[353] During the most happily productive
period of his life, Wordsworth was impatient of what may be called the
mechanical portion of his art. His wife and sister seem from the first to
have been his scribes. In later years, he had learned and often insisted
on the truth that poetry was an art no less than a gift, and corrected
his poems in cold blood, sometimes to their detriment. But he certainly
had more of the vision than of the faculty divine, and was always a
little numb on the side of form and proportion. Perhaps his best poem in
these respects is the "Laodamia," and it is not uninstructive to learn
from his own lips that "it cost him more trouble than almost anything of
equal length he had ever written." His longer poems (miscalled epical)
have no more intimate bond of union than their more or less immediate
relation to his own personality. Of character other than his own he had
but a faint conception, and all the personages of "The Excursion" that
are not Wordsworth are the merest shadows of himself upon mist, for his
self-concentrated nature was incapable of projecting itself into the
consciousness of other men and seeing the springs of action at their
source in the recesses of individual character. The best parts of these
longer poems are bursts of impassioned soliloquy, and his fingers were
always clumsy at the _callida junctura_.
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