s, nevertheless, the contact of these
thoughts, the speculative boldness in them, which constitutes, at least
for some minds, the secret attraction of much of his best poetry--the
sudden passage from lowly thoughts and places to the majestic forms of
philosophical imagination, the play of these forms over a world so
different, enlarging so strangely the bounds of its humble churchyards,
and breaking such a wild light on the graves of christened children.

And these moods always brought with them faultless expression. In
regard to expression, as with feeling and thought, the duality of the
higher and lower moods was absolute. It belonged to the higher, the
imaginative mood, and was the pledge of its reality, to bring the [58]
appropriate language with it. In him, when the really poetical motive
worked at all, it united, with absolute justice, the word and the idea;
each, in the imaginative flame, becoming inseparably one with the
other, by that fusion of matter and form, which is the characteristic
of the highest poetical expression. His words are themselves thought
and feeling; not eloquent, or musical words merely, but that sort of
creative language which carries the reality of what it depicts,
directly, to the consciousness.

The music of mere metre performs but a limited, yet a very peculiar and
subtly ascertained function, in Wordsworth's poetry. With him, metre
is but an additional grace, accessory to that deeper music of words and
sounds, that moving power, which they exercise in the nobler prose no
less than in formal poetry. It is a sedative to that excitement, an
excitement sometimes almost painful, under which the language, alike of
poetry and prose, attains a rhythmical power, independent of metrical
combination, and dependent rather on some subtle adjustment of the
elementary sounds of words themselves to the image or feeling they
convey. Yet some of his pieces, pieces prompted by a sort of
half-playful mysticism, like the Daffodils and The Two April Mornings,
are distinguished by a certain quaint gaiety of metre, and rival by
their perfect execution, in this respect, similar pieces among our own
Elizabethan, or contemporary French poetry.

[59] And those who take up these poems after an interval of months, or
years perhaps, may be surprised at finding how well old favourites
wear, how their strange, inventive turns of diction or thought still
send through them the old feeling of surprise. Those wh