in the song rose up,
Full-formed, like Venus rising from the sea.

_Prelude_, Book IV.

[50] His best poetry was written when he was under the
immediate influence of Coleridge. Coleridge seems to have
felt this, for it is evidently to Wordsworth that he alludes
when he speaks of 'those who have been so well pleased that I
should, year after year, flow with a hundred nameless rills
into _their_ main stream' (_Letters, Conversations, and
Recollections of S. T. C._, vol. i, pp. 5-6). Wordsworth
found fault with the repetition of the concluding sound of
the participles in Shakespeare's line about bees:

The singing masons building roofs of gold.

This, he said, was a line that Milton never would have
written. Keats thought, on the other hand, that the
repetition was in harmony with the continued note of the
singers' (Leigh Hunt's _Autobiography_). Wordsworth writes to
Crabb Robinson in 1837, 'My ear is susceptible to the
clashing of sounds almost to disease.' One cannot help
thinking that his training in these niceties was begun by
Coleridge.

[51] In the Preface to his translation of the _Orlando
Furioso_.

Chief Justice Marshall once blandly interrupted a junior counsel who
was arguing certain obvious points of law at needless length, by
saying, 'Brother Jones, there are _some_ things which a Supreme Court
of the United States sitting in equity may be presumed to know.'
Wordsworth has this fault of enforcing and restating obvious points
till the reader feels as if his own intelligence were somewhat
underrated. He is over-conscientious in giving us full measure, and
once profoundly absorbed in the sound of his own voice, he knows not
when to stop. If he feel himself flagging, he has a droll way of
keeping the floor, as it were, by asking himself a series of questions
sometimes not needing, and often incapable of answer. There are three
stanzas of such near the close of the First Part of _Peter Bell_,
where Peter first catches a glimpse of the dead body in the water, all
happily incongruous, and ending with one which reaches the height of
comicality:

Is it a fiend that to a stake
Of fire his desperate self is tethering?
Or stubborn spirit doomed to yell,
In solitary ward or cell,
Ten thousand miles from all his brethren?

The same want of humour which made him insens