If any man proposes to stay a month among scenery of hill, mountain, and lake, I should advise him to slip a copy of Wordsworth into his pocket, and read therefrom an hour daily; not hurrying over the pages, but turning aside, now and again, to take in the glory of pinewood, heather, and linn. In no volume, ancient or modern, can a tired man find such soft and genial balm for his weariness as in the calm pages of the Rydal singer. The poet is at his best in the broad region of natural religion. He looks round on the beauties of the world with that solemn awe a man feels in the hallowed precincts of a mediæval temple. The grandeur and mystery of the world throw him into a kind of enchantment: his own soul and that of the universe touch and commune with each other. In his rapt verses we feel some of that mystic thrill felt by a devotee in the open sanctuary of the Almighty. No man ever interpreted Nature in such inspired strains as William Wordsworth. What supremely delights the lover of scenery is that this poet's muse can overwrap the exact and detailed knowledge of Nature with a superb mantle of idealistic glory. He saw and understood the harmony of Nature's forms and colours through all the seasons: at the quiet ingleside he meditated on what he had seen and heard, enshrined these in verse, and added to them the warmth of his own devout and sensitive soul. There is no exaggeration in Arnold's tribute:-- "He laid us, as we lay at birth, On the cool, flowery lap of earth, Smiles broke from us, and we had ease; The hills were round us, and the breeze Went o'er the sunlit fields again. Our foreheads felt the wind and rain, Our youth returned; for there was shed On spirits that had long been dead-- Spirits dried up and closely furled-- The freshness of the early world." Of Wordsworth and his successor, Tennyson, it is impossible to speak save in terms of affectionate gratitude. God looked kindly on Britain when he sent two such men to minister to us. Tennyson did more than all the bishops of the Church of England to stifle crude infidelity and equally crude religious bigotry. There is not a single line he ever wrote of which in his last days he had need, from the point of view of truth and morality, to be ashamed. He increased the world's stock of happiness by poems which have been the solace of men and women in the hours of darkness and doubt, which have led men to rise to nobler things on the stepping-stones of their dead selves, and which, I am certain, his grateful fellow-countrymen will not willingly let die.