1918] on The Romantic Revival 269 



poet than Wordsworth, or Diyden than Tennyson, or Shelley than 

 Gray. These always seem to me to be vain and profitless com- 

 parisons. When I go into a garden I do not argue that a rose is 

 nobler than a lily, or a daffodil than a crocus. I bless each flower as 

 it comes. Its beauty and its fragrance are its own. Each has its 

 season, and in their season all are welcome. And in this fashion I 

 can enjoy the rich banquet which the Romantic School has spread 

 for us. 



The song'which Burns wrote on Xew Year's Day more than a 

 hundred years ago expresses the popular side of the movement, and 

 has graven it into the souls of every generation since : — 



" The rank is but the guinea's stamp, 

 The man's the gowd for a' that." 



When " John Anderson my Joe " has been sung many a " frosty 

 pow" has stolen unseen across the sofa and clasped a thin white hand 

 upon which the worn wedding-ring hangs loosely. 



No generation, least of all our own, can afford to forget the 

 lesson which Wordsworth taught when he sung : — 



" The world is too much with us ; late and soon, 



Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers ; 



Little we see in nature that is ours ; 

 We have given away our hearts, a sordid boon 1 

 The sea that bears its bosom to the moon ; 



The winds that will be howling at all hours, 



And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers ; 

 For this, for everything, we are out of tune ; 

 It moves us not. Great God ! I'd rather be 



A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn ; 

 So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 



Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; 

 Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea ; 



Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 



But it is in no single passage that we can fairly measure the power 

 of any writer. " Not," says Mr. Myers, " not the isolated expression 

 of moral ideas, but their fusion into a whole in one personality is 

 that wiiich connects them for ever with a single name. Therefore it 

 is that Wordsworth is venerated ; because to so many men— indifferent, 

 it may be, to literary or poetical effects as such — he has shown by the 

 subtle intensity of his ow^n emotion how the contemplation of Nature 

 can be made a revealing agency, like Love or Prayer, an opening — 

 if indeed there l^e any opening — into the transcendent world." 



And when we remember Him who said " Consider the lihes," 

 " Consider the ravens," we may well feel how much of larger thought 

 and fuller life we lose who do not keep our minds open to the 

 soothing benison of the messages which Nature is bringing to us 

 from the Father of all. 



The gains of the movement can hardly well be reckoned up. It 

 was a popular movement. This may mean what is good or what is 



