e excellent, had
the writer himself purged away that alien element. How perfect would
have been the little treasury, shut between the covers of how thin a
book! Let us suppose the desired separation made, the electric thread
untwined, the golden pieces, [43] great and small, lying apart
together.* What are the peculiarities of this residue? What special
sense does Wordsworth exercise, and what instincts does he satisfy?
What are the subjects and the motives which in him excite the
imaginative faculty? What are the qualities in things and persons
which he values, the impression and sense of which he can convey to
others, in an extraordinary way?

An intimate consciousness of the expression of natural things, which
weighs, listens, penetrates, where the earlier mind passed roughly by,
is a large element in the complexion of modern poetry. It has been
remarked as a fact in mental history again and again. It reveals
itself in many forms; but is strongest and most attractive in what is
strongest and most attractive in modern literature. It is exemplified,
almost equally, by writers as unlike each other as Senancour and
Theophile Gautier: as a singular chapter in the history of the human
mind, its growth might be traced from Rousseau to Chateaubriand, from
Chateaubriand to Victor Hugo: it has doubtless some latent connexion
with those pantheistic theories which locate an intelligent soul in
material things, and have largely exercised men's minds in some modern
systems of philosophy: it is traceable even in [44] the graver writings
of historians: it makes as much difference between ancient and modern
landscape art, as there is between the rough masks of an early mosaic
and a portrait by Reynolds or Gainsborough. Of this new sense, the
writings of Wordsworth are the central and elementary expression: he is
more simply and entirely occupied with it than any other poet, though
there are fine expressions of precisely the same thing in so different
a poet as Shelley. There was in his own character a certain
contentment, a sort of inborn religious placidity, seldom found united
with a sensibility so mobile as his, which was favourable to the quiet,
habitual observation of inanimate, or imperfectly animate, existence.
His life of eighty years is divided by no very profoundly felt
incidents: its changes are almost wholly inward, and it falls into
broad, untroubled, perhaps somewhat monotonous spaces. What it most
resembles