om Wordsworth was indebted for some of his happiest
inspirations. Her charming _Memorials of a Tour in the Scottish
Highlands_ records the origin of many of her brother's best poems.
Throughout life Wordsworth was remarkably self-centered. The ridicule of
the reviewers, against which he gradually made his way to public
recognition, never disturbed his serene belief in himself, or in the
divine message which he felt himself commissioned to deliver. He was a
slow and serious person, a preacher as well as a poet, with a certain
rigidity, not to say narrowness, of character. That plastic temperament
which we associate with poetic genius Wordsworth either did not possess,
or it hardened early. Whole sides of life were beyond the range of his
sympathies. He touched life at fewer points than Byron and Scott, but
touched it more profoundly. It is to him that we owe the phrase "plain
living and high thinking," as also a most noble illustration of it in
his own practice. His was the wisest and deepest spirit among the
English poets of his generation, though hardly the most poetic. He wrote
too much, and, attempting to make every petty incident or reflection the
occasion of a poem, he finally reached the point of composing verses
_On Seeing a Harp in the shape of a Needle Case_, and on other themes
more worthy of Mrs. Sigourney. In parts of his long blank-verse poems,
_The Excursion_, 1814, and _The Prelude_--which was printed after his
death in 1850, though finished as early as 1806--the poetry wears very
thin and its place is taken by prosaic, tedious didacticism. These two
poems were designed as portions of a still more extended work, _The
Recluse_, which was never completed. _The Excursion_ consists mainly of
philosophical discussions on nature and human life between a
school-master, a solitary, and an itinerant peddler. _The Prelude_
describes the development of Wordsworth's own genius. In parts of _The
Excursion_ the diction is fairly Shaksperian:

The good die first,
And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust
Burn to the socket;

a passage not only beautiful in itself but dramatically true, in the
mouth of the bereaved mother who utters it, to that human instinct which
generalizes a private sorrow into a universal law. Much of _The Prelude_
can hardly be called poetry at all, yet some of Wordsworth's loftiest
poetry is buried among its dreary wastes, and now and then, in the midst
of commonplaces, c