There was a great deal in Wordsworth’s character that reminds us of Milton; the same self-reliance, the same purity and loftiness of purpose, and, I suspect, the same personal dryness of temperament and seclusion of self. He seems to have had a profounder imagination than Milton, but infinitely less music, less poetical faculty. I am not entirely satisfied of the truth of the modern philosophy which, if a man knocks another on the head, transfers all the guilt to some peccant bump on his own occiput or sinciput; but if we measure Wordsworth in this way, I feel as if he had plenty of forehead, but that he wanted hind-head, and would have been more entirely satisfactory if he had had one of the philo-something-or-other. It cannot be denied that in Wordsworth the very highest powers of the poetical mind were associated with a certain tendency to the diffuse and commonplace. It is in the Understanding (always prosaic) that the great golden veins of his imagination are embedded. He wrote too much to write always well; for it is not a great Xerxes army of words, but a compact Greek ten thousand that march safely down to posterity. He sets tasks to the divine faculty, which is much the same as trying to make Jove’s eagle do the service of a clucking hen. Throughout the “Prelude” and the “Excursion,” he seems striving to bind the wizard imagination with the sand-ropes of dry disquisition, and to have forgotten the potent spell-word which would make the particulars adhere. There is an arenaceous quality in the style which makes progress wearisome; yet with what splendors of mountain-sunsets are we not rewarded! What golden rounds of verse do we not see stretching heavenward, with angels ascending and descending! What haunting melodies hover around us, deep and eternal, like the undying barytone of the sea! And if we are compelled to fare through sands and desert wilderness, how often do we not hear airy shapes that syllable our names with a startling personal appeal to our highest consciousness and our noblest aspiration, such as we might wait for in vain in any other poet.