get home, to do your duty to your family, friends, and fellow-countrymen, to attain inward freedom, serenity, happiness, contentment.  Style takes your fancy, arguing takes your fancy, and you forget your home and want to make your abode with them and to stay with them, on the plea that they are taking.  Who denies that they are taking? but as places of passage, as inns.  And when I say this, you suppose me to be attacking the care for style, the care for argument.  I am not; I attack the resting in them, the not looking to the end which is beyond them."[372]

Now, when we come across a poet like Theophile Gautier,[373] we have a poet who has taken up his abode at an inn, and never got farther.  There may be inducements to this or that one of us, at this or that moment, to find delight in him, to cleave to him; but after all, we do not change the truth about him,—­we only stay ourselves in his inn along with him.  And when we come across a poet like Wordsworth, who sings

  “Of truth, of grandeur, beauty, love and hope,
  And melancholy fear subdued by faith,
  Of blessed consolations in distress,
  OF moral strength and intellectual power,
  Of joy in widest commonalty spread—­“[374]

then we have a poet intent on “the best and master thing,” and who prosecutes his journey home.  We say, for brevity’s sake, that he deals with life, because he deals with that in which life really consists.  This is what Voltaire means to praise in the English poets,—­this dealing with what is really life.  But always it is the mark of the greatest poets that they deal with it; and to say that the English poets are remarkable for dealing with it, is only another way of saying, what is true, that in poetry the English genius has especially shown its power.

Wordsworth deals with it, and his greatness lies in his dealing with it so powerfully.  I have named a number of celebrated poets above all of whom he, in my opinion, deserves to be placed.  He is to be placed above poets like Voltaire, Dryden, Pope, Lessing, Schiller, because these famous personages, with a thousand gifts and merits, never, or scarcely ever, attain the distinctive accent and utterance of the high and genuine poets—­

  “Quique pii vates et Phoebo digna locuti,"[375]

at all.  Burns, Keats, Heine, not to speak of others in our list, have this accent;—­who can doubt it?  And at the same time they have treasures of humor, felicity, passion, for which in Wordsworth we shall look in vain.  Where, then, is Wordsworth’s superiority?  It is here; he deals with more of life than they do; he deals with life as a whole, more powerfully.