has given us not only a most poetical insight into the real nature of the ‘Illustrious Hidalgo of La Mancha’; he has shown us that it was a nature compacted of the madman and the poet, and this in language so appropriate, that the consideration of it cannot fail to give pleasure to all who have found a reason for weighing Wordsworth’s words.

“He demands

           ’Oh! why hath not the Mind
    Some element to stamp her image on?’

then falls asleep, ‘his senses yielding to the sultry air,’ and he
sees before him

            ’stretched a boundless plain

Of sandy wilderness, all black and void,
And as I looked around, distress and fear
Came creeping over me, when at my side,
Close at my side, an uncouth shape appeared
Upon a dromedary, mounted high. 
He seemed an Arab ...’

  Here we have the plains of Montiel, and the poet realising all that
  Don Quixote felt on that day of July, ‘the hottest of the year,’ when
  he first set out on his quest and met with nothing worth recording.

    ‘The uncouth shape’

  is of course the Don himself,

the ‘dromedary’

is Rozinante, and

the ‘Arab’

doubtless is Cid Hamete Benengeli.

“Taking such an one for the guide,

             ’who with unerring skill
    Would through the desert lead me,’

is a most sweet play of humour like to the lambent flame of his whose
satire was as a summer breath, and who smiled all the time he wrote,
although he wrote chiefly in a prison.

‘The loud prophetic blast of harmony’

is doubtless a continuation of this humour, down to the lines

’Nor doubted once but that they both were books,
Having a perfect faith in all that passed.’

“Our poet now becomes positive,

                           ’Lance in rest,
    He rode, I keeping pace with him; and now
    He, to my fancy, had become the knight
    Whose tale Cervantes tells; yet not the knight
    But was an Arab of the desert too,
    Of these was neither, and was both at once.’

This is absolutely true, and was one of the earliest complaints made a century and a half ago, when Spaniards began to criticise their one great book.  They could not tell at times whether Don Quixote was speaking, or Cervantes, or Cid Hamete Benengeli.

    ‘A bed of glittering light’

  is a delightful description of the attitude of Don Quixote’s mind
  towards external nature while passing through the desert.

    ‘It is,’ said he, ’the waters of the deep
    Gathering upon us.’

“It was, of course, only the mirage; but this he changed to suit his own purpose into the ‘waters of the deep,’ as he changed the row of Castilian wind-mills into giants, and the roar of the fulling mills into the din of war.

  “Wordsworth is now awake from his dream, but turning all he saw in it
  into a reality, as only the poet can, he feels that