No More Learning

Nor less, to feed voluptuous thought,
The beauteous forms of nature wrought,
Fair trees and lovely flowers;
The breezes their own languor lent;
The stars had feelings, which they sent
Into those magic bowers.

Yet in his worst pursuits, I ween,
That sometimes there did intervene
Pure hopes of high intent
For passions linked to forms so fair
And stately, needs must have their share
Of noble sentiment. "

But from Mr. Wordsworth's more elevated compositions, which already form
three-fourths of his works; and will, I trust, constitute hereafter a
still larger proportion;--from these, whether in rhyme or blank verse,
it would be difficult and almost superfluous to select instances of a
diction peculiarly his own, of a style which cannot be imitated without
its being at once recognised, as originating in Mr. Wordsworth. It would
not be easy to open on any one of his loftier strains, that does not
contain examples of this; and more in proportion as the lines are more
excellent, and most like the author. For those, who may happen to have
been less familiar with his writings, I will give three specimens
taken with little choice. The first from the lines on the BOY OF
WINANDER-MERE,--who

"Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls,
That they might answer him. --And they would shout
Across the watery vale, and shout again,
With long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud
Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild
Of mirth and jocund din! And when it chanced,
That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill,
Then sometimes in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene [73]
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received
Into the bosom of the steady lake. "

The second shall be that noble imitation of Drayton [74] (if it was not
rather a coincidence) in the lines TO JOANNA.

--"When I had gazed perhaps two minutes' space,
Joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld
That ravishment of mine, and laughed aloud.
The Rock, like something starting from a sleep,
Took up the Lady's voice, and laughed again!
That ancient woman seated on Helm-crag
Was ready with her cavern; Hammar-scar
And the tall Steep of Silver-How sent forth
A noise of laughter; southern Lougbrigg heard,
And Fairfield answered with a mountain tone.
Helvellyn far into the clear blue sky
Carried the lady's voice! --old Skiddaw blew
His speaking trumpet! --back out of the clouds
From Glaramara southward came the voice:
And Kirkstone tossed it from its misty head! "

The third, which is in rhyme, I take from the SONG AT THE FEAST OF
BROUGHAM CASTLE, upon the restoration of Lord Clifford, the Shepherd, to
the Estates and Honours of his Ancestors.

------"Now another day is come,
Fitter hope, and nobler doom;
He hath thrown aside his crook,
And hath buried deep his book;
Armour rusting in his halls
On the blood of Clifford calls,--
'Quell the Scot,' exclaims the Lance!
Bear me to the heart of France,
Is the longing of the Shield--
Tell thy name, thou trembling Field! --
Field of death, where'er thou be,
Groan thou with our victory!
Happy day, and mighty hour,
When our Shepherd, in his power,
Mailed and horsed, with lance and sword,
To his ancestors restored,
Like a re-appearing Star,
Like a glory from afar,
First shall head the flock of war! "

"Alas! the fervent harper did not know,
That for a tranquil Soul the Lay was framed,
Who, long compelled in humble walks to go,
Was softened into feeling, soothed, and tamed.

Love had he found in huts where poor men lie;
His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills. "

The words themselves in the foregoing extracts, are, no doubt,
sufficiently common for the greater part. --But in what poem are they not
so, if we except a few misadventurous attempts to translate the arts
and sciences into verse? In THE EXCURSION the number of polysyllabic
(or what the common people call, dictionary) words is more than usually
great. And so must it needs be, in proportion to the number and variety
of an author's conceptions, and his solicitude to express them with
precision. --But are those words in those places commonly employed in
real life to express the same thought or outward thing? Are they the
style used in the ordinary intercourse of spoken words? No! nor are the
modes of connections; and still less the breaks and transitions. Would
any but a poet--at least could any one without being conscious that he
had expressed himself with noticeable vivacity--have described a bird
singing loud by, "The thrush is busy in the wood? "--or have spoken of
boys with a string of club-moss round their rusty hats, as the boys
"with their green coronal? "--or have translated a beautiful May-day into
"Both earth and sky keep jubilee! "--or have brought all the different
marks and circumstances of a sealoch before the mind, as the actions of
a living and acting power? Or have represented the reflection of the sky
in the water, as "That uncertain heaven received into the bosom of the
steady lake? " Even the grammatical construction is not unfrequently
peculiar; as "The wind, the tempest roaring high, the tumult of a tropic
sky, might well be dangerous food to him, a youth to whom was given,
etc. " There is a peculiarity in the frequent use of the asymartaeton
(that is, the omission of the connective particle before the last of
several words, or several sentences used grammatically as single words,
all being in the same case and governing or governed by the same verb)
and not less in the construction of words by apposition ("to him, a
youth"). In short, were there excluded from Mr. Wordsworth's poetic
compositions all, that a literal adherence to the theory of his preface
would exclude, two thirds at least of the marked beauties of his poetry
must be erased. For a far greater number of lines would be sacrificed
than in any other recent poet; because the pleasure received from
Wordsworth's poems being less derived either from excitement of
curiosity or the rapid flow of narration, the striking passages form a
larger proportion of their value. I do not adduce it as a fair criterion
of comparative excellence, nor do I even think it such; but merely as
matter of fact. I affirm, that from no contemporary writer could so many
lines be quoted, without reference to the poem in which they are found,
for their own independent weight or beauty. From the sphere of my own
experience I can bring to my recollection three persons of no every-day
powers and acquirements, who had read the poems of others with more and
more unallayed pleasure, and had thought more highly of their authors,
as poets; who yet have confessed to me, that from no modern work had so
many passages started up anew in their minds at different times, and as
different occasions had awakened a meditative mood.




CHAPTER XXI

Remarks on the present mode of conducting critical journals.


Long have I wished to see a fair and philosophical inquisition into the
character of Wordsworth, as a poet, on the evidence of his published
works; and a positive, not a comparative, appreciation of their
characteristic excellencies, deficiencies, and defects. I know no claim
that the mere opinion of any individual can have to weigh down the
opinion of the author himself; against the probability of whose parental
partiality we ought to set that of his having thought longer and more
deeply on the subject. But I should call that investigation fair and
philosophical in which the critic announces and endeavours to establish
the principles, which he holds for the foundation of poetry in general,
with the specification of these in their application to the different
classes of poetry. Having thus prepared his canons of criticism for
praise and condemnation, he would proceed to particularize the most
striking passages to which he deems them applicable, faithfully noticing
the frequent or infrequent recurrence of similar merits or defects,
and as faithfully distinguishing what is characteristic from what is
accidental, or a mere flagging of the wing. Then if his premises be
rational, his deductions legitimate, and his conclusions justly applied,
the reader, and possibly the poet himself, may adopt his judgment in
the light of judgment and in the independence of free-agency. If he has
erred, he presents his errors in a definite place and tangible form, and
holds the torch and guides the way to their detection.

