Coleridge or Shelley; but he
was a masculine thinker, and in his more characteristic poems there is
always a kernel of firm conclusion from far-reaching principles that
stimulates thought and challenges meditation. Groping in the dark
passages of life, we come upon some axiom of his, as it were a wall
that gives us our bearings and enables us to find an outlet. Compared
with Goethe we feel that he lacks that serene impartiality of mind
which results from breadth of culture; nay, he seems narrow, insular,
almost provincial. He reminds us of those saints of Dante who gather
brightness by revolving on their own axis. But through this very
limitation of range he gains perhaps in intensity and the
impressiveness which results from eagerness of personal conviction. If
we read Wordsworth through, as I have just done, we find ourselves
changing our mind about him at every other page, so uneven is he. If
we read our favourite poems or passages only, he will seem uniformly
great. And even as regards _The Excursion_ we should remember how few
long poems will bear consecutive reading. For my part I know of but
one,--the _Odyssey_.

None of our great poets can be called popular in any exact sense of
the word, for the highest poetry deals with thoughts and emotions
which inhabit, like rarest sea-mosses, the doubtful limits of that
shore between our abiding divine and our fluctuating human nature,
rooted in the one, but living in the other, seldom laid bare, and
otherwise visible only at exceptional moments of entire calm and
clearness. Of no other poet except Shakespeare have so many phrases
become household words as of Wordsworth. If Pope has made current more
epigrams of worldly wisdom, to Wordsworth belongs the nobler praise of
having defined for us, and given us for a daily possession, those
faint and vague suggestions of other-worldliness of whose gentle
ministry with our baser nature the hurry and bustle of life scarcely
ever allowed us to be conscious. He has won for himself a secure
immortality by a depth of intuition which makes only the best minds at
their best hours worthy, or indeed capable, of his companionship, and
by a homely sincerity of human sympathy which reaches the humblest
heart. Our language owes him gratitude for the habitual purity and
abstinence of his style, and we who speak it, for having emboldened us
to take delight in simple things, and to trust ourselves to our own
instincts. And he hath his reward. I