are the conditions of permanence? Immediate or contemporaneous recognition is certainly not dominant among them, or Cowley would still be popular,- Cowley, to whom the Muse gave every gift but one, the gift of the unexpected and inevitable word. Nor can mere originality assure the interest of posterity, else why are Chaucer and Gray familiar, while Donne, one of the subtlest and most self-irradiating minds that ever sought an outlet in verse, is known only to the few?

Will Wordsworth survive as Lucretius survives, through the splendor of certain sunbursts of imagination refusing for a passionate moment to be subdued by the unwilling material in which it is forced to work, while that material takes fire in the working as it can and will only in the hands of genius? His teaching, whatever it was, is part of the air we breathe, and has lost that charm of exclusion and privilege that kindled and kept alive the zeal of his acolytes while it was still sectarian or even heretical. but he has that surest safeguard against oblivion, that imperishable incentive to curiosity and interest that belongs to all original minds. His finest utterances do not merely nestle in the ear by virtue of their music, but in the soul and life, by virtue of their meaning. One would be slow to say that his general outfit as poet was so complete as that of Dryden, but that he habitually dwelt in a diviner air, and alone of modern poets renewed and justifled the earlier faith that made poet and prophet interchangeable terms. Surely he was not an artist in the strictest sense of the word; neither was Isaiah; but he had a rarer gift, the capability of being greatly inspired. Popular, let us admit, he can never be; but as in Catholic countries men go for a time into retreat from the importunate dissonances of life to collect their better selves again by communion with things that are heavenly, and therefore eternal, so this Chartreuse of Wordsworth, dedicated to the Genius of Solitude, will allure to its imperturbable calm the finer natures and the more highly tempered intellects of every generation, so long as a man has any intuition of what is most sacred in his own emotions and sympathies, or of whatever in outward nature is most capable of awakening them and making them operative, whether to console or strengthen.