that he deals
with _life_, because he deals with that in which life really consists.
This is what Voltaire means to praise in the English poets,--this
dealing with what is really life. But always it is the mark of the
greatest poets that they deal with it; and to say that the English poets
are remarkable for dealing with it, is only another way of saying, what
is true, that in poetry the English genius has especially shown its
power.

Wordsworth deals with it, and his greatness lies in his dealing with it
so powerfully. I have named a number of celebrated poets above all of
whom he, in my opinion, deserves to be placed. He is to be placed above
poets like Voltaire, Dryden, Pope, Lessing, Schiller, because these
famous personages, with a thousand gifts and merits, never, or scarcely
ever, attain the distinctive accent and utterance of the high and
genuine poets--

"Quique pii vates et Phoebo digna locuti,"[375]

at all. Burns, Keats, Heine, not to speak of others in our list, have
this accent;--who can doubt it? And at the same time they have treasures
of humor, felicity, passion, for which in Wordsworth we shall look in
vain. Where, then, is Wordsworth's superiority? It is here; he deals
with more of _life_ than they do; he deals with _life_ as a whole, more
powerfully.

No Wordsworthian will doubt this. Nay, the fervent Wordsworthian will
add, as Mr. Leslie Stephen[376] does, that Wordsworth's poetry is
precious because his philosophy is sound; that his "ethical system is as
distinctive and capable of exposition as Bishop Butler's"; that his
poetry is informed by ideas which "fall spontaneously into a scientific
system of thought." But we must be on our guard against the
Wordsworthians, if we want to secure for Wordsworth his due rank as a
poet. The Wordsworthians are apt to praise him for the wrong things, and
to lay far too much stress upon what they call his philosophy. His
poetry is the reality, his philosophy--so far, at least, as it may put
on the form and habit of "a scientific system of thought," and the more
that it puts them on--is the illusion. Perhaps we shall one day learn to
make this proposition general, and to say: Poetry is the reality,
philosophy the illusion. But in Wordsworth's case, at any rate, we
cannot do him justice until we dismiss his formal philosophy.

The _Excursion_ abounds with philosophy and therefore the _Excursion_ is
to the Wordsworthian what it never can be to the disintere