rank nature, of that large and pure utterance,--the _the large
utterance of the early gods_. There will remain an admiring and ever
widening report of that great and ingenuous soul, simple, affectionate,
without vanity, without pedantry, human, equitable, patient, kind. She
believed herself, she said, "to be in sympathy, across time and space,
with a multitude of honest wills which interrogate their conscience and
try to put themselves in accord with it." This chain of sympathy will
extend more and more.

It is silent, that eloquent voice! it is sunk, that noble, that speaking
head! we sum up, as we best can, what she said to us, and we bid her
adieu. From many hearts in many lands a troop of tender and grateful
regrets converge towards her humble churchyard in Berry. Let them be
joined by these words of sad homage from one of a nation which she
esteemed, and which knew her very little and very ill. Her guiding
thought, the guiding thought which she did her best to make ours too,
"the sentiment of the ideal life, which is none other than man's normal
life as we shall one day know it," is in harmony with words and promises
familiar to that sacred place where she lies. _Exspectat resurrectionem
mortuorum, et vitam venturi saeculi._[345]

WORDSWORTH[346]

I remember hearing Lord Macaulay say, after Wordsworth's death, when
subscriptions were being collected to found a memorial of him, that ten
years earlier more money could have been raised in Cambridge alone, to
do honor to Wordsworth, than was now raised all through the country.
Lord Macaulay had, as we know, his own heightened and telling way of
putting things, and we must always make allowance for it. But probably
it is true that Wordsworth has never, either before or since, been so
accepted and popular, so established in possession of the minds of all
who profess to care for poetry, as he was between the years 1830 and
1840, and at Cambridge. From the very first, no doubt, he had his
believers and witnesses. But I have myself heard him declare that, for
he knew not how many years, his poetry had never brought him in enough
to buy his shoe-strings. The poetry-reading public was very slow to
recognize him, and was very easily drawn away from him. Scott effaced
him with this public. Byron effaced him.

The death of Byron seemed, however, to make an opening for Wordsworth.
Scott, who had for some time ceased to produce poetry himself, and stood
before the public