Supreme among the Elysian quire,
Is, for the dwellers upon earth,
Mute as a lark ere morning's birth,

and perceive that he who wrote them has entered--where no
commentator could conduct him--into the solemn pathos of Virgil's
_Musaeum ante omnis_--; where the singer whose very existence upon
earth has become a legend and a mythic name is seen keeping in the
underworld his old pre-eminence, and towering above the blessed dead.

This is a stage in Wordsworth's career on which his biographer is
tempted unduly to linger. For we have reached the Indian summer of
his genius; it can still shine at moments bright as ever, and with
even a new majesty and calm; but we feel, nevertheless, that the
melody is dying from his song; that he is hardening into
self-repetition, into rhetoric, into sermonizing common-place, and
is rigid where he was once profound. The _Thanksgiving Ode_ (1816)
strikes death to the heart. The accustomed patriotic sentiments--the
accustomed virtuous aspirations--these are still there; but the
accent is like that of a ghost who calls to us in hollow mimicry of a
voice that once we loved.

And yet Wordsworth's poetic life was not to close without a great
symbolical spectacle, a solemn farewell. Sunset among the Cumbrian
hills, often of remarkable beauty, once or twice, perhaps, in a
score of years, reaches a pitch of illusion and magnificence which
indeed seems nothing less than the commingling of earth and heaven.
Such a sight--seen from Rydal Mount in 1818--afforded once more the
needed stimulus, and evoked that "_Evening Ode, composed on an
evening of extraordinary splendour and beauty_," which is the last