muring his
calm verse, in a sober and temperate joy, looking everywhere for the
same grave qualities among quiet homekeeping folk, brings with it a
high inspiration. But we tend to think of Wordsworth as a father and a
priest, rather than as a brother and a friend. He is a leader and a
guide, not a comrade. We must learn that, though he can perhaps turn
our heart the right way, towards the right things, we cannot
necessarily acquire that pure peace, that solemn serenity, by obeying
his precepts, unless we too have something of the same strong calmness
of soul. In some moods, far from sustaining and encouraging us, the
thought of his equable, impassioned life may only fill us with
unutterable envy. But still to have sat in his homely rooms, to have
paced his little terraces, does bring a certain imagined peace into the
mind, a noble shame for all that is sordid or mean, a hatred for the
conventional aims, the pitiful ambitions of the world.

Alas, that the only sound from the little hill-platform, the embowered
walks, should be the dull rolling of wheels--motors, coaches,
omnibuses--in the road below! That is the shadow of his greatness. It
is a pitiable thought that one of the fruits of his genius is that it
has made his holy retreat fashionable. The villas rise in rows along
the edges of the clear lakes, under the craggy fell-sides, where the
feathery ashes root among the mimic precipices. A stream of
chattering, vacuous, indifferent tourists pours listlessly along the
road from _table-d'hote_ to _table-d'hote_. The turbid outflow of the
vulgar world seems a profanation of these august haunts. One hopes
despairingly that something of the spirit of lonely beauty speaks to
these trivial heads and hearts. But is there consolation in this?
What would the poet himself have felt if he could have foreseen it all?

I descended the hill-road and crossed the valley highway; it was full
of dust; the vehicles rolled along, crowded with men smoking cigars and
reading newspapers, tired women, children whose idea of pleasure had
been to fill their hands with ferns and flowers torn from cranny and
covert. I climbed the little hill opposite the great Scar; its green
towering head, with its feet buried in wood, the hardy trees straggling
up the front wherever they could get a hold among the grey crags, rose
in sweet grandeur opposite to me. I threaded tracks of shimmering
fern, out of which the buzzing flies rose round me