A CRITICISM OF LIFE? 331 



Up to this point the application of moral ideas has been 

 made with perfect success. The artistic charm has not been 

 broken. But the last stanza falls into the sermonising style, 

 as though the poet's inspiration failed him, and a pedagogue, 

 with no clear conception of the unalterable order of the 

 material universe, had taken his place : 



One lesson, Shepherd, let us two divide, 



Taught both by what she shows, and what conceals, 



Never to blend our pleasure or our pride 



With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels. 



The tone I have attempted to describe, as of some clear 

 upland climate, at once soothing and invigorating, austere 

 but gifted with rare charms for those who have submitted 

 to its influence, this tone, unique in poetry, outside the 

 range, perhaps, of Scandinavian literature, will secure for 

 Wordsworth, in England at any rate, an immortality of love 

 and fame. He is, moreover, the poet of man's dependence 

 upon Nature. More deeply, because more calmly, than 

 Shelley, with the passionate enthusiasms of youth subdued 

 to the firm convictions of maturity, he expressed for modern 

 men that creed which, for want of a better word, we designate 

 as Pantheism, but which might be described as the inner soul 

 of Science, the bloom of feeling and enthusiasm destined to 

 ennoble and to poetise our knowledge of the world and of 

 ourselves. In proportion as the sciences make us more 

 intimately acquainted with man's relation to the universe, 

 while the sources of life and thought remain still inscrutable, 

 Wordsworth must take stronger and firmer hold on minds 

 which recognise a mystery in Nature far beyond our ken. 

 What Science is not called on to supply, the fervour and the 

 piety that humanise her truths, and bring them into harmony 

 with permanent emotions of the soul, may be found in all 

 that Wordsworth wrote. 



The time might come, indeed may not be distant, when 

 lines like those which I have quoted above (p. 291) from the 

 poem composed at Tintern Abbey should be sung in hours 

 of worship by congregations for whom the ' cosmic emotion ' 

 is a reality and a religion. 



