Hooker's voice, was the great symbol of the union of high and stable
institution with thought, faith, right living, and "sacred religion,
mother of form and fear." As might be expected from such a point of
view, the church pieces, to which Wordsworth gave so much thought,
are, with few exceptions, such as the sonnet on _Seathwaite Chapel_,
formal, hard, and very thinly enriched with spiritual graces or
unction. They are ecclesiastical, not religious. In religious
poetry, the Church of England finds her most affecting voice, not in
Wordsworth, but in the _Lyra Innocentium_ and the _Christian Year_.
Wordsworth abounds in the true devotional cast of mind, but less than
anywhere else does it show in his properly ecclesiastical verse.

It was perhaps natural that when events no longer inspired him,
Wordsworth should have turned with new feelings towards the classic,
and discovered a virtue in classic form to which his own method had
hitherto made him a little blind. Towards the date of Waterloo, he
read over again some of the Latin writers, in attempting to prepare
his son for college. He even at a later date set about a translation
of the _Aeneid_ of Virgil, but the one permanent result of the classic
movement in his mind is _Laodamia_. Earlier in life he had translated
some books of Ariosto at the rate of a hundred lines a day, and he
even attempted fifteen of the sonnets of Michael Angelo, but so much
meaning is compressed into so little room in those pieces that he
found the difficulty insurmountable. He had a high opinion of the
resources of the Italian language. The poetry of Dante and of Michael
Angelo, he said, proves that if there be little majesty and strength
in Italian verse, the fault is in the authors and not in the tongue.

Our last glimpse of Wordsworth in the full and peculiar power of his
genius is the Ode _Composed on an evening of extraordinary splendour