Coleridge and other English critics at the beginning of the present century had a great deal to say concerning a psychological distinction of much importance (as it appeared to them) between the fancy and the imagination. Stripped of a great deal of somewhat obscure metaphysical theory, this distinction reduced itself to the certainly vital one, with which all true criticism more or less directly has to do, between the lower and higher degrees of intensity in the [94] poet's conception of his subject, and his concentration of himself upon his work. It was Wordsworth who made most of this distinction, assuming it as the basis for the final classification (abandoned, as we said, in the new edition) of his poetical writings. And nowhere is the distinction more realizable than in Wordsworth's own work. For though what may be called professed Wordsworthians, including Matthew Arnold, found a value in all that remains of him--could read anything he wrote, "even the 'Thanksgiving Ode,'--everything, I think, except 'Vaudracour and Julia,'"--yet still the decisiveness of such selections as those made by Arnold himself, and now by Professor Knight, hint at a certain very obvious difference of level in his poetic work. This perpetual suggestion of an absolute duality between his lower and higher moods, and the poetic work produced in them, stimulating the reader to look below the immediate surface of his poetry, makes the study of Wordsworth an excellent exercise for the training of those mental powers in us, which partake both of thought and imagination. It begets in those [95] who fall in with him at the right moment of their spiritual development, a habit of reading between the lines, a faith in the effect of concentration and collectedness of mind on the right appreciation of poetry, the expectation that what is really worth having in the poetic order will involve, on their part, a certain discipline of the temper not less than of the intellect. Wordsworth meets them with the assurance that he has much to give them, and of a very peculiar kind, if they will follow a certain difficult way, and seems to possess the secret of some special mental illumination. To follow that way is an initiation, by which they will become able to distinguish, in art, speech, feeling, manners, in men and life generally, what is genuine, animated, and expressive from what is only conventional and derivative, and therefore inexpressive.