imagine Ezekiel or Isaiah to have
had such eyes.' Southey tells us that he had no sense of smell, and
Haydon that he had none of form. The best likeness of him, in De
Quincey's judgement, is the portrait of Milton prefixed to
Richardson's notes on _Paradise Lost_. He was active in his habits,
composing in the open air, and generally dictating his poems. His
daily life was regular, simple, and frugal; his manners were dignified
and kindly; and in his letters and recorded conversations it is
remarkable how little that was personal entered into his judgement of
contemporaries.

The true rank of Wordsworth among poets is, perhaps, not even yet to
be fairly estimated, so hard is it to escape into the quiet hall of
judgement uninflamed by the tumult of partisanship which besets the
doors.

Coming to manhood, predetermined to be a great poet, at a time when
the artificial school of poetry was enthroned with all the authority
of long succession and undisputed legitimacy, it was almost
inevitable that Wordsworth, who, both by nature and judgement was a
rebel against the existing order, should become a partisan.
Unfortunately, he became not only the partisan of a system, but of
William Wordsworth as its representative. Right in general principle,
he thus necessarily became wrong in particulars. Justly convinced that
greatness only achieves its ends by implicitly obeying its own
instincts, he perhaps reduced the following his instincts too much to
a system, mistook his own resentments for the promptings of his
natural genius, and, compelling principle to the measure of his own
temperament or even of the controversial exigency of the moment, fell
sometimes into the error of making naturalness itself artificial. If a
poet resolve to be original, it will end commonly in his being merely
peculiar.

Wordsworth himself departed more and more in practice, as he grew
older, from the theories which he had laid down in his prefaces;[46]
but those theories undoubtedly had a great effect in retarding the
growth of his fame. He had carefully constructed a pair of spectacles
through which his earlier poems were to be studied, and the public
insisted on looking through them at his mature works, and were
consequently unable to see fairly what required a different focus. He
forced his readers to come to his poetry with a certain amount of
conscious preparation, and thus gave them beforehand the impression of
something like mechanical artific