Perhaps one way to test a poet is to measure him by the number of single line poems that can be found in his poetry; lines that make the real poem of a number of verses. Pope thought that a long poem was a contradiction of terms, and we certainly know many references in the poets to suggestive lines that are almost poems in themselves. Wordsworth's Solitary Reaper contains one or two passages of this kind.
"Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago."
or the following from the Ode:
"Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence."
Another of his most exquisite lines is,
"And the stars move along the edges of the hills."
Walter Pater finds in Wordsworth's poetry an extraordinary number of these short passage poems, which he called 'delicious morsels.' Coleridge says of Wordsworth: "Since Milton, I know of no poet with so many felicitous and unforgetable lines." Many critics have found these suggestive lines in the poets, and I find Wordsworth full of them. The lines of this kind that I find in the poetry of John Burroughs are rather numerous for the amount of poetry he gave to the world, and some of them are as fine as the language has.
"Like mellow thunder leagues away,"
"I hear the wild bee's mellow chord,
In airs that swim above,"
"Once more the tranquil days brood o'er the hills,
And sooth earth's toiling breast,"