of fancy and stir of imagination, they will find him less
congenial to their mood than poets not worthy to loose the latchet of
his shoe in the greater elements of his art. In all these comparisons,
it is not merely Wordsworth's theme and motive and dominant note that
are different; the skill of hand is different, and the musical ear and
the imaginative eye.

To maintain or to admit so much as this, however, is not to say the
last word. The question is whether Wordsworth, however unequal to
Shelley in lyric quality, to Coleridge or to Keats in imaginative
quality, to Burns in tenderness, warmth, and that humour which is so
nearly akin to pathos, to Byron in vividness and energy, yet possesses
excellences of his own which place him in other respects above
these master-spirits of his time. If the question is to be answered
affirmatively, it is clear that only in one direction must we look.
The trait that really places Wordsworth on an eminence above his
poetic contemporaries, and ranks him, as the ages are likely to rank
him, on a line just short of the greatest of all time, is his direct
appeal to will and conduct. "There is volition and self-government in
every line of his poetry, and his best thoughts come from his steady
resistance to the ebb and flow of ordinary desires and regrets. He
contests the ground inch by inch with all despondent and indolent
humours, and often, too, with movements of inconsiderate and wasteful
joy" (_R.H. Hutton_). That would seem to be his true distinction and
superiority over men to whom more had been given of fire, passion, and
ravishing music. Those who deem the end of poetry to be intoxication,
fever, or rainbow dreams, can care little for Wordsworth. If its
end be not intoxication, but on the contrary a search from the wide
regions of imagination and feeling for elements of composure deep and
pure, and of self-government in a far loftier sense than the merely
prudential, then Wordsworth has a gift of his own in which he was
approached by no poet of his time. Scott's sane and humane genius,
with much the same aims, yet worked with different methods. He once
remonstrated with Lockhart for being too apt to measure things by some
reference to literature. "I have read books enough," said Scott,
"and observed and conversed with enough of eminent and splendidly
cultivated minds; but I assure you, I have heard higher sentiments
from the lips of poor uneducated men and women, when exerting
the