The Imagination is a faculty that flouts at foreordination, and
Wordsworth seemed to do all he could to cheat his readers of her company
by laying out paths with a peremptory _Do not step off the gravel!_ at
the opening of each, and preparing pitfalls for every conceivable
emotion, with guide-boards to tell each when and where it must be caught.
But if these things stood in the way of immediate appreciation, he had
another theory which interferes more seriously with the total and
permanent effect of his poems. He was theoretically determined not only
to be a philosophic poet, but to be a _great_ philosophic poet, and to
this end he must produce an epic. Leaving aside the question whether the
epic be obsolete or not, it may be doubted whether the history of a
single man's mind is universal enough in its interest to furnish all the
requirements of the epic machinery, and it may be more than doubted
whether a poet's philosophy be ordinary metaphysics, divisible into
chapter and section. It is rather something which is more energetic in a
word than in a whole treatise, and our hearts unclose themselves
instinctively at its simple _Open sesame!_ while they would stand firm
against the reading of the whole body of philosophy. In point of fact,
the one element of greatness which "The Excursion" possesses indisputably
is heaviness.
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