William Milligan "London, 1802"

Wordsworth—London, 1802 (Harper's Magazine)

In Milton, Wordsworth sees a pretentious envisioning of England’s quondam. The realm’s capital and power were rather of a holy cast—a unifying perspective of England, in which the churchgoing and the governmental fused. Still, Milton was an major-republican, a twist and defender of the regicides and a man who placed as much value in the languages and literatures of the continent as of England. The favourite days of Milton were, of movement, far from fertile by most measures. Milton offers a new understanding of England and her approaching. It coincides with some vivid changes in Wordsworth’s existence–he came into an birthright that enabled him to unexploded comfortably, he married Mary Hutchinson, a girlhood ally, and turned away from the militant, republican ideas of his college years. It moves precipitately away from the rebellious Wordsworth of the whilom before decade, and it has distinctly isolationist flashes (“aged English dower/Of inward delight”). This rhyme might be one of the first manifestations of the fundamentalist Wordsworth....

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