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 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924103995241 
 
V 
 
 BY A. J. GEORGE, A.M. 
 
 WORDSWORTH'S PRELUDE, with notes. 
 
 SELECTIONS FROM WORDSWORTH, with notes. 
 
 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES AND ESSAYS ON POE- 
 TRY, with notes. 
 
 BURKE'S SPEECHES ON THE AMERICAN WAR, and 
 LETTER TO THE SHERIFFS OF BRISTOL, with 
 notes. 
 
 SYLLABUS OF ENGLISH HISTORY AND LITERATURE. 
 
 IN PREPARATION. 
 
 SELECT SPEECHES OF DANIEL WEBSTER. 
 
 WORDSWORTH'S EXCURSION, and THE WHITE DOE OF RYL- 
 STONE. 
 
 THE HISTORY AND LITERATURE OF SCOTLAND; 
 I. THE HIGHLANDS. II. THE BORDER. 
 
Ibeatb'g gngllsb Clagsicg. 
 
 WORDSWORTH'S 
 
 PREFACES AND ESSAYS ON POETRY; 
 
 WITH 
 
 LETTER TO LADY BEAUMONT. 
 
 (1798-1S45.) 
 
 i£tiiteti Sxiii\) Untrotuction anti Notes 
 
 BY 
 
 A. J. GEORGE, A.M. 
 
 " Wordsworth was a great critic, and it is to be sincerely regretted that he has not left 
 us more criticism." — Matthew Arnold. 
 
 " Admirable specimens of philosophical criticism." — Sir Henry Taylor. 
 
 *• No one can read the reasoning of these Prefaces without instruction." — Prof. vShairp. 
 
 "The Prefaces are most valuable contributions to our literature of criticism." — 
 Aubrey De Vere. 
 
 BOSTON, U.S.A.: 
 
 D. C. HEATH ^ CO., PUBLISHERS. 
 
 1892. 
 

 Copyright, 1892, 
 By a. J. GEORGE. 
 
 "Typography by J. S. Gushing & Co., Boston, U.S.A. 
 Presswork by Berwick & Smith, Boston, U.S.A. 
 
TO 
 
 Subreg 2Be Fere, 2.iL>B., 
 
 THE FRIEND OF WORDSWORTH, 
 
 WHO HAS NOBLY ILLUSTRATED IN PROSE AND VERSE 
 
 THE PRINCIPLES OF LITERATURE AND LIFE 
 
 CONTAINED IN THESE 
 
 PREFACES. 
 
' High is our calling, Friend ! — Creative Art 
 (Whether the instrument of words she use, 
 Or pencil pregnant with ethereal hues) , 
 Demands the service of a mind and heart, 
 Though sensitive yet, in their weakest part, 
 Heroically fashioned — to infuse 
 Faith in the whispers of the lonely Muse, 
 While the whole world seems adverse to desert. 
 And, Oh ! When Nature sinks, as oft she may, 
 Through long-lived pressure of obscure distress, 
 Still to be strenuous for the bright reward. 
 And in the soul admit of no decay. 
 Brook no continuance of weak mindedness — 
 Great is the glory, for the strife is hard." 
 
 VI 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 " He too upon a wintry clime 
 Had fallen — on this iron time 
 Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears. 
 He found us when the age had bound 
 Our souls in its benumbing round; 
 He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears; 
 He laid us as we lay at birth 
 On the cool flowery lap of earth, 
 Smiles broke from us, and we had ease; 
 The hills were round us, and the breeze 
 Went o'er the sunlit fields again; 
 Our foreheads felt the wind and rain. 
 Our youth returned; for there was shei 
 On spirits that had long been dead, 
 Spirits dried up and closely furl'd, 
 The freshness of the early world." ^ 
 
 A spirit of manly independence has characterized every era 
 of reformation, but in our own century this spirit has had a 
 wider range, and has manifested itself in a greater variety of 
 movements, than ever before. Independence in hterature and 
 art, in church and state, in social and political life, has been 
 the distinguishing feature of the nineteenth century. In the 
 Hterature of Greece and Rome the state is the centre, and the 
 individual is of Uttle account. In the Middle Ages the church 
 
 1 Matthew Arnold. 
 
 vii 
 
viii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 is the centre, and here too the individual is lost in the system. 
 In modern literature the state and the church are represented, 
 but not as central, the individual has become the centre of 
 interest. The idea of the individual as a hero because he 
 belongs to a certain class has given way to the idea of the 
 hero as a private citizen, as Tennyson says — 
 
 " And the individual withers, and the world is more and more." 
 
 The happy warrior is 
 
 " A soul whose master-bias leans 
 To homefelt pleasures and to gentle scenes." 
 
 It is this elevation of the private man to the place of honor 
 in literature and art, in church and state, in social and political 
 life, that has won for the century the title ^' revolutionary." The 
 revolutionary movement in hterature consisted chiefly in the 
 restoration of passion, " which is highest reason in a soul 
 sublime." The eighteenth century was an age of reason, an 
 age of prose ; in it spiritual east winds prevailed, and only a 
 few of those who faithfully strove to be loyal to the higher 
 ideal were successful and won a hearing. Thomson and 
 Collins saw the faint glow of the coming dawn, while Allan 
 Ramsay and Hamilton of Bangour, through the pathos of the 
 ballad and Scotch song, exerted a marked effect upon the 
 poetry of the generation. 
 
 Beginning thus, the return to nature became more clearly 
 marked when Gray turned to the Country Churchyard and 
 Goldsmith to the Deserted Village, when Crabbe sang of the 
 Borough, when Cowper mused by the banks of the languid 
 Ouse, and Burns crooned his immortal lyrics on the Scottish 
 
INTRODUCTION. ix 
 
 hillside. Its first movement was completed on the publication 
 of the first edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1798. 
 
 Passion in its relation to modern poetry shows itself in 
 Byron, Shelley, and Keats as the passion of youth, with a ten- 
 dency to a passionate wail of despair ; in Arnold, Clough, and 
 Rossetti it appears in" the form of Greek idealism ; in Keble 
 and Newman we see it as a spiritual light, a deity within the 
 soul ; while in Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning it be- 
 comes the connecting link between the priestly and the scien- 
 tific nature, and utters itself in the prayer — 
 
 " Let knowledge grow from more to more, 
 But more of reverence in us dwell." 
 
