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Prose

Notes contemplates a whole-length figure of himself, he looks along the unbroken line of his personal
identity. He thrusts aside all other objects, all other interests, with scorn and impatience, that he
may repose on his own being, that he may dig out the treasures of thought contained in it, that he
may unfold the precious stores of a mind for ever brooding over itself. His genius is the effect of
his individual character. He stamps that character, that deep individual interest, on whatever he
meets. The object is nothing but as it furnishes food for internal meditation, for old associations.
If there had been no other being in the universe, Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry would have been just
what it is. If there had been neither love nor friendship, neither ambition nor pleasure nor business
in the World, the author of the Lyrical Ballads need not have been greatly changed from what he
is—might still have ‘kept the noiseless tenour of his way,’ retired in the sanctuary of his own
heart, hallowing the Sabbath of his own thoughts. With the passions, the pursuits, and imaginations
of other men he does not profess to sympathise, but ‘finds tongues in the trees, books in the
running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.’ With a mind averse from outward
objects, but ever intent upon its own workings, he hangs a weight of thought and feeling upon
every trifling circumstance connected with his past history. The note of the cuckoo sounds in his
ear like the voice of other years; the daisy spreads its leaves in the rays of boyish delight that
stream from his thoughtful eyes; the rainbow lifts its proud arch in heaven but to mark his
progress from infancy to manhood; an old thorn is buried, bowed down under the mass of
associations he has wound about it; and to him, as he himself beautifully says.
The meanest flow’r that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.It is this
power of habitual sentiment, or of transferring the interest of our conscious existence to whatever
gently solicits attention, and is a link in the chain of association without rousing our passions or
hurting our pride, that is the striking feature in Mr. Wordsworth’s mind and poetry. Others have
left and shown this power before, as Wither, Burns, etc., but none have felt it so intensely and
absolutely as to lend to it the voice of inspiration, as to make it the foundation of a new style and
school in poetry. His strength, as it so often happens, arises from the excess of his weakness. But
he has opened a new avenue to the human heart, has explored another secret haunt and nook of
nature, ‘sacred to verse, and sure of everlasting fame.’ Compared with his lines, Lord Byron’s
stanzas are but exaggerated common-place, and Walter Scott’s poetry (not his prose) old wives’
fables. There is no one in whom I have been more disappointed than in the writer here spoken of,
nor with whom I am more disposed on certain points to quarrel; but the love of truth and justice
which obliges me to do this, will not suffer me to blench his merits. Do what he can, he cannot
help being an original-minded man. His poetry is not servile. While the cuckoo returns in the
spring, while the daisy looks bright in the sun, while the rainbow lifts its head above the storm
Yet I’ll remember thee, Glencairn, And all that thou hast done for me!
Sir Joshua Reynolds, in endeavouring to show that there is no such thing as proper originality, a
spirit emanating from the mind of the artist and shining through his works, has traced Raphael
through a number of figures which he has borrowed from Masaccio and others. This is a bad
calculation. If Raphael had only borrowed those figures from others, would he, even in Sir Joshua’s
sense, have been entitled to the praise of originality? Plagiarism, in so far as it is plagiarism, is not
originality. Salvator is considered by many as a great genius. He is what they call an irregular
genius. My notion of genius is not exactly the same as theirs. It has also been made a question;
whether there is not more genius in Rembrandt’s Three Trees than in all Claude Lorraine’s
landscapes. I do not know how that may be; but it was enough for Claude to have been a perfect
landscape-painter.
Capacity is not the same thing as genius. Capacity may be described to relate to the quantity of
knowledge, however acquired; genius, to its quality and the mode of acquiring it. Capacity is
power over given ideas combinations of ideas; genius is the power over those which are not given,
and for which no obvious or precise rule can be laid down. Or capacity is power of any sort;

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