“While he forewarns, denounces, launches forth
  Against all systems built on abstract rights.”

The Church, as conceived by the spirit of Laud, and described by Hooker’s voice, was the great symbol of the union of high and stable institution with thought, faith, right living, and “sacred religion, mother of form and fear.”  As might be expected from such a point of view, the church pieces, to which Wordsworth gave so much thought, are, with few exceptions, such as the sonnet on Seathwaite Chapel, formal, hard, and very thinly enriched with spiritual graces or unction.  They are ecclesiastical, not religious.  In religious poetry, the Church of England finds her most affecting voice, not in Wordsworth, but in the Lyra Innocentium and the Christian Year.  Wordsworth abounds in the true devotional cast of mind, but less than anywhere else does it show in his properly ecclesiastical verse.

It was perhaps natural that when events no longer inspired him, Wordsworth should have turned with new feelings towards the classic, and discovered a virtue in classic form to which his own method had hitherto made him a little blind.  Towards the date of Waterloo, he read over again some of the Latin writers, in attempting to prepare his son for college.  He even at a later date set about a translation of the Aeneid of Virgil, but the one permanent result of the classic movement in his mind is Laodamia.  Earlier in life he had translated some books of Ariosto at the rate of a hundred lines a day, and he even attempted fifteen of the sonnets of Michael Angelo, but so much meaning is compressed into so little room in those pieces that he found the difficulty insurmountable.  He had a high opinion of the resources of the Italian language.  The poetry of Dante and of Michael Angelo, he said, proves that if there be little majesty and strength in Italian verse, the fault is in the authors and not in the tongue.

Our last glimpse of Wordsworth in the full and peculiar power of his genius is the Ode Composed on an evening of extraordinary splendour and beauty.  It is the one exception to the critical dictum that all his good work was done in the decade between 1798 and 1808.  He lived for more than thirty years after this fine composition.  But he added nothing more of value to the work that he had already done.  The public appreciation of it was very slow.  The most influential among the critics were for long hostile and contemptuous.  Never at any time did Wordsworth come near to such popularity as that of Scott or of Byron.  Nor was this all.  For many years most readers of poetry thought more even of Lalla Rookh than of the Excursion.  While Scott, Byron, and Moore were receiving thousands of pounds, Wordsworth received nothing.  Between 1830 and 1840 the current turned in Wordsworth’s direction, and when he received the honour of a doctor’s degree at the Oxford Commemoration in 1839, the Sheldonian