WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE, SOUTHEY, The Poet of Healing 66 I FIRMLY believe that the poetical performance of Wordsworth is, after that of Shakespeare and Milton, of which all the world now recognises the worth, undoubtedly the most considerable in our language from the Elizabethan age to the present time." Thus wrote Matthew Arnold more than forty years ago, and thus, we may be sure, he would write were he alive to-day. But more memorable, because more explicit, is his tribute in "Memorial Verses," written in 1850 under the emotion he felt at Wordsworth's death: When, thirty years later, Arnold made his "Selections" from Wordsworth's poetry, and prefaced them with a critical essay, he remarked that since the year 1842 Tennyson had drawn the poetry-reading public from Wordsworth, and that it was still permitted to tenth-rate critics and compilers to speak of Wordsworth's poetry with ignorance, even with impertinence. He perceived that its abundance, and the inferiority of two-thirds of it to his best, had lowered the fame of a poet who will be ranked, in the end, above Spenser, Dryden, Pope, Cowper, Burns, Shelley, and Keats. But as this hour had not come it seemed to Arnold that it would be good to give the public only the best work of Wordsworth in his "Selections." This he did. His The "Selections" is still the best introduction to a poet whom many people read with difficulty or tedium because they do not read his poems as they are written—broodingly. They want quick results, immediate thrills, and tunes which they can easily remember. Wordsworth cannot be known thus. poetry represents sixty years of meditation and communion with Nature and Human Nature. He has to be approached along his own paths, and through moods and ways of thought akin to his own. He is difficult to read "at sight," but, read with insight, he is supreme in his sphere. John Morley, writing in 1888, said of Wordsworth: By his secret of bringing the infinite into common life, as he evokes it out of common life, he has the skill to lead us, so long as we yield ourselves to his influence, with inner moods of settled peace, to touch "the depth and not the tumult of the soul," to give us quietness, strength, steadfastness, and purpose, whether to do or to endure. William Wordsworth died in 1850 as Poet Laureate under Queen Victoria. This fact has long kept alive in the public mind a certain illusion concerning his true period. For he lived to be eighty. He was born fourteen years before the death of |