his own poems to all comers with an
enthusiasm of wondering admiration that would have been profoundly
comic but for its simple sincerity and for the fact that William
Wordsworth, Esquire, of Rydal Mount, was one person, and the William
Wordsworth whom he so heartily reverenced quite another. We recognize
two voices in him, as Stephano did in Caliban. There are Jeremiah and
his scribe Baruch. If the prophet cease from dictating, the
amanuensis, rather than be idle, employs his pen in jotting down some
anecdotes of his master, how he one day went out and saw an old woman,
and the next day did _not_, and so came home and dictated some verses
on this ominous phenomenon, and how another day he saw a cow. These
marginal annotations have been carelessly taken up into the text, have
been religiously held by the pious to be orthodox scripture, and by
dexterous exegesis have been made to yield deeply oracular meanings.
Presently the real prophet takes up the word again and speaks as one
divinely inspired, the Voice of a higher and invisible power.
Wordsworth's better utterances have the bare sincerity, the absolute
abstraction from time and place, the immunity from decay, that belong
to the grand simplicities of the Bible. They seem not more his own
than ours and every man's, the word of the inalterable Mind. This gift
of his was naturally very much a matter of temperament, and
accordingly by far the greater part of his finer product belongs to
the period of his prime, ere Time had set his lumpish foot on the
pedal that deadens the nerves of animal sensibility.[50] He did not
grow as those poets do in whom the artistic sense is predominant. One
of the most delightful fancies of the Genevese humorist, Toepffer, is
the poet Albert, who, having had his portrait drawn by a highly
idealizing hand, does his best afterwards to look like it. Many of
Wordsworth's later poems seem like rather unsuccessful efforts to
resemble his former self. They would never, as Sir John Harington says
of poetry, 'keep a child from play and an old man from the
chimney-corner'.[51]

[48] Nowhere is this displayed with more comic
self-complacency than when he thought it needful to rewrite
the ballad of Helen of Kirconnel,--a poem hardly to be
matched in any language for swiftness of movement and savage
sincerity of feeling. Its shuddering compression is masterly.
Compare:

Curst be the heart that thought the thought,