He
defended him with a warmth that indicated much irritation;
nevertheless I could not abandon my point, and said, 'In compass and
variety of sound your own versification surpasses his.' Never shall
I forget the change in his countenance and tone of voice. The storm
was laid in a moment; he no longer disputed my judgment; and I
passed immediately in his mind, no doubt, for as great a critic as
ever lived."
It was with personages simple and unromantic as these that
Wordsworth filled the canvas of his longest poem. Judged by ordinary
standards the _Excursion_ appears an epic without action, and with
two heroes, the Pastor and the Wanderer, whose characters are
identical. Its form is cumbrous in the extreme, and large tracts of
it have little claim to the name of poetry. Wordsworth compares the
_Excursion_ to a temple of which his smaller poems form subsidiary
shrines; but the reader will more often liken the small poems to gems,
and the _Excursion_ to the rock from which they were extracted. The
long poem contains, indeed, magnificent passages, but as a whole it
is a diffused description of scenery which the poet has elsewhere
caught in brighter glimpses; a diffused statement of hopes and
beliefs which have crystallized more exquisitely elsewhere round
moments of inspiring emotion.
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