headstrong and presumptuous spirit be shamed into gentleness and
solemnized into humility. But sorrow is used also by the Power above
as in cases where we men would have shrunk in horror from so rough a
touch. Natures that were already of a heroic unselfishness, of a
childlike purity, have been raised ere now by anguish upon anguish,
woe after woe, to a height of holiness which we may believe that they
could have reached by no other road. Why should it not be so I since
there is no limit to the soul's possible elevation, why should her
purifying trials have any assignable end? She is of a metal which
can grow for ever brighter in the fiercening flame. And if, then, we
would still pronounce the true Beatitudes not on the rejoicing, the
satisfied, the highly-honoured, but after an ancient and sterner
pattern, what account are we to give of Wordsworth's long years of
blissful calm?

In the first place, we may say that his happiness was as wholly free
from vulgar or transitory elements as a man's can be. It lay in a
life which most men would have found austere and blank indeed; a
life from which not Croesus only, but Solon would have turned in
scorn, a life of poverty and retirement, of long apparent failure,
and honour that came tardily at the close; it was a happiness
nourished on no sacrifice of other men, on no eager appropriation of
the goods of earth, but springing from, a single eye and a loving
spirit, and wrought from those primary emotions which are the
innocent birthright of all. And if it be answered that however truly
philosophic, however sacredly pure, his happiness may have been, yet
its wisdom and its holiness were without an effort, and, that it is
effort which makes the philosopher and the saint: then we must use
in answer his own Platonic scheme of things, to express a thought
which we can but dimly apprehend; and we must say that though