Viewless obstructions.

But if these things stood in the way of immediate appreciation, he had
another theory which interferes more seriously with the total and
permanent effect of his poems. He was theoretically determined not
only to be a philosophic poet, but to be a _great_ philosophic poet,
and to this end he must produce an epic. Leaving aside the question
whether the epic be obsolete or not, it may be doubted whether the
history of a single man's mind is universal enough in its interest to
furnish all the requirements of the epic machinery, and it may be more
than doubted whether a poet's philosophy be ordinary metaphysics,
divisible into chapter and section. It is rather something which is
more energetic in a word than in a whole treatise, and our hearts
unclose themselves instinctively at its simple _Open sesame!_ while
they would stand firm against the reading of the whole body of
philosophy. In point of fact, the one element of greatness which _The
Excursion_ possesses indisputably is heaviness. It is only the
episodes that are universally read, and the effect of these is diluted
by the connecting and accompanying lectures on metaphysics. Wordsworth
had his epic mould to fill, and, like Benvenuto Cellini in casting his
Perseus, was forced to throw in everything, debasing the metal, lest
it should run short. Separated from the rest, the episodes are perfect
poems in their kind, and without example in the language.

Wordsworth, like most solitary men of strong minds, was a good critic
of the substance of poetry, but somewhat niggardly in the allowance he
made for those subsidiary qualities which make it the charmer of
leisure and the employment of minds without definite object. It may be
doubted, indeed, whether he set much store by any contemporary writing
but his own, and whether he did not look upon poetry too exclusively
as an exercise rather of the intellect than as a nepenthe of the
imagination. He says of himself, speaking of his youth:

In fine,
I was a better judge of thoughts than words,
Misled in estimating words, not only
By common inexperience of youth,
But by the trade in classic niceties,
The dangerous craft of culling term and phrase
From languages that want the living voice
To carry meaning to the natural heart;
To tell us what is passion, what is truth,
What reason, what simplicity and sense.[47]

[47]