We are not called upon to place great men of his stamp as if they were collegians in a class-list.  It is best to take with thankfulness and admiration from each man what he has to give.  What Wordsworth does is to assuage, to reconcile, to fortify.  He has not Shakespeare’s richness and vast compass, nor Milton’s sublime and unflagging strength, nor Dante’s severe, vivid, ardent force of vision.  Probably he is too deficient in clear beauty of form and in concentrated power to be classed by the ages among these great giants.  We cannot be sure.  We may leave it to the ages to decide.  But Wordsworth, at any rate, by his secret of bringing the infinite into common life, as he evokes it out of common life, has the skill to lead us, so long as we yield ourselves to his influence, into 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.  All art or poetry that has the effect of breathing into men’s hearts, even if it be only for a space, these moods of settled peace, and strongly confirming their judgment and their will for good,—­whatever limitations may be found besides, however prosaic may be some or much of the detail,—­is great art and noble poetry, and the creator of it will always hold, as Wordsworth holds, a sovereign title to the reverence and gratitude of mankind.

APHORISMS.[1]

[Footnote 1:  An Address delivered before the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution, November 11, 1887.]

Since I accepted the honour of the invitation to deliver the opening address of your course, I have found no small difficulty in settling down on an appropriate subject.  I half wrote a discourse on modern democracy,—­how the rule of numbers is to be reconciled with the rule of sage judgment, and the passion for liberty and equality is to be reconciled with sovereign regard for law, authority, and order; and how our hopes for the future are to be linked to wise reverence for tradition and the past.  But your secretary had emphatically warned me off all politics, and I feared that however carefully I might be on my guard against every reference to the burning questions of the hour, yet the clever eyes of political charity would be sure to spy out party innuendoes in the most innocent deliverances of purely abstract philosophy.  Then for a day or two I lingered over a subject in a little personal incident.  One Saturday night last summer I found myself dining with an illustrious statesman on the Welsh border, and on the Monday following I was seated under the acacias by the shore of the Lake of Geneva, where Gibbon, a hundred years ago almost to the day, had, according to his own famous words, laid down his pen after writing the last lines of his last page, and there under a serene sky, with the silver orb of the moon reflected from the waters, and amid the silence of nature, felt his joy at the completion of