It was an organ that Milton
mastered, mighty in compass, capable equally of the trumpet's ardors or
the slim delicacy of the flute, and sometimes it bursts forth in great
crashes through his prose, as if he touched it for solace in the
intervals of his toil. If Wordsworth sometimes puts the trumpet to his
lips, yet he lays it aside soon and willingly for his appropriate
instrument, the pastoral reed. And it is not one that grew by any vulgar
stream, but that which Apollo breathed through, tending the flocks of
Admetus,--that which Pan endowed with every melody of the visible
universe,--the same in which the soul of the despairing nymph took refuge
and gifted with her dual nature,--so that ever and anon, amid the notes
of human joy or sorrow, there comes suddenly a deeper and almost awful
tone, thrilling us into dim consciousness of a forgotten divinity.
Wordsworth's absolute want of humor, while it no doubt confirmed his
self-confidence by making him insensible both to the comical incongruity
into which he was often led by his earlier theory concerning the language
of poetry and to the not unnatural ridicule called forth by it, seems to
have been indicative of a certain dulness of perception in other
directions.[352] We cannot help feeling that the material of his nature
was essentially prose, which, in his inspired moments, he had the power
of transmuting, but which, whenever the inspiration failed or was
factitious, remained obstinately leaden.
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