nes of daily popularity and application. In the handbooks of
familiar quotations Wordsworth fills more space than anybody save
Shakespeare and Pope. He exerted commanding influence over great minds
that have powerfully affected our generation. "I never before," said
George Eliot in the days when her character was forming itself (1839),
"met with so many of my own feelings expressed just as I should like
them," and her reverence for Wordsworth remained to the end. J.S. Mill
has described how important an event in his life was his first reading
of Wordsworth. "What made his poems a medicine for my state of mind
was that they expressed not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling
and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. I
needed to be made to feel that there was real permanent happiness in
tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this, not only without
turning away from, but with greatly increased interest in the common
feelings and common destiny of human beings" _(Autobiog_., 148). This
effect of Wordsworth on Mill is the very illustration of the phrase
of a later poet of our own day, one of the most eminent and by his
friends best beloved of all those whom Wordsworth had known, and on
whom he poured out a generous portion of his own best spirit:--

Time may restore us in his course
Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force.
But where will Europe's latter hour
Again find Wordsworth's healing power?

It is the power for which Matthew Arnold found this happy designation
that compensates us for that absence of excitement of which the
heedless complain in Wordsworth's verse--excitement so often meaning
mental fever, hysterics, distorted passion, or other fitful agitation
of the soul.

Pretensions are sometimes advanced as to Wordsworth's historic
position, which involve a mistaken view of literary history. Thus, we
are gravely told by the too zealous Wordsworthian that the so-called
poets of the eighteenth century were simply men of letters; they had
various accomplishments and great general ability, but their thoughts
were expressed in prose, or in mere metrical diction, which passed
current as poetry without being so. Yet Burns belonged wholly to
the eighteenth century (1759-96), and no verse-writer is so little
literary as Burns, so little prosaic; no writer more truly poetic in
melody, diction, thought, feeling, and spontaneous song. It was Burns
who showed Wordsworth's own youth "