It was a fortunate thing for England that when the time had come when she was to open and expand her heart towards Nature, as she had never before done, the function of leading the new movement and of expressing it was committed to a soul like Wordsworth’s,—a soul in which sensibility, far healthier than that of Rousseau, and deeper than that of Goethe, was based on a moral nature, simple, solid, profound. It is the way in all great changes of every kind. When the change is to come, the man who is by his nature predestined to make it comes too. So it was in history and in art. Contemporary with Wordsworth’s movement, a change in these was needed. Men ever since the Reformation had got so absorbed in the new order of things, that they had quite forgotten the old, and had become ignorant of and unsympathetic to the past. So history, art, architecture, and many other things, had become meagre and starved. Men’s minds, in this country at least, had to be made aware that there had lived brave men before Cromwell, good men before Luther and Knox. And Walter Scott was born into the world to teach it this lesson, and to let in the sympathies of men in full tide on the buried centuries. The change which Scott wrought in men’s way of apprehending history was not greater than that which Wordsworth wrought in their feelings towards the world of Nature, with which, not less than with the world of History, their lives are encompassed. If Scott taught men to look with other eyes on the characters of the past, Wordsworth not the less taught them to do the same towards the present earth around them, and the heavens above them. This was indeed but half of Wordsworth’s function. For he had moral truth to communicate to his generation, not less than naturalistic truth. It is, however, with the latter order of truth that we have now to do. Yet in him each kind of truth was so interpenetrated with the other, they were balanced in such harmony, that it is not possible in any study of him to dissever them. Thus it seems that two poets were the chief agents in letting in on men’s minds two great bodies of sentiment, the one historical, the other naturalistic, which have leavened all modern society, and even visibly changed the outward face of things. Sir W. Stirling Maxwell, at the Scott Centenary, remarked that the mention of any spot by Scott, in his poems or romances, has increased the market value of the surrounding acres more than the highest farming could do. And there is not an inn or small farm-house in all the Lake country which does not reap every summer in hard coin the results of Wordsworth’s poetry. Can even the stoutest utilitarian, seeing these things, say that Poetry is mere sentimental moonshine, with no power on men’s lives an actions?