ower, connected with
fragmentary, willful, or even weak execution--that humble, yet proud,
precipitation of himself, Antaeus-like, upon the bosom of simple scenes and
simple sentiments, to regain primeval vigor--that obscure, yet lofty
isolation, like a tarn, little in size, but elevated in site, with few
visitors, but with many stars--that Tory-Radicalism, Popish-Protestantism,
philosophical Christianity, which have rendered him a glorious riddle, and
made Shelley, in despair of finding it out, exclaim,

"No Deist, and no Christian he,
No Whig, no Tory.
He got so subtle, that to be
_Nothing_ was all his glory,"--

all such apparent contradictions, but real unities, in his poetical and
moral creed and character, are fully expressed in his lowly but aspiring
language, and the simple, elaborate architecture of his verse--every stone
of which is lifted up by the strain of strong logic, and yet laid to
music; and, above all, in the choice of his subjects, which range, with a
free and easy motion, up from a garden spade and a village drum, to the
"celestial visages" which darkened at the tidings of man's fall, and to
the "organ of eternity," which sung paeans over his recovery.

We sum up what we have further to say of Wordsworth, under the items of
his works, his life and character, his death; and shall close by
inquiring, Who is worthy to be his successor?

His works, covering a large space, and abounding in every variety of
excellence and style, assume, after all, a fragmentary aspect. They are
true, simple, scattered, and strong, as blocks torn from the crags of
Helvellyn, and lying there "low, but mighty still." Few even of his
ballads are wholes. They leave too much untold. They are far too
suggestive to satisfy. From each poem, however rounded, there streams off
a long train of thought: like the tail of a comet, which, while testifying
its power, mars its aspect of oneness. The "Excursion," avowedly a
fragment, seems the splinter of a larger splinter; like a piece of Pallas,
itself a piece of some split planet. Of all his poems, perhaps, his
sonnets, his "Laodamia," his "Intimations of Immortality," and his verses
on the "Eclipse in Italy," are the most complete in execution, as
certainly they are the most classical in design. Dramatic power he has
none, nor does he regret the want. "I hate," he was wont to say to
Hazlitt, "those interlocutions between Caius and Lucius." He sees, as
"from a to