On Wordsworth’s exact position in the hierarchy of sovereign poets, a deep difference of estimate still divides even the most excellent judges.  Nobody now dreams of placing him so low as the Edinburgh Reviewers did, nor so high as Southey placed him when he wrote to the author of Philip van Artevelde in 1829 that a greater poet than Wordsworth there never has been nor ever will be.  An extravagance of this kind was only the outburst of generous friendship.  Coleridge deliberately placed Wordsworth “nearest of all modern writers to Shakespeare and Milton, yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and his own.”  Arnold, himself a poet of rare and memorable quality, declares his firm belief that the poetical performance of Wordsworth is, after that of Shakespeare and Milton, undoubtedly the most considerable in our language from the Elizabethan age to the present time.  Dryden, Pope, Gray, Cowper, Goldsmith, Burns, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats—­“Wordsworth’s name deserves to stand, and will finally stand, above them all.”  Mr. Myers, also a poet, and the author of a volume on Wordsworth as much distinguished by insight as by admirable literary grace and power, talks of “a Plato, a Dante, a Wordsworth,” all three in a breath, as stars of equal magnitude in the great spiritual firmament.  To Mr. Swinburne, on the contrary, all these panegyrical estimates savour of monstrous and intolerable exaggeration.  Amid these contentions of celestial minds it will be safest to content ourselves with one or two plain observations in the humble positive degree, without hurrying into high and final comparatives and superlatives.

One admission is generally made at the outset.  Whatever definition of poetry we fix upon, whether that it is the language of passion or imagination formed into regular numbers; or, with Milton, that it should be “simple, sensuous, impassioned;” in any case there are great tracts in Wordsworth which, by no definition and on no terms, can be called poetry.  If we say with Shelley, that poetry is what redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man, and is the record of the best and happiest moments of the best and happiest minds, then are we bound to agree that Wordsworth records too many moments that are not specially good or happy, that he redeems from decay frequent visitations that are not from any particular divinity in man, and treats them all as very much on a level.  Mr. Arnold is undoubtedly right in his view that, to be receivable as a classic, Wordsworth must be relieved of a great deal of the poetical baggage that now encumbers him.

The faults and hindrances in Wordsworth’s poetry are obvious to every reader.  For one thing, the intention to instruct, to improve the occasion, is too deliberate and too hardly pressed.  “We hate poetry,” said Keats, “that has a palpable design upon us.  Poetry should be great and unobtrusive.”  Charles Lamb’s friendly remonstrance on one of Wordsworth’s poems is applicable to more of them:  “The instructions conveyed in it are too direct; they don’t slide into the mind of the reader while he is imagining no such matter.”