To exhibit this body of Wordsworth’s best work, to clear away obstructions from around it, and to let it speak for itself, is what every lover of Wordsworth should desire.  Until this has been done, Wordsworth, whom we, to whom he is dear, all of us know and feel to be so great a poet, has not had a fair chance before the world.  When once it has been done, he will make his way best, not by our advocacy of him, but by his own worth and power.  We may safely leave him to make his way thus, we who believe that a superior worth and power in poetry finds in mankind a sense responsive to it and disposed at last to recognize it.  Yet at the outset, before he has been duly known and recognized, we may do Wordsworth a service, perhaps, by indicating in what his superior power and worth will be found to consist, and in what it will not.

Long ago, in speaking of Homer, I said that the noble and profound application of ideas to life is the most essential part of poetic greatness[Transcriber’s note:  no punctuation here] I said that a great poet receives his distinctive character of superiority from his application, under the conditions immutably fixed by the laws of poetic beauty and poetic truth, from his application, I say, to his subject, whatever it may be, of the ideas

  “On man, on nature, and on human life,"[368]

which he has acquired for himself.  The line quoted is Wordsworth’s own; and his superiority arises from his powerful use, in his best pieces, his powerful application to his subject, of ideas “on man, on nature, and on human life.”

Voltaire, with his signal acuteness, most truly remarked that “no nation has treated in poetry moral ideas with more energy and depth than the English nation.”  And he adds; “There, it seems to me, is the great merit of the English poets.”  Voltaire does not mean by treating in poetry moral ideas, the composing moral and didactic poems;—­that brings us but a very little way in poetry.  He means just the same thing as was meant when I spoke above “of the noble and profound application of ideas to life”; and he means the application of these ideas under the conditions fixed for us by the laws of poetic beauty and poetic truth.  If it is said that to call these ideas moral ideas is to introduce a strong and injurious limitation, I answer that it is to do nothing of the kind, because moral ideas are really so main a part of human life.  The question, how to live, is itself a moral idea; and it is the question which most interests every man, and with which, in some way or other, he is perpetually occupied.  A large sense is of course to be given to the term moral.  Whatever bears upon the question, “how to live,” comes under it.

“Nor love thy life, nor hate; but, what thou liv’st, Live well; how long or short, permit to heaven."[369]

In those fine lines Milton utters, as every one at once perceives, a moral idea.  Yes, but so too, when Keats consoles the forward-bending lover on the Grecian Urn, the lover arrested and presented in immortal relief by the sculptor’s hand before he can kiss, with the line,