us to watch his adventure with curiosity and inquiry, lead us on to win
more of his secret and borrow more of his experience (I mean, needless
to say, when we are at all critically minded); but there is something in
the clear safe arrival of the poetic nature, in a given case, at the
point of its free and happy exercise, that provokes, if not the cold
impulse to challenge or cross-question it, at least the need of
understanding so far as possible how, in a world in which difficulty and
disaster are frequent, the most wavering and flickering of all fine
flames has escaped extinction. We go back, we help ourselves to hang
about the attestation of the first spark of the flame, and like to
indulge in a fond notation of such facts as that of the air in which it
was kindled and insisted on proceeding, or yet perhaps failed to
proceed, to a larger combustion, and the draughts, blowing about the
world, that were either, as may have happened, to quicken its native
force or perhaps to extinguish it in a gust of undue violence. It is
naturally when the poet has emerged unmistakeably clear, or has at a
happy moment of his story seemed likely to, that our attention and our
suspense in the matter are most intimately engaged; and we are at any
rate in general beset by the impression and haunted by the observed law,
that the growth and the triumph of the faculty at its finest have been
positively in proportion to certain rigours of circumstance.

It is doubtless not indeed so much that this appearance has been
inveterate as that the quality of genius in fact associated with it is
apt to strike us as the clearest we know. We think of Dante in harassed
exile, of Shakespeare under sordidly professional stress, of Milton in
exasperated exposure and material darkness; we think of Burns and
Chatterton, and Keats and Shelley and Coleridge, we think of Leopardi
and Musset and Emily Bronte and Walt Whitman, as it is open to us surely
to think even of Wordsworth, so harshly conditioned by his spareness and