d. But
while welcoming the new freshness, sincerity, and direct and fertile
return on nature, that is a very bad reason why we should disparage
poetry so genial, so simple, so humane, and so perpetually pleasing,
as the best verse of the rationalistic century.

What Wordsworth did was to deal with themes that had been partially
handled by precursors and contemporaries, in a larger and more
devoted spirit, with wider amplitude of illustration, and with the
steadfastness and persistency of a religious teacher. "Every great
poet is a teacher," he said; "I wish to be considered as a teacher or
as nothing." It may be doubted whether his general proposition is at
all true, and whether it is any more the essential business of a poet
to be a teacher than it was the business of Handel, Beethoven, or
Mozart. They attune the soul to high states of feeling; the direct
lesson is often as nought. But of himself no view could be more sound.
He is a teacher, or he is nothing. "To console the afflicted; to add
sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier; to teach the
young and the gracious of every age to see, to think, and feel, and
therefore to become more actively and sincerely virtuous"--that was
his vocation; to show that the mutual adaptation of the external
world and the inner mind is able to shape a paradise from the "simple
produce of the common day"--that was his high argument.

Simplification was, as I have said elsewhere, the keynote of the
revolutionary time. Wordsworth was its purest exponent, but he had one
remarkable peculiarity, which made him, in England at least, not only
its purest but its greatest. While leading men to pierce below the
artificial and conventional to the natural man and natural life, as
Rousseau did, Wordsworth still cherished the symbols, the traditions,
and the great institutes of social order. Simplification of life and
thought and feeling was to be accomplished without summoning up the
dangerous spirit of destruction and revolt. Wordsworth lived with
nature, yet waged no angry railing war against society. The chief
opposing force to Wordsworth in literature was Byron. Whatever he was
in his heart, Byron in his work was drawn by all the forces of his
character, genius, and circumstances to the side of violent social
change, and hence the extraordinary popularity of Byron in the
continental camp of emancipation. Communion with nature is in
Wordsworth's doctrine the school of duty. With Byron