 The origin of the Lyrical Ballads has often been told. Its 
 joint authorship is alluded to in the Prelude as follows : — 
 
 "That summer, under whose indulgent skies 
 Upon smooth Quantock's airy ridge we roved 
 Unchecked, or loitered mid her sylvan combs, 
 Thou in bewitching words, with happy heart, 
 Didst chaunt the vision of that Ancient Man, 
 ' • The bright-eyed Mariner; 
 
 And I, associate with such labor, steeped 
 
 - In soft forgetfulness the livelong hours, 
 Murmuring of him who, joyous hap, was found, 
 After the perils of his moonlight ride, 
 Near the loud waterfall." 
 
 Although this volume did not prove profitable to the Bristol 
 pubhsher, it secured the poetic fame of its authors, and 
 enriched the world of English poetry as no one volume has 
 since done, in that it re-established forever the principle that 
 the soil of true poetry is a genuine human heartedness, a rev- 
 
X INTR OD UC TION, 
 
 erence for the beauty and the worth of nature as revealing 
 the soul of God, the sanctity of the domestic affections, whether 
 under cottage roofs or in the '^perfumed chambers of the 
 great." In 1800 a second edition was published, somewhat 
 enlarged ; it contained the famous Preface which set forth 
 Wordsworth's theory of poetry in general and of his own poetry 
 in particular, and which called down upon him a storm of 
 abuse second only to that caused by the poems themselves. 
 The years from 1798 to 1815 — the midsummer of Words- 
 worth's genius, in which he raised that " vionuinentum cere 
 pe?'e?i7iius^' — were years of neglect, obloquy, ridicule, and 
 disparagement. It is to these same years that we owe the 
 sound criticism and wise reflection of the Prefaces. 
 
 In the edition of 1802 the preface to the second edition 
 (1800) was enlarged, and there was added an appendix on 
 " Poetic Diction." These were repeated in successive editions 
 until 1815 when, in the edition pubhshed that year, the first 
 volume contained a new preface and a supplementary essay 
 on the poetry of the last two centuries ; at the close of the 
 second volume was placed the preface to the edition of 1802 
 and the essay on Poetic Diction. These prefaces were changed 
 by alterations, insertions, and omissions, in the various editions, 
 until they received their last revision in 1845. 
 
 While it is true that Wordsworth vanquished his opponents 
 more by his poems than by his Prefaces, the two are so inter- 
 related that the history of one is the history of both. Of no 
 artist can it be more truly said than of Wordsworth that he 
 builded better than he knew. Artists cannot explain the 
 mystery of their art, and yet they can at times reveal to us 
 much that is helpful to an appreciation of their work. Every 
 artist brings into the world of art an entirely new thing — his 
 
INTRODUCTION. ^ xi 
 
 own personality — and consequently must create the taste by 
 which he is to be judged. 
 
 These Prefaces admit us, as far as it is possible for us to be 
 admitted, into the secrets of the poet's workmanship ; they lay 
 bare some fundamental processes and do much to show us the 
 truth respecting the origin, the purpose, and the power of 
 poetry. Mr. F. W. Myers says : " The essays effected, what is 
 perhaps as much as the writer on art can fairly hope to accom- 
 plish. They placed in striking light that side of the subject 
 which had been too long ignored ; they aided in recalling an 
 art which had become conventional and fantastic into the 
 normal current of English thought and speech." " In his first 
 efforts," says De Vere, "Wordsworth was doubtless somewhat 
 too much of a radical reformer as regards the abuses which 
 had long corrupted language. His remarks on that subject 
 seemed to assume that the language of common life which he 
 recommended for poetical purposes, differed little from that of 
 good prose writings, a statement to which there are many 
 exceptions. He did not succeed in thus substituting the lan- 
 guage of common hfe for poetic diction ; but he did a much 
 better thing. He dug deep into the ore of manly thoughts, 
 and finding there a corresponding tongue, both new and true, 
 he blew away the dry dust of conventionalities and affectations, 
 and replaced a false poetic diction by a genuine one." 
 
 As I have said, the revolutionary spirit in this century has 
 been general ; and it is but natural that, if it altered the con- 
 ception of poetry, it should at the same time affect the principles 
 of criticism. Following the history of criticism from Aristotle 
 to Matthew Arnold, in Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and 
 England, one finds that there is substantial agreement upon 
 the idea that the end of art is to give pleasure. Each nation, 
 
xii' INTR OD UCTION. 
 
 -however, has had its own interpretation of pleasure, and hence 
 the history of criticism is exceedingly complex. 
 
 The etymological meaning of the word critic is a judge, and 
 to the present time it has retained with varying emphasis this 
 idea. Aristotle, Longinus, Horace, Aristarchus, and Boileau 
 judged by fixed principles established by the court of their 
 predecessors. They rested their opinion upon a logical basis, 
 they appealed to established canons and accepted definitions, 
 and all that was necessary for such critics was a knowledge of 
 these historical precedents. This classical criticism held un- 
 limited power until the close of the last century. The divine 
 right of such an order was then challenged both in Germany 
 and England, where the right of individual judgment was being 
 insisted upon. The prominence of the personal element, in 
 which likes and dislikes took the place of established rules, char- 
 acterized the romantic school ; this in turn gave way to the 
 principle of induction. Under the influence of Goethe, Sainte- 
 Beuve, and Matthew Arnold, this movement, by uniting the clas- 
 sical and the romantic, has resulted in producing that spirit of 
 disinterestedness by which alone the real in art can be recognized. 
 
 " The form of this world passes ; and I would fain occupy 
 myself with that only which constitutes abiding relations," 
 said Goethe. M. Sainte-Beuve, speaking of the function of 
 criticism, says : " The first consideration for us is, not whether 
 we are amused and pleased by a work of art or mind, nor is it 
 whether we are touched by it. What we should seek first of all 
 is, — ought we to be amused, are we right in being moved by 
 it, in applauding it? " Again he says : " The critic is the man 
 who knows how to read and who can teach others how to read." 
 " Criticism," says Matthew Arnold, " is a disinterested endeavor 
 to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought 
 in the world." 
 
INTR OD UC TION. xii'l 
 
 The classical school was judicial, dealt with a difference in 
 degree, and required knowledge of precedents. The scientific 
 school is inductive, deals with differences in kind, and requires 
 both knowledge and sympathy. So long as the classical school 
 ruled was it any wonder that the history of Hterature revealed the 
 triumph of author over critic? The war which Wordsworth' 
 waged against the old judicial criticism was of the greatest 
 moment both for the poet and the critic. In these Prefaces we 
 have the principles which constitute the foundation of inductive 
 
 criticism. 
 
 " You must love him ere to you 
 He will seem worthy of your love." 
 
