e thoughts themselves, and upon the skill he has demonstrated
in the choice of his media: for an affair of skill and study, in the
most rigorous sense, it evidently was. But he has not laboured in
vain; he has exercised, and continues to exercise, a powerful, and
mostly a highly beneficial influence over the formation and growth of
not a few of the most cultivated and vigorous of the youthful minds of
our time, over whose heads poetry of the opposite description would
have flown, for want of an original organization, physical or mental,
in sympathy with it.

On the other hand, Wordsworth's poetry is never bounding, never
ebullient; has little even of the appearance of spontaneousness: the
well is never so full that it overflows. There is an air of calm
deliberateness about all he writes, which is not characteristic of the
poetic temperament: his poetry seems one thing, himself another; he
seems to be poetical because he wills to be so, not because he cannot
help it: did he will to dismiss poetry, he need never again, it might
almost seem, have a poetical thought. He never seems _possessed_ by
any feeling; no emotion seems ever so strong as to have entire sway,
for the time being, over the current of his thoughts. He never, even
for the space of a few stanzas, appears entirely given up to
exultation, or grief, or pity, or love, or admiration, or devotion, or
even animal spirits. He now and then, though seldom, attempts to write
as if he were: and never, we think, without leaving an impression of
poverty: as the brook which on nearly level ground quite fills its
banks, appears but a thread when running rapidly down a precipitous
declivity. He has feeling enough to form a decent, graceful, even
beautiful decoration to a thought which is in itself interesting and
moving; but not so much as suffices to stir up the soul by mere
sympathy with itself in its simplest manifestation, nor enough to
summon up that array of 'thoughts of power' which in a richly stored
mind always attends the call of really intense feeling. It is for this
reason, doubtless, that the genius of Wordsworth is essentially
unlyrical. Lyric poetry, as it was the earliest kind, is also, if the
view we are now taking of poetry be correct, more eminently and
peculiarly poetry than any other: it is the poetry most natural to a
really poetic temperament, and least capable of being successfully
imitated by one not so endowed by nature.

Shelley is the very reve