I most willingly admit, and estimate at a high value, the services which
the EDINBURGH REVIEW, and others formed afterwards on the same plan,
have rendered to society in the diffusion of knowledge. I think the
commencement of the EDINBURGH REVIEW an important epoch in periodical
criticism; and that it has a claim upon the gratitude of the literary
republic, and indeed of the reading public at large, for having
originated the scheme of reviewing those books only, which are
susceptible and deserving of argumentative criticism. Not less
meritorious, and far more faithfully and in general far more ably
executed, is their plan of supplying the vacant place of the trash or
mediocrity, wisely left to sink into oblivion by its own weight, with
original essays on the most interesting subjects of the time, religious,
or political; in which the titles of the books or pamphlets prefixed
furnish only the name and occasion of the disquisition. I do not arraign
the keenness, or asperity of its damnatory style, in and for itself, as
long as the author is addressed or treated as the mere impersonation of
the work then under trial. I have no quarrel with them on this account,
as long as no personal allusions are admitted, and no re-commitment
(for new trial) of juvenile performances, that were published, perhaps
forgotten, many years before the commencement of the review: since for
the forcing back of such works to public notice no motives are easily
assignable, but such as are furnished to the critic by his own personal
malignity; or what is still worse, by a habit of malignity in the form
of mere wantonness.

"No private grudge they need, no personal spite
The viva sectio is its own delight!
All enmity, all envy, they disclaim,
Disinterested thieves of our good name:
Cool, sober murderers of their neighbour's fame! "
S. T. C.

Every censure, every sarcasm respecting a publication which the critic,
with the criticised work before him, can make good, is the critic's
right. The writer is authorized to reply, but not to complain. Neither
can anyone prescribe to the critic, how soft or how hard; how friendly,
or how bitter, shall be the phrases which he is to select for the
expression of such reprehension or ridicule. The critic must know, what
effect it is his object to produce; and with a view to this effect must
he weigh his words. But as soon as the critic betrays, that he knows
more of his author, than the author's publications could have told him;
as soon as from this more intimate knowledge, elsewhere obtained, he
avails himself of the slightest trait against the author; his censure
instantly becomes personal injury, his sarcasms personal insults. He
ceases to be a critic, and takes on him the most contemptible character
to which a rational creature can be degraded, that of a gossip,
backbiter, and pasquillant: but with this heavy aggravation, that he
steals the unquiet, the deforming passions of the world into the museum;
into the very place which, next to the chapel and oratory, should be our
sanctuary, and secure place of refuge; offers abominations on the altar
of the Muses; and makes its sacred paling the very circle in which he
conjures up the lying and profane spirit.

This determination of unlicensed personality, and of permitted and
legitimate censure, (which I owe in part to the illustrious Lessing,
himself a model of acute, spirited, sometimes stinging, but always
argumentative and honourable, criticism) is beyond controversy the
true one: and though I would not myself exercise all the rights of the
latter, yet, let but the former be excluded, I submit myself to
its exercise in the hands of others, without complaint and without
resentment.

Let a communication be formed between any number of learned men in the
various branches of science and literature; and whether the president
and central committee be in London, or Edinburgh, if only they
previously lay aside their individuality, and pledge themselves
inwardly, as well as ostensibly, to administer judgment according to
a constitution and code of laws; and if by grounding this code on the
two-fold basis of universal morals and philosophic reason, independent
of all foreseen application to particular works and authors, they obtain
the right to speak each as the representative of their body corporate;
they shall have honour and good wishes from me, and I shall accord to
them their fair dignities, though self-assumed, not less cheerfully than
if I could inquire concerning them in the herald's office, or turn
to them in the book of peerage. However loud may be the outcries for
prevented or subverted reputation, however numerous and impatient the
complaints of merciless severity and insupportable despotism, I shall
neither feel, nor utter aught but to the defence and justification of
the critical machine. Should any literary Quixote find himself provoked
by its sounds and regular movements, I should admonish him with Sancho
Panza, that it is no giant but a windmill; there it stands on its own
place, and its own hillock, never goes out of its way to attack anyone,
and to none and from none either gives or asks assistance. When
the public press has poured in any part of its produce between its
mill-stones, it grinds it off, one man's sack the same as another, and
with whatever wind may happen to be then blowing. All the two-and-thirty
winds are alike its friends. Of the whole wide atmosphere it does not
desire a single finger-breadth more than what is necessary for its sails
to turn round in. But this space must be left free and unimpeded. Gnats,
beetles, wasps, butterflies, and the whole tribe of ephemerals and
insignificants, may flit in and out and between; may hum, and buzz, and
jar; may shrill their tiny pipes, and wind their puny horns, unchastised
and unnoticed. But idlers and bravadoes of larger size and prouder show
must beware, how they place themselves within its sweep. Much less may
they presume to lay hands on the sails, the strength of which is
neither greater nor less than as the wind is, which drives them round.
Whomsoever the remorseless arm slings aloft, or whirls along with it in
the air, he has himself alone to blame; though, when the same arm throws
him from it, it will more often double than break the force of his fall.

Putting aside the too manifest and too frequent interference of national
party, and even personal predilection or aversion; and reserving for
deeper feelings those worse and more criminal intrusions into the
sacredness of private life, which not seldom merit legal rather than
literary chastisement, the two principal objects and occasions which I
find for blame and regret in the conduct of the review in question are
first, its unfaithfulness to its own announced and excellent plan, by
subjecting to criticism works neither indecent nor immoral, yet of such
trifling importance even in point of size and, according to the critic's
own verdict, so devoid of all merit, as must excite in the most candid
mind the suspicion, either that dislike or vindictive feelings were at
work; or that there was a cold prudential pre-determination to increase
the sale of the review by flattering the malignant passions of human
nature. That I may not myself become subject to the charge, which I am
bringing against others, by an accusation without proof, I refer to
the article on Dr. Rennell's sermon in the very first number of the
EDINBURGH REVIEW as an illustration of my meaning. If in looking through
all the succeeding volumes the reader should find this a solitary
instance, I must submit to that painful forfeiture of esteem, which
awaits a groundless or exaggerated charge.

The second point of objection belongs to this review only in common with
all other works of periodical criticism: at least, it applies in common
to the general system of all, whatever exception there may be in favour
of particular articles. Or if it attaches to THE EDINBURGH REVIEW, and
to its only corrival (THE QUARTERLY), with any peculiar force, this
results from the superiority of talent, acquirement, and information
which both have so undeniably displayed; and which doubtless deepens
the regret though not the blame. I am referring to the substitution
of assertion for argument; to the frequency of arbitrary and sometimes
petulant verdicts, not seldom unsupported even by a single quotation
from the work condemned, which might at least have explained the
critic's meaning, if it did not prove the justice of his sentence. Even
where this is not the case, the extracts are too often made without
reference to any general grounds or rules from which the faultiness or
inadmissibility of the qualities attributed may be deduced; and without
any attempt to show, that the qualities are attributable to the passage
extracted. I have met with such extracts from Mr. Wordsworth's poems,
annexed to such assertions, as led me to imagine, that the reviewer,
having written his critique before he had read the work, had then
pricked with a pin for passages, wherewith to illustrate the various
branches of his preconceived opinions. By what principle of rational
choice can we suppose a critic to have been directed (at least in a
Christian country, and himself, we hope, a Christian) who gives the
following lines, portraying the fervour of solitary devotion excited by
the magnificent display of the Almighty's works, as a proof and
example of an author's tendency to downright ravings, and absolute
unintelligibility?