 It is doubtless natural that one should enjoy and praise 
 Wordsworth's poetry first, but his criticism should by no means 
 be neglected, for, believe me, whether one goes to him for 
 poetry or criticism, one will not leave him without a blessing. 
 
 " Wisdom sheathed 
 In song love-humble; contemplations high, 
 That built like larks their nests upon the ground; 
 Insight and vision, sympathies profound 
 That spanned the total of humanity; 
 These were the gifts which God poured forth at large 
 On man through him; and he was faithful to his charge." i 
 
 As regards Wordsworth's prose style Kttle need be said. 
 When a poet chooses to adopt the prose form one expects to 
 find the same characteristics as distinguished his verse. Style, 
 either in prose or verse, is the constant transpiration of char- 
 acter. As it is the distinctly personal element that renders 
 Wordsworth's poetry ''non verba sed tonitrua," so in his prose 
 one finds everywhere these elements of strength, dignity, purity, 
 and truth united with a subtle thought and tender sensibiHty 
 
 1 Aubrey De Vere. 
 
xiv INTR OD UCTION. 
 
 which individualize and give character to his style. There is 
 a ruggedness in the sentence which makes it often austere and 
 heavy, but it never falls into the opposite fault of the florid and 
 the ornate. It may be said that Wordsworth's style is everywhere 
 distinguished for its manhness, — '' suavitas austera et solida." 
 
 The seminary method of teaching English literature makes 
 necessary the publication of the best texts both of literature 
 and criticism in a form and at a price accessible to every 
 student. The day has gone by when pupils can be lectured 
 into what they should think about literature. The successful 
 teacher is the one who is best able to stimulate the student to 
 research and discovery — to select and painstaking reading. 
 
 My thanks are due to Mrs. St. John of Ithaca, New York, 
 for timely assistance in the matter of text, and for calling 
 my attention to a possible inaccuracy in the date of the 
 second essay, as recorded in the bibliography of Wordsworth. 
 It is certain that the proper date is 1802 and not 18 15, as 
 given by Professor Knight. The order of the last two essays 
 has been changed from that found in Professor Knight's edi- 
 tion of the poet's works. I cannot see how an essay supple- 
 mentary to the preface of 18 15 can precede the preface. I am 
 very grateful for permission to associate this edition of the 
 Prefaces with the name of one who has seen with singular 
 clearness and has expressed with singular force and beauty the 
 " Wisdom and Truth," the '' Genius and Passion," of Words- 
 worth. 
 
 I have used the text of the edition of 1845 as given in Gro- 
 sart's edition of the prose works of Wordsworth. Of the dates 
 prefixed to each work the first refers to the year of composi- 
 tion , the second, to the year of the author's last revision. 
 
 Brookline, Mass., June, 1892. A T C 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 -»o^ 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Preface, 1800-1 845 i 
 
 Appendix, 1802-1845 33 
 
 Preface, 1815-1845 40 
 
 Essay Supplementary to Preface, 1815-1845 59 
 
 Letter to Lady Beaumont 95 
 
 Notes loi 
 
 References * 119 
 
 XV 
 
WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 PREFACE, 
 
 180O-1845. 
 
 The first Volume of these Poems has already been sub- 
 mitted to general perusal. It was published, as an experi- 
 ment, which, I hoped, might be of some use to ascertain, 
 how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of 
 the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that 5 
 sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be 
 imparted, which a Poet may rationally endeavour to impart.^ 
 
 I had formed no very inaccurate estimate of the proba- 
 ble effect of those Poems : I flattered myself that they who 
 should be pleased with them would read them with more 10 
 than common pleasure : and, on the other hand, I was well 
 aware, that by those who should dislike them, they would 
 be read with more than common dislike. The result has 
 differed from my expectation in this only, that a greater 
 number have been pleased than I ventured to hope I should 15 
 please.'^ 
 
 Several of my Friends are anxious for the success of 
 these Poems, from a belief, that, if the views with which 
 they were composed were indeed realised, a class of Poetry 20 
 would be produced, well adapted to interest mankind 
 permanently, and not unimportant, in the quality, and in 
 
2 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 the multiplicity of its moral relations : and on this account 
 they have advised me to prefix a systematic defence of the 
 theory upon which the Poems were written.-^ But I was 
 unwilling to undertake the task, knowing that on this occa- 
 
 5 sion the Reader would look coldly upon my arguments, 
 since I might be suspected of having been principally 
 influenced by the selfish and foolish hope of reasoning him 
 into an approbation of these particular Poems : and I was 
 still more unwilling to undertake the task, because, ade- 
 
 10 quately to display the opinions, and fully to enforce the 
 arguments, would require a space wholly disproportionate 
 to a preface. For, to treat the subject with the clearness 
 and coherence of which it is susceptible, it would be 
 necessary to give a full account of the present state of the 
 
 15 public taste in this country, and to determine how far this 
 taste is healthy or depraved; which, again, could not be 
 determined, without pointing out in what manner language 
 and the human mind act and re-act on each other, and 
 without retracing the revolutions, not of literature alone, 
 
 20 but likewise of society itself. I have therefore altogether 
 declined to enter regularly upon this defence; yet I am 
 sensible, that there would be something like impropriety 
 in abruptly obtruding upon the Public, without a few words 
 of introduction, Poems so materially different from those 
 
 25 upon which general approbation is at present bestowed. 
 
 It is supposed, that by the act of writing in verse an 
 Author makes a formal engagement that he will gratify 
 certain known habits of association; that he not only thus 
 apprises the Reader that certain classes of ideas and 
 
 30 expressions will be found in his book, but that others will 
 be carefully excluded. This exponent or symbol held 
 
PREFACE, 1800- 184s. 3 
 
 forth by metrical language must in different eras of litera- 
 ture have excited very different expectations : for example, 
 in the age of Catullus, Terence, and Lucretius, and that 
 of Statins or Claudian; and in our own country, in the age 
 of Shakspeare and Beaumont and Fletcher, and that of 5 
 Donne and Cowley, or Dryden, or Pope. I will not take 
 upon me to determine the exact import of the promise 
 which, by the act of writing in verse, an Author in the 
 present day makes to his reader : but it will undoubtedly 
 appear to many persons that I have not fulfilled the terms 10 
 of an engagement thus voluntarily contrasted. They who 
 have been accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phrase- 
 ology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading 
 this book to its conclusion, will, no doubt, frequently have 
 to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness: 15 
 they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to 
 inquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be 
 permitted to assume that title. -^ I hope therefore the reader 
 will not censure me for attempting to state what I have 
 proposed to myself to perform; and also (as far as the 20 
 limitsjof a preface will permit) to explain some of the chief 
 reasons which have determined me in the choice of my 
 purpose : that at least he may be spared any unpleasant 
 feeling of disappointment, and that I mjself may be pro- 
 tected from one of the most dishonourable accusations 25 
 which can be brought against an Author; namely, that of 
 an indolence which prevents him from endeavouring to 
 ascertain what is his duty, or, when his duty is ascertained, 
 prevents him from performing it. 
 
