There is another thing.  Wordsworth classified his poems not according to any commonly received plan of arrangement, but according to a scheme of mental physiology.  He has poems of the fancy, poems of the imagination, poems of sentiment and reflection, and so on.  His categories are ingenious but far-fetched, and the result of his employment of them is unsatisfactory.  Poems are separated one from another which possess a kinship of subject or of treatment far more vital and deep than the supposed unity of mental origin, which was Wordsworth’s reason for joining them with others.

The tact of the Greeks in matters of this kind was infallible.  We may rely upon it that we shall not improve upon the classification adopted by the Greeks for kinds of poetry; that their categories of epic, dramatic, lyric, and so forth, have a natural propriety, and should be adhered to.  It may sometimes seem doubtful to which of two categories a poem belongs; whether this or that poem is to be called, for instance, narrative or lyric, lyric or elegiac.  But there is to be found in every good poem a strain, a predominant note, which determines the poem as belonging to one of these kinds rather than the other; and here is the best proof of the value of the classification, and of the advantage of adhering to it.  Wordsworth’s poems will never produce their due effect until they are freed from their present artificial arrangement, and grouped more naturally.

Disengaged from the quantity of inferior work which now obscures them, the best poems of Wordsworth, I hear many people say, would indeed stand out in great beauty, but they would prove to be very few in number, scarcely more than a half a dozen.  I maintain, on the other hand, that what strikes me with admiration, what establishes in my opinion Wordsworth’s superiority, is the great and ample body of powerful work which remains to him, even after all his inferior work has been cleared away.  He gives us so much to rest upon, so much which communicates his spirit and engages ours!

This is of very great importance.  If it were a comparison of single pieces, or of three or four pieces, by each poet, I do not say that Wordsworth would stand decisively above Gray, or Burns, or Coleridge, or Keats, or Manzoni, or Heine.  It is in his ampler body of powerful work that I find his superiority.  His good work itself, his work which counts, is not all of it, of course, of equal value.  Some kinds of poetry are in themselves lower kinds than others.  The ballad kind is a lower kind; the didactic kind, still more, is a lower kind.  Poetry of this latter sort counts, too, sometimes, by its biographical interest partly, not by its poetical interest pure and simple; but then this can only be when the poet producing it has the power and importance of Wordsworth, a power and importance which he assuredly did not establish by such didactic poetry alone.  Altogether, it is, I say, by the great body of powerful and significant work which remains to him, after every reduction and deduction has been made, that Wordsworth’s superiority is proved.