certainly gain nothing from their namby-pamby dialect, and sometimes go near to losing the beauty that really is in them by dint of it. Moreover, the Miltonic blank verse and sonnets--at their best of a stately magnificence surpassed by no poet--have a tendency to become heavy and even dull when the poetic fire fails to fuse and shine through them. In fact it may be said of Wordsworth, as of most poets with theories, that his theories helped him very little, and sometimes hindered him a great deal. His real poetical merits are threefold, and lie first in the inexplicable, the ultimate, felicity of phrase which all great poets must have, and which only great poets have; secondly, in his matchless power of delineating natural objects; and lastly, more properly, and with most special rarity of all, in the half-pantheistic mysticism which always lies behind this observation, and which every now and then breaks through it, puts it, as mere observation, aside, and blazes in unmasked fire of rapture. The summits of Wordsworth's poetry, the "Lines Written at Tintern Abbey" and the "Ode on Intimations of Immortality,"--poems of such astonishing magnificence that it is only more astonishing that any one should have read them and failed to see what a poet had come before the world,--are the greatest of many of these revelations or inspirations. It is indeed necessary to read Wordsworth straight through--a proceeding which requires that the reader shall be in good literary training, but is then feasible, profitable, and even pleasant enough--to discern the enormous height at which the great Ode stands above its author's other work. The _Tintern Abbey_ lines certainly approach it nearest: many smaller things--"The Affliction of Margaret," "The Daffodils," and others--group well under its shadow, and innumerable passages and even single lines, such as that which all good critics have noted as lightening the darkness of the _Prelude_-- Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone--