_Prelude_, Book VI.

Though he here speaks in the preterite tense, this was always true of
him, and his thought seems often to lean upon a word too weak to bear
its weight. No reader of adequate insight can help regretting that he
did not earlier give himself to 'the trade of classic niceties'. It
was precisely this which gives to the blank-verse of Landor the severe
dignity and reserved force which alone among later poets recall the
tune of Milton, and to which Wordsworth never attained. Indeed,
Wordsworth's blank-verse (though the passion be profounder) is always
essentially that of Cowper. They were alike also in their love of
outward nature and of simple things. The main difference between them
is one of scenery rather than of sentiment, between the lifelong
familiar of the mountains and the dweller on the plain.

It cannot be denied that in Wordsworth the very highest powers of the
poetic mind were associated with a certain tendency to the diffuse and
commonplace. It is in the understanding (always prosaic) that the
great golden veins of his imagination are imbedded. He wrote too much
to write always well; for it is not a great Xerxes-army of words, but
a compact Greek ten thousand, that march safely down to posterity. He
set tasks to his divine faculty, which is much the same as trying to
make Jove's eagle do the service of a clucking hen. Throughout _The
Prelude_ and _The Excursion_ he seems striving to bind the wizard
Imagination with the sand-ropes of dry disquisition, and to have
forgotten the potent spell-word which would make the particles cohere.
There is an arenaceous quality in the style which makes progress
wearisome. Yet with what splendours as of mountain-sunsets are we
rewarded! what golden rounds of verse do we not see stretching
heavenward with angels ascending and descending! what haunting
harmonies hover around us deep and eternal like the undying baritone
of the sea! and if we are compelled to fare through sands and desert
wildernesses, how often do we not hear airy shapes that syllable our
names with a startling personal appeal to our highest consciousness
and our noblest aspiration, such as we wait for in vain in any other
poet!

Take from Wordsworth all which an honest criticism cannot but allow,
and what is left will show how truly great he was. He had no humour,
no dramatic power, and his temperament was of that dry and juiceless
quality, that in all his published correspondence you shall