I am careful in choosing words to describe the manner of this threefold prophesying, because I am anxious to distinguish it from didacticism. Not that Wordsworth is never didactic; for he is very often entirely and dreadfully so. But at such times he is not at his best; and it is in these long uninspired intervals that we must bear, as Walter Pater has said, “With patience the presence of an alien element in Wordsworth’s work, which never coalesced with what is really delightful in it, nor underwent his peculiar power.” Wordsworth’s genius as a poet did not always illuminate his industry as a writer. In the intervals he prosed terribly. There is a good deal of what Lowell calls “Dr. Wattsiness,” in some of his poems. But the character of his best poems was strangely inspirational. They came to him like gifts, and he read them aloud as if wondering at their beauty. Through the protracted description of an excursion, or the careful explanation of a state of mind, he slowly plods on foot; but when he comes to the mount of vision, he mounts up with wings as an eagle. In the analysis of a character, in the narration of a simple story, he often drones, and sometimes stammers; but when the flash of insight arrives, he sings. This is the difference between the pedagogue and the prophet: the pedagogue repeats a lesson learned by rote, the prophet chants a truth revealed by vision. III Let me speak first of Wordsworth as a poet of Nature. The peculiar and precious quality of his best work is that it is done with his eye on the object and his imagination beyond it. Nothing could be more accurate, more true to the facts than Wordsworth’s observation of the external world. There was an underlying steadiness, a fundamental placidity, a kind of patient, heroic obstinacy in his character, which blended with his delicate, almost tremulous sensibility, to make him rarely fitted for this work. He could look and listen long. When the magical moment of disclosure arrived, he was there and ready. Some of his senses were not particularly acute. Odours seem not to have affected him. There are few phrases descriptive of the fragrance of nature in his poetry, and so far as I can remember none of them are vivid. He could never have written Tennyson’s line about “The smell of violets hidden in the green.” Nor was he especially sensitive to colour. Most of his descriptions in this region are vague and luminous, rather than precise and brilliant. Colour-words are comparatively rare in his poems. Yellow, I think, was his favourite, if we may judge by the flowers that he mentioned most frequently. Yet more than any colour he loved clearness, transparency, the diaphanous current of a pure stream, the light of sunset “that imbues Whate’er it strikes with gem-like hues.”