And some injustice has been done to his
memory by those who have not fully realized the predisposing causes
which were at work,--the timidity of age, and the deep-rooted
attachment to the England which he knew.
I speak of age, perhaps, somewhat prematurely, as the poet's
gradually growing conservatism culminated in his opposition to the
Catholic Relief Bill, before he was sixty years old. But there is
nothing to wonder at in the fact that the mind of a man of brooding
and solitary habits should show traces of advancing age earlier than
is the case with statesmen or men of the world, who are obliged to
keep themselves constantly alive to the ideas of the generation that
is rising around them. A deadness to new impressions, an
unwillingness to make intellectual efforts in fresh directions, a
tendency to travel the same mental pathways over and over again, and
to wear the ruts of prejudice deeper at every step; such traces of
age as these undoubtedly manifested themselves in the way in which
the poet confronted the great series of changes--Catholic
Emancipation, Reform Bill, New Poor Law, on which England entered
about the year 1829. "My sixty-second year," Wordsworth writes, in
1832, "will soon be completed; and though I have been favoured thus
far in health and strength beyond most men of my age, yet I feel its
effects upon my spirits; they sink under a pressure of apprehension
to which, at an earlier period of my life, they would probably have
been superior.
Pages:
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217