 The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems 30 
 was to choose incidents and situations from common life, 
 
4 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was 
 possible in a selection of language really used by men, 
 and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain col- 
 ouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be 
 
 5 presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and, further, 
 and above all, to make these incidents and situations inter- 
 esting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, 
 primary laws of our nature : chiefly, as far as regards the 
 manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excite- 
 
 10 ment.^ Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, 
 because, in that condition, the essential passions of the 
 heat find a better soil in which they can attain their 
 maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and 
 more emphatic language; because in that condition of life 
 
 15 our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater sim- 
 plicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately con- 
 templatedj and more forcibly communicated; because the 
 manners of rural life germinate from those elementary 
 feelings, and, from the necessary character of rural occu- 
 
 20 pations, are more easily comprehended, and are more 
 durable; and, lastly, because in that condition the passions 
 of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent 
 forms of Nature.^ The language, too, of these men has 
 been adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its 
 
 25 real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike 
 or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the 
 best objects from which the best part of language is origi- 
 nally derived; and because, from their rank in society and 
 the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being 
 
 30 less under the influence of social vanity, they convey their 
 feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions- 
 
PREFACE, 1800-184^. 5 
 
 Accordingly, such a language, arising out of repeated 
 experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and 
 a far more philosophical language, than that which is fre- 
 quently substituted for it by Poets, who think that they 
 are conferring honour upon themselves and their art, in 5 
 proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies 
 of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of 
 expression, in order to furnish food for fickle tastes, and 
 fickle appetites, of their own creation.* 
 
 I cannot, however, be insensible to the present outcry 10 
 against the triviality and meanness, both of thought and 
 language, which some of my contemporaries have occa- 
 sionally introduced into their metrical compositions; and 
 I acknowledge that this defect, where it exists, is more 
 dishonourable to the Writer's own character than false 15 
 refinement or arbitrary innovation, though I should contend 
 at the same time, that it is far less pernicious in the sum 
 of its consequences. From such verses the Poems in these 
 volumes will be found distinguished at least by one mark 
 of difference, that each of them has a vfoxihy purpose. Not 20 
 that I always began to write with a distinct purpose for- 
 mally conceived; but habits of meditation have, I trust, 
 so prompted and regulated my feelings, that my descrip- 
 tions of such objects as strongly excite those feelings, will 
 be found to carry along with them a purpose} If this 25 
 opinion be erroneous, I can have little right to the name 
 of a Poet.^ For all good poetry is the spontaneous over- 
 flow of powerful feelings : and though this be true. Poems 
 
 * It is worth while here to observe, that the affecting parts of Chaucer are 
 almost always expressed in language pure and universally intelligible even 
 to this day. 
 
6 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 to which any value can be attached were never produced 
 on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed 
 of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought 
 long and deeply.^ For our continued influxes of feeling 
 
 5 are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are 
 indeed the representatives of all our past feelings; and, as 
 by contemplating the relation of these general representa- 
 tives to each other, we discover what is really important to 
 men, so, by the repetition and continuance of this act, our 
 
 10 feelings will be connected with important subjects, till at 
 length, if we be originally possessed of much sensibility, 
 such habits of mind will be produced, that, by obeying 
 blindly and mechanically the impulses of those habits, we 
 shall describe objects, and utter sentiments, of such a 
 
 15 nature, and in such connection with each other, that the 
 understanding of the Reader must necessarily be in some 
 degree enlightened, and his affections strengthened and 
 purified. 
 
 It has been said that each of these poems has a purpose. 
 
 20 Another circumstance must be mentioned which distin- 
 guishes these Poems from the popular Poetry of the day; 
 it is this, that the feeling therein developed gives impor- 
 tance to the action and situation, and not the action and 
 situation to the feeling.^ 
 
 25 A sense of false modesty shall not prevent me from 
 asserting, that the Reader's attention is pointed to this 
 mark of distinction, far less for the sake of these particular 
 Poems than from the general importance of the subject. 
 The subject is indeed important! For the human mind is 
 
 30 capable of being excited without the application of gross 
 and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint per- 
 
PREFACE, 1800-184S. 7 
 
 ception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, 
 and who does not further know, that one being is elevated 
 above another, in proportion as he possesses this capabil- 
 ity.-^ It has therefore appeared to me, that to endeavour to 
 produce or enlarge this capability is one of the best ser- 5 
 vices in which, at any period, a Writer can be engaged; 
 but this service, excellent at all times, is especially so at 
 the present day. For a multitude of causes, unknown to 
 former times, are now acting with a combined force to 
 blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting 10 
 it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost 
 savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the 
 great national events which are daily taking place, and the 
 increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uni- 
 formity of their occupations produces a craving for ex- 15 
 traordinary incident, which the rapid communication of 
 intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and 
 manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the 
 country have conformed themselves.^ The invaluable works 
 of our elder writers, I had almost said the works of Shak- 20 
 speare and Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic 
 novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges 
 of idle and extravagant stories in verse. — When I think 
 upon this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation, I 
 am almost ashamed to have spoken of the feeble endeavour 25 
 made in these volumes to counteract it; and, reflecting 
 upon the magnitude of the general evil, I should be 
 oppressed with no dishonourable melancholy, had I not a 
 deep impression of certain inherent and indestructible 
 qualities of the human mind, and likewise of certain powers 3° 
 in the great and permanent objects that act upon it, which 
 
8 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 are equally inherent and indestructible; and were there 
 not added to this impression a belief, that the time is 
 approacEing when the evil will be systematically opposed, 
 by men of greater powers, and with far more distinguished 
 5 success. 
 
