06. Had Mr. Wordsworth's poems been the silly, the er childish things, which they were for a long time de

L-proclaimed as excellent; and for the same space of time a great Iman was defrauded of that worldly remuneration of his virtuous labours, which the authors of frivolous novels and licentious poems were permitted-and in some instances helped-during the same period to obtain for their compositions. To make the lesson perfect, it has pleased Heaven to let Wordsworth himself live to see that revolution legitimated which he and his compeers, Coleridge and Southey, in different ways and degrees, together wrought; and to read his own defence and praise in the pages of the same work by which some of his most exquisite productions were once pronounced below criticism. Ed.

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Agreeing as I do with these remarks in the main, I venture to observe that in my mind they ascribe too much influence upon the early fate of Mr. W.'s poems to the E. Review. That and those poems were not generally admired from the first, was, in the my opinion, their own fault, that is to say, arose principally from kit their being works of great genius, and consequently, though old as the world itself, in one way, yet in another, a new thing under the sun. Novelty is delightful when it is understood at his once, when it is but the old familiar matters newly set forth; but here was a new world presented to the reader which was nd also a strange world, and most of those who had grown to midis dle age acquainted with the old world only, and chiefly with ese that part of it which was least like Wordsworth's,-the hither vel part, out of sight of Chaucer and Spencer and the old English ing Poets in general, could never learn their way, or find themselves at home there.

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Periodical literature can hardly be said to create public taste ad and opinion: I believe it does no more than strongly reflect and ng. thereby concentre and strengthen it. The fashionable journal ule is expected to be a mirror of public opinion in its own party, a ing, brilliant magnifying mirror, in which the mind of the public may se see itself look large and handsome. Woe be to the mirror if it the presumes to give pictures and images of its own!-it will fall to the ground, even if not shivered at once by popular indignation. Such publications depend for their maintenance on the public ich which they are to teach, and must therefore, like the pastor of a ere voluntary flock, pipe only such tunes as suit their auditor's sense

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scribed as being; had they been really distinguis from the compositions of other poets merely by m

of harmony. They cannot afford to make ventures, like w hearted disinterested individuals. It is far from my inter to deny, that the boldest things are often said, the most ex vagant novelties broached in publications of this kind: that strongest and most sweeping assertions, fit, as might be supp to startle and shock even the cold and careless,-ascription saintly excellence to men whose unchristian acts of duplicit cruelty are undenied and undeniable-of worse than human: and wickedness to men, whom millions have regarded with verential gratitude, and this in the way of mere assertion, no attempt at proof, or only the merest shadow of a shade one,-references to the authority of accusers, who are themse resting their vague and violent charges on the authority of vious accusers and bitter enemies-will never be ventured u in the public journal. We have had evidence enough in our to the contrary. Still I aver that such things are not done nothing but truth and charity is risked in the doing of the till the mass of readers are known to be in such a state of mi that these bold utterances will move them not at all, or o with a pleasurable excitement. Again, the chief contribut to the leading periodicals are for the most part a class of p sons opposed to essential novelty; able men more or less vanced beyond the period of impressible youth, whose intell tual frame is set,-who are potent in exposing new follies a false pretensions; but slow to understand the fresh produ of genius, unwilling even to believe in them. It is by the your or at least by the youthful, that accessions to the old stores thought and imagination are welcomed and placed in the tre sury. Still it is a remarkable fact, that the journal, which

*

*For some considerable evidence on these points I refer t reader to Note 10 in Vol. II. (pp. 656-878), of Archdeac Hare's new work, The Mission of the Comforter, &c. whi contains a thorough investigation of the charges brought again Martin Luther of late years, including those of Bossuet, and most animated and luminous exposure of the perversions an transmutations, rather than misrepresentations, of his teaching imputable to certain reviewers.

