ible to incongruity may
perhaps account also for the singular unconsciousness of disproportion
which so often strikes us in his poetry. For example, a little farther
on in _Peter Bell_ we find:

_Now_--like a tempest-shattered bark
That overwhelmed and prostrate lies,
And in a moment to the verge
Is lifted of a foaming surge--
Full suddenly the Ass doth rise!

And one cannot help thinking that the similes of the huge stone, the
sea-beast, and the cloud, noble as they are in themselves, are
somewhat too lofty for the service to which they are put.[52]

[52] In _Resolution and Independence_.

The movement of Wordsworth's mind was too slow and his mood too
meditative for narrative poetry. He values his own thoughts and
reflections too much to sacrifice the least of them to the interests
of his story. Moreover, it is never action that interests him, but the
subtle motives that lead to or hinder it. _The Waggoner_ involuntarily
suggests a comparison with _Tam O'Shanter_, infinitely to its own
disadvantage. _Peter Bell_, full though it be of profound touches and
subtle analysis, is lumbering and disjointed. Even Lamb was forced to
confess that he did not like it. _The White Doe_, the most
Wordsworthian of them all in the best meaning of the epithet, is also
only the more truly so for being diffuse and reluctant. What charms in
Wordsworth and will charm for ever is the

Happy tone
Of meditation slipping in between
The beauty coming and the beauty gone.

A few poets, in the exquisite adaptation of their words to the tune of
our own feelings and fancies, in the charm of their manner,
indefinable as the sympathetic grace of woman, _are_ everything to us
without our being able to say that they are much in themselves. They
rather narcotize than fortify. Wordsworth must subject our mood to his
own before he admits us to his intimacy; but, once admitted, it is for
life, and we find ourselves in his debt, not for what he has been to
us in our hours of relaxation, but for what he has done for us as a
reinforcement of faltering purpose and personal independence of
character. His system of a Nature-cure, first professed by Dr. Jean
Jacques and continued by Cowper, certainly breaks down as a whole. The
Solitary of _The Excursion_, who has not been cured of his scepticism
by living among the medicinal mountains, is, so far as we can see,
equally proof against the lectures of Ped