“And yet, with his creed, what might not a great poet have done?  That the language of poetry is but the language of strong human passion! ...  And what, pray, has he made out of this true and philosophical creed?  A few ballads, (pretty, at the best,) two or three moral fables, some natural description of scenery, and half a dozen narratives of common distress or happiness.  Not one single character has he created, not one incident, not one tragical catastrophe.  He has thrown no light on man’s estate here below; and Crabbe, with all his defects, stands immeasurably above Wordsworth as the Poet of the Poor ...  I confess that the ‘Excursion’ is the worst poem, of any character, in the English language.  It contains about two hundred sonorous lines, some of which appear to be fine, even in the sense, as well as the sound.  The remaining seven thousand three hundred are quite ineffectual.  Then what labor the builder of that lofty rhyme must have undergone!  It is, in its own way, a small Tower of Babel, and all built by a single man.”

Christopher was surely in the dumps, when he wrote thus:  he was soured by an Edinburgh study.  After a run in the crisp air of the moors, he would never have written such atrabilious criticism of a poet whom he admired highly, for it was not honestly in the natural man.  Neither his postulates nor his inferences are quite correct.  It is incorrect to say that the poet’s creed was a true one; that, with it, he might have been a great poet; but that, from not making the most of it, he was a bad one.  De Quincey’s position, we think, was the only true one:  that Wordsworth’s poetic creed was radically false,—­a creed more honored in the breach than the observance,—­a creed good on paper only; that its author, though professing, did in fact never follow it; that, with it, he could never have been a great poet; and that, without it, he was really great.

Wilson at Windermere, like Wilson at Oxford, was versatile, active, Titanic, mysterious, and fascinating.  An immense energy and momentum marked the man; and a strange fitfulness, a lack of concentration, made the sum total of results far too small.  There was power; but much of it was power wasted.  He overflowed everywhere; his magnificent physique often got the better of him; his boundless animal spirits fairly ran riot with him; his poetic soul made him the fondest and closest of Nature’s wooers; his buoyant health lent an untold luxury to the mere fact of existence; his huge muscles and tuneful nerves always hungered for action, and bulged and thrilled joyously when face to face with danger.  He was exuberant, extravagant, enthusiastic, reckless, stupendous, fantastic.  It is only by the cumulation of epithets that one can characterize a being so colossal in proportion, so many-sided in his phases, so manifold in operation.  He was a brilliant of the first water, whose endless facets were forever gleaming, now here, now there, with a gorgeous, but irregular light.  No man could tell where to look for the coming splendor.  The glory dazzled all eyes, yet few saw their way the clearer by such fitful flashes.