His works, covering a large space, and abounding in every variety of excellence and style, assume, after all, a fragmentary aspect. They are true, simple, scattered, and strong, as blocks torn from the crags of Helvellyn, and lying there “low, but mighty still.” Few even of his ballads are wholes. They leave too much untold. They are far too suggestive to satisfy. From each poem, however rounded, there streams off a long train of thought: like the tail of a comet, which, while testifying its power, mars its aspect of oneness. The “Excursion,” avowedly a fragment, seems the splinter of a larger splinter; like a piece of Pallas, itself a piece of some split planet. Of all his poems, perhaps, his sonnets, his “Laodamia,” his “Intimations of Immortality,” and his verses on the “Eclipse in Italy,” are the most complete in execution, as certainly they are the most classical in design. Dramatic power he has none, nor does he regret the want. “I hate,” he was wont to say to Hazlitt, “those interlocutions between Caius and Lucius.” He sees, as “from a tower, the end of all.” The waving lights and shadows, the varied loopholes of view, the shiftings and fluctuations of feeling, the growing, broadening interest of the drama, have no charm for him. His mind, from its gigantic size, contracts a gigantic stiffness. It “moveth altogether, if it move at all.” Hence, some of his smaller poems remind you of the dancing of an elephant, or of the “hills leaping like lambs.” Many of the little poems which he wrote upon a system, are exceedingly tame and feeble. Yet often, even in his narrow bleak vales, we find one “meek streamlet—only one”—beautifying the desolation; and feel how painful it is for him to become poor, and that, when he sinks, it is with “compulsion and laborious flight.” But, having subtracted such faults, how much remains—of truth—of tenderness—of sober, eve-like grandeur—of purged beauties, white and clean as the lilies of Eden—of calm, deep reflection, contained in lines and sentences which have become proverbs—of mild enthusiasm—of minute knowledge of nature—of strong, yet unostentatious sympathy with man—and of devout and breathless communion with the Great Author of all! Apart altogether from their intellectual pretensions Wordsworth’s poems possess a moral clearness, beauty, transparency, and harmony, which connect them immediately with those of Milton: and beside the more popular poetry of the past age—such as Byron’s, and Moore’s—they remind us of that unplanted garden, where the shadow of God united all trees of fruitfulness, and all flowers of beauty, into one; where the “large river,” which watered the whole, “ran south,” toward the sun of heaven—when compared with the gardens of the Hesperides, where a dragon was the presiding deity, or with those of Vauxhall or White Conduit-house, where Comus and his rabble rout celebrate their undisguised orgies of miscalled and miserable pleasure. [Illustration.]