"O then what soul was his, when on the tops
Of the high mountains he beheld the sun
Rise up, and bathe the world in light! He looked--
Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth,
And ocean's liquid mass, beneath him lay
In gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched,
And in their silent faces did he read
Unutterable love. Sound needed none,
Nor any voice of joy: his spirit drank
The spectacle! sensation, soul, and form,
All melted into him; they swallowed up
His animal being; in them did he live,
And by them did he live: they were his life. "

Can it be expected, that either the author or his admirers, should be
induced to pay any serious attention to decisions which prove nothing
but the pitiable state of the critic's own taste and sensibility? On
opening the review they see a favourite passage, of the force and truth
of which they had an intuitive certainty in their own inward experience
confirmed, if confirmation it could receive, by the sympathy of their
most enlightened friends; some of whom perhaps, even in the world's
opinion, hold a higher intellectual rank than the critic himself would
presume to claim. And this very passage they find selected, as the
characteristic effusion of a mind deserted by reason! --as furnishing
evidence that the writer was raving, or he could not have thus strung
words together without sense or purpose! No diversity of taste seems
capable of explaining such a contrast in judgment.

That I had over-rated the merit of a passage or poem, that I had erred
concerning the degree of its excellence, I might be easily induced to
believe or apprehend. But that lines, the sense of which I had analysed
and found consonant with all the best convictions of my understanding;
and the imagery and diction of which had collected round those
convictions my noblest as well as my most delightful feelings; that I
should admit such lines to be mere nonsense or lunacy, is too much for
the most ingenious arguments to effect. But that such a revolution of
taste should be brought about by a few broad assertions, seems little
less than impossible. On the contrary, it would require an effort of
charity not to dismiss the criticism with the aphorism of the wise man,
in animam malevolam sapientia haud intrare potest.

What then if this very critic should have cited a large number of single
lines and even of long paragraphs, which he himself acknowledges to
possess eminent and original beauty? What if he himself has owned, that
beauties as great are scattered in abundance throughout the whole
book? And yet, though under this impression, should have commenced his
critique in vulgar exultation with a prophecy meant to secure its own
fulfilment? With a "This won't do! " What? if after such acknowledgments
extorted from his own judgment he should proceed from charge to charge
of tameness and raving; flights and flatness; and at length, consigning
the author to the house of incurables, should conclude with a strain of
rudest contempt evidently grounded in the distempered state of his own
moral associations? Suppose too all this done without a single leading
principle established or even announced, and without any one attempt at
argumentative deduction, though the poet had presented a more than usual
opportunity for it, by having previously made public his own principles
of judgment in poetry, and supported them by a connected train of
reasoning!

The office and duty of the poet is to select the most dignified as well
as

"The gayest, happiest attitude of things. "

The reverse, for in all cases a reverse is possible, is the appropriate
business of burlesque and travesty, a predominant taste for which has
been always deemed a mark of a low and degraded mind. When I was at
Rome, among many other visits to the tomb of Julius II. I went thither
once with a Prussian artist, a man of genius and great vivacity of
feeling. As we were gazing on Michael Angelo's MOSES, our conversation
turned on the horns and beard of that stupendous statue; of the
necessity of each to support the other; of the super-human effect of the
former, and the necessity of the existence of both to give a harmony and
integrity both to the image and the feeling excited by it. Conceive
them removed, and the statue would become un-natural, without being
super-natural. We called to mind the horns of the rising sun, and I
repeated the noble passage from Taylor's HOLY DYING. That horns were the
emblem of power and sovereignty among the Eastern nations, and are still
retained as such in Abyssinia; the Achelous of the ancient Greeks; and
the probable ideas and feelings, that originally suggested the mixture
of the human and the brute form in the figure, by which they realized
the idea of their mysterious Pan, as representing intelligence blended
with a darker power, deeper, mightier, and more universal than the
conscious intellect of man; than intelligence;--all these thoughts and
recollections passed in procession before our minds. My companion who
possessed more than his share of the hatred, which his countrymen bore
to the French, had just observed to me, "a Frenchman, Sir! is the only
animal in the human shape, that by no possibility can lift itself up to
religion or poetry:" when, lo! two French officers of distinction and
rank entered the church! "Mark you," whispered the Prussian, "the
first thing which those scoundrels will notice--(for they will begin by
instantly noticing the statue in parts, without one moment's pause of
admiration impressed by the whole)--will be the horns and the beard. And
the associations, which they will immediately connect with them will be
those of a he-goat and a cuckold. " Never did man guess more luckily. Had
he inherited a portion of the great legislator's prophetic powers, whose
statue we had been contemplating, he could scarcely have uttered words
more coincident with the result: for even as he had said, so it came to
pass.

In THE EXCURSION the poet has introduced an old man, born in humble but
not abject circumstances, who had enjoyed more than usual advantages of
education, both from books and from the more awful discipline of nature.
This person he represents, as having been driven by the restlessness of
fervid feelings, and from a craving intellect to an itinerant life; and
as having in consequence passed the larger portion of his time, from
earliest manhood, in villages and hamlets from door to door,

"A vagrant Merchant bent beneath his load. "

Now whether this be a character appropriate to a lofty didactick poem,
is perhaps questionable. It presents a fair subject for controversy; and
the question is to be determined by the congruity or incongruity of such
a character with what shall be proved to be the essential constituents
of poetry. But surely the critic who, passing by all the opportunities
which such a mode of life would present to such a man; all the
advantages of the liberty of nature, of solitude, and of solitary
thought; all the varieties of places and seasons, through which his
track had lain, with all the varying imagery they bring with them; and
lastly, all the observations of men,

"Their manners, their enjoyments, and pursuits,
Their passions and their feelings="

which the memory of these yearly journeys must have given and recalled
to such a mind--the critic, I say, who from the multitude of possible
associations should pass by all these in order to fix his attention
exclusively on the pin-papers, and stay-tapes, which might have been
among the wares of his pack; this critic, in my opinion, cannot be
thought to possess a much higher or much healthier state of moral
feeling, than the Frenchmen above recorded.




CHAPTER XXII

The characteristic defects of Wordsworth's poetry, with the principles
from which the judgment, that they are defects, is deduced--Their
proportion to the beauties--For the greatest part characteristic of his
theory only.


If Mr. Wordsworth have set forth principles of poetry which his
arguments are insufficient to support, let him and those who have
adopted his sentiments be set right by the confutation of those
arguments, and by the substitution of more philosophical principles. And
still let the due credit be given to the portion and importance of the
truths, which are blended with his theory; truths, the too exclusive
attention to which had occasioned its errors, by tempting him to carry
those truths beyond their proper limits. If his mistaken theory have at
all influenced his poetic compositions, let the effects be pointed
out, and the instances given. But let it likewise be shown, how far the
influence has acted; whether diffusively, or only by starts; whether the
number and importance of the poems and passages thus infected be great
or trifling compared with the sound portion; and lastly, whether they
are inwoven into the texture of his works, or are loose and separable.
The result of such a trial would evince beyond a doubt, what it is high
time to announce decisively and aloud, that the supposed characteristics
of Mr. Wordsworth's poetry, whether admired or reprobated; whether they
are simplicity or simpleness; faithful adherence to essential nature, or
wilful selections from human nature of its meanest forms and under the
least attractive associations; are as little the real characteristics of
his poetry at large, as of his genius and the constitution of his mind.

