He neither achieved
nor underwent any of those experiences which can make all high
romance seem a part of memory, and bestow as it were a password and
introduction into the very innermost of human fates. On the other
hand, he almost wholly escaped those sufferings which exceptional
natures must needs derive from too close a contact with this
commonplace world. It was not his lot--as it has been the lot of so
many poets--to move amongst mankind at once as an intimate and a
stranger; to travel from disillusionment to disillusionment and from
regret to regret; to construct around him a world of ideal beings,
who crumble into dust at his touch; to hope from them, what they can
neither understand nor accomplish, to lavish on them what they can
never repay. Such pain, indeed, may become a discipline; and the
close contact with many lives may teach to the poetic nature lessons
of courage, of self-suppression, of resolute goodwill, and may
transform into an added dignity the tumult of emotions which might
else have run riot in his heart. Yet it is less often from moods of
self-control than from moods of self-abandonment that the fount of
poetry springs; and herein it was that Wordsworth's especial
felicity lay--that there was no one feeling in him which the world
had either repressed or tainted; that he had no joy which might not
be the harmless joy of all; and that therefore it was when he was
most unreservedly himself that he was most profoundly human.
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