growth of a poet's mind, told by the poet himself with all the
sincerity of which he was capable, is never likely to be popular. Of
that, as of so much more of his poetry, we must say that, as a whole,
it has not the musical, harmonious, sympathetic quality which seizes
us in even the prose of such a book as Rousseau's _Confessions_.
Macaulay thought the _Prelude_ a poorer and more tiresome _Excursion_,
with the old flimsy philosophy about the effect of scenery on the
mind, the old crazy mystical metaphysics, and the endless wilderness
of twaddle; still he admits that there are some fine descriptions and
energetic declamations. All Macaulay's tastes and habits of mind made
him a poor judge of such a poet as Wordsworth. He valued spirit,
energy, pomp, stateliness of form and diction, and actually thought
Dryden's fine lines about to-morrow being falser than the former clay
equal to any eight lines in Lucretius. But his words truly express
the effect of the _Prelude_ on more vulgar minds than his own. George
Eliot, on the other hand, who had the inward eye that was not among
Macaulay's gifts, found the _Prelude_ full of material for a daily
liturgy, and it is easy to imagine how she fondly lingered, as she
did, over such a thought as this--

"There is
One great society alone on earth:
The noble Living and the noble Dead."

There is, too, as may be found imbedded even in Wordsworth's dullest
work, many a line of the truest poetical quality, such as that on
Newton's statue in the silent Chapel of Trinity College--

"The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought alone."