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ness of language and inanity of thought; had they indeed contained nothing more than what is found in

pecially professed faith in the intellectual progress of the human race, and to be open-eyed to modern excellence, should have shewn itself blind to the merits of a body of poetry, in which the spirit of the age, in its noblest and most refined characteristics, is more amply and energetically manifested than in any other. When the luminary first appeared above the horizon, those admirers of new light declared it to be nothing better than green cheese, yet assailed it with as violent outcries as if they thought it able to set the world on fire. If these criticisms excited "a great laugh," this shows with how little expenditure of wit a great laugh may be excited; for whatever talents in that way the writers may have possessed and on other occasions shewn, I think they displayed none of them at the expense of Mr. Wordsworth. The same kind of attack has been repeated of late years with a far more cunning malice and amusing injustice, without exciting any general laughter at all, simply because the time for laughing at a great poet is over and gone. If any laughter is 1. heard now it is but an echo of the past:-if there be any minds that have been dwelling in caves under the earth during the last quarter of a century, they may suppose that Wordsworth's fame has never risen above the horizon. Not that every man of sense must needs bow down before it; there are clever persons who deny the greatness of Milton; some ingenious critics have pronounced Homer a barbarian, others have decried Shakespeare, many have looked upon Pindar as a “crazy fellow,” and Spenser is thought even by some of the poetical a very great bore. In like manner there may be a man of sense who has no sense of the merits of Mr. Wordsworth's writings; but to be ignorant of their power and influence is to be ignorant of the mind of the age in relation to poetry. The laughter of thirty years ago must have been chiefly produced by a sense of the contrast between the great conception of the Poet entertained by a few, and the small conception which the many were then alone able to form of it. "He strides on so far before us," said Mr. Coleridge of his friend," that he dwarfs himself in the distance." People saw him as a dwarf yet had a suspicion that he might in reality be a giant. One advantage of the present time to Mr. Wordsworth is this, that poetry is not now the fashion.

the parodies and pretended imitations of them; tl must have sunk at once, a dead weight, into the slou of oblivion, and have dragged the preface along w them. But year after year increased the number Mr. Wordsworth's admirers. They were found t not in the lower classes of the reading public, b chiefly among young men of strong sensibility and m ditative minds; and their admiration (inflamed perha in some degree by opposition) was distinguished its intensity, I might almost say, by its religious fervou These facts, and the intellectual energy of the autho which was more or less consciously felt, where it w outwardly and even boisterously denied, meeting wit sentiments of aversion to his opinions, and of alarm their consequences, produced an eddy of criticism which would of itself have borne up the poems by th violence with which it whirled them round and round With many parts of this preface in the sense attribute to them and which the words undoubtedly seem t authorize, I never concurred; but on the contrary ob jected to them as erroneous in principle, and as com tradictory (in appearance at least) both to other part of the same preface, and to the author's own practic in the greater part of the poems themselves. Mr Wordsworth in his recent collection has, I find, de graded this prefatory disquisition to the end of hi second volume, to be read or not at the reader': choice. But he has not, as far as I can discover, an

We bestow our "ignorance, incapability and presumption," or a least our superficiality, incompetence and hastiness on the reli gious tract or controversial pamphlet, and poetry is resigned to those who have a true taste for it and study it in earnest. S. C.]

7 ["The observations prefixed to that portion of these Volumes which was published many years ago, under the title of Lyrical Ballads, have so little of a special application to the great part

nounced any change in his poetic creed. At all events, considering it as the source of a controversy, in which I have been honoured more than I deserve by the frequent conjunction of my name with his, I think it expedient to declare once for all, in what points I coincide with the opinions supported in that preface, and in what points I altogether differ. But in order to render myself intelligible I must previously, in as few words as possible, explain my views, first, of a Poem ; and secondly, of Poetry itself, in kind, and in essence. The office of philosophical disquisition consists in just distinction; while it is the privilege of the philo30pher to preserve himself constantly aware, that distinction is not division. In order to obtain adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate its distinguishable parts; and this is the technical process of philosophy. But having so done, we must then restore them in our conceptions to the unity, in which they actually co-exist; and this is the result of philosophy. A poem contains the same elements as a prose composition; the difference therefore must 1 consist in a different combination of them, in consequence of a different object being proposed. According to the difference of the object will be the difference of the combination. It is possible, that the object

of the present enlarged and diversified collection, that they could not with propriety stand as an Introduction to it. Not deeming it, however, expedient to suppress that exposition, slight and imperfect as it is, of the feelings which had determined the choice of the subjects, and the principles which had regulated the composition of these Pieces, I have transferred it to the end of the second volume, to be attended to, or not, at the pleasure of the Reader." Pref. to edition of 1815.

This preface is now to be found in Vol. II. p. 303, of the edition of 1840. Ed.]