not find a
letter, but only essays. If we consider carefully where he was most
successful, we shall find that it was not so much in description of
natural scenery, or delineation of character, as in vivid expression
of the effect produced by external objects and events upon his own
mind, and of the shape and hue (perhaps momentary) which they in turn
took from his mood or temperament. 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. This power of particularization (for it is as truly a
power as generalization) is what gives such vigour and greatness to
single lines and sentiments of Wordsworth, and to poems developing a
single thought or sentiment. 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 his garrulity) was never self-denying
enough to impose on itself. It suits his solitary and meditative
temper, and it was there that Lamb (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 French 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 spicery, some brooding over the silent
thunders of their battailous armaments, but all swept forward in their
destined track, over the long billows of his verse, every inch of
canvas strained by the unifying breath of their common epic impulse.
It was an organ that Milton mastered, mighty in compass, capable
equally of the trumpet's ardours 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 puts 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 vulgar stream, but that which
Apollo breathed throu