"A thousand times have I asked myself, as your tender sympathy led
me to do, 'Why was he taken away?' and I have answered the question
as you have done. In fact there is no other answer which can satisfy,
and lay the mind at rest. Why have we a choice, and a will, and a
notion of justice and injustice, enabling us to be moral agents? Why
have we sympathies that make the best of us so afraid of inflicting
pain and sorrow, which yet we see dealt about so lavishly by the
Supreme Governor? Why should our notions of right towards each other,
and to all sentient beings within our influence, differ so widely
from what appears to be His notion and rule, _if every thing were to
end here_? Would it not be blasphemy to say that, upon the
supposition of the thinking principle being _destroyed by death_,
however inferior we may be to the great Cause and Ruler of things we
have _more of love_ in our nature than He has? The thought is
monstrous; and yet how to get rid of it, except upon the supposition
of _another_ and a _better world_, I do not see."
From this calamity, as from all the lessons of life, Wordsworth drew
all the benefit which it was empowered to bring. "A deep distress
hath humanized my soul,"--what lover of poetry does not know the
pathetic lines in which he bears witness to the teaching of sorrow?
Other griefs, too, he had--the loss of two children in 1812; his
sister's chronic illness, beginning in 1832; his daughter's death in
1847.
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