The Solitary Reaper, singing a Gaelic song, becomes, under the spell of Wordsworth, a living presence and a power as of an incarnate melody: and the same prodigious spell inspires the gaunt and dreadful Leech-gatherer. Conceive how harsh, how crude an image, however powerful, Balzac would have given of this, one of the most appalling figures in all literature; but Wordsworth so inspires his terrible Leech-gatherer with his own antique virtue, and so invests him with his own extraordinary majesty, that it is only now as I point it out you recognize the indwelling horror of a portrait beside which the outcasts of the Russian realists lose all significance. But men reject Wordsworthdom. Two did try to live in it-- John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold: but these were men of inferior temperament: and Mill also lacked imagination, while in Matthew Arnold imagination was a thing trained, as a tendon may, by special exercise, be developed into a muscle. Further, neither Mill nor Arnold had any childhood: they were never boys. Nowhere in Wordsworthdom is there any actual room for that which, failing a known surname, we still call by the "fond, adoptious Christendom" of Romance: there is little scope in Wordsworthdom for Napoleon or Wagner, for a great tragedy or a great triumph: nor is the universe the projection of a Wordsworthian humanity into space. Generation after generation may visit Carlyledom and Wordsworthdom, and there may always be a few vengeful or placid minds to make, or to try to make, a permanent abode in the frowning donjon of the one, or the pastoral peace of the other: but neither is an enduring habitation for the spirit of an era. And now I come to my own immorality. My four Testaments, "The Vivisector," "The Man Forbid," "The Empire Builder," and "The Prime Minister," may be likened to statues with subsidiary groups about their feet, and with panels in relief on the four sides of the pedestals. As a fresco in the series of my Testaments, and in order to bring home the matter contained in them by a closer application to life than is possible in dramatic monologue, also desiring to extend the circle of my readers and the effect of my message, I wrote in the autumn of 1904 "The Theatrocrat: a Tragic Play of Church and Stage." My hope was to have this tragedy published and another ready by this time; but like my own Knight of the Phoenix, "delays" are "the lackeys circumstance Provides abundantly for all my schemes." On the night I finished "The Theatrocrat," being unable to sleep, I searched about for an anodyne, and fell upon Wordsworth, whom I had not looked into for twenty years. Remembering the tedium and general drowsiness of "The Excursion," I turned to it--to the last book, which I had not come within six of before. The pleasant catalogue of the opening began to operate when suddenly, like one hoist with his own petard, I sat up more than broad awake upon the perusal of the sixteenth line--