Page:Poet Lore, volume 3, 1891.djvu/73

Rh none has dwelt on the subtle nature of this temporal change so curiously as Wordsworth. In Wordsworth, as we should expect, it is the changed aspect of nature rather than of human life which receives the strongest emphasis,—

To Wordsworth it is,—

It is then something more than an idle study to sit at the feet of those who have grown grey in the service of poetry and learn of them, because they represent a rare combination of the susceptibility and freshness of youth with the wisdom of age. The years which have shrunk and stiffened the body have been impotent against the pliancy of the mind; with the poet's keenness of feeling and fineness of vision undulled by that bedimming mist of custom which so often blurs the sight of tired age, they interpret life from the vantage ground of one who has known it and who is about to leave it behind. In Ben Jonson's epilogue to "The New Inn," which we can hardly read dry-eyed, so brave and so unspeakably pitiable is the shattered old giant's appeal to a public that had forgot him for younger and slighter favorites, he contrasts the decay of his failing body with the integrity of his mind,—

But "The New Inn" shows us none of that gracious and half-pathetic charm which so often floods the last works of a great poet;