In a comparatively small number of poems he chose to try an experiment;
and this experiment we will suppose to have failed. Yet even in these
poems it is impossible not to perceive that the natural tendency of
the poet's mind is to great objects and elevated conceptions. The
poem entitled FIDELITY is for the greater part written in language,
as unraised and naked as any perhaps in the two volumes. Yet take the
following stanza and compare it with the preceding stanzas of the same
poem.

"There sometimes doth a leaping fish
Send through the tarn a lonely cheer;
The crags repeat the raven's croak,
In symphony austere;
Thither the rainbow comes--the cloud--
And mists that spread the flying shroud;
And sun-beams; and the sounding blast,
That, if it could, would hurry past;
But that enormous barrier holds it fast. "

Or compare the four last lines of the concluding stanza with the former
half.

"Yes, proof was plain that, since the day
On which the Traveller thus had died,
The Dog had watched about the spot,
Or by his Master's side:
How nourish'd here through such long time
He knows, who gave that love sublime,--
And gave that strength of feeling, great
Above all human estimate! "

Can any candid and intelligent mind hesitate in determining, which of
these best represents the tendency and native character of the poet's
genius? Will he not decide that the one was written because the poet
would so write, and the other because he could not so entirely repress
the force and grandeur of his mind, but that he must in some part or
other of every composition write otherwise? In short, that his only
disease is the being out of his element; like the swan, that, having
amused himself, for a while, with crushing the weeds on the river's
bank, soon returns to his own majestic movements on its reflecting and
sustaining surface. Let it be observed that I am here supposing the
imagined judge, to whom I appeal, to have already decided against the
poet's theory, as far as it is different from the principles of the art,
generally acknowledged.

I cannot here enter into a detailed examination of Mr. Wordsworth's
works; but I will attempt to give the main results of my own judgment,
after an acquaintance of many years, and repeated perusals. And though,
to appreciate the defects of a great mind it is necessary to understand
previously its characteristic excellences, yet I have already expressed
myself with sufficient fulness, to preclude most of the ill effects that
might arise from my pursuing a contrary arrangement. I will therefore
commence with what I deem the prominent defects of his poems hitherto
published.

The first characteristic, though only occasional defect, which I appear
to myself to find in these poems is the inconstancy of the style. Under
this name I refer to the sudden and unprepared transitions from lines
or sentences of peculiar felicity--(at all events striking and
original)--to a style, not only unimpassioned but undistinguished. He
sinks too often and too abruptly to that style, which I should place
in the second division of language, dividing it into the three species;
first, that which is peculiar to poetry; second, that which is only
proper in prose; and third, the neutral or common to both. There have
been works, such as Cowley's Essay on Cromwell, in which prose and verse
are intermixed (not as in the Consolation of Boetius, or the ARGENIS
of Barclay, by the insertion of poems supposed to have been spoken or
composed on occasions previously related in prose, but) the poet passing
from one to the other, as the nature of the thoughts or his own feelings
dictated. Yet this mode of composition does not satisfy a cultivated
taste. There is something unpleasant in the being thus obliged to
alternate states of feeling so dissimilar, and this too in a species of
writing, the pleasure from which is in part derived from the preparation
and previous expectation of the reader. A portion of that awkwardness
is felt which hangs upon the introduction of songs in our modern comic
operas; and to prevent which the judicious Metastasio (as to whose
exquisite taste there can be no hesitation, whatever doubts may be
entertained as to his poetic genius) uniformly placed the aria at the
end of the scene, at the same time that he almost always raises and
impassions the style of the recitative immediately preceding. Even in
real life, the difference is great and evident between words used as the
arbitrary marks of thought, our smooth market-coin of intercourse,
with the image and superscription worn out by currency; and those which
convey pictures either borrowed from one outward object to enliven and
particularize some other; or used allegorically to body forth the inward
state of the person speaking; or such as are at least the exponents of
his peculiar turn and unusual extent of faculty. So much so indeed, that
in the social circles of private life we often find a striking use of
the latter put a stop to the general flow of conversation, and by the
excitement arising from concentred attention produce a sort of damp
and interruption for some minutes after. But in the perusal of works of
literary art, we prepare ourselves for such language; and the business
of the writer, like that of a painter whose subject requires unusual
splendour and prominence, is so to raise the lower and neutral tints,
that what in a different style would be the commanding colours, are
here used as the means of that gentle degradation requisite in order to
produce the effect of a whole. Where this is not achieved in a poem,
the metre merely reminds the reader of his claims in order to disappoint
them; and where this defect occurs frequently, his feelings are
alternately startled by anticlimax and hyperclimax.

I refer the reader to the exquisite stanzas cited for another purpose
from THE BLIND HIGHLAND BOY; and then annex, as being in my opinion
instances of this disharmony in style, the two following:

"And one, the rarest, was a shell,
Which he, poor child, had studied well:
The shell of a green turtle, thin
And hollow;--you might sit therein,
It was so wide, and deep. "

"Our Highland Boy oft visited
The house which held this prize; and, led
By choice or chance, did thither come
One day, when no one was at home,
And found the door unbarred. "

Or page 172, vol. I.

"'Tis gone forgotten, let me do
My best. There was a smile or two--
I can remember them, I see
The smiles worth all the world to me.
Dear Baby! I must lay thee down:
Thou troublest me with strange alarms;
Smiles hast thou, sweet ones of thine own;
I cannot keep thee in my arms;
For they confound me: as it is,
I have forgot those smiles of his! "

Or page 269, vol. I.

"Thou hast a nest, for thy love and thy rest
And though little troubled with sloth
Drunken lark! thou would'st be loth
To be such a traveller as I.
Happy, happy liver!
_With a soul as strong as a mountain river
Pouring out praise to th' Almighty giver,_
Joy and jollity be with us both!
Hearing thee or else some other,
As merry a brother
I on the earth will go plodding on
By myself cheerfully till the day is done. "

The incongruity, which I appear to find in this passage, is that of the
two noble lines in italics with the preceding and following. So vol. II.
page 30.

"Close by a Pond, upon the further side,
He stood alone; a minute's space I guess,
I watch'd him, he continuing motionless
To the Pool's further margin then I drew;
He being all the while before me full in view. "

Compare this with the repetition of the same image, the next stanza but
two.

"And, still as I drew near with gentle pace,
Beside the little pond or moorish flood
Motionless as a Cloud the Old Man stood,
That heareth not the loud winds when they call;
And moveth altogether, if it move at all. "

Or lastly, the second of the three following stanzas, compared both with
the first and the third.

