If Wordsworth had possessed Browning's sense of humor, he would have withdrawn an eighth of his published works; if he had possessed Hood's sense of humor, I think he would have withdrawn a third. Humor is a great and good shortener. Humor seeks to provoke mirth and ripples of cheery satisfaction, so it shuns length and prosiness. Humor is a charming quality in either preacher or poet; and brevity is one of the best parts of humor; indeed brevity and humor always lock hands. Unfortunately, Wordsworth had no humor. Again, that too free and lax play of language in Wordsworth--that told nothing vital, but only served to tie together, by loose and swaying looplets, the flashing jewels wherein his real genius coruscated and crystallized--not only fatigued us who followed and wanted to follow, but it filled the master's time and books and thought to the neglect of that large entertainment of some systematized purpose--some great, balanced, and concreted scheme of poetic story, {333} which he always hinted at, but never made good. Take that budget of verse which went toward the making of the "Recluse"--how incomplete; how unfinished even in detail; yet splashed up and down with brilliancies of thought and fancy; with here and there noble, statuesque, single figures; like a great antechamber, detaining us with its diverting objects, with interposed, wearisome, official talk--we all the while hoping to fare through to some point where we shall see the grandeur of the house and take in reverently its great proportions, and pay homage to the master. But we never come to those Arcana; we end in waiting; great, fine bursts of song, and of glowing narrative--sun, mountains, and clouds giving us august attendance--but no mapping of a whole, whose scheme is fitly balanced, and whose foundations bear up a completed body and dome, with cross and crown. But though his languors of language, his prosiness, his self-satisfaction do madden one to damnatory speech, yet when his song breaks out at its best--seeming to tie the upper mysterious world to this mundane level--to make steps of melody and of heavenly lift to {334} invite and charm as toward the Infinite, we are ashamed of our too easy discomfiture:-- "Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: "O joy! that in our embers Is something that doth live, That Nature yet remembers What was so fugitive! The thought of our past years in me doth breed Perpetual benediction: nor indeed For that which is most worthy to be blest;