them by dint of it.
Moreover, the Miltonic blank verse and sonnets--at their best of a
stately magnificence surpassed by no poet--have a tendency to become
heavy and even dull when the poetic fire fails to fuse and shine through
them. In fact it may be said of Wordsworth, as of most poets with
theories, that his theories helped him very little, and sometimes
hindered him a great deal.

His real poetical merits are threefold, and lie first in the
inexplicable, the ultimate, felicity of phrase which all great poets
must have, and which only great poets have; secondly, in his matchless
power of delineating natural objects; and lastly, more properly, and
with most special rarity of all, in the half-pantheistic mysticism which
always lies behind this observation, and which every now and then breaks
through it, puts it, as mere observation, aside, and blazes in unmasked
fire of rapture. The summits of Wordsworth's poetry, the "Lines Written
at Tintern Abbey" and the "Ode on Intimations of Immortality,"--poems of
such astonishing magnificence that it is only more astonishing that any
one should have read them and failed to see what a poet had come before
the world,--are the greatest of many of these revelations or
inspirations. It is indeed necessary to read Wordsworth straight
through--a proceeding which requires that the reader shall be in good
literary training, but is then feasible, profitable, and even pleasant
enough--to discern the enormous height at which the great Ode stands
above its author's other work. The _Tintern Abbey_ lines certainly
approach it nearest: many smaller things--"The Affliction of Margaret,"
"The Daffodils," and others--group well under its shadow, and
innumerable passages and even single lines, such as that which all good
critics have noted as lightening the darkness of the _Prelude_--

Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone--

must of course be added to the poet's credit. But the Ode remains not
merely the greatest, but the one really, dazzlingly, supremely great
thing he ever did. Its theory has been scorned or impugned by some;
parts of it have even been called nonsense by critics of weight. But,
sound or unsound, sense or nonsense, it is poetry, and magnificent
poetry, from the first line to the last--poetry than which there is none
better in any language, poetry such as there is not perhaps more than a
small volume-full in all languages. The second class of merit, that of
viv