religions. The body, the static and dynamic integer of which mind and soul are only exponents, is held in profound disesteem by both metaphysic and theology. The metaphysician says, "The Universe is thought"; the theologian says, "The Universe is soul." It is as if one were to say "amber is electricity," or "iron is sound," or "the spindrift is the sea," or "this sure and firm-set earth is a word": all possible figures of speech, and therefore all liable in the hands of a pedant to be erected into a dogma. That was the tragedy of Wordsworth; his poetry became a pedantry. It was not age--a man may be a poet at eighty; it was not disease, as Wordsworth's health lasted to the end--besides, having once known what health and strength are, a man may be a poet although glued to the floor with consumption of the spinal marrow; it was not poverty, for Wordsworth was frugal, nor ever knew the hell it is to have to write for bread--besides, a man may be a poet starving in a London suburb: it was the want of a great audience and the world's applause that left Wordsworth to the pernicious obsession of a metaphysic, dried up his poetry and made him at last little better than a moralist. But whenever imagination had its way, when his powers of body, mind, and soul were in equipollence and co-operating, Wordsworth's immorality could be as free as Shakespeare's or Burns's, and could disport itself with a _naïveté_, as in "The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale," impossible to Shakespeare and Burns, who were, both of them, men of the world; and no speech of Falstaff or of Hamlet, no song of the Jolly Beggars, approaches the stark utterance in "Rob Roy's Grave" of that immutable immorality which is the inmost complexion of the world. What was it Wordsworth really wanted? He wanted what all great poets want, to extend his self-consciousness into the self-consciousness of the world. At whatever cost to himself, his actual and avowed aim was to live in the imagination of posterity to the end of time. In effect his poetry says, and his prefaces and his letters:--"What I desire--I make a present of it to all the humorists; I love them, and I wish I were a humorist: I make a present of it to all the wits; I love them also, and I would that I were witty: I make a present of it to all the fools, whom I love the most, for there I belong by reason of my _naïveté_ and unworldliness: and, further, I make a present of it to all the impertinents and to all the malignants, whom I do not hate, for they are part of the whole--what I desire is to substitute for Christendom a William Wordsworthdom." The two potentates of English literature in the nineteenth century, Carlyle and Wordsworth, had the same ambition--to furnish imagination with a new abiding-place: the Carlyledom, which the first would have substituted for Christendom, he called Hero-worship: Wordsworthdom is a Nature-worship.