332 IS POETRY AT BOTTOM 



Wordsworth, again, is the poet of the simple and the 

 permanent in social life. He has shown that average human 

 nature may be made to yield the motives of the noblest 

 poems, instinct with passion, glowing with beauty, needing 

 only the insight and the touch of the artist to disengage them 

 from the coarse material of commonplace. 



The moving accident is not my trade : 

 To freeze the blood I have no ready arts : 

 'Tis my delight, alone in summer shade, 

 To pipe a simple song for thinking hearts. 



Should the day arrive when society shall be remodelled 

 upon principles of true democracy, when * plain living and 

 high thinking ' shall become the rule, when the vulgarity of 

 manners inseparable from decaying feudalism shall have 

 disappeared, when equality shall be rightly apprehended and 

 refinement be the common mark of humble and wealthy 

 homes should this golden age of a grander civilisation dawn 

 upon the nations, then Wordsworth will be recognised as the 

 prophet and apostle of the world's rejuvenescence. He, too, 

 has something to give, a quiet dignity, a nobleness and lofti- 

 ness of feeling joined to primitive simplicity, the tranquillity 

 of self-respect, the calm of self-assured uprightness, which it 

 would be very desirable for the advocates of fraternity and 

 equality to assimilate. Of science and democracy Words- 

 worth in his lifetime was suspicious. It is almost a paradox 

 to proclaim him the poet of democracy and science. Yet 

 there is that in his work which renders it congenial to the 

 mood of men powerfully influenced by scientific ideas, and 

 expecting from democracy the regeneration of society at no 

 incalculably distant future. 



After all, Wordsworth is essentially an English poet. He 

 has the limitations no less than the noble qualities of the 

 English character powerfully impressed upon him. Shelley 

 brought into English literature a new ideality, a new element 

 of freedom and expansion. Mazzini greeted Byron witl 

 enthusiastic panegyric as the poet of emancipation. Words- 

 worth moves in a very different region from that of eittu 



