Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/217

Rh afflicted; to add sunshine to daylight, by making the happy happier; to teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think, and feel, and therefore become, more actively and securely virtuous," etc. Here, too, are the calm and patient confidence in his own immortality, a serene foreknowledge of how the matter would end, though there are some dark spots in his pre-vision, as when he says that "the people would love Peter Bell" if only the critics would let them. It appears, too, that these poets were discreet in their confidential criticism of each other, and by no means blind to faults. Wordsworth notices that in Southey's verse, notwithstanding picturesqueness and romance and a minor touch or two, "there is nothing that shows the hand of the great master;" and Coleridge, with all his adoration for Wordsworth, even when declaring that he regarded the tale of the ruined cottage in the Excursion as "the finest poem in our language, comparing it with any of the same or similar length," could yet put his finger on the very centre of weakness in Wordsworth. "I have sometimes fancied," he says, "that, having by the conjoint operation of his own experiences,