to the glory and the dream of external nature, as infancy recedes further from us, is, with all respect for the declaration of Mr. Ruskin to the contrary, contrary to notorious fact, experience, and truth.  It is a beggarly conception, no doubt, to judge as if poetry should always be capable of a prose rendering; but it is at least fatal to the philosophic pretension of a line or a stanza if, when it is fairly reduced to prose, the prose discloses that it is nonsense, and there is at least one stanza of the great Ode that this doom would assuredly await.  Wordsworth’s claim, his special gift, his lasting contribution, lies in the extraordinary strenuousness, sincerity, and insight with which he first idealises and glorifies the vast universe around us, and then makes of it, not a theatre on which men play their parts, but an animate presence, intermingling with our works, pouring its companionable spirit about us, and “breathing grandeur upon the very humblest face of human life.”  This twofold and conjoint performance, consciously and expressly—­perhaps only too consciously—­undertaken by a man of strong inborn sensibility to natural impressions, and systematically carried out in a lifetime of brooding meditation and active composition, is Wordsworth’s distinguishing title to fame and gratitude.  In “words that speak of nothing more than what we are,” he revealed new faces of nature; he dwelt on men as they are, men themselves; he strove to do that which has been declared to be the true secret of force in art, to make the trivial serve the expression of the sublime.  “Wordsworth’s distinctive work,” Mr. Ruskin has justly said (Modern Painters, iii. 293), “was a war with pomp and pretence, and a display of the majesty of simple feelings and humble hearts, together with high reflective truth in his analysis of the courses of politics and ways of men; without these, his love of nature would have been comparatively worthless.”

Yet let us not forget that he possessed the gift which to an artist is the very root of the matter.  He saw Nature truly, he saw her as she is, and with his own eyes.  The critic whom I have just quoted boldly pronounces him “the keenest eyed of all modern poets for what is deep and essential in nature.”  When he describes the daisy, casting the beauty of its star-shaped shadow on the smooth stone, or the boundless depth of the abysses of the sky, or the clouds made vivid as fire by the rays of light, every touch is true, not the copying of a literary phrase, but the result of direct observation.

It is true that Nature has sides to which Wordsworth was not energetically alive—­Nature “red in tooth and claw.”  He was not energetically alive to the blind and remorseless cruelties of life and the world.  When in early spring he heard the blended notes of the birds, and saw the budding twigs and primrose tufts, it grieved him, amid such fair works of nature, to think “what man has made of man.”  As if nature itself, excluding