phrase in the
last stanza, Wordsworth invents an impossible tortoise-shell, and thus
robs his story of the reality which alone gave it a living interest.
Any extemporized raft would have floated the boy down to immortality.
But Wordsworth never quite learned the distinction between Fact, which
suffocates the Muse, and Truth, which is the very breath of her
nostrils. Study and self-culture did much for him, but they never
quite satisfied him that he was capable of making a mistake. He
yielded silently to friendly remonstrance on certain points, and gave
up, for example, the ludicrous exactness of

I've measured it from side to side,
'Tis three feet long and two feet wide.

But I doubt if he was ever really convinced, and to his dying day he
could never quite shake off that habit of over-minute detail which
renders the narratives of uncultivated people so tedious, and
sometimes so distasteful. _Simon Lee_, after his latest revision,
still contains verses like these:

And he is lean and he is sick;
His body, dwindled and awry,
Rests upon ankles swollen and thick;
His legs are thin and dry;

* * * * *

Few months of life he has in store,
As he to you will tell,
For still, the more he works, the more
Do his weak ankles swell,--

which are not only prose, but _bad_ prose, and moreover guilty of the
same fault for which Wordsworth condemned Dr. Johnson's famous parody
on the ballad-style,--that their '_matter_ is contemptible'. The
sonorousness of conviction with which Wordsworth sometimes gives
utterance to commonplaces of thought and trivialities of sentiment has
a ludicrous effect on the profane and even on the faithful in
unguarded moments. We are reminded of a passage in _The Excursion_:

List! I heard
From yon huge breast of rock _a solemn bleat_,
_Sent forth as if it were the mountain's voice_.

In 1800 the friendship of Wordsworth with Lamb began, and was
thenceforward never interrupted. He continued to live at Grasmere,
conscientiously diligent in the composition of poems, secure of
finding the materials of glory within and around him; for his genius
taught him that inspiration is no product of a foreign shore, and that
no adventurer ever found it, though he wandered as long as Ulysses.
Meanwhile the appreciation of the best minds and the gratitude of the
purest hearts gradually centred more and more towards