I come back to M. Renan’s praise of glory, from which I started.  Yes, real glory is a most serious thing, glory authenticated by the Amphictyonic Court[352] of final appeal, definite glory.  And even for poets and poetry, long and difficult as may be the process of arriving at the right award, the right award comes at last, the definitive glory rests where it is deserved.  Every establishment of such a real glory is good and wholesome for mankind at large, good and wholesome for the nation which produced the poet crowned with it.  To the poet himself it can seldom do harm; for he, poor man, is in his grave, probably, long before his glory crowns him.

Wordsworth has been in his grave for some thirty years, and certainly his lovers and admirers cannot flatter themselves that this great and steady light of glory as yet shines over him.  He is not fully recognized at home; he is not recognized at all abroad.  Yet I firmly believe that the poetical performance of Wordsworth is, after that of Shakespeare and Milton, of which all the world now recognizes the worth, undoubtedly the most considerable in our language from the Elizabethan age to the present time.  Chaucer is anterior; and on other grounds, too, he cannot well be brought into the comparison.  But taking the roll of our chief poetical names, besides Shakespeare and Milton, from the age of Elizabeth downwards, and going through it,—­Spenser, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns, Coleridge, Scott, Campbell, Moore, Byron, Shelley, Keats (I mention those only who are dead),—­I think it certain that Wordsworth’s name deserves to stand, and will finally stand, above them all.  Several of the poets named have gifts and excellences which Wordsworth has not.  But taking the performance of each as a whole, I say that Wordsworth seems to me to have left a body of poetical work superior in power, in interest, in the qualities which give enduring freshness, to that which any one of the others has left.

But this is not enough to say.  I think it certain, further, that if we take the chief poetical names of the Continent since the death of Moliere, and, omitting Goethe, confront the remaining names with that of Wordsworth, the result is the same.  Let us take Klopstock,[353] Lessing,[354] Schiller, Uhland,[355] Ruckert,[356] and Heine[357] for Germany; Filicaja,[358] Alfieri,[359] Manzoni,[360] and Leopardi[361] for Italy; Racine,[362] Boileau,[363] Voltaire, Andre Chenier,[364] Beranger,[365] Lamartine,[366] Musset,[367] M. Victor Hugo (he has been so long celebrated that although he still lives I may be permitted to name him) for France.  Several of these, again, have evidently gifts and excellences to which Wordsworth can make no pretension.  But in real poetical achievement it seems to me indubitable that to Wordsworth, here again, belongs the palm.  It seems to me that Wordsworth has left behind him a body of poetical work which wears, and will wear, better on the whole than the performance of any one of these personages, so far more brilliant and celebrated, most of them, than the homely poet of Rydal.  Wordsworth’s performance in poetry is on the whole, in power, in interest, in the qualities which give enduring freshness, superior to theirs.