When we hear of
certain productions, that they are feeble in design, but masterly in
parts, that they are incoherent, to be sure, but have great merits of
style, we know that it cannot be true; for in the highest examples we
have, the master is revealed by his plan, by his power of making all
accessories, each in its due relation, subordinate to it, and that to
limit style to the rounding of a period or a distich is wholly to
misapprehend its truest and highest function. Donne is full of salient
verses that would take the rudest March winds of criticism with their
beauty, of thoughts that first tease us like charades and then delight us
with the felicity of their solution; but these have not saved him. He is
exiled to the limbo of the formless and the fragmentary. To take a more
recent instance,--Wordsworth had, in some respects, a deeper insight, and
a more adequate utterance of it, than any man of his generation. But it
was a piece-meal insight and utterance; his imagination was feminine, not
masculine, receptive, and not creative. His longer poems are Egyptian
sand-wastes, with here and there an oasis of exquisite greenery, a grand
image, Sphinx-like, half buried in drifting commonplaces, or the solitary
Pompey's Pillar of some towering thought.
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