gh, tending the flocks of Admetus,--that which
Pan endowed with every melody of the visible 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 notes of human joy or
sorrow, there comes suddenly a deeper and almost awful tone,
thrilling us into dim consciousness of a forgotten divinity.

Wordsworth's absolute want of humour, while it no doubt confirmed his
self-confidence by making him insensible both to the comical
incongruity into which he was often led by his earlier theory
concerning the language of poetry and to the not unnatural ridicule
called forth by it, seems to have been indicative of a certain
dullness of perception in other directions.[48] We cannot help
feeling that the material of his nature was essentially prose, which,
in his inspired moments, he had the power of transmuting, but which,
whenever the inspiration failed or was factitious, remained
obstinately leaden. The normal condition of many poets would seem to
approach that temperature to which Wordsworth's mind could be raised
only by the white heat of profoundly inward passion. And in proportion
to the intensity needful to make his nature thoroughly aglow is the
very high quality of his best verses. They seem rather the productions
of nature than of man, and have the lastingness of such, delighting
our age with the same startle of newness and beauty that pleased our
youth. Is it his thought? It has the shifting inward lustre of
diamond. Is it his feeling? It is as delicate as the impressions of
fossil ferns. He seems to have caught and fixed for ever in immutable
grace the most evanescent and intangible of our intuitions, the very
ripple-marks on the remotest shores of being. But this intensity of
mood which insures high quality is by its very nature incapable of
prolongation, and Wordsworth, in endeavouring it, falls more below
himself, and is, more even than many poets his inferiors in
imaginative quality, a poet of passages. Indeed, one cannot help
having the feeling sometimes that the poem is there for the sake of
these passages, rather than that these are the natural jets and
elations of a mind energized by the rapidity of its own motion. In
other words, the happy couplet or gracious image seems not to spring
from the inspiration of the poem conceived as a whole, but rather to
have dropped of itself into the mind of the poet in one of his
rambles, who then