a deep difference of estimate still divides even the most excellent
judges. Nobody now dreams of placing him so low as the _Edinburgh
Reviewers_ did, nor so high as Southey placed him when he wrote to
the author of _Philip van Artevelde_ in 1829 that a greater poet than
Wordsworth there never has been nor ever will be. An extravagance of
this kind was only the outburst of generous friendship. Coleridge
deliberately placed Wordsworth "nearest of all modern writers to
Shakespeare and Milton, yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and his
own." Arnold, himself a poet of rare and memorable quality, declares
his firm belief that the poetical performance of Wordsworth is, after
that of Shakespeare and Milton, undoubtedly the most considerable in
our language from the Elizabethan age to the present time. Dryden,
Pope, Gray, Cowper, Goldsmith, Burns, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley,
Keats--"Wordsworth's name deserves to stand, and will finally stand,
above them all." Mr. Myers, also a poet, and the author of a volume on
Wordsworth as much distinguished by insight as by admirable literary
grace and power, talks of "a Plato, a Dante, a Wordsworth," all three
in a breath, as stars of equal magnitude in the great spiritual
firmament. To Mr. Swinburne, on the contrary, all these panegyrical
estimates savour of monstrous and intolerable exaggeration. Amid these
contentions of celestial minds it will be safest to content ourselves
with one or two plain observations in the humble positive degree,
without hurrying into high and final comparatives and superlatives.

One admission is generally made at the outset. Whatever definition
of poetry we fix upon, whether that it is the language of passion or
imagination formed into regular numbers; or, with Milton, that it
should be "simple, sensuous, impassioned;" in any case there are great
tracts in Wordsworth which, by no definition and on no terms, can be
called poetry. If we say with Shelley, that poetry is what redeems