ENGLAND'S DEBT TO WORDSWORTH.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR,"] Sin.—In your article upon the above subject in the Spectator of August 5th you say : "We should be inclined 'to appraise the true inner nature of any well-read and cultivated English- man by his attitude to Wordsworth." Now, having no love whatever for Wordsworth's poems, and indeed feeling always more or less bored when compelled to read any verse, though now and then falling in a vague manner upon some lines by a small poet which please my ear, I am wondering how low my inner nature must be. And yet I am tolerably well read in prose writings, and have always hoped that I possess a fair amount of culture. Moreover, I am positive that I possess a large amount of artistic taste and feeling, and my love of music, from Mozart to Tschaikowsky, is unbounded. What, then, is the matter with my inner nature? Why do I always read prose in preference to the very beat verse P Why do I find more poetry in parts of "Marius the Epicurean" and "John Inglesant " than in all the volumes of Tennyson and Browning, or even in' those of the great Shakespeare himself ? Now and then I dip into Shelley, and find pleasure in some of his short poems; but, as a rule, I never read poetry if I can get prose, and I find parts of "Modern Painters" appeal to my love of Nature far more than anything Wordsworth, or any other poet, ever wrote. It is not appreciation of Nature which is absent ; the intense love of the beauties of the earth, the sea, and the sky were in me long before I could read; but in your judgment there must be something terribly wrong about my inner self; and there is only one thing which may account for the deficiency,—I am a woman. Will this fact save me from condemnation, and allow me, as a. cultivated human being, to go on loving rhythmical prose fax more than rhyming verse P—I am, Sir, &c., B. B.
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