Читать книгу My Commonplace Book онлайн

87 страница из 124

Continuing the work of creation, i.e., co-operating as instruments of Providence in bringing order out of disorder ... is only a part of the mission of mankind, and the time will come again when its due rank will be assigned to contemplation and the calm culture of reverence and love. Then poetry will resume her equality with prose.... But that time is not yet, and the crowning glory of Wordsworth is that he has borne witness to it and kept alive its traditions in an age, which, but for him, would have lost sight of it entirely.

J. S. Mill.

In that utilitarian period the figure of the great poet stands out in sheer sublimity. Apart from the depressing atmosphere of the time, one needs to remember how serenely he continued to deliver his high message in spite of the most deadly want of appreciation. At thirty he received £10 from his poems and nothing more until he was sixty-five! The quotation is from a letter in Caroline Fox’s Journals.

My sarcastic friend says, with the utmost gravity, that no man with less than a thousand pounds a year can afford to have private opinions upon certain important subjects. He admits that he has known it done upon eight hundred a year; but only by very prudent people with small families.