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Besides being prolix, Wordsworth is often cumbrous; has often no flight; is not liquid, is not musical. He is heavy and self-conscious with the burden of his message. How much at his best he is, when, as in the admirable and truly Wordsworthian poem of Michael, he spares us a sermon and leaves us the story.
In an area some three hundred and fifty miles long by three hundred broad are contained the ruggedness of Cornwall, the idyllic softness of Devon, the dreamy solitudes of the South Downs, with their billowy, chalky contours, the agricultural fertility of Kent and Middlesex, the romantic woodlands and hilly pastures of Surrey, the melancholy fens of Lincolnshire, the broad, bosky levels of the midlands, the sudden wildness of Wales, with her mountains and glens, Yorkshire, with its grim, heather-clad moors, Westmoreland, with its fells and Wordsworthian "Lakes"; every note in the gamut of natural beauty has been struck, from honeysuckle prettiness to savage grandeur.
The earlier editions lacked the beautiful songs of the ladies, and that additional trait of dream, the strange trance- like seizures of the Prince: "fallings from us, vanishings," in Wordsworthian phrase; instances of "dissociation," in modern psychological terminology.
Underneath this growth and diversity of opinion we see George Eliot's oneness of character, just, for that matter, as we see it in Mill's long and grave march from the uncompromising denials instilled into him by his father, then through Wordsworthian mysticism and Coleridgean conservatism, down to the pale belief and dim starlight faith of his posthumous volume.
"They had so many virtues that they must have been kind to brutes, but I taste something more Cowperian, more Wordsworthian, than Marcus-Aurelian in our own kindness. These poets taught me, so far as I could learn, not to 'enter on my list of friends the man Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm, and 'Never to mix my pleasure or my pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that breathes."
But in this priest, Borrow's method, always instinctively intense if not exaggerated, falls to caricature. I have no objection to caricature; when it is of a logical or incidental kind I enjoy it, even in "The Romany Rye"; I enjoy, for example, the snoring Wordsworthian, without any prejudice against Wordsworth.
His landscapes have in this way a Wordsworthian directness, simplicity, and severity. They are not troubled and dramatic like Turner's. They are not decorative like Dupré's, they have not the solemn sentiment of Daubigny's, or the airy aspiration and fairy-like blitheness of Corot's.
Tennyson’s blank verse seems at its best to combine the beauties of the Miltonic and the Wordsworthian line; while nothing is so rare in his work as a Shakespearean line. Now and then such a line as Authority forgets a dying king turns up, but very rarely. We agree with all Professor Jebb says in praise of Tennyson’s blank verse.
Early in the century, something approaching the Wordsworthian doctrine of emotion recollected in tranquillity was in vogue, as regards capacity for passion. The Byronic hero is one whose affections have burned themselves out, and who employs the last worthless years of his life writing them up. Childe Harold is
Of a mere Byronite, indeed, Mr Arnold has even less than he has of a Wordsworthian pure and simple. He makes the most damaging admissions; he has to fall back on Goethe for comfort and confirmation; he is greatly disturbed by M. Scherer's rough treatment of his subject. Mr Arnold is obviously not at ease in this Zion which indeed is a Zion of an odd kind.
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