IN PRAISE OF BOTH, 205 



and of holding friendly commerce with the things 

 that grew outside his garden hedge, let me bring 

 upon my page a modern of moderns, who, by the 

 wide range of his sympathies, recalls the giants of a 

 healthier day, and redeems a generation of lop-sided 

 folk abnormally developed in one direction. 



And the poet Wordsworth, self-drawn in his own 

 works, or depicted by his friends, is one of the old 

 stock of sane, sound-hearted Englishmen, who can 

 be equally susceptible to the inward beauties of man's 

 created brain-world, and the outward beauties of 

 unkempt Nature. So the combination we plead for 

 is not impossible ! The two tastes are not irrecon- 

 cilable ! Blessed be both ! 



We may trust Wordsworth implicitly as an 

 authority upon Nature. No one questions his know- 

 ledge of wild woodland lore. There is no one of 

 ancient or of modern times who in his outward mien, 

 his words, his habits, carries more indisputable proof 

 of the prophet's ordination than the man who spent 

 a long noviciate in his native mountain solitudes. 

 There is no one so fully entitled, or so well able to 

 speak of and for her, as he who knows her language to 

 the faintest whisper, who spent his days at her feet, 

 who pored over her lineaments under every change of 

 expression, who in his writings drew upon the secret 

 honey of the beauty and harmony of the world, 

 telling, to use his own swinging phrases, of " the 

 joy and happiness of loving creatures, of men and 

 children, of birds and beasts, of hills and streams, 

 and trees and flowers ; with the changes of night and 



