rose are identical. You know, too, I dare say, into what
banalities that theory over and over again betrayed him: banalities such
as--

His widowed mother, for a second mate
Espoused the teacher of the village school:
Who on her offspring zealously bestowed
Needful instruction.

--and the rest. Nevertheless Wordsworth was a genius; and genius working
persistently on a narrow theory will now and again 'bring it off' (as
they say). So he, amid the flat waste of his later compositions, did
undoubtedly 'bring it off' in the following sonnet:--

These times strike monied worldlings with dismay:
Ev'n rich men, brave by nature, taint the air
With words of apprehension and despair;
While tens of thousands, thinking on the affray,
Men unto whom sufficient for the day
And minds not stinted or untill'd are given,
Sound healthy children of the God of Heaven,
Are cheerful as the rising sun in May.
What do we gather hence but firmer faith
That every gift of noble origin
Is breath'd upon by Hope's perpetual breath;
That Virtue and the faculties within
Are vital; and that riches are akin
To fear, to change, to cowardice, and death?

Here, I grant, are no repetitions, no inversions. The sentences, though
metrical, run straightforwardly, verb following subject, object verb, as
in strict prose. In short here you have verse reduced to the order and
structure of prose as nearly as a man of genius, working on a set theory,
could reduce it while yet maintaining its proper emotional key. But first
let me say that you will find very few like instances of success even in
Wordsworth; and few indeed to set against innumerable passages wherein
either his verse defies his theory and triumphs, or succumbs to it and,
succumbing, either drops sheer to bathos or spreads itself over dead
flats of commonplace. Let me tell you next that the instances you will
find in other poets are so few and so far between as to be negligible;
and lastly that even such verse as the above has only to be compared with
a passage of prose and its emotional pitch is at once betrayed. Take
this, for example, from Jeremy Taylor:--

Since all the evil in the world consists in the disagreeing between the
object and the appetite, as when a man hath what he desires not, or
desires what he hath not, or desires amiss, he that compares his spirit
to the present accident hath variety of instance for his virtue,