"[350]
Though he here speaks in the preterite tense, this was always true of
him, and his thought seems often to lean upon a word too weak to bear its
weight. No reader of adequate insight can help regretting that he did not
earlier give himself to "the trade of classic niceties." It was precisely
this which gives to the blank-verse of Landor the severe dignity and
reserved force which alone among later poets recall the tune of Milton,
and to which Wordsworth never attained. Indeed, Wordsworth's blank-verse
(though the passion be profounder) is always essentially that of Cowper.
They were alike also in their love of outward nature and of simple
things. The main difference between them is one of scenery rather than of
sentiment, between the life-long familiar of the mountains and the
dweller on the plain.
It cannot be denied that in Wordsworth the very highest powers of the
poetic 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 imbedded.[351] 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 set
tasks to his divine faculty, which is much the same as trying to make
Jove's eagle do the service of a clucking hen.
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