nt devotion to 'high endeavours.' If life run smoothly, the
transformation may be easy, and our primitive optimism turn
imperceptibly into general complacency. The trial comes when we make
personal acquaintance with sorrow, and our early buoyancy begins to
fail. We are tempted to become querulous or to lap ourselves in
indifference. Most poets are content to bewail our lot melodiously, and
admit that there is no remedy unless a remedy be found in 'the luxury of
grief.' Prosaic people become selfish, though not sentimental. They
laugh at their old illusions, and turn to the solid consolations of
comfort. Nothing is more melancholy than to study many biographies, and
note--not the failure of early promise, which may mean merely an aiming
above the mark--but the progressive deterioration of character which so
often follows grief and disappointment. If it be not true that most men
grow worse as they grow old, it is surely true that few men pass
through the world without being corrupted as much as purified.

Now Wordsworth's favourite lesson is the possibility of turning grief
and disappointment into account. He teaches in many forms the necessity
of 'transmuting' sorrow into strength. One of the great evils is a lack
of power,

An agonising sorrow to transmute.

The Happy Warrior is, above all, the man who in face of all human
miseries can

Exercise a power
Which is our human nature's highest dower;
Controls them, and subdues, transmutes, bereaves
Of their bad influence, and their good receives;

who is made more compassionate by familiarity with sorrow, more placable
by contest, purer by temptation, and more enduring by distress.[28] It
is owing to the constant presence of this thought, to his sensibility to
the refining influence of sorrow, that Wordsworth is the only poet who
will bear reading in times of distress. Other poets mock us by an
impossible optimism, or merely reflect the feelings which, however we
may play with them in times of cheerfulness, have now become an
intolerable burden. Wordsworth suggests the single topic which, so far
at least as this world is concerned, can really be called consolatory.
None of the ordinary commonplaces will serve, or serve at most as
indications of human sympathy. But there is some consolation in the
thought that even death may bind the survivors closer, and leave as a
legacy enduring motives to noble action. It is easy to say th