which escape the eye of common observation, thus raising to the rank of
gems what had been often kicked away by the hurrying foot of the
traveller on the dusty high-road of custom. . .

"Fifth; a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with
sensibility; a sympathy with man as man; the sympathy indeed of a
contemplator, rather than a fellow-sufferer or co-mate, but of a
contemplator, from whose view no difference of rank conceals the
sameness of the nature; no injuries of wind or weather, of toil, or
even of ignorance, wholly disguise the human face divine. The
superscription and the image of the Creator still remains legible to
_him_ under the dark lines, with which guilt or calamity had cancelled
or cross-barred it. Here the Man and the Poet lose and find themselves
in each other, the one as glorified, the latter as substantiated. In
this mild and philosophic pathos, Wordsworth appears to me without a
compeer. Such as he is; so he writes.

"Last and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of
imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word. In the
play of fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is not always graceful, and
sometimes recondite. . . But in imaginative power, he stands nearest of
all writers to Shakespeare and Milton; and yet in a kind perfectly
unborrowed and his own."

These are the grounds upon which Coleridge bases the poetic claims of
Wordsworth.

Matthew Arnold, in the preface to his well-known collection of
Wordsworth's poems, accords to the poet a rank no less exalted. "I
firmly believe that the poetical performance of Wordsworth is, after