work,
as it actually stands, is so perplexed, that one fears to miss the
least promising composition even, lest some precious morsel should be
lying hidden within--the few perfect lines, the phrase, the single word
perhaps, to which he often works up mechanically through a poem, almost
the whole of which may be tame enough. He who thought that in all
creative work the larger part was given passively, to the recipient
mind, who waited so dutifully upon the gift, to whom so large a measure
was sometimes given, had his times also of desertion and relapse; and
he has permitted the impress of these too to remain in his work. And
this duality there--the fitfulness with which the higher qualities
manifest themselves in it, gives the effect in his poetry of a power
not altogether his own, or under his control, which comes and goes when
it will, lifting or lowering a matter, poor in itself; so that that old
fancy which made the poet's art an enthusiasm, a form of divine
possession, seems almost literally true of him.

This constant suggestion of an absolute duality between higher and
lower moods, and the work done in them, stimulating one always to look
below the surface, makes the reading of Wordsworth an excellent sort of
training towards the things of art and poetry. It begets in those,
[42] who, coming across him in youth, can bear him at all, a habit of
reading between the lines, a faith in the effect of concentration and
collectedness of mind in the right appreciation of poetry, an
expectation of things, in this order, coming to one by means of a right
discipline of the temper as well as of the intellect. He meets us with
the promise that he has much, and something very peculiar, to give us,
if we will follow a certain difficult way, and seems to have the secret
of a special and privileged state of mind. And those who have
undergone his influence, and followed this difficult way, are like
people who have passed through some initiation, a disciplina arcani, by
submitting to which they become able constantly to distinguish in art,
speech, feeling, manners, that which is organic, animated, expressive,
from that which is only conventional, derivative, inexpressive.

But although the necessity of selecting these precious morsels for
oneself is an opportunity for the exercise of Wordsworth's peculiar
influence, and induces a kind of just criticism and true estimate of
it, yet the purely literary product would have been mor