Certainly there was room for improvement here; and in the edition of 1815 we find the lines recast as follows:
A pang of pitiless dismay Into her soul was sent; A Fire was kindled in her breast, Which might not burn itself to rest.
Or see again this prosaic passage from "The Brothers," as first published in the "Lyrical Ballads." The lines describe the parting of James from his companions at a certain rock:
——By our shepherds it is call'd the Pillar. James, pointing to its summit, over which They all had purposed to return together, Inform'd them that he there would wait for them; They parted, and his comrades pass'd that way Some two hours after, but they did not find him At the appointed place, a circumstance Of which they took no heed.
—1800.
It would occur to few readers to call this poetry were it not visibly divided into verse; and Wordsworth himself seems to have thought as much, for after many years he rewrote the passage, condensing and poetizing it as follows:
——By our shepherds it is called The Pillar. Upon its airy summit crowned with heath The loiterer, not unnoticed by his comrades, Lay stretched at ease; but, passing by the place On their return, they found that he was gone. No ill was feared.
There are hundreds of corrections in this style; and we naturally ask what made it necessary for Wordsworth to weed his poetic garden so often, to amend with care and trouble what some other poets would have done well at first? We need not hold with some of his critics that Wordsworth had in any peculiar sense a dual nature, to explain the amount of prosaic poetry, if I may call it so, that he wrote. No real poet ever wrote, as I take it, a greater amount of prosaic poetry than he; and no real poet ever published a greater number of verses that might fairly be called not only poor poetry, but considered as proof that their author could not write good poetry at all.
What critic would believe before the proof, that the poet who had written the lines just quoted from "The Thorn," and others like them, could have written also the "Lines to H. C." and "She Was a Phantom of Delight"? But to inquire at length into this contrast is to inquire into the deepest traits of Wordsworth's genius. One cause of his prosaic verse, however, may be mentioned here. Wordsworth had injurious habits of composition; he dictated his prose to an amanuensis, and he composed his poems in the fields as he walked. He was thus a libertine of opportunity, and though he strictly economized his subjects, and made the least yield him up its utmost, yet he was prodigal in the quantity of his expression. He did not wait for what are called moments of inspiration; he was always ready to compose, and thus he composed too much; he made verses whenever he was out of doors, "murmuring them out" to the astonishment of the rustics. Doubtless the first factor of genius is this abundance of power. But, on the other hand, the control, the direction of power is the first essential to the beauty of the work of art. "Good men may utter whatever comes uppermost; good poets may not," says Landor; and the aphorism touches upon a serious fault of Wordsworth's method. He lacked due power of self-repression; he was too much interested in his own thoughts to make a sufficiently jealous choice among them when he came to write them down. Two qualities, indeed, of his nature he kept in such abeyance, the amative and the humorous—and he was not without a humorous side—as to express but little of them in his writings. But he seems to have recorded almost everything, not humorous or amatory, that came into his mind; and, in consequence, we feel that his poetry comes perilously near being a verbatim transcript of his processes of consciousness. But no man's thought is always sufficiently valuable for a shorthand report; and we often wish that Wordsworth had reflected, with Herrick, that the poet is not fitted every day to prophesy:
No; but when the spirit fills The fantastic pannicles Full of fire—then I write As the Godhead doth indite.