more than perhaps any other poet of equal endowment, he is great and surprising in passages and ejaculations. In these he loses himself, as Sir Thomas Browne would say, in an O, altitudo, where his muse is indeed a muse of fire, that can ascend, if not to the highest heaven of invention, yet to the supremest height of impersonal utterance. Then, like Elias, the prophet, "he stands up as fire, and his word burns like a lamp." But too often, when left to his own resources, and to the conscientious performance of the duty laid upon him to be a great poet quand meme, he seems diligently intent on producing fire by the primitive method of rubbing the dry sticks of his blank verse one against the other, while we stand in shivering expectation of the flame that never comes.

Even as a teacher he is often too much of a pedagogue, and is apt to forget that poetry instructs not by precept and inculcation, but by hints and indirections and suggestions, by inducing a mood rather than by enforcing a principle or a moral. He sometimes impresses our fancy with the image of a schoolmaster whose class-room commands an unrivalled prospect of cloud and mountain, of all the pomp and prodigality of heaven and earth. From time to time he calls his pupils to the window, and makes them see what, without the finer intuition of his eyes, they had never seen; makes them feel what, without the sympathy of his more penetrating sentiment, they had never felt. It seems the revelation of a new heaven and new earth, and to contain in itself its own justification. Then suddenly recollecting his duty, he shuts the window, calls them back to their tasks, and is equally well pleased and more discursive in enforcing on them the truth that the moral of all this is that in order to be happy they must be virtuous.

If it be one of the baser consolations, it is also one of the most disheartening concomitants of long life, that we get used to everything. Two things, perhaps, retain their freshness more perdurably than the rest,- the return of spring, and the more poignant utterances of the poets. And here, I think, Wordsworth holds his own with the best. But how much of his poetry is likely to be a permanent possession? The answer to this question is involved in the answer to a question of wider bearing,- What