This is what Voltaire means to praise in the English poets,--this
dealing with what is really life. But always it is the mark of the
greatest poets that they deal with it; and to say that the English poets
are remarkable for dealing with it, is only another way of saying, what
is true, that in poetry the English genius has especially shown its
power.
Wordsworth deals with it, and his greatness lies in his dealing with it
so powerfully. I have named a number of celebrated poets above all of
whom he, in my opinion, deserves to be placed. He is to be placed above
poets like Voltaire, Dryden, Pope, Lessing, Schiller, because these
famous personages, with a thousand gifts and merits, never, or scarcely
ever, attain the distinctive accent and utterance of the high and
genuine poets--
"Quique pii vates et Phoebo digna locuti,"[375]
at all. Burns, Keats, Heine, not to speak of others in our list, have
this accent;--who can doubt it? And at the same time they have treasures
of humor, felicity, passion, for which in Wordsworth we shall look in
vain.
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