The predominating characteristic of Wordsworth’s poetry is thoughtfulness, a thoughtfulness in which every faculty of his mind and every disposition of his heart meet and mingle; and the result is an atmosphere of thought, giving a softening charm to all the objects it surrounds and permeates. This atmosphere is sometimes sparklingly clear, as if the airs and dews and sunshine of a May morning had found a home in his imagination; but, in his philosophical poems, where he penetrates into a region of thought above the ken of ordinary mortals, this atmosphere is touched by an ideal radiance which slightly obscures as well as consecrates the objects seen through it, and occasionally it thickens into mystical obscurity. No person can thoroughly enjoy Wordsworth who does not feel the subtle spirit of this atmosphere of thought, as it communicates an air of freshness and originality even to the commonplaces of his thinking, and apparels his loftier conceptions in celestial light— “The gleam, The light that never was on sea or land, The consecration and the poet’s dream.” The first and grandest exercise, therefore, of his imagination is the creation of this harmonizing atmosphere, enveloping as it does the world of his creation with that peculiar light and air, indescribable but unmistakable, which enable us at once to recognize and to class a poem by Wordsworth. We do not hesitate to say that, in its peculiarity, there is nothing identical with it in literature—that it constitutes an absolutely new kind of poetry, in the Platonic sense of the word kind. An imagination which thus fuse all the faculties and emotions into one individuality, so that all the vital products of that individuality are characterized by unity of effect, is an imagination of the highest _kind_. The next question to be considered is the variety which this unity includes; for Shakspeare himself, the most comprehensively creative of human beings, never goes beyond the unity of his individuality, his multifarious variety always answering to the breadth of his personality. He is like the banyan tree in the marvelous fertility of his creativeness, and the province of humanity he covers; but the fertility all comes from one root and trunk, and indicates simply the greatness of the _kind_, as compared with other _kinds_ of trees. The variety in the operation of Wordsworth’s imagination we will consider first in its emotional, and second in its intellectual, manifestation—of course, using these words as terms of distinction, not of division, because when we employ the word imagination we desire to imply a fusion of the whole nature of the man into one living power. In the emotional operation of Wordsworth’s imagination we discern his Sentiment. No term has been more misused than this, its common acceptation being a weak affectionateness; and, at best, it is considered as an instinct of the sensibility, as a simple, indivisible