 Having dwelt thus long on the subjects and aim of these 
 Poems, I shall request the Reader's permission to apprise 
 him of a few circumstances relating to thtu style ^ in order, 
 among other reasons, that he may not censure me for not 
 10 having performed what I never attempted.^ The Reader 
 will find that personifications of abstract ideas rarely occur 
 in these volumes; and are utterly rejected, as an ordinary 
 device to elevate the style, and raise it above prose. ^ My 
 purpose was to imitate, and, as far as possible, to adopt 
 
 15 the very language of men; and assuredly such personifica- 
 tions do not make any natural or regular part of that lan- 
 guage. They are, indeed, a figure of speech occasionally 
 prompted by passion, and I have made use of them as 
 such; but have endeavoured utterly to reject them as a 
 
 20 mechanical device of style, or as a family language which 
 Writers in metre seem to lay claim to by prescription. I 
 have wished to keep the Reader in the company of flesh 
 and blood, persuaded that by so doing I shall interest him. 
 Others who pursue a different track will interest him like- 
 
 25 wise; I do not interfere with their claim, but wish to 
 prefer a claim of my own. There will also be found in 
 these volumes little of what is usually called poetic diction; ^ 
 as much pains has been taken to avoid it as is ordinarily 
 taken to produce it; this has been done for the reason 
 
 30 already alleged, to bring my language near to the language 
 of men; and further, because the pleasure which I have 
 
PREFACE, 1800-184J. 9 
 
 proposed to myself to impart, is of a kind very different 
 from that which is supposed by many persons to be the 
 proper object of poetry.^ Without being culpably particu- 
 lar, I do not know how to give my Reader a more exact 
 notion of the style in which it was my wish and intention 5 
 to write, than by informing him that I have at all times 
 endeavoured to look steadily at my subject; ^ consequently, 
 there is I hope in these Poems little falsehood of descrip- 
 tion, and my ideas are expressed in language fitted to 
 their respective importance. Something must have been lo 
 gained by this practice, as it is friendly to one property of 
 all good poetry, namely, good sense : ^ but it has necessarily 
 cut me off from a large portion of phrases and figures of 
 speech which from father to son have long been regarded 
 as the common inheritance of Poets. I have also thought '5 
 it expedient to restrict myself still further, having abstained 
 from the use of many expressions, in themselves proper 
 and beautiful, but which have been foolishly treated by 
 bad Poets, till such feelings of disgust are connected with 
 them as it is scarcely possible by any art of association to 20 
 overpower. 
 
 If in a Poem there should be found a series of lines, or 
 even a single line, in which the language, though naturally 
 arranged, and according to the strict laws of metre, does 
 not differ from that of prose, there is a numerous class of 25 
 critics, who, when they stumble upon these prosaisms, as 
 they call them, imagine that they have made a notable 
 discovery, and exult over the Poet as over a man ignorant 
 of his own profession. Now these men would establish a 
 canon of criticism which the Reader will conclude he must 3° 
 utterly reject, if he wishes to be pleased with these volumes.' 
 
 4 
 
10 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 And it would be a most easy task to prove to him, that not 
 only the language of a large portion oi every good poem, 
 even of the most elevated character, must necessarily, 
 except with reference to the metre, in no respect differ 
 
 5 from that of good prose, but likewise that some of the most 
 interesting parts of the best poems will be found to be 
 strictly the language of prose when prose is well written.^ 
 The truth of this assertion might be demonstrated by 
 innumerable passages from almost all the poetical writings, 
 
 30 even of Milton himself. To illustrate the subject in a 
 general manner, will here adduce a short composition of 
 Gray, who was at the head of those who, by their reason- 
 ings, have attempted to widen the space of separation 
 betwixt Prose and Metrical composition, and was more 
 
 ^5 than any other man curiously elaborate in the structure of 
 his own poetic diction. 
 
 In vain to me the smiling mornings shine, 
 And reddening Phoebus hfts his golden tire : 
 The birds in vain their amorous descant join, 
 Or cheerful fields resume their green attire. 
 These ears, alas ! for other notes repine; 
 A different object do these eyes require ; 
 My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine ; 
 And in my breast the imperfect joys expire ; 
 25 Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer, 
 
 And new-born pleasure brings to happier men; 
 
 The fields to all their wonted tribute bear; 
 
 To warm their little loves the birds complain. 
 
 I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear, 
 3° And weep the more because I weep in vaift. 
 
 It will easily be perceived, that the only part of this 
 Sonnet which is of any value is the lines printed in Italics; 
 
 :20 
 
PREFACE, 1 8 00- 1 84s. U 
 
 it is equally obvious, that, except in the rhyme, and in the 
 use of the single word 'fruitless ' for fruitlessly, which is so 
 far a defect, the language of these lines does in no respect 
 differ from that of prose. 
 
 By the foregoing quotation it has been shown that the 5 
 language of Prose may yet be well adapted to Poetry; and 
 it was previously asserted, that a large portion of the 
 language of every good poem can in no respect differ from 
 that of good Prose. ^ We will go further. It may be safely 
 affirmed, that there neither is, nor can be, any essential 10 
 difference between the language of prose and metrical 
 composition.^ We are fond of tracing the resemblance 
 between Poetry and Painting, and, accordingly, we call 
 them Sisters : but where shall we find bonds of connection 
 sufficiently strict to typify the affinity betwixt metrical ^5 
 and prose composition? They both speak by and to the 
 same organs; the bodies in which both of them are clothed 
 may be said to be of the same substance, their affections 
 are kindred, and almost identical, not necessarily differing 
 even in degree; Poetry* sheds no tears 'such as Angels 20 
 weep,' but natural and human tears; she can boast of no 
 celestial ichor that distinguishes her vital juices from those 
 of prose; the same human blood circulates through the 
 veins of them both. 
 
 * I here use the word ' Poetry ' (though against my own judgment) as 
 opposed to the word Prose, and synonymous with metrical composition. 
 But much confusion has been introduced into criticism by this contradistinc- 
 tion of Poetry and Prose, instead of the more philosophical one of Poetry 
 and Matter of Fact, or Science. The only strict antithesis to Prose is Metre ; 
 nor is this, in truth, a strict antithesis, because lines and passages of metre 
 so naturally occur in writing prose, that it would be scarcely possible to 
 avoid them, even were it desirable. 
 
