r the final classification (abandoned, as we said, in the new
edition) of his poetical writings. And nowhere is the distinction more
realizable than in Wordsworth's own work. For though what may be
called professed Wordsworthians, including Matthew Arnold, found a
value in all that remains of him--could read anything he wrote, "even
the 'Thanksgiving Ode,'--everything, I think, except 'Vaudracour and
Julia,'"--yet still the decisiveness of such selections as those made
by Arnold himself, and now by Professor Knight, hint at a certain very
obvious difference of level in his poetic work.

This perpetual suggestion of an absolute duality between his lower and
higher moods, and the poetic work produced in them, stimulating the
reader to look below the immediate surface of his poetry, makes the
study of Wordsworth an excellent exercise for the training of those
mental powers in us, which partake both of thought and imagination. It
begets in those [95] who fall in with him at the right moment of their
spiritual development, a habit of reading between the lines, a faith in
the effect of concentration and collectedness of mind on the right
appreciation of poetry, the expectation that what is really worth
having in the poetic order will involve, on their part, a certain
discipline of the temper not less than of the intellect. Wordsworth
meets them with the assurance that he has much to give them, and of a
very peculiar kind, if they will follow a certain difficult way, and
seems to possess the secret of some special mental illumination. To
follow that way is an initiation, by which they will become able to
distinguish, in art, speech, feeling, manners, in men and life
generally, what is genuine, animated, and expressive from what is only
conventional and derivative, and therefore inexpressive.

A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which
ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed
consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general
temper of our modern poetry. Critics of literary history have again
[96] and again remarked upon it; it is a characteristic which reveals
itself in many different forms, but is strongest and most sympathetic
in what is strongest and most serious in modern literature; it is
exemplified by writers as unlike Wordsworth as the French romanticist
poets. As a curious chapter in the history of the human mind, its
growth might be traced f