Wordsworthian what it never can be to the disinterested lover of poetry, a satisfactory work. “Duty exists,” says Wordsworth in The Excursion; and then he proceeds thus:

... Immutably survive, For our support, the measures and the forms Which an abstract Intelligence supplies, Whose kingdom is where time and space are not.

And the Wordsworthian is delighted, and thinks that here is a sweet union of philosophy and poetry. But the disinterested lover of poetry will feel that the lines carry us really not a step farther than the proposition which they would interpret; that they are a tissue of elevated but abstract verbiage, alien to the very nature of poetry.

Merely observing that I wholly agree with the foregoing estimate, I pass to the higher Reflective Poetry,[Pg 19] of which Wordsworth has given us such splendid but comparatively brief instances. The Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, Elegiac Stanzas suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, his best Sonnets, the Character of the Happy Warrior, the Ode to Duty, and, finally, the Ode on Intimations of Immortality seem to me to place Wordsworth above all other English Poets in the domain of exclusively Reflective Poetry. I do not forget much noble Reflective Poetry in Childe Harold; but it is too much blent with other elements, and into it the active quality enters too strongly, for its more reflective features to be separated from them. Moreover, it generally falls far short of the intellectual note so strongly marked in Wordsworth’s best Reflective Poetry, into which, be it added, both the descriptive and the lyrical notes, in accordance with the general law I am seeking to expound in this paper, enter very largely, if, of course, subordinately. It will be obvious, however, to any dispassionate lover of poetry, that a merely reflective poem of any great length cannot well be entitled to the designation of a great poem. Had such been possible, Wordsworth would have bequeathed it to us. The Excursion is the answer; which, notwithstanding a certain number of fine passages, is, for the most part, what Matthew Arnold says of it, “doctrine such as we hear in church, religious and philosophical doctrine; and the attached Wordsworthian loves passages of such doctrine, and brings them forward as proofs of his poet’s excellence.”

[Pg 19]

If the reader has followed me so far, with more or less assent, he will be prepared not only to allow, but of himself to feel, that there must be yet another kind or order of poetry, in which the greatest poems are to be 

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