Apart, however, from excess of prolixity and of solemnity, can it be really contended that in purely poetic quality—­in aerial freedom and space, in radiant purity of light or depth and variety of colour, in penetrating and subtle sweetness of music, in supple mastery of the instrument, in vivid spontaneity of imagination, in clean-cut sureness of touch—­Wordsworth is not surpassed by men who were below him in weight and greatness?  Even in his own field of the simple and the pastoral has he touched so sweet and spontaneous a note as Burns’s Daisy, or the Mouse?  When men seek immersion or absorption in the atmosphere of pure poesy, without lesson or moral, or anything but delight of fancy and stir of imagination, they will find him less congenial to their mood than poets not worthy to loose the latchet of his shoe in the greater elements of his art.  In all these comparisons, it is not merely Wordsworth’s theme and motive and dominant note that are different; the skill of hand is different, and the musical ear and the imaginative eye.

To maintain or to admit so much as this, however, is not to say the last word.  The question is whether Wordsworth, however unequal to Shelley in lyric quality, to Coleridge or to Keats in imaginative quality, to Burns in tenderness, warmth, and that humour which is so nearly akin to pathos, to Byron in vividness and energy, yet possesses excellences of his own which place him in other respects above these master-spirits of his time.  If the question is to be answered affirmatively, it is clear that only in one direction must we look.  The trait that really places Wordsworth on an eminence above his poetic contemporaries, and ranks him, as the ages are likely to rank him, on a line just short of the greatest of all time, is his direct appeal to will and conduct.  “There is volition and self-government in every line of his poetry, and his best thoughts come from his steady resistance to the ebb and flow of ordinary desires and regrets.  He contests the ground inch by inch with all despondent and indolent humours, and often, too, with movements of inconsiderate and wasteful joy” (R.H.  Hutton).  That would seem to be his true distinction and superiority over men to whom more had been given of fire, passion, and ravishing music.  Those who deem the end of poetry to be intoxication, fever, or rainbow dreams, can care little for Wordsworth.  If its end be not intoxication, but on the contrary a search from the wide regions of imagination and feeling for elements of composure deep and pure, and of self-government in a far loftier sense than the merely prudential, then Wordsworth has a gift of his own in which he was approached by no poet of his time.  Scott’s sane and humane genius, with much the same aims, yet worked with different methods.  He once remonstrated with Lockhart for being too apt to measure things by some reference to literature.  “I have read books enough,” said Scott, “and observed