we come upon some of the profoundest and most beautiful passages that
the poet ever wrote. In deserts of preaching we find, almost within
sight of one another, delightful oases of purest poetry. Besides being
prolix, Wordsworth is often cumbrous; has often no flight; is not
liquid, is not musical. He is heavy and self-conscious with the burden
of his message. How much at his best he is, when, as in the admirable
and truly Wordsworthian poem of _Michael_, he spares us a sermon and
leaves us the story. Then, he is apt to wear a somewhat stiff-cut
garment of solemnity, when not solemnity, but either sternness or
sadness, which are so different things, would seem the fitter mood. In
truth Wordsworth hardly knows how to be stern, as Dante or Milton was
stern; nor has he the note of plangent sadness which strikes the ear
in men as morally inferior to him as Rousseau, Keats, Shelley, or
Coleridge; nor has he the Olympian air with which Goethe delivered
sage oracles. This mere solemnity is specially oppressive in some
parts of the _Excursion_--the performance where we best see the whole
poet, and where the poet most absolutely identifies himself with his
subject. Yet, even in the midst of these solemn discoursings, he
suddenly introduces an episode in which his peculiar power is at its
height. There is no better instance of this than the passage in the
second Book of the _Excursion_, where he describes with a fidelity, at
once realistic and poetic, the worn-out almsman, his patient life and
sorry death, and then the unimaginable vision in the skies, as they
brought the ancient man down through dull mists from the mountain
ridge to die. These hundred and seventy lines are like the landscape
in which they were composed; you can no more appreciate the beauty of
the one by a single or a second perusal, than you can the other in a
scamper through the vale on the box of the coach. But any lover of
poetry who will submit himself with leisure and meditation to the
impressions of the story, the pity of it, the naturalness of it, the