Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/439

Rh solemnity, and philosophizing in a method the most tiresome, on events the most trivial?

It is to this cause that we must, perhaps, attribute the fact that, although written by a man of Wordsworth's colossal powers, this poem is, perhaps, the most uninteresting book of confessions ever penned. It certainly will bear no comparison with the painful interest, or the calm self-knowledge which attracts us to the Autobiographies of Rousseau or Goethe, and will be read at a disadvantage by the side of Lamartine's rhapsodies, the fascinating pages of Contarini Fleming, or even the garrulous narratives of Mr. Leigh Hunt and Mr. Jerdan. Is it not this, or some kindred intellectual defect which has prevented this poet from sustaining a long and lofty flight? Why does there occur page after page in "The Excursion" and "Prelude," which is merely prose metrically arranged? How is it that he seldom rises to any elevation without marring the sublimity or beauty of the passage by some mean or vulgar thought? It is not owing to what Mr. Carlyle has called "unconsciousness," because Wordsworth wrote on a system, and criticised and classified his own productions. It proceeded rather from a want of critical acumen, which was probably the result of his having relied too much on his moody meditations in his garden, and having neglected his library. That he was but an indifferent judge of the merits of other writers, we may conclude, among other reasons, from the fact of his considering Goethe an overrated man, and by his unfair depreciation of the poetical powers of Dryden, Pope, Gray, Sir W. Scott, and Lord Byron.

This depreciation of others, caused him to overestimate himself. Indeed, if we did not believe that he was blinded by self-love to the defects of his own composition, we should be quite at a loss to comprehend why he should ever have stooped to such a simile as that in which he