had with Wordsworth, in which he vehemently condemned the
ultra-realistic poet, who goes to Nature with

"pencil and note-book, and jots down whatever strikes him most,"
adding, "Nature does not permit an inventory to be made of her charms!
He should have left his pencil and note-book at home; fixed his eye as
he walked with a reverent attention on all that surrounded him, and
taken all into a heart that could understand and enjoy. Afterwards he
would have discovered that while much of what he had admired was
preserved to him, much was also most wisely obliterated. _That which
remained, the picture surviving in his mind, would have presented the
ideal and essential truth of the scene, and done so in large part by
discarding much which, though in itself striking, was not
characteristic._ In every scene, many of the most brilliant details
are but accidental."

The two last sentences of this extract give admirable expression to one
feature of Wordsworth's interpretation of Nature. In the deepest poetry,
as in the loftiest music,--in Wordsworth's lyrics as in Beethoven's
sonatas--it is by what they unerringly suggest and not by what they
exhaustively express that their truth and power are known. "In what he
leaves unsaid," wrote Schiller, "I discover the master of style." It
depends, no doubt, upon the vision of the "inward eye," and the
reproductive power of the idealising mind, whether the result is a
travesty of Nature, or the embodiment of a truth higher than Nature
yields. On the other hand, it is equally certain that the identification
of localities casts a sudden light in many instances upon obscure
passages in a poem, and is by far the best commentary that can be given.
It is much to be able to compare the actual scene, with the ideal
creation suggested by it; as the latter was both Wordsworth's reading of