"My former thoughts returned; the fear that kills;
And hope that is unwilling to be fed;
Cold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills;
And mighty Poets in their misery dead.
But now, perplex'd by what the Old Man had said,
My question eagerly did I renew,
'How is it that you live, and what is it you do? '

"He with a smile did then his words repeat;
And said, that gathering Leeches far and wide
He travell'd; stirring thus about his feet
The waters of the Ponds where they abide.
`Once I could meet with them on every side;
'But they have dwindled long by slow decay;
'Yet still I persevere, and find them where I may. '

While he was talking thus, the lonely place,
The Old Man's shape, and speech, all troubled me
In my mind's eye I seemed to see him pace
About the weary moors continually,
Wandering about alone and silently. "

Indeed this fine poem is especially characteristic of the author. There
is scarce a defect or excellence in his writings of which it would
not present a specimen. But it would be unjust not to repeat that this
defect is only occasional. From a careful reperusal of the two volumes
of poems, I doubt whether the objectionable passages would amount in the
whole to one hundred lines; not the eighth part of the number of pages.
In THE EXCURSION the feeling of incongruity is seldom excited by
the diction of any passage considered in itself, but by the sudden
superiority of some other passage forming the context.
The second defect I can generalize with tolerable accuracy, if the
reader will pardon an uncouth and new-coined word. There is, I should
say, not seldom a matter-of-factness in certain poems. This may
be divided into, first, a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the
representation of objects, and their positions, as they appeared to the
poet himself; secondly, the insertion of accidental circumstances,
in order to the full explanation of his living characters, their
dispositions and actions; which circumstances might be necessary to
establish the probability of a statement in real life, where nothing is
taken for granted by the hearer; but appear superfluous in poetry, where
the reader is willing to believe for his own sake. To this actidentality
I object, as contravening the essence of poetry, which Aristotle
pronounces to be spoudaiotaton kai philosophotaton genos, the most
intense, weighty and philosophical product of human art; adding, as the
reason, that it is the most catholic and abstract. The following passage
from Davenant's prefatory letter to Hobbes well expresses this truth.
"When I considered the actions which I meant to describe; (those
inferring the persons), I was again persuaded rather to choose those
of a former age, than the present; and in a century so far removed, as
might preserve me from their improper examinations, who know not the
requisites of a poem, nor how much pleasure they lose, (and even the
pleasures of heroic poesy are not unprofitable), who take away the
liberty of a poet, and fetter his feet in the shackles of an historian.
For why should a poet doubt in story to mend the intrigues of fortune
by more delightful conveyances of probable fictions, because austere
historians have entered into bond to truth? An obligation, which were
in poets as foolish and unnecessary, as is the bondage of false martyrs,
who lie in chains for a mistaken opinion. But by this I would imply,
that truth, narrative and past, is the idol of historians, (who worship
a dead thing), and truth operative, and by effects continually alive,
is the mistress of poets, who hath not her existence in matter, but in
reason. "

For this minute accuracy in the painting of local imagery, the lines in
THE EXCURSION, pp. 96, 97, and 98, may be taken, if not as a striking
instance, yet as an illustration of my meaning. It must be some strong
motive--(as, for instance, that the description was necessary to the
intelligibility of the tale)--which could induce me to describe in
a number of verses what a draughtsman could present to the eye with
incomparably greater satisfaction by half a dozen strokes of his pencil,
or the painter with as many touches of his brush. Such descriptions too
often occasion in the mind of a reader, who is determined to understand
his author, a feeling of labour, not very dissimilar to that, with
which he would construct a diagram, line by line, for a long geometrical
proposition. It seems to be like taking the pieces of a dissected map
out of its box. We first look at one part, and then at another, then
join and dove-tail them; and when the successive acts of attention have
been completed, there is a retrogressive effort of mind to behold it as
a whole. The poet should paint to the imagination, not to the fancy; and
I know no happier case to exemplify the distinction between these two
faculties. Master-pieces of the former mode of poetic painting abound
in the writings of Milton, for example:

"The fig-tree; not that kind for fruit renown'd,
"But such as at this day, to Indians known,
"In Malabar or Decan spreads her arms
"Branching so broad and long, that in the ground
"The bended twigs take root, and daughters grow
"About the mother tree, a pillar'd shade
"High over-arch'd and ECHOING WALKS BETWEEN;
"There oft the Indian herdsman, shunning heat,
"Shelters in cool, and tends his pasturing herds
"At hoop-holes cut through thickest shade. "

This is creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and
with such co-presence of the whole picture flashed at once upon the
eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. But the poet must likewise
understand and command what Bacon calls the vestigia communia of the
senses, the latency of all in each, and more especially as by a magical
penny duplex, the excitement of vision by sound and the exponents of
sound. Thus, "The echoing walks between," may be almost said to reverse
the fable in tradition of the head of Memnon, in the Egyptian statue.
Such may be deservedly entitled the creative words in the world of
imagination.

The second division respects an apparent minute adherence to matter-
of-fact in character and Incidents; a biographical attention to
probability, and an anxiety of explanation and retrospect. Under this
head I shall deliver, with no feigned diffidence, the results of my best
reflection on the great point of controversy between Mr. Wordsworth and
his objectors; namely, on the choice of his characters. I have already
declared, and, I trust justified, my utter dissent from the mode of
argument which his critics have hitherto employed. To their question,
"Why did you choose such a character, or a character from such a rank
of life? "--the poet might in my opinion fairly retort: why with the
conception of my character did you make wilful choice of mean or
ludicrous associations not furnished by me, but supplied from your own
sickly and fastidious feelings? How was it, indeed, probable, that
such arguments could have any weight with an author, whose plan, whose
guiding principle, and main object it was to attack and subdue that
state of association, which leads us to place the chief value on those
things on which man differs from man, and to forget or disregard the
high dignities, which belong to Human Nature, the sense and the feeling,
which may be, and ought to be, found in all ranks? The feelings with
which, as Christians, we contemplate a mixed congregation rising
or kneeling before their common Maker, Mr. Wordsworth would have us
entertain at all times, as men, and as readers; and by the excitement of
this lofty, yet prideless impartiality in poetry, he might hope to have
encouraged its continuance in real life. The praise of good men be his!
In real life, and, I trust, even in my imagination, I honour a virtuous
and wise man, without reference to the presence or absence of artificial
advantages. Whether in the person of an armed baron, a laurelled bard,
or of an old Pedlar, or still older Leech-gatherer, the same qualities
of head and heart must claim the same reverence. And even in poetry I am
not conscious, that I have ever suffered my feelings to be disturbed
or offended by any thoughts or images, which the poet himself has not
presented.

