There have certainly been,
even in our own age, greater poets than Wordsworth; but poetry of deeper
and loftier feeling could not have done for me at that time what his
did. I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent
happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this, not only
without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in the
common feelings and common destiny of human beings. And the delight
which these poems gave me, proved that with culture of this sort, there
was nothing to dread from the most confirmed habit of analysis. At the
conclusion of the Poems came the famous Ode, falsely called Platonic,
"Intimations of Immortality:" in which, along with more than his usual
sweetness of melody and rhythm, and along with the two passages of grand
imagery but bad philosophy so often quoted, I found that he too had had
similar experience to mine; that he also had felt that the first
freshness of youthful enjoyment of life was not lasting; but that he had
sought for compensation, and found it, in the way in which he was now
teaching me to find it.
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