Intimations of Immortality_, the poet doubtless does point to a set of
philosophic ideas, more or less complete; but the thought from which
he sets out, that our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting, and that
we are less and less able to perceive the visionary gleam, less and
less alive to the glory and the dream of external nature, as infancy
recedes further from us, is, with all respect for the declaration of
Mr. Ruskin to the contrary, contrary to notorious fact, experience,
and truth. It is a beggarly conception, no doubt, to judge as if
poetry should always be capable of a prose rendering; but it is at
least fatal to the philosophic pretension of a line or a stanza if,
when it is fairly reduced to prose, the prose discloses that it is
nonsense, and there is at least one stanza of the great _Ode_ that
this doom would assuredly await. Wordsworth's claim, his special gift,
his lasting contribution, lies in the extraordinary strenuousness,
sincerity, and insight with which he first idealises and glorifies the
vast universe around us, and then makes of it, not a theatre on which
men play their parts, but an animate presence, intermingling with
our works, pouring its companionable spirit about us, and "breathing
grandeur upon the very humblest face of human life." This twofold and
conjoint performance, consciously and expressly--perhaps only too
consciously--undertaken by a man of strong inborn sensibility to
natural impressions, and systematically carried out in a lifetime
of brooding meditation and active composition, is Wordsworth's
distinguishing title to fame and gratitude. In "words that speak of
nothing more than what we are," he revealed new faces of nature; he
dwelt on men as they are, men themselves; he strove to do that which
has been declared to be the true secret of force in art, to make the
trivial serve the expression of the sublime. "Wordsworth's distinctive
work," Mr. Ruskin has justly said (_Modern Painters_, iii. 293), "was
a war with pomp and pretence, and a display of the majesty of simple