But yet I object, nevertheless, and for the following reasons. First,
because the object in view, as an immediate object, belongs to the moral
philosopher, and would be pursued, not only more appropriately, but in
my opinion with far greater probability of success, in sermons or moral
essays, than in an elevated poem. It seems, indeed, to destroy the main
fundamental distinction, not only between a poem and prose, but even
between philosophy and works of fiction, inasmuch as it proposes truth
for its immediate object, instead of pleasure. Now till the blessed time
shall come, when truth itself shall be pleasure, and both shall be so
united, as to be distinguishable in words only, not in feeling, it will
remain the poet's office to proceed upon that state of association,
which actually exists as general; instead of attempting first to make
it what it ought to be, and then to let the pleasure follow. But here
is unfortunately a small hysteron-proteron. For the communication of
pleasure is the introductory means by which alone the poet must expect
to moralize his readers. Secondly: though I were to admit, for a moment,
this argument to be groundless: yet how is the moral effect to be
produced, by merely attaching the name of some low profession to powers
which are least likely, and to qualities which are assuredly not more
likely, to be found in it? The Poet, speaking in his own person, may
at once delight and improve us by sentiments, which teach us the
independence of goodness, of wisdom, and even of genius, on the favours
of fortune. And having made a due reverence before the throne of
Antonine, he may bow with equal awe before Epictetus among his
fellow-slaves

------"and rejoice
In the plain presence of his dignity. "

Who is not at once delighted and improved, when the Poet Wordsworth
himself exclaims,

"Oh! many are the Poets that are sown
By Nature; men endowed with highest gifts
The vision and the faculty divine,
Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse,
Nor having e'er, as life advanced, been led
By circumstance to take unto the height
The measure of themselves, these favoured Beings,
All but a scattered few, live out their time,
Husbanding that which they possess within,
And go to the grave, unthought of. Strongest minds
Are often those of whom the noisy world
Hears least. "

To use a colloquial phrase, such sentiments, in such language, do one's
heart good; though I for my part, have not the fullest faith in the
truth of the observation. On the contrary I believe the instances to
be exceedingly rare; and should feel almost as strong an objection to
introduce such a character in a poetic fiction, as a pair of black swans
on a lake, in a fancy landscape. When I think how many, and how much
better books than Homer, or even than Herodotus, Pindar or Aeschylus,
could have read, are in the power of almost every man, in a country
where almost every man is instructed to read and write; and how
restless, how difficultly hidden, the powers of genius are; and yet find
even in situations the most favourable, according to Mr. Wordsworth, for
the formation of a pure and poetic language; in situations which ensure
familiarity with the grandest objects of the imagination; but one Burns,
among the shepherds of Scotland, and not a single poet of humble life
among those of English lakes and mountains; I conclude, that Poetic
Genius is not only a very delicate but a very rare plant.

But be this as it may, the feelings with which,

"I think of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy,
The sleepless Soul, that perished in his pride;
Of Burns, who walk'd in glory and in joy
Behind his plough, upon the mountain-side"--

are widely different from those with which I should read a poem,
where the author, having occasion for the character of a poet and a
philosopher in the fable of his narration, had chosen to make him a
chimney-sweeper; and then, in order to remove all doubts on the subject,
had invented an account of his birth, parentage and education, with all
the strange and fortunate accidents which had concurred in making him at
once poet, philosopher, and sweep! Nothing, but biography, can justify
this. If it be admissible even in a novel, it must be one in the manner
of De Foe's, that were meant to pass for histories, not in the manner of
Fielding's: In THE LIFE OF MOLL FLANDERS, Or COLONEL JACK, not in a TOM
JONES, or even a JOSEPH ANDREWS. Much less then can it be legitimately
introduced in a poem, the characters of which, amid the strongest
individualization, must still remain representative. The precepts of
Horace, on this point, are grounded on the nature both of poetry and of
the human mind. They are not more peremptory, than wise and prudent.
For in the first place a deviation from them perplexes the reader's
feelings, and all the circumstances which are feigned in order to make
such accidents less improbable, divide and disquiet his faith, rather
than aid and support it. Spite of all attempts, the fiction will appear,
and unfortunately not as fictitious but as false. The reader not only
knows, that the sentiments and language are the poet's own, and his
own too in his artificial character, as poet; but by the fruitless
endeavours to make him think the contrary, he is not even suffered to
forget it. The effect is similar to that produced by an Epic Poet, when
the fable and the characters are derived from Scripture history, as in
THE MESSIAH of Klopstock, or in CUMBERLAND'S CALVARY; and not merely
suggested by it as in the PARADISE LOST of Milton. That illusion,
contradistinguished from delusion, that negative faith, which simply
permits the images presented to work by their own force, without either
denial or affirmation of their real existence by the judgment, is
rendered impossible by their immediate neighbourhood to words and facts
of known and absolute truth. A faith, which transcends even historic
belief, must absolutely put out this mere poetic analogon of faith, as
the summer sun is said to extinguish our household fires, when it shines
full upon them. What would otherwise have been yielded to as pleasing
fiction, is repelled as revolting falsehood. The effect produced in
this latter case by the solemn belief of the reader, is in a less degree
brought about in the instances, to which I have been objecting, by the
balked attempts of the author to make him believe.

Add to all the foregoing the seeming uselessness both of the project and
of the anecdotes from which it is to derive support. Is there one word,
for instance, attributed to the pedlar in THE EXCURSION, characteristic
of a Pedlar? One sentiment, that might not more plausibly, even without
the aid of any previous explanation, have proceeded from any wise and
beneficent old man, of a rank or profession in which the language of
learning and refinement are natural and to be expected? Need the
rank have been at all particularized, where nothing follows which the
knowledge of that rank is to explain or illustrate? When on the contrary
this information renders the man's language, feelings, sentiments,
and information a riddle, which must itself be solved by episodes
of anecdote? Finally when this, and this alone, could have induced a
genuine Poet to inweave in a poem of the loftiest style, and on subjects
the loftiest and of most universal interest, such minute matters of
fact, (not unlike those furnished for the obituary of a magazine by the
friends of some obscure "ornament of society lately deceased" in some
obscure town,) as

"Among the hills of Athol he was born
There, on a small hereditary Farm,
An unproductive slip of rugged ground,
His Father dwelt; and died in poverty;
While He, whose lowly fortune I retrace,
The youngest of three sons, was yet a babe,
A little One--unconscious of their loss.
But ere he had outgrown his infant days
His widowed Mother, for a second Mate,
Espoused the teacher of the Village School;
Who on her offspring zealously bestowed
Needful instruction. "

"From his sixth year, the Boy of whom I speak,
In summer tended cattle on the Hills;
But, through the inclement and the perilous days
Of long-continuing winter, he repaired
To his Step-father's School,"-etc.

For all the admirable passages interposed in this narration, might, with
trifling alterations, have been far more appropriately, and with far
greater verisimilitude, told of a poet in the character of a poet;
and without incurring another defect which I shall now mention, and a
sufficient illustration of which will have been here anticipated.

Third; an undue predilection for the dramatic form in certain poems,
from which one or other of two evils result. Either the thoughts and
diction are different from that of the poet, and then there arises an
incongruity of style; or they are the same and indistinguishable, and
then it presents a species of ventriloquism, where two are represented
as talking, while in truth one man only speaks.

The fourth class of defects is closely connected with the former;
but yet are such as arise likewise from an intensity of feeling
disproportionate to such knowledge and value of the objects described,
as can be fairly anticipated of men in general, even of the most
cultivated classes; and with which therefore few only, and those few
particularly circumstanced, can be supposed to sympathize: In this
class, I comprise occasional prolixity, repetition, and an eddying,
instead of progression, of thought. As instances, see pages 27, 28, and
62 of the Poems, vol. I. and the first eighty lines of the VIth Book of
THE EXCURSION.

Fifth and last; thoughts and images too great for the subject. This
is an approximation to what might be called mental bombast,
as distinguished from verbal: for, as in the latter there is a
disproportion of the expressions to the thoughts so in this there is a
disproportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion. This, by the
bye, is a fault of which none but a man of genius is capable. It is the
awkwardness and strength of Hercules with the distaff of Omphale.