12 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 If it be affirmed that rhyme and metrical arrangement of 
 themselves constitute a distinction which overturns what 
 has just been said on the strict affinity of metrical language 
 with that of prose, and paves the way for other artificial 
 5 distinctions which the mind voluntarily admits, I answer 
 that the language of such Poetry as is here recommended 
 is, as far as is possible, a selection of the language really 
 spoken by men; that this selection, wherever it is made 
 with true taste and feeling, will of itself form a distinction 
 10 far greater than would at first be imagined, and will 
 entirely separate the composition from the vulgarity and 
 meanness of ordinary life; and, if metre be superadded 
 thereto, I believe that a dissimilitude will be produced 
 altogether sufficient for the gratification of a rational mind.^ 
 ^5 What other distinction would we have? Whence is it to 
 come? And where is it to exist? Not, surely, where the 
 Poet speaks through the mouths of his characters : it can- 
 not be necessary here, either for elevation of style, or any 
 of its supposed ornaments : for, if the Poet's subject be 
 20 judiciously chosen, it will naturally, and upon fit occasion, 
 lead him to passions the language of which, if selected 
 truly and judiciously, must necessarily be dignified and 
 variegated, and alive with metaphors and figures. I for- 
 bear to speak of an incongruity which would shock the 
 25 intelligent Reader, should the Poet intenveave any foreign 
 splendour of his own with that which the passion naturally 
 suggests: it is sufficient to say that such addition is 
 unnecessary. And, surely, it is more probable that those 
 passages, which with propriety abound with metaphors and 
 30 figures, will have their due effect, if, upon other occasions 
 
PREFACE, 1800- J84S. 13 
 
 where the passions are of a milder character, the style also 
 be subdued and temperate. 
 
 But, as the pleasure which I hope to give by the Poems 
 now presented to the Reader must depend entirely on just 
 notions upon this subject, and, as it is in itself of high 5 
 importance to our taste and moral feelings, I cannot con- 
 tent myself with these detached remarks. And if, in what 
 I am about to say, it shall appear to some that my labour 
 is unnecessary, and that I am like a man fighting a battle 
 without enemies, such persons may be reminded, that, 10 
 whatever be the language outwardly holden by men, a 
 practical faith in the opinions which I am wishing to 
 establish is almost unknown. If my conclusions are 
 admitted, and carried as far as they must be carried if 
 admitted at all, our judgments concerning the works of the 15 
 greatest poets both ancient and modern will be far differ- 
 ent from what they are at present, both when we praise, 
 and when we censure : and our moral feelings influencing 
 and influenced by these judgments will, I believe, be cor- 
 rected and purified.-^ 20 
 
 Taking up the subject, then, upon general grounds, let 
 me ask, what is meant by the word Poet? What is a Poet? 
 To whom does he address himself? And what language is 
 to be expected from him ? ^ — He is a man speaking to men : 
 a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, 25 
 more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowl- 
 edge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, 
 than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man 
 pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who 
 rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in 3° 
 him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and pas- 
 
14 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES, 
 
 sions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and 
 habitually impelled to create them where he does not find 
 them. To these qualities he has added a disposition to 
 be affected more than other men by absent things as if they 
 5 were present; an ability of conjuring up in himself pas- 
 sions, which are indeed far from being the same as those 
 produced by real events, yet (especially in those parts of 
 the general sympathy which are pleasing and delightful) 
 do more nearly resemble the passions produced by real 
 10 events, than anything which, from the motions of their 
 own minds merely, other men are accustomed to feel in 
 themselves : — whence, and from practice, he has acquired 
 a greater readiness and power in expressing what he thinks 
 and feels, and especially those thoughts and feelings 
 15 which, by his own choice, or from the structure of his own 
 mind, arise in him without immediate external excitement. 
 But whatever portion of this faculty we may suppose 
 even the greatest Poet to possess, there cannot be a doubt 
 that the language which it will suggest to him, must often, 
 20 in liveliness and truth, fall short of that which is uttered 
 by men in real life, under the actual pressure of those 
 passions, certain shadows of which the Poet thus produces, 
 or feels to be produced, in himself. 
 
 However exalted a notion we would wish to cherish of 
 
 25 the character of a Poet, it is obvious, that while he 
 
 describes and imitates passions, his employment is in some 
 
 degree mechanical, compared with the freedom and power 
 
 of real and substantial action and suffering. So that it 
 
 will be the wish of the Poet to bring his feelings near to 
 
 30 those of the persons whose feelings he describes, nay, for 
 
 short spaces of time, perhaps, to let himself slip into an 
 
PREFACE, 1800-184S. IS 
 
 entire delusion, and even confound and identify his own 
 feelings with theirs;^ modifying only the language which is 
 thus suggested to him by a consideration that he describes 
 for a particular purpose, that of giving pleasure. Here, 
 then, he will apply the principle of selection which has 5 
 been already insisted upon. He will depend upon this for 
 removing what would otherwise be painful or disgusting in 
 the passion; he will feel that there is no necessity to trick 
 out or to elevate nature: and, the more industriously he 
 applies this principle, the deeper will be his faith that no i© 
 words, w^hich his fancy or imagination can suggest, will be 
 to be compared with those which are the emanations of 
 reality and truth. ^ 
 
 But it may be said by those who do not object to the 
 general spirit of these remarks, that, as it is impossible for 15 
 the Poet to produce upon all occasions language as exquis- 
 itely fitted for the passion as that which the real passion 
 itself suggests, it is proper that he should consider himself 
 as in the situation of a translator, who does not scruple to 
 substitute excellencies of another kind for those which are 20 
 unattainable by him; and endeavours occasionally to sur- 
 pass his original, in order to make some amends for the 
 general inferiority to which he feels that he must submit. 
 But this would be to encourage idleness and unmanly 
 despair. Further, it is the language of men who speak of 25 
 what they do not understand; who talk of Poetry as of a 
 matter of amusement and idle pleasure f who will converse 
 with us as gravely about a taste for Poetry, as they express 
 it, as if it were a thing as indifferent as a taste for rope- 
 dancing, or Frontiniac or Sherry. Aristotle, I have been 30 
 told, has said, that Poetry is the most philosophic of all 
 
^^ WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 writing:^ it is so: its object is truth, not individual and 
 local, but general, and operative; not standing upon exter- 
 nal testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion; 
 truth which is its own testimony, which gives competence 
 5 and confidence to the tribunal to which it appeals, and 
 receives them from the same tribunal. Poetry is the image 
 of man and nature. ^ The obstacles which stand in the way 
 of the fidelity of the Biographer and Historian, and of 
 their consequent utility, are incalculably greater than those 
 10 which are to be encountered by the Poet who comprehends 
 the dignity of his art. The Poet writes under one restric- 
 tion only, namely, the necessity of giving immediate 
 pleasure to a human Being possessed of that information 
 which may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a 
 15 physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a natural philoso- 
 pher, but as a Man.^ Except this one restriction, there is 
 no object standing between the Poet and the image of 
 things; between this, and the Biographer and Historian, 
 there are a thousand. 
 20 Nor let this necessity of producing immediate pleasure 
 be considered as a degradation of the Poet's art.^ It is far 
 otherwise. It is an acknowledgment of the beauty of the 
 universe, an acknowledgment the more sincere, because 
 not formal, but indirect; it is a task light and easy to him 
 25 who looks at the world in the spirit of love : further, it is 
 a homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man, to 
 the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which he 
 knows, and feels, and lives, and moves. We have no 
 sympathy but what is propagated by pleasure : I would not 
 30 be misunderstood; but wherever we sympathise with pain, 
 it will be found that the sympathy is produced and carried 
 
