Wordsworth And His Circle

ho lives in intellectual community and not alone. Yet no fact about Wordsworth is more certain and more striking than his essential solitariness. To him, even more than to Milton, his own words belong : his soul was like a star and dwelt apart. The Puritanism of his age, the culture of his age, are much more perceptible in Milton, than are any sympathies of the eighteenth or nineteenth century in the work of Wordsworth. Milton, for all his mighty originality, was a classicist; he was proud to work on traditional lines ; his form was as great as his matter, and is inseparable from it. But Wordsworth had the daring, defiant individuality of the true Romantic. He tlrought of himself, and he thought rightly, as a reformer, an innovator, in poetry; and he neither had, nor believed himself to have, much essential kinship with any of his contemporaries. He always had enthusiastic admirers, and always friends whose cordial admiration fell short of enthusiasm; but there was not one of them, who was wholly without perplexity anddisappointment about the master, not one who could wholly abandon the attitude of apology. While disciples and admirers were not without uncertainty and occasional dissent, Wordsworth himself habitually felt a serene self-complacency which enclosed him as a constant envelope, but which must not be confounded with any kind of vulgar egotism. Traces of such egotism there undoubtedly were in Wordsworth; but they have really nothing to do wit...