It is a well-known fact, that bright colours in motion both make and
leave the strongest impressions on the eye. Nothing is more likely too,
than that a vivid image or visual spectrum, thus originated, may become
the link of association in recalling the feelings and images that had
accompanied the original impression. But if we describe this in such
lines, as

"They flash upon that inward eye,
Which is the bliss of solitude! "

in what words shall we describe the joy of retrospection, when the
images and virtuous actions of a whole well-spent life, pass before that
conscience which is indeed the inward eye: which is indeed "the bliss
of solitude? " Assuredly we seem to sink most abruptly, not to say
burlesquely, and almost as in a medley, from this couplet to--

"And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils. " Vol. I. p. 328.

The second instance is from vol. II. page 12, where the poet having gone
out for a day's tour of pleasure, meets early in the morning with a knot
of Gipsies, who had pitched their blanket-tents and straw-beds, together
with their children and asses, in some field by the road-side. At the
close of the day on his return our tourist found them in the same place.
"Twelve hours," says he,

"Twelve hours, twelve bounteous hours are gone, while I
Have been a traveller under open sky,
Much witnessing of change and cheer,
Yet as I left I find them here! "

Whereat the poet, without seeming to reflect that the poor tawny
wanderers might probably have been tramping for weeks together through
road and lane, over moor and mountain, and consequently must have been
right glad to rest themselves, their children and cattle, for one whole
day; and overlooking the obvious truth, that such repose might be quite
as necessary for them, as a walk of the same continuance was pleasing
or healthful for the more fortunate poet; expresses his indignation in a
series of lines, the diction and imagery of which would have been rather
above, than below the mark, had they been applied to the immense empire
of China improgressive for thirty centuries:

"The weary Sun betook himself to rest:--
--Then issued Vesper from the fulgent west,
Outshining, like a visible God,
The glorious path in which he trod.
And now, ascending, after one dark hour,
And one night's diminution of her power,
Behold the mighty Moon! this way
She looks, as if at them--but they
Regard not her:--oh, better wrong and strife,
Better vain deeds or evil than such life!
The silent Heavens have goings on
The stars have tasks! --but these have none! "

The last instance of this defect,(for I know no other than these already
cited) is from the Ode, page 351, vol. II. , where, speaking of a child,
"a six years' Darling of a pigmy size," he thus addresses him:

"Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the Eternal Mind,--
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find!
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave,
A Present which is not to be put by! "

Now here, not to stop at the daring spirit of metaphor which connects
the epithets "deaf and silent," with the apostrophized eye: or (if we
are to refer it to the preceding word, "Philosopher"), the faulty and
equivocal syntax of the passage; and without examining the propriety of
making a "Master brood o'er a Slave," or "the Day" brood at all; we will
merely ask, what does all this mean? In what sense is a child of that
age a Philosopher? In what sense does he read "the eternal deep? " In
what sense is he declared to be "for ever haunted" by the Supreme Being?
or so inspired as to deserve the splendid titles of a Mighty Prophet, a
blessed Seer? By reflection? by knowledge? by conscious intuition? or
by any form or modification of consciousness? These would be tidings
indeed; but such as would pre-suppose an immediate revelation to
the inspired communicator, and require miracles to authenticate his
inspiration. Children at this age give us no such information of
themselves; and at what time were we dipped in the Lethe, which has
produced such utter oblivion of a state so godlike? There are many of us
that still possess some remembrances, more or less distinct, respecting
themselves at six years old; pity that the worthless straws only should
float, while treasures, compared with which all the mines of Golconda
and Mexico were but straws, should be absorbed by some unknown gulf into
some unknown abyss.

But if this be too wild and exorbitant to be suspected as having
been the poet's meaning; if these mysterious gifts, faculties, and
operations, are not accompanied with consciousness; who else is
conscious of them? or how can it be called the child, if it be no part
of the child's conscious being? For aught I know, the thinking Spirit
within me may be substantially one with the principle of life, and of
vital operation. For aught I know, it might be employed as a secondary
agent in the marvellous organization and organic movements of my body.
But, surely, it would be strange language to say, that I construct my
heart! or that I propel the finer influences through my nerves! or that
I compress my brain, and draw the curtains of sleep round my own eyes!
Spinoza and Behmen were, on different systems, both Pantheists; and
among the ancients there were philosophers, teachers of the EN KAI PAN,
who not only taught that God was All, but that this All constituted God.
Yet not even these would confound the part, as a part, with the
whole, as the whole. Nay, in no system is the distinction between
the individual and God, between the Modification, and the one only
Substance, more sharply drawn, than in that of Spinoza. Jacobi indeed
relates of Lessing, that, after a conversation with him at the house of
the Poet, Gleim, (the Tyrtaeus and Anacreon of the German Parnassus,) in
which conversation Lessing had avowed privately to Jacobi his reluctance
to admit any personal existence of the Supreme Being, or the possibility
of personality except in a finite Intellect, and while they were sitting
at table, a shower of rain came on unexpectedly. Gleim expressed his
regret at the circumstance, because they had meant to drink their
wine in the garden: upon which Lessing in one of his half-earnest,
half-joking moods, nodded to Jacobi, and said, "It is I, perhaps, that
am doing that," i. e. raining! --and Jacobi answered, "or perhaps I;"
Gleim contented himself with staring at them both, without asking for
any explanation.

So with regard to this passage. In what sense can the magnificent
attributes, above quoted, be appropriated to a child, which would not
make them equally suitable to a bee, or a dog, or afield of corn: or
even to a ship, or to the wind and waves that propel it? The omnipresent
Spirit works equally in them, as in the child; and the child is equally
unconscious of it as they. It cannot surely be, that the four lines,
immediately following, are to contain the explanation?

"To whom the grave
Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight
Of day or the warm light,
A place of thought where we in waiting lie;"--

Surely, it cannot be that this wonder-rousing apostrophe is but a
comment on the little poem, "We are Seven? "--that the whole meaning of
the passage is reducible to the assertion, that a child, who by the bye
at six years old would have been better instructed in most Christian
families, has no other notion of death than that of lying in a dark,
cold place? And still, I hope, not as in a place of thought! not the
frightful notion of lying awake in his grave! The analogy between death
and sleep is too simple, too natural, to render so horrid a belief
possible for children; even had they not been in the habit, as all
Christian children are, of hearing the latter term used to express the
former. But if the child's belief be only, that "he is not dead, but
sleepeth:" wherein does it differ from that of his father and mother,
or any other adult and instructed person? To form an idea of a thing's
becoming nothing; or of nothing becoming a thing; is impossible to
all finite beings alike, of whatever age, and however educated or
uneducated. Thus it is with splendid paradoxes in general. If the words
are taken in the common sense, they convey an absurdity; and if, in
contempt of dictionaries and custom, they are so interpreted as to avoid
the absurdity, the meaning dwindles into some bald truism. Thus you must
at once understand the words contrary to their common import, in order
to arrive at any sense; and according to their common import, if you are
to receive from them any feeling of sublimity or admiration.

