Wordsworth

Parnassus has two peaks—the one where improvising poets cluster, the other where the singer of deep secrets sits alone, a peak veiled sometimes from the whole morning of a generation by earth-born mists and smoke of kitchen fires, only to glow the more conspicuously at sunset, and after nightfall to crown itself with imperishable stars. Wordsworth had that self-trust which, in the man of genius, is sublime, and, in the man of talent, insufferable. It mattered not to him though all the reviewers had been in a chorus of laughter or conspiracy of silence behind him. He went quietly over to Germany to write more Lyrical Ballads, and to begin a poem on the growth of his own mind, at a time when there were only two men in the world (himself and Coleridge) who were aware that he had one, or at least one anywise differing from the mechanically uniform ones which are stuck drearily, side by side, in the great pin-paper of society.

His finest passages are always monologues. He had a fondness for particulars, and there are parts of his poems which remind us of local histories in the undue relative importance given to trivial matters. He was the historian of Wordsworthshire. It was this that made him so fond of the sonnet, that sequestered nook forced upon him the limits which his fecundity (if I may not say its garrulity) was never self-denying enough to impose on itself. It suits his solitary and meditative temper, and it was therein that time (an admirable judge of what was permanent in literature) liked him best. Its narrow bounds, but fourteen paces from end to end, turn into a virtue his too common fault of giving undue prominence to every passing emotion. He excels in monologue, and the law of the sonnet tempers monologue with mercy. In 'The Excursion,' we are driven to the subterfuge of a verdict of extenuating circumstances.

His mind had not that reach and elemental movement of Milton's, which, like the trade-wind, gathered to itself thoughts and images, like stately fleets, from every quarter; some deep with silks and spices, some brooding over the silent thunders of their battalious armament, but all swept forward in their destined track, over the long billows of his verse, every inch of canvas strained by the vivifying breath of their common epic impulse. It was an organ that Milton mastered, mighty in compass, capable equally of the trumpet's ardors or the slim delicacy of the flute, and sometimes it bursts forth in great crashes through his prose, as if he touched it for solace in the intervals of his toil. If Wordsworth sometimes put the trumpet to his lips, yet he lays it aside soon, and willingly, for his appropriate instrument, the pastoral reed. And it is not one that grew by any sluggish stream, but that which Apollo breathed through, tending the flocks of Admetus, that which Pan endowed with every melody of the universe—the same in which the soul of the despairing nymph took refuge and gifted with her dual nature, so that, ever and anon, amid the human joy or sorrow, there comes suddenly a deeper and almost awful tone, thrilling us with dim consciousness of a forgotten [...]

Of no other poet except Shakespeare have so many phrases become household words as Wordsworth's. If Pope has made current more epigrams of worldly wisdom, to Wordsworth belongs the nobler praise of having defined for us, and given us for a daily possession, the faint and vague suggestions of other worldliness, of whose gentler ministry with our baser nature the hurry and bustle of life scarcely ever allowed us to be conscious. He has won for himself a secure immortality by a depth of intuition which makes only the best minds, at their best hours, worthy, or indeed capable, of his companionship; and by a homely sincerity of human sympathy which reaches the humblest heart. Our language owes him gratitude for the habitual purity and abstinence of his style, and we who speak it, for having emboldened us to take delight in simple things, and to trust ourselves to our own instincts.