, in a less rapt mood, has patiently built up around
it a setting of verse too often ungraceful in form and of a material
whose cheapness may cast a doubt on the priceless quality of the gem
it encumbers.[49] During the most happily productive period of his
life, Wordsworth was impatient of what may be called the mechanical
portion of his art. His wife and sister seem from the first to have
been his scribes. In later years, he had learned and often insisted
on the truth that poetry was an art no less than a gift, and corrected
his poems in cold blood, sometimes to their detriment. But he
certainly had more of the vision than of the faculty divine, and was
always a little numb on the side of form and proportion. Perhaps his
best poem in these respects is the _Laodamia_, and it is not
uninstructive to learn from his own lips that 'it cost him more
trouble than almost anything of equal length he had ever written'. His
longer poems (miscalled epical) have no more intimate bond of union
than their more or less immediate relation to his own personality. Of
character other than his own he had but a faint conception, and all
the personages of _The Excursion_ that are not Wordsworth are the
merest shadows of himself upon mist, for his self-concentrated nature
was incapable of projecting itself into the consciousness of other men
and seeing the springs of action at their source in the recesses of
individual character. The best parts of these longer poems are bursts
of impassioned soliloquy, and his fingers were always clumsy at the
_callida junctura_. The stream of narration is sluggish, if varied by
times with pleasing reflections (_viridesque placido aequore sylvas_);
we are forced to do our own rowing, and only when the current is
hemmed in by some narrow gorge of the poet's personal consciousness do
we feel ourselves snatched along on the smooth but impetuous rush of
unmistakable inspiration. The fact that what is precious in
Wordsworth's poetry was (more truly even than with some greater poets
than he) a gift rather than an achievement should always be borne in
mind in taking the measure of his power. I know not whether to call
it height or depth, this peculiarity of his, but it certainly endows
those parts of his work which we should distinguish as Wordsworthian
with an unexpectedness and impressiveness of originality such as we
feel in the presence of Nature herself. He seems to have been half
conscious of this, and recited