Though the instances of this defect in Mr. Wordsworth's poems are so
few, that for themselves it would have been scarcely just to attract the
reader's attention toward them; yet I have dwelt on it, and perhaps the
more for this very reason. For being so very few, they cannot sensibly
detract from the reputation of an author, who is even characterized
by the number of profound truths in his writings, which will stand
the severest analysis; and yet few as they are, they are exactly those
passages which his blind admirers would be most likely, and best able,
to imitate. But Wordsworth, where he is indeed Wordsworth, may be
mimicked by copyists, he may be plundered by plagiarists; but he cannot
be imitated, except by those who are not born to be imitators. For
without his depth of feeling and his imaginative power his sense would
want its vital warmth and peculiarity; and without his strong sense, his
mysticism would become sickly--mere fog, and dimness!

To these defects which, as appears by the extracts, are only occasional,
I may oppose, with far less fear of encountering the dissent of
any candid and intelligent reader, the following (for the most part
correspondent) excellencies. First, an austere purity of language both
grammatically and logically; in short a perfect appropriateness of
the words to the meaning. Of how high value I deem this, and how
particularly estimable I hold the example at the present day, has been
already stated: and in part too the reasons on which I ground both the
moral and intellectual importance of habituating ourselves to a strict
accuracy of expression. It is noticeable, how limited an acquaintance
with the masterpieces of art will suffice to form a correct and even
a sensitive taste, where none but master-pieces have been seen and
admired: while on the other hand, the most correct notions, and the
widest acquaintance with the works of excellence of all ages and
countries, will not perfectly secure us against the contagious
familiarity with the far more numerous offspring of tastelessness or of
a perverted taste. If this be the case, as it notoriously is, with the
arts of music and painting, much more difficult will it be, to avoid the
infection of multiplied and daily examples in the practice of an art,
which uses words, and words only, as its instruments. In poetry, in
which every line, every phrase, may pass the ordeal of deliberation and
deliberate choice, it is possible, and barely possible, to attain that
ultimatum which I have ventured to propose as the infallible test of
a blameless style; namely: its untranslatableness in words of the same
language without injury to the meaning. Be it observed, however, that I
include in the meaning of a word not only its correspondent object, but
likewise all the associations which it recalls. For language is framed
to convey not the object alone but likewise the character, mood and
intentions of the person who is representing it. In poetry it is
practicable to preserve the diction uncorrupted by the affectations
and misappropriations, which promiscuous authorship, and reading not
promiscuous only because it is disproportionally most conversant with
the compositions of the day, have rendered general. Yet even to the
poet, composing in his own province, it is an arduous work: and as
the result and pledge of a watchful good sense of fine and luminous
distinction, and of complete self-possession, may justly claim all the
honour which belongs to an attainment equally difficult and valuable,
and the more valuable for being rare. It is at all times the proper food
of the understanding; but in an age of corrupt eloquence it is both food
and antidote.

In prose I doubt whether it be even possible to preserve our style
wholly unalloyed by the vicious phraseology which meets us everywhere,
from the sermon to the newspaper, from the harangue of the legislator
to the speech from the convivial chair, announcing a toast or sentiment.
Our chains rattle, even while we are complaining of them. The poems of
Boetius rise high in our estimation when we compare them with those of
his contemporaries, as Sidonius Apollinaris, and others. They might even
be referred to a purer age, but that the prose, in which they are
set, as jewels in a crown of lead or iron, betrays the true age of the
writer. Much however may be effected by education. I believe not only
from grounds of reason, but from having in great measure assured myself
of the fact by actual though limited experience, that, to a youth led
from his first boyhood to investigate the meaning of every word and
the reason of its choice and position, logic presents itself as an old
acquaintance under new names.

On some future occasion, more especially demanding such disquisition, I
shall attempt to prove the close connection between veracity and habits
of mental accuracy; the beneficial after-effects of verbal precision in
the preclusion of fanaticism, which masters the feelings more especially
by indistinct watch-words; and to display the advantages which language
alone, at least which language with incomparably greater ease and
certainty than any other means, presents to the instructor of impressing
modes of intellectual energy so constantly, so imperceptibly, and as it
were by such elements and atoms, as to secure in due time the formation
of a second nature. When we reflect, that the cultivation of the
judgment is a positive command of the moral law, since the reason can
give the principle alone, and the conscience bears witness only to the
motive, while the application and effects must depend on the judgment
when we consider, that the greater part of our success and comfort in
life depends on distinguishing the similar from the same, that which is
peculiar in each thing from that which it has in common with others, so
as still to select the most probable, instead of the merely possible or
positively unfit, we shall learn to value earnestly and with a practical
seriousness a mean, already prepared for us by nature and society,
of teaching the young mind to think well and wisely by the same
unremembered process and with the same never forgotten results, as those
by which it is taught to speak and converse. Now how much warmer
the interest is, how much more genial the feelings of reality and
practicability, and thence how much stronger the impulses to imitation
are, which a contemporary writer, and especially a contemporary poet,
excites in youth and commencing manhood, has been treated of in the
earlier pages of these sketches. I have only to add, that all the
praise which is due to the exertion of such influence for a purpose so
important, joined with that which must be claimed for the infrequency of
the same excellence in the same perfection, belongs in full right to
Mr. Wordsworth. I am far however from denying that we have poets whose
general style possesses the same excellence, as Mr. Moore, Lord
Byron, Mr. Bowles, and, in all his later and more important works, our
laurel-honouring Laureate. But there are none, in whose works I do not
appear to myself to find more exceptions, than in those of Wordsworth.
Quotations or specimens would here be wholly out of place, and must be
left for the critic who doubts and would invalidate the justice of this
eulogy so applied.

The second characteristic excellence of Mr. Wordsworth's work is: a
correspondent weight and sanity of the Thoughts and Sentiments,--won,
not from books; but--from the poet's own meditative observation. They
are fresh and have the dew upon them. His muse, at least when in her
strength of wing, and when she hovers aloft in her proper element,

Makes audible a linked lay of truth,
Of truth profound a sweet continuous lay,
Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes!

Even throughout his smaller poems there is scarcely one, which is not
rendered valuable by some just and original reflection.

See page 25, vol. II. : or the two following passages in one of his
humblest compositions.

"O Reader! had you in your mind
Such stores as silent thought can bring,
O gentle Reader! you would find
A tale in every thing;"

and

"I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning;
Alas! the gratitude of men
Has oftener left me mourning;"

or in a still higher strain the six beautiful quatrains, page 134.

"Thus fares it still in our decay:
And yet the wiser mind
Mourns less for what age takes away
Than what it leaves behind.

The Blackbird in the summer trees,
The Lark upon the hill,
Let loose their carols when they please,
Are quiet when they will.

With Nature never do they wage
A foolish strife; they see
A happy youth, and their old age
Is beautiful and free!

But we are pressed by heavy laws;
And often glad no more,
We wear a face of joy, because
We have been glad of yore.

If there is one, who need bemoan
His kindred laid in earth,
The household hearts that were his own,
It is the man of mirth.

My days, my Friend, are almost gone,
My life has been approved,
And many love me; but by none
Am I enough beloved;"

or the sonnet on Buonaparte, page 202, vol. II. or finally (for a volume
would scarce suffice to exhaust the instances,) the last stanza of the
poem on the withered Celandine, vol.