hich gives the physiognomic expressions to all
the works of nature. Like a green field reflected in a calm and
perfectly transparent lake, the image is distinguished from the reality
only by its greater softness and lustre. Like the moisture or the
polish on a pebble, genius neither distorts nor false-colors its
objects; but on the contrary, brings out many a vein and many a tint,
which escape the eye of common observation, thus raising to the rank of
gems what had been often kicked away by the hurrying foot of the
traveller on the dusty high-road of custom. . .

"Fifth; a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with
sensibility; a sympathy with man as man; the sympathy indeed of a
contemplator, rather than a fellow-sufferer or co-mate, but of a
contemplator, from whose view no difference of rank conceals the
sameness of the nature; no injuries of wind or weather, of toil, or
even of ignorance, wholly disguise the human face divine. The
superscription and the image of the Creator still remains legible to
_him_ under the dark lines, with which guilt or calamity had cancelled
or cross-barred it. Here the Man and the Poet lose and find themselves
in each other, the one as glorified, the latter as substantiated. In
this mild and philosophic pathos, Wordsworth appears to me without a
compeer. Such as he is; so he writes.

"Last and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of
imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word. In the
play of fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is not always graceful, and
sometimes recondite. . . But in imaginative power, he stands nearest of
all writers to Shakespeare and Milton; and yet in a kind perfectly
unborrowed and his own."

These are the grounds upon which Coleridge bases the poetic claims of
Wordsworth.

Matthew Arnold, in the preface to his well-known collection of
Wordsworth's poems, accords to the poet a rank no less exalted. "I
firmly believe that the poetical performance of Wordsworth is, after
that of Shakespeare and Milton, of which all the world now recognizes
the worth, undoubtedly the most considerable in our language from the
Elizabethan age to the present time." His essential greatness is to be
found in his shorter pieces, despite the frequent intrusion of much
that is very inferior. Still it is "by the great body of powerful and
significant work which remains to him after every reduction and
deduction has been made, that Word