of "Etna with its burning depths seen in glimpses between gusts of lurid vapour." Two mournful impressions contain an epitome of the entire human race: "Past and Present are a pair of incomplete statues: one, all mutilated, unearthed from the wreck of ages; the other still lacking its future perfection." The only recollection left after a survey of a great city, with its intense life and mighty forces of activity, is that of the careless indifference of some stonemasons lounging at the foot of the statue of Charles I., or whistling as they trim their stones, ignorant of the monument's very name. After 1798 Words worth would certainly have considered it morally wrong to draw his reader's attention to a subject so gloomy and so destitute of any ray of comfort. It is true that he had himself written narratives of un relieved sorrow or distress. Yet observe how he now Too beautiful, too precious a work to be sacrificed, it cannot be published without being first disguised by extenuating and tranquillizing reflections. The poet almost for having dwelt so long on a subject which can yield passes censure upon himself nothing but sorrow. In the midst of the narrative, the pedlar who recounts it becomes ashamed of his tears, and pauses abruptly to ask Why should we thus with an untoward mind, From natural wisdom turn our hearts away; Not without regret, not without a kind of remorse, does he yield to the entreaties of his listener and resume his story. And at its conclusion, seeing his friend give way to "the impotence of grief," he feels it his duty to stem the emotion he has aroused; he would leave a more serene impression on the mind he has disturbed. Making Nature his ally, and pointing to the sad and desolate garden, with its air of mourning for those who once tended it, he says: My Friend! enough to sorrow you have given, She sleeps in the calm earth, and peace is here. I well remember that those very plumes, Those weeds, and the high spear-grass on that wall, As once I passed, did to my heart So still an image of tranquillity, convey So calm and still, and looked so beautiful Amid the uneasy thoughts which filled my mind, That what we feel of sorrow and despair From ruin and from change, and all the grief The passing shows of Being leave behind, 1 He began to alter it towards the end of December 1801. (Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal.) Appeared an idle dream, that could not live Anxious, therefore, to make the most of the power of resistance to despondency, both in himself and in others, and believing that a wilful persistence in melancholy exhausts the springs of man's vitality, Wordsworth henceforth always cuts short a narrative at any point beyond which it can only call forth the listener's tears, or else summons every form of consolation known to him in order to quench them. And if no purely human hope suggests itself whereby human suffering may be assuaged, he seeks in the external world some cheering token which may enable him once more to consolidate within his own heart and the hearts of all men the shaken foundations of happiness. So frequently is he impelled, by the constant recurrence of causes for sorrow, thus to seek encouragement, that finally he enlists the whole of nature in the service of optimism. Whatever the thoughts which engage his attention, it is his first object, and his last, to derive from them all the enjoyment they can yield. And in his choice of enjoyments he is guided only by the varying, but always lofty, needs of his being. For the present Nature suffices him, and will continue to do so throughout the most poetical years of his life. When with sorrowful eyes he watches the fading of the splendours which have so long decked the world around him, he will turn to the moral pleasures of duty; when, in the evening of life, "the fair smile which Duty wears upon its face" in its turn grows dimwhen, beneath the footsteps of Duty, flowers bloom no longer and cease to shed their perfume-he will turn to religion for its consolation and its hope. And though, when that time comes, the poet in him will but rarely appear, as a man he will be ever the same, steadfastly setting his face towards whatever may give him cause to restrain a sigh or to express thanksgiving. 1 The Excursion, i., earliest text (1814). In 1845 Wordsworth introduced into this passage Christian sentiments which have completely transformed it. 2 Observe for instance the abrupt ending of the admirable pastoral Michael, "There is a comfort in the strength of love." 3 Ode to Duty (1805). Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1821). CHAPTER II Wordsworth's Relation to Science I Is it at the cost of truth that the poet has won back his happiness? To realize his dream of becoming the poet of optimism, will it be necessary for him to dwell in a world of illusion, and thus to sacrifice the pursuit of the true? Such is not Wordsworth's opinion. His soul is too sincere to be happy under the suspicion that he owes his happiness to a deception. His conviction, scarcely ever shaken, that in discerning harmony he is also discerning truth, is the distinguishing characteristic of his work and of his life. His cheerfulness returned, he says, simultaneously with his return to nature; in other words, his trust was restored on the day when he forsook the premature abstraction which builds its theories of the universe and of the soul of man on insufficient and unsubstantial grounds, and placed himself once more in direct contact with facts: multiplying his slender stock of observations tenfold, and demanding of his sensations and feelings immediate and positive data with regard to questions which he had once thought to solve by the mere operation of his intellectual faculties unprovided with matter. He became an optimist on the day when he perceived reality. If, after its indescribable wave of enthusiasm, the generation to which he belongs is overshadowed by a cloud of discouragement, the evil arises from the ignorance and presumption of the philosophers and false professors who have been its guides; who have supposed themselves acquainted with the whole of nature after brief glimpses of some of its aspects, and have imagined themselves familiar with the whole of man as soon as they have distinguished two or three faculties of that human soul "of a thousand |