There were many who knew Wordsworth’s poetry well while he was still alive, who felt its power, and the new light which it threw on the material world. But though they half-guessed they did not fully know the secret of it. They got glimpses of part, but could not grasp the whole of the philosophy on which it was based But when, after his death, “The Prelude” was published, they were let into the secret, they saw the hidden foundations on which it rests, as they had never seen them before. The smaller poems were more beautiful, more delightful, but “The Prelude” revealed the secret of their beauty. It showed that all Wordsworth’s impassioned feeling towards Nature was no mere fantastic dream, but based on sanity, on a most assured and reasonable philosophy. It was as though one who had been long gazing on some building grand and fair, admiring the vast sweep of its walls, and the strength of its battlements, without understanding their principle of coherence, were at length to be admitted inside by the master builder, and given a view of the whole plan from within, the principles of the architecture, and the hidden substructures on which it was built. This is what “The Prelude” does for the rest of Wordsworth’s poetry. For all his later phases of thought, all that followed the republicanism of “The Prelude,” Wordsworth, I know, has been well abused. Shelley bemoaned him, Mr. Browning has flouted him, and following these all the smaller fry of Liberalism have snarled at his heels. But all his changes of thought are self-consistent, and if fairly judged, the good faith and wisdom of them all can well be justified. For a few years during the Revolution he had hoped for a sudden regeneration from that great catastrophe. He found himself deceived, and gradually unlearnt the fallacies whence that deception had sprung. He ceased to look for the improvement of mankind from violent convulsions. Neither did he expect much from gradual political change, nor from those formalities which we nickname education, not from a revised code and payment by results, not from these nor from any outward machinery. But he hoped much from whatever helps forward the growth, the expanding, and the deepening, in all the grades of men, of the “feeling soul,” by which they may become more sensitive to the face of Nature, more sensitive towards their fellow-men and the lower creatures, and more open to influences which are directly divine. In these things he believed, for these he wrought consistently, till his task was done.