But the
capital merit of Wordsworth is, that he has done more for the sanity
of this generation than any other writer. Early in life, at a
crisis, it is said, in his private affairs, he made his election
between assuming and defending some legal rights with the chances of
wealth and a position in the world -- and the inward promptings of
his heavenly genius; he took his part; he accepted the call to be a
poet, and sat down, far from cities, with coarse clothing and plain
fare to obey the heavenly vision. The choice he had made in his
will, manifested itself in every line to be real. We have poets who
write the poetry of society, of the patrician and conventional
Europe, as Scott and Moore, and others who, like Byron or Bulwer,
write the poetry of vice and disease. But Wordsworth threw himself
into his place, made no reserves or stipulations; man and writer were
not to be divided. He sat at the foot of Helvellyn and on the margin
of Winandermere, and took their lustrous mornings and their sublime
midnights for his theme, and not Marlow, nor Massinger, not Horace,
nor Milton, nor Dante.
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