this cause its productions are
doomed, most of them, in spite of the sanguine hopes which accompanied and
do still accompany them, to prove hardly more lasting than the productions
of far less splendid epochs. And this prematureness comes from its having
proceeded without having its proper data, without sufficient materials to
work with. In other words, the English poetry of the first quarter of this
century, with plenty of energy, plenty of creative force, did not know
enough. This makes Byron so empty of matter, Shelley so incoherent,
Wordsworth, even, profound as he is, yet so wanting in completeness and
variety. Wordsworth cared little for books, and disparaged Goethe. I
admire Wordsworth, as he is, so much that I cannot wish him different; and
it is vain, no doubt, to imagine such a man different from what he is, to
suppose that he could have been different; but surely the one thing
wanting to make Wordsworth an even greater poet than he is,--his thought
richer, and his influence of wider application,--was that he should have
read more books--among them, no doubt, those of that Goethe whom he
disparaged without reading him.

But to speak of books and reading may easily lead to a misunderstanding
here. It was not really books and reading that lacked to our poetry at
this epoch; Shelley had plenty of reading, Coleridge had immense reading.
Pindar and Sophocles--as we all say so glibly, and often with so little
discernment of the real import of what we are saying--had not many books;
Shakespeare was no deep reader. True; but in the Greece of Pindar and
Sophocles, in the England of Shakespeare, the poet lived in a current of
ideas in the highest degree animating and nourishing to the creative
power; society was, in the fullest measure, permeated by fresh thought,
intelligent and alive; and this state of things is the true basis for the
creative power's exercise; in this it finds its data, its materials, truly
ready for its hand; all the books and reading in the world are only
valuable as they are helps to this. Even when this does not actually
exist, books and reading may enable a man to construct a kind of semblance
of it in his own mind, a world of knowledge and intelligence in which he
may live and work. This is by no means an equivalent to the artist for the
nationally diffused life and thought of the epochs of Sophocles or
Shakespeare; but, besides that, it may be a means of preparation for such
epochs, it does rea