all the benefit which it was empowered to bring. "A deep distress
hath humanized my soul,"--what lover of poetry does not know the
pathetic lines in which he bears witness to the teaching of sorrow?
Other griefs, too, he had--the loss of two children in 1812; his
sister's chronic illness, beginning in 1832; his daughter's death in
1847. All these he felt to the full; and yet, until his daughter's
death, which was more than his failing energies could bear, these
bereavements were but the thinly-scattered clouds "in a great sea of
blue"--seasons of mourning here and there among years which never
lost their hold on peace; which knew no shame and no remorse, no
desolation and no fear; whose days were never long with weariness,
nor their nights broken at the touch of woe. Even when we speak of
his tribulations, it is his happiness which rises in our minds.

And inasmuch as this felicity is the great fact of Wordsworth's life--
since his history is for the most part but the history of a halycon
calm--we find ourselves forced upon the question whether such a life
is to be held desirable or no. Happiness with honour was the ideal
of Solon; is it also ours? To the modern spirit,--to the Christian,
in whose ears counsels of perfection have left "a presence that is
not to be put by," this question, at which a Greek would have smiled,
is of no such easy solution.

To us, perhaps, in computing the fortune of any one whom we hold dear,
it may seem more needful to inquire not whether he has had enough of
joy, but whether he has had enough of sorrow; whether the blows of
circumstance have wholly shaped his character from the rock; whether
his soul has taken lustre and purity in the refiner's fire. Nor is
it only (as some might say) for violent and faulty natures that
sorrow is the best. It is true that by sorrow only can the