This is a stage in Wordsworth's career on which his biographer is
tempted unduly to linger. For we have reached the Indian summer of
his genius; it can still shine at moments bright as ever, and with
even a new majesty and calm; but we feel, nevertheless, that the
melody is dying from his song; that he is hardening into
self-repetition, into rhetoric, into sermonizing common-place, and
is rigid where he was once profound. The _Thanksgiving Ode_ (1816)
strikes death to the heart. The accustomed patriotic sentiments--the
accustomed virtuous aspirations--these are still there; but the
accent is like that of a ghost who calls to us in hollow mimicry of a
voice that once we loved.
And yet Wordsworth's poetic life was not to close without a great
symbolical spectacle, a solemn farewell. Sunset among the Cumbrian
hills, often of remarkable beauty, once or twice, perhaps, in a
score of years, reaches a pitch of illusion and magnificence which
indeed seems nothing less than the commingling of earth and heaven.
Such a sight--seen from Rydal Mount in 1818--afforded once more the
needed stimulus, and evoked that "_Evening Ode, composed on an
evening of extraordinary splendour and beauty_," which is the last
considerable production of Wordsworth's genius.
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