eave her to reveal her own
mystery. We do not say this in depreciation of one who stands now
far above human praise or blame. The wonder is, not that Wordsworth
rose no higher, but that, considering the level on which his taste
was formed, he had power to rise to the height above his age which he
did attain. He did a mighty work. He has left the marks of his
teaching upon every poet who has written verses worth reading for the
last twenty years. The idea by which he conquered was, as Coleridge
well sets forth, the very one which, in its practical results on his
own poetry, procured him loud and deserved ridicule. This, which
will be the root idea of the whole poetry of this generation, was the
dignity of nature in all her manifestations, and not merely in those
which may happen to suit the fastidiousness or Manichaeism of any
particular age. He may have been at times fanatical on his idea, and
have misused it, till it became self-contradictory, because he could
not see the correlative truths which should have limited it. But it
is by fanatics, by men of one great thought, that great works are
done; and it is good for the time that a man arose in it of fearless
honesty enough to write Peter Bell and the Idiot Boy, to shake all
the old methods of nature-painting to their roots, and set every man
seriously to ask himself what he meant, or whether he meant anything
real, reverent, or honest, when he talked about "poetic diction," or
"the beauties of nature." And after all, like all fanatics,
Wordsworth was better than his own creed. As Coleridge thoroughly
shows in the second volume of the "Biographia Literaria," and as may
be seen nowhere more strikingly than in his grand posthumous work,
his noblest poems and noblest stanzas are those in which his true
poetic genius, unconsciously to himself, sets at naught his own
pseudo-naturalist dogmas.

Now Mr. Tennyson, while fully adopting Wordsworth's principle from
the very first, seemed by instinctive taste to have escaped the
snares which had proved too subtle both for Keats and Wordsworth.
Doubtless there are slight niaiseries, after the manner of both those
poets, in the first editions of his earlier poems. He seems, like
most other great artists, to have first tried imitations of various
styles which already existed, before he learnt the art of
incorporating them into his own, and learning from all his
predecessors, without losing his own individual peculiarities