s of high merit are mingled with a
mass of pieces very inferior to them; so inferior to them that it seems
wonderful how the same poet should have produced both. Shakespeare
frequently has lines and passages in a strain quite false, and which are
entirely unworthy of him. But one can imagine him smiling if one could
meet him in the Elysian Fields and tell him so; smiling and replying
that he knew it perfectly well himself, and what did it matter? But with
Wordsworth the case is different. Work altogether inferior, work quite
uninspired, flat and dull, is produced by him with evident
unconsciousness of its defects, and he presents it to us with the same
faith and seriousness as his best work. Now a drama or an epic fill the
mind, and one does not look beyond them; but in a collection of short
pieces the impression made by one piece requires to be continued and
sustained by the piece following. In reading Wordsworth the impression
made by one of his fine pieces is too often dulled and spoiled by a very
inferior piece coming after it.

Wordsworth composed verses during a space of some sixty years; and it is
no exaggeration to say that within one single decade of those years,
between 1798 and 1808, almost all his really first-rate work was
produced. A mass of inferior work remains, work done before and after
this golden prime, imbedding the first-rate work and clogging it,
obstructing our approach to it, chilling, not unfrequently, the
high-wrought mood with which we leave it. To be recognized far and wide
as a great poet, to be possible and receivable as a classic, Wordsworth
needs to be relieved of a great deal of the poetical baggage which now
encumbers him. To administer this relief is indispensable, unless he is
to continue to be a poet for the few only,--a poet valued far below his
real worth by the world.

There is another thing. Wordsworth classified his poems not according to
any commonly received plan of arrangement, but according to a scheme of
mental physiology. He has poems of the fancy, poems of the imagination,
poems of sentiment and reflection, and so on. His categories are
ingenious but far-fetched, and the result of his employment of them is
unsatisfactory. Poems are separated one from another which possess a
kinship of subject or of treatment far more vital and deep than the
supposed unity of mental origin, which was Wordsworth's reason for
joining them with others.

The tact of the Greeks in matters o