Nevertheless, we are not to suppose that everything is precious which Wordsworth, standing even at this perennial and beautiful source, may give us.  Wordsworthians are apt to talk as if it must be.  They will speak with the same reverence of The Sailor’s Mother, for example, as of Lucy Gray.  They do their master harm by such lack of discrimination. Lucy Gray is a beautiful success; The Sailor’s Mother is a failure.  To give aright what he wishes to give, to interpret and render successfully, is not always within Wordsworth’s own command.  It is within no poet’s command; here is the part of the Muse, the inspiration, the God, the “not ourselves."[382] In Wordsworth’s case, the accident, for so it may almost be called, of inspiration, is of peculiar importance.  No poet, perhaps, is so evidently filled with a new and sacred energy when the inspiration is upon him; no poet, when it fails him, is so left “weak as is a breaking wave.”  I remember hearing him say that “Goethe’s poetry was not inevitable enough.”  The remark is striking and true; no line in Goethe, as Goethe said himself, but its maker knew well how it came there.  Wordsworth is right, Goethe’s poetry is not inevitable; not inevitable enough.  But Wordsworth’s poetry, when he is at his best, is inevitable, as inevitable as Nature herself.  It might seem that Nature not only gave him the matter for his poem, but wrote his poem for him.  He has no style.  He was too conversant with Milton not to catch at times his master’s manner, and he has fine Miltonic lines; but he has no assured poetic style of his own, like Milton.  When he seeks to have a style he falls into ponderosity and pomposity.  In the Excursion we have his style, as an artistic product of his own creation; and although Jeffrey completely failed to recognize Wordsworth’s real greatness, he was yet not wrong in saying of the Excursion, as a work of poetic style:  “This will never do."[383].  And yet magical as is that power, which Wordsworth has not, of assured and possessed poetic style, he has something which is an equivalent for it.

Every one who has any sense for these things feels the subtle turn, the heightening, which is given to a poet’s verse by his genius for style.  We can feel it in the

  “After life’s fitful fever, he sleeps well”—­[384]

of Shakespeare; in the

      “... though fall’n on evil days,
  On evil days though fall’n, and evil tongues”—­[385]

of Milton.  It is the incomparable charm of Milton’s power of poetic style which gives such worth to Paradise Regained, and makes a great poem of a work in which Milton’s imagination does not soar high.  Wordsworth has in constant possession, and at command, no style of this kind; but he had too poetic a nature, and had read the great poets too well, not to catch, as I have already remarked, something of it occasionally.  We find it not only in his Miltonic lines; we find it in such a phrase as this, where the manner is his own, not Milton’s—­