There is, and always has been, on the part of too many admirers of Wordsworth a disposition to resent any depreciation or expression of dissent from fullest praise, which has counted against his reputation. We do not like--any of us--to be forced into our admiration of this or that poet, and will not be, for long whiles together. There is no {331} bolstering of bad work that will make it permanently sound; so, too, what good things are done--whatever opposing sneers or silence may do--will surely, some day or other, be found out. A book or a poem that needs careful and insistent pilotage by critics, into the harbor of a great Fame, will not be so sure of safe anchorage and good holding-ground as one that drifts thither under stress of the unbroken, quiet, resistless tide of a cultivated popular judgment. Wordsworth's place is a very high one; some things he has done are incomparable; some altitudes of thought he has reached range among the Miltonic heights. But he has printed--as so many people have--too much. His vanities--which were excellently well developed--seem to have made him insensible to any demerits in his own work and incapable of believing that hand or brain of his could do aught that was not so far above common level as to warrant its acceptance by the world. I think he was conscientious in this; I do not believe that, like many an author, he put before us what he knew or suspected to be inferior, simply because he knew it would be devoured. There was {332} none of that dishonesty in Wordsworth. He religiously believed that even "Peter Bell" and the dreariest lines of the "Idiot Boy" had a mission.