physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn
what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater
evils of life shall have been removed. And I felt myself at once better
and happier as I came under their influence. There have certainly been,
even in our own age, greater poets than Wordsworth; but poetry of deeper
and loftier feeling could not have done for me at that time what his
did. I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent
happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this, not only
without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in the
common feelings and common destiny of human beings. And the delight
which these poems gave me, proved that with culture of this sort, there
was nothing to dread from the most confirmed habit of analysis. At the
conclusion of the Poems came the famous Ode, falsely called Platonic,
"Intimations of Immortality:" in which, along with more than his usual
sweetness of melody and rhythm, and along with the two passages of grand
imagery but bad philosophy so often quoted, I found that he too had had
similar experience to mine; that he also had felt that the first
freshness of youthful enjoyment of life was not lasting; but that he had
sought for compensation, and found it, in the way in which he was now
teaching me to find it. The result was that I gradually, but completely,
emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it.
I long continued to value Wordsworth less according to his intrinsic
merits, than by the measure of what he had done for me. Compared with
the greatest poets, he may be said to be the poet of unpoetical natures,
possessed of quiet and contemplative tastes. But unpoetical natures are
precisely those which require poetic cultivation. This cultivation
Wordsworth is much more fitted to give, than poets who are intrinsically
far more poets than he.

FOOTNOTES: