generation, is another—or else the genius that produced Tom Sawyer and Innocents Abroad would never have allowed such sorry stuff as Adam's Diary to don the dignity of print. Other writers, even some of the greatest, can get the proper outside perspective of their work only by some systematic method, some mechanical device. Balzac, for instance, needed the impersonality of the printed page before he could judge the value of his writings or do any effective revision; it was only through re-
is there so perplexed a mixture as in Wordsworth's own poetry, of work touched with intense and individual power, with work of almost no character at all.… Of all poets equally great he would gain most by a skilfully made anthology." And similarly Lowell, in his essay entitled "Shakespeare Once More:"
"His (Wordsworth's) poems are Egyptian sand-wastes, with here and there an oasis of exquisite greenery, a grand image Sphynx-like, half buried in drifting commonplaces, or a solitary pillar of some towering thought."[ 51 ]
