211 



which guilt or calamity had concealed or cross-barred it. In this 

 mild and philosophic pattern, Wordsworth appears to me without a 

 compeer. . . . Last, and preeminently, I challenge for this 

 poet the gift of Imagination, in the highest and strictest sense of 

 the word. ... In imaginative power he stands nearest of all 

 modern writers to Shakespeare and Milton ; and yet, in a kind, 

 perfectly unborrowed and his own."* With this I conjoin the 

 estimate of another acute critic, the poet Delta. Dr. Moir says, 

 "Never, perhaps,'_in the whole range of literary history, from 

 Homer downwards, did any individual, throughout the course of 

 a long life, dedicate himself to poetry with a devotion so pure, so 

 perfect, and so uninterrupted, as he did. It was not his amuse- 

 ment, his recreation, his mere pleasure. It was the main, the 

 serious, the solemn business of his being. It was his morning 

 noon, and evening thought, the object of his out-door rambles, the 

 subject of his in-door reflections ; and, as an art, he studied it as 

 severely as ever Canova did sculpture, or Michael Angelo paint- 

 ing."! 



This leads me to a fresh point in the estimate of Wordsworth. 

 It was the ambition and aim of his life to construct " a literary 

 work that might live ; " and he first wrote his own autobiography 

 in verse. The result was such, that he determined to compose 

 " a philosophical poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and 

 Society, to be called The Rediise." One part of this only — The 

 Excursion — was written. The Prelude, he tells us, was meant to 

 have the same relation to The Recluse as the " ante-chapel has to 

 the body of a Gothic church ; " and he hoped that his minor 

 poems, when properly arranged, would be found " to have such a 

 connection with the main work as might give them claim to be 

 likened to the little cells, oratories or sepulchral recesses, ordinarily 

 included in these edifices."! 



In this ambition, you see the love of artistic symmetry and 

 completion. He was not satisfied with occasional " lyric cries " 



• Biographia Literaria, pp. 161-186. 



+ The Poetical Literature of the Last Half-Century, p. 65. 



5: Poetical Works, vol. vi, Preface, p. 4. 



