Independence_; but it is bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with
a baldness which is full of grandeur. . . Wherever we meet with the
successful balance, in Wordsworth, of profound truth of subject with
profound truth of execution, he is unique."

Professor Dowden has also laid stress upon the harmonious balance of
Wordsworth's nature, his different faculties seeming to interpenetrate
one another, and yield mutual support. He has likewise called
attention to the austere naturalism of which Arnold speaks.
"Wordsworth was a great naturalist in literature, but he was also a
great Idealist; and between the naturalist and the idealist in
Wordsworth no opposition existed: each worked with the other, each
served the other. While Scott, by allying romance with reality, saved
romantic fiction from the extravagances and follies into which it had
fallen, Wordsworth's special work was to open a higher way for
naturalism in art by its union with ideal truth."

Criticism has long since ceased to ridicule his _Betty Foy_, and his
_Harry Gill_, whose "teeth, they chatter, chatter still." Such
malicious sport proved only too easy for Wordsworth's contemporaries,
and still the essential value of his poetry was unimpaired.

The range of poetry is indeed inexhaustible, and even the greatest
poets must suffer some subtraction from universal pre-eminence.
Therefore we may frankly admit the deficiencies of Wordsworth,--that he
was lacking in dramatic force and in the power of characterization;
that he was singularly deficient in humor, and therefore in the saving
grace of self-criticism in the capacity to see himself occasionally in
a ridiculous light; that he has little of the romantic glamor and none
of the narrative energy of Scott; that Shelley's lyrical flights leave