Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/440

426 compares his mind at the theatre, flashing through the many-headed mass, to a kitten at play among straws, and rustling leaves. We believe that this sublime comparison was suggested by his earliest theatre-going during his first sojourn in London. As it occurs in "The Prelude," we are glad to think that it was not elaborated on the night when he, among so many other celebrities, greeted by their presence the first representation of "Ion." In his diary, kept during a tour in North Wales, he speaks with the utmost apparent complacency of some lines on the waterfall at the Devil's Bridge. "It rained heavily in the night, and we saw the waterfall in perfection. While Dora was attempting to make a sketch from the chasm in the rain, I composed by her the following address to the torrent:

Longinus places interrogation among the scourcessources [sic] of the sublime. Here it is more remarkable as an instance of Wordsworth's knowledge of the "art of sinking in Poetry." The shower may perhaps have damped the fire of inspiration.

We may appear to lay too great a stress on the defects of his intellect, and if we do so it is not that we shut our eyes to his sublimities and beauties, but rather because there is a disposition now-a-days, in some people, to look upon all that he wrote as faultless. Wordsworth's works have gone through two phases of the fickle fashions of literary taste. He was at first ridiculed—he was afterwards worshipped. If misanthropy was lisped when Byronism was the rage, surely Wordsworthism has been the "bore" of the last few years. Because the meanest flower that blows is said to give thoughts that lie too deep for tears, daisies and dandelions now suggest a