and conversed with enough of eminent and splendidly cultivated minds; but I assure you, I have heard higher sentiments from the lips of poor uneducated men and women, when exerting the spirit of severe yet gentle heroism under difficulties and afflictions, or speaking their simple thoughts as to circumstances in the lot of friends and neighbours, than I ever yet met with out of the pages of the Bible.  We shall never learn to respect our real calling and destiny, unless we have taught ourselves to consider everything as moonshine compared with the education of the heart.”  This admirable deliverance of Scott’s is, so far as it goes, eminently Wordsworthian; but Wordsworth went higher and further, striving not only to move the sympathies of the heart, but to enlarge the understanding, and exalt and widen the spiritual vision, all with the aim of leading us towards firmer and austerer self-control.

Certain favourers of Wordsworth answer our question with a triumphant affirmative, on the strength of some ethical, or metaphysical, or theological system which they believe themselves to find in him.  But is it credible that poets can permanently live by systems?  Or is not system, whether ethical, theological, or philosophical, the heavy lead of poetry?  Lucretius is indisputably one of the mighty poets of the world, but Epicureanism is not the soul of that majestic muse.  So with Wordsworth.  Thought is, on the whole, predominant over feeling in his verse, but a prevailing atmosphere of deep and solemn reflection does not make a system.  His theology and his ethics, and his so-called Platonical metaphysics, have as little to do with the power of his poetry over us, as the imputed Arianism or any other aspect of the theology of Paradise Lost has to do with the strength and the sublimity of Milton, and his claim to a high perpetual place in the hearts of men.  It is best to be entirely sceptical as to the existence of system and ordered philosophy in Wordsworth.  When he tells us that “one impulse from a vernal wood may teach you more of man, of moral evil and of good, than all the sages can,” such a proposition cannot be seriously taken as more than a half-playful sally for the benefit of some too bookish friend.  No impulse from a vernal wood can teach us anything at all of moral evil and of good.  When he says that it is his faith, “that every flower enjoys the air it breathes,” and that when the budding twigs spread out their fan to catch the air, he is compelled to think “that there was pleasure there,” he expresses a charming poetic fancy and no more, and it is idle to pretend to see in it the fountain of a system of philosophy.  In the famous Ode on Intimations of Immortality, the poet doubtless does point to a set of philosophic ideas, more or less complete; but the thought from which he sets out, that our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting, and that we are less and less able to perceive the visionary gleam, less and less alive