PREFACE, 1800-1S4S. 17 
 
 on by subtile combinations with pleasure. We have no 
 knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn from the 
 contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built 
 up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone. The 
 Man of science, the Chemist and Mathematician, whatever 5 
 difficulties and disgusts they may have had to struggle with, 
 know and feel this. However painful may be the objects 
 with which the Anatomist's knowledge is connected, he 
 feels that his knowledge is pleasure ; and where he has no 
 pleasure he has no knowledge. What then does the Poet? 10 
 He considers man and the objects that surround him as 
 acting and re-acting upon each other, so as to produce an 
 infinite complexity of pain and pleasure; he considers man 
 in his own nature and in his ordinary life as contemplat- 
 ing this with a certain quantity of immediate knowledge, i- 
 with certain convictions, intuitions, and deductions, which 
 from habit acquire the quality of intuitions; he considers 
 him as looking upon this complex scene of ideas and sen- 
 sations, and finding every where objects that immediately 
 excite in him sympathies which, from the necessities of 20 
 his nature, are accompanied by an overbalance of enjoy- 
 ment. 
 
 To this knowledge which all men carry about with them, 
 and to these sympathies in which, without any other disci- 
 pline than that of our daily life, we are fitted to take delight, 25 
 the Poet principally directs his attention.^ He considers 
 man and nature as essentially adapted to each other, and 
 the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and 
 most interesting properties of nature. And thus the Poet, 
 prompted by this feeling of pleasure, which accompanies 30 
 him through the whole course of his studies, converses 
 
18 
 
 WORDS WORTH'S PRE FA CES. 
 
 with general nature, with affections akin to those, which, 
 through labour and length of time, the Man of science has 
 raised up in himself, by conversing with those particular 
 parts of nature which are the objects of his studies. The 
 5 knowledge both of the Poet and the Man of science is 
 pleasure ; but the knowledge of the one cleaves to us as a 
 necessary part of our existence, our natural and unalienable 
 inheritance; the other is a personal and individual acqui- 
 sition, slow to come to us, and by no habitual and direct 
 10 sympathy connecting us with our fellow-beings. The Man 
 of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; ^ 
 he cherishes and loves it in his solitude : the Poet, singing 
 a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices 
 in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly 
 15 companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all 
 knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in 
 the countenance of all Science. Emphatically may it be 
 said of the Poet, as Shakespeare hath said of man, 'that he 
 looks before and after.' He is the rock of defence for 
 20 human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying every 
 where with him relationship and love. In spite of differ- 
 ence of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws 
 and customs : in spite of things silently gone out of mind, 
 and things violently destroyed; the Poet binds together by 
 25 passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, 
 as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time. 
 The objects of the Poet's thoughts are every where; 
 though the eyes and senses of man are, it is true, his 
 favourite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find 
 30 an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings. 
 Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge — it is as 
 
PREFACE, 1800-1843. 19 
 
 immortal as the heart of man.^ If the labours of Men of 
 science should ever create any material revolution, direct 
 or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which 
 we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then no more 
 than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps of the 5 
 Man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, 
 but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst 
 of the objects of the science itself. The remotest dis- 
 coveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, 
 will be as proper objects of the Poet's art as any upon 10 
 which it can be employed, if the time should ever come 
 when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations 
 under which they are contemplated by the followers of 
 these respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably 
 material to us as enjoying and suffering beings. If the 15 
 time should ever come when what is now called science, 
 thus familiarised to men, shall be ready to put on, as it 
 were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his 
 divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome 
 the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of 20 
 the household of man.^ — It is not, then, to be supposed 
 that any one, who holds that sublime notion of Poetry 
 which I have attempted to convey, will break in upon the 
 sanctity and truth of his pictures by transitory and acci- 
 dental ornaments, and endeavour to excite admiration of 25 
 himself by arts, the necessity of which must manifestly 
 depend upon the assumed meanness of his subject.^ 
 
 What has been thus far said applies to Poetry in general; 
 but especially to those parts of composition where the Poet 
 speaks through the mouths of his character; and upon this 30 
 point it appears to authorise the conclusion that there are 
 
20 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 few persons of good sense, who would not allow that the 
 dramatic parts of composition are defective, in proportion 
 as they deviate from the real language of nature, and are 
 coloured by a diction of the Poet's own, either peculiar to 
 
 5 him as an individual Poet or belonging simply to Poets in 
 general; to a body of men who, from the circumstance of 
 their composition being in metre, it is expected will 
 employ a particular language. 
 
 It is not, then, in the dramatic parts of composition that 
 
 10 we look for this distinction of language; but still it may 
 be proper and necessary where the Poet speaks to us in his 
 own person and character. To this I answer by referring 
 the Reader to the description before given of a Poet. 
 Among the qualities there enumerated as principally con- 
 
 13 ducing to form a Poet, is implied nothing differing in kind 
 from other men, but only in degree. The sum of what 
 was said is, that the Poet is chiefly distinguished from 
 other men by a greater promptness to think and feel with- 
 out immediate external excitement, and a greater power 
 
 20 in expressing such thoughts and feelings as are produced in 
 him in that manner.^ But these passions and thoughts and 
 feelings are the general passions and thoughts and feelings 
 of men. And with what are they connected? Undoubtedly 
 with our moral sentiments and animal sensations, and with 
 
 25 the causes which excite these; with the operations of the 
 elements, and the appearances of the visible universe; 
 with storm and sunshine, with the revolutions of the 
 seasons, with cold and heat, with loss of friends and kin- 
 dred, with injuries and resentments, gratitude and hope, 
 
 30 with fear and sorrow. These, and the like, are the sensa- 
 tions and objects which the Poet describes, as they are the 
 
