rse of all this. Where Wordsworth is strong,
he is weak; where Wordsworth is weak, he is strong. Culture, that
culture by which Wordsworth has reared from his own inward nature the
richest harvest ever brought forth by a soil of so little depth, is
precisely what was wanting to Shelley: or let us rather say, he had
not, at the period of his deplorably early death, reached sufficiently
far in that intellectual progression of which he was capable, and
which, if it has done so much for greatly inferior natures, might have
made of him the most perfect, as he was already the most gifted of our
poets. For him, voluntary mental discipline had done little: the
vividness of his emotions and of his sensations had done all. He
seldom follows up an idea; it starts into life, summons from the
fairy-land of his inexhaustible fancy some three or four bold images,
then vanishes, and straight he is off on the wings of some casual
association into quite another sphere. He had scarcely yet acquired
the consecutiveness of thought necessary for a long poem; his more
ambitious compositions too often resemble the scattered fragments of a
mirror; colours brilliant as life, single images without end, but no
picture. It is only when under the overruling influence of some one
state of feeling, either actually experienced, or summoned up in the
vividness of reality by a fervid imagination, that he writes as a
great poet; unity of feeling being to him the harmonizing principle
which a central idea is to minds of another class, and supplying the
coherency and consistency which would else have been wanting. Thus it
is in many of his smaller, and especially his lyrical poems. They are
obviously written to exhale, perhaps to relieve, a state of feeling,
or of conception of feeling, almost oppressive from its vividness. The
thoughts and imagery are suggested by the feeling, and are such as it
finds unsought. The state of feeling may be either of soul or of
sense, or oftener (might we not say invariably?) of both: for the
poetic temperament is usually, perhaps always, accompanied by
exquisite senses. The exciting cause may be either an object or an
idea. But whatever of sensation enters into the feeling, must not be
local, or consciously organic; it is a condition of the whole frame,
not of a part only. Like the state of sensation produced by a fine
climate, or indeed like all strongly pleasurable or painful sensations
in an impassioned nature, it pervade