y spread."[381]

Here is an immense advantage for a poet. Wordsworth tells of what all
seek, and tells of it at its truest and best source, and yet a source
where all may go and draw for it.

Nevertheless, we are not to suppose that everything is precious which
Wordsworth, standing even at this perennial and beautiful source, may
give us. Wordsworthians are apt to talk as if it must be. They will
speak with the same reverence of _The Sailor's Mother_, for example, as
of _Lucy Gray_. They do their master harm by such lack of
discrimination. _Lucy Gray_ is a beautiful success; _The Sailor's
Mother_ is a failure. To give aright what he wishes to give, to
interpret and render successfully, is not always within Wordsworth's own
command. It is within no poet's command; here is the part of the Muse,
the inspiration, the God, the "not ourselves."[382] In Wordsworth's
case, the accident, for so it may almost be called, of inspiration, is
of peculiar importance. No poet, perhaps, is so evidently filled with a
new and sacred energy when the inspiration is upon him; no poet, when it
fails him, is so left "weak as is a breaking wave." I remember hearing
him say that "Goethe's poetry was not inevitable enough." The remark is
striking and true; no line in Goethe, as Goethe said himself, but its
maker knew well how it came there. Wordsworth is right, Goethe's poetry
is not inevitable; not inevitable enough. But Wordsworth's poetry, when
he is at his best, is inevitable, as inevitable as Nature herself. It
might seem that Nature not only gave him the matter for his poem, but
wrote his poem for him. He has no style. He was too conversant with
Milton not to catch at times his master's manner, and he has fine
Miltonic lines; but he has no assured poetic style of his own, like
Milton. When he seeks to have a style he falls into ponderosity and
pomposity. In the _Excursion_ we have his style, as an artistic product
of his own creation; and although Jeffrey completely failed to recognize
Wordsworth's real greatness, he was yet not wrong in saying of the
_Excursion_, as a work of poetic style: "This will never do."[383]. And
yet magical as is that power, which Wordsworth has not, of assured and
possessed poetic style, he has something which is an equivalent for it.

Every one who has any sense for these things feels the subtle turn, the
heightening, which is given to a poet's verse by his genius for style.
We can feel it in the

"After l