PREFACE, 1800-184S. 21 
 
 sensations of other men, and the objects which interest 
 them. The Poet thinks and feels in the spirit of human 
 passions. How, then, can his language differ in any 
 material degree from that of all other men who feel vividly 
 and see clearly? It might ^^^ proved \kidX it is impossible. 5 
 But supposing that this were not the case, the Poet might 
 then be allowed to use a peculiar language when expressing 
 his feelings for his own gratification, or that of men like 
 himself. But Poets do not write for Poets alone, but for 
 men. Unless therefore we are advocates for that admira- 10 
 tion which subsists upon ignorance, and that pleasure which 
 arises from hearing what we do not understand, the Poet 
 must descend from this supposed height; and, in order to 
 excite rational sympathy, he must express himself as other 
 men express themselves. To this it may be added, that ^5 
 while he is only selecting from the real language of men, 
 or, which amounts to the same thing, composing accurately 
 in the spirit of such selection, he is treading upon safe 
 ground, and we know what we are to expect from him. 
 Our feelings are the same with respect to metre; for, as it 20 
 may be proper to remind the Reader, the distinction of 
 metre is regular and uniform, and not, like that which is 
 produced by what is usually called poetic diction, arbi- 
 trary, and subject to infinite caprices, upon which no 
 calculation whatever can be made.^ In the one case, the 25 
 Reader is utterly at the mercy of the Poet, respecting what 
 imagery or diction he may choose to connect with the 
 passion; whereas, in the other, the metre obeys certain 
 laws, to which the Poet and Reader both willingly submit 
 because they are certain, and because no interference is 3° 
 made by them with the passion but such as the concurring 
 
22 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 testimony of ages has shown to heighten and improve the 
 pleasure which co-exists with it. 
 
 It will now be proper to answer an obvious question, 
 namely, Why, professing these opinions, have I written in 
 
 5 verse ? To this, in addition to such answer as is included 
 in what has been already said, I reply, in the first place, 
 Because, however I may have restricted myself, there is 
 still left open to me what confessedly constitutes the most 
 valuable object of all writing, whether in prose or verse; 
 
 10 the great and universal passions of men, the most general 
 and interesting of their occupations, and the entire world 
 of nature before me — to supply endless combinations of 
 forms and imagery. Now, supposing for a moment that 
 whatever is interesting in these objects may be as vividly 
 
 15 described in prose, why should I be condemned for 
 attempting to superadd to such description, the charm 
 which, by the consent of all nations, is acknowledged to 
 exist in metrical language? To this, by such as are yet 
 unconvinced, it may be answered that a very small part 
 
 20 of the pleasure given by Poetry depends upon the metre, 
 and that it is injudicious to write in metre, unless it be 
 accompanied with the other artificial distinctions of style 
 with which metre is usually accompanied, and that, by 
 such deviation, more will be lost from the shock which 
 
 25 will hereby be given to the Reader's associations than 
 will be counterbalanced by any pleasure which he can 
 derive from the general power of numbers. In answer 
 to those who still contend for the necessity of accom- 
 panying metre with certain appropriate colours of style 
 
 30 in order to the accomplishment of its appropriate end, 
 and who also, in my opinion, greatly underrate the 
 
PREFACE, 1800-184^. 23 
 
 power of metre in itself, it might, perhaps, as far as relates 
 to these Volumes, have been almost sufficient to observe, 
 that poems are extant, written upon more humble subjects, 
 and in a still more naked and simple style, which have 
 continued to give pleasure from generation to generation. 5 
 Now, if nakedness and simplicity be a defect, the fact 
 here mentioned affords a strong presumption that poems 
 somewhat less naked and simple are capable of affording 
 pleasure at the present day; and, what I wished chiefly to 
 attempt, at present, was to justify myself for having written 10 
 under the impression of this belief. 
 
 But various causes might be pointed out why, when the 
 style is manly, and the subject of some importance, words 
 metrically arranged will long continue to impart such a 
 pleasure to mankind as he who proves the extent of that 15 
 pleasure will be desirous to impart. The end of Poetry is 
 to produce excitement in co-existence with an overbalance 
 of pleasure; but, by the supposition, excitement is an 
 unusual and irregular state of the mind; ideas and feelings 
 do not, in that state, succeed each other in accustomed 20 
 order. If the words, however, by which this excitement 
 is produced be in themselves powerful, or the images and 
 feelings have an undue proportion of pain connected with 
 them, there is some dange^JJiat the excitement may be 
 carried beyond its proper bounds. Now the co-presence 25 
 of something regular, something to which the mind has 
 been accustomed in various moods and in a less excited 
 state, cannot but have great efficacy in tempering and 
 restraining the passion by an intertexture of ordinary 
 feeling, and of feeling not strictly and necessarily con- 3° 
 nected with the passion. This is unquestionably true; and 
 
24 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 hence, though the opinion will at first appear paradoxical, 
 from the tendency of metre to divest language, in a cer- 
 tain degree, of its reality, and thus to throw a sort of half- 
 consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole 
 
 5 composition, there can be little doubt but that more 
 pathetic situations and sentiments, that is, those which 
 have a greater proportion of pain connected with them, 
 may be endured in metrical composition, especially in 
 rhyme, than in prose. The metre of the old ballads is very 
 
 10 artless; yet they contain many passages which would illus- 
 trate this opinion; and I hope, if the following Poems 
 be attentively perused, similar instances will be found in 
 them. This opinion may be further illustrated by appeal- 
 ing to the Reader's own experience of the reluctance with 
 
 15 which he comes to the re-perusal of the distressful parts of 
 Clarissa Harlow, or the Gafnesfer ; while Shakspeare's 
 writings, in the most pathetic scenes, never act upon us, 
 as pathetic, beyond the bounds of pleasure — an effect 
 which, in a much greater degree than might at first be 
 
 20 imagined, is to be ascribed to small, but continual and 
 regular impulses of pleasurable surprise from the metrical 
 arrangement. — On the other hand (what it must be allowed 
 will much more frequently happen) if the Poet's words 
 should be incommensurate with the passion, and inade- 
 
 25 quate to raise the Reader to a height of desirable excite- 
 ment, then, (unless the Poet's choice of his metre has been 
 grossly injudicious) in the feelings of pleasure which the 
 Reader has been accustomed to connect with metre in 
 general, and in the feeling, whether cheerful or melan- 
 
 30 choly, which he has been accustomed to connect with that 
 particular movement of metre, there will be found some- 
 
PREFACE, 1800-184^. 25; 
 
 thing which will greatly contribute to impart passion ta 
 the words, and to effect the complex end which the Poet 
 proposes to himself. 
 
 If I had undertaken a systematic defence of the theory- 
 here maintained, it would have been my duty to develop s 
 the various causes upon which the pleasure received from 
 metrical language depends. Among the chief of these 
 causes is to be reckoned a principle which must be well 
 known to those who have made any of the arts the object 
 of accurate reflection