It is too customary with critics to draw a sharp line between Wordsworth in his moments of inspired passion and Wordsworth in the mood of solemn ineffectiveness; and thus those who write on Wordsworth too often view his work with a certain impatience, as if by an effort he could have criticised himself, and made a more emphatic selection of his own writings. But Pater, though he echoes the wish that Wordsworth could have been more severe in the matter of omission, shows the essential unity of his work, arising from the deliberate passivity with which he waited dutifully upon the gift of inspiration; and he compares him beautifully to “one of those early Italian or Flemish painters, who, just because their minds were full of heavenly visions, passed, some of them, the better part of sixty years in quiet, systematic industry.” In fact, Pater realised, perhaps unconsciously, that what Wordsworth had written in the “Poet’s Epitaph” was as true of Wordsworth himself;—“And you must love him, ere to you he will seem worthy of your love”; and thus the spirit in which he deals with Wordsworth’s work is one of a reverent tenderness, that cannot even bear to speak with the least roughness or harshness of the writings of one so sincere, so wise, so deep-hearted, even when engaged in the task of producing arid and pompous couplets, or rubbing, as Matthew Arnold says, like Indians in primeval forests, one dry stick upon another in the hope of generating a flame. Pater is particularly alive to Wordsworth’s deep sense of what may be called the _admonitus locorum_, the local sanctities, the far-reaching human associations with places, dealing with them largely, “till the low walls, the green mounds, the half-obliterated epitaphs seemed full of voices.” Again, Pater skilfully divines Wordsworth’s peculiar power “of realising, and conveying to the consciousness of the reader, abstract and elementary impressions—silence, darkness, absolute motionlessness: or, again, the whole complex sentiment of a particular place, the abstract expression of desolation in the long white road, of peacefulness in a particular folding of the hills.”