The sonnet on _Seathwaite Chapel_, and the life of Robert Walker,
the incumbent of Seathwaite, which is given at length in the notes
to the sonnets on the Duddon, afford a still more characteristic
instance of the clerical ideal towards which Wordsworth naturally
turned. In Robert Walker he had a Cumbrian statesman turned into a
practical saint; and he describes him with a gusto in which his
laboured sonnets on _Laud_ or on _Dissensions_ are wholly deficient.
It was in social and political matters that the consequences of this
idealizing view of the facts around him in Cumberland were most
apparent. Take education, for example. Wordsworth, as has been
already stated, was one of the earliest and most impressive
assertors of the national duty of teaching every English child to
read. He insists on this with a prosaic earnestness which places
several pages of the _Excursion_ among what may be called the
standing bugbears which his poems offer to the inexperienced reader.
And yet as soon as, through the exertions of Bell and Lancaster,
there seems to be some chance of really educating the poor, Dr. Bell,
whom Coleridge fondly imagines as surrounded in heaven by multitudes
of grateful angels, is to Wordsworth a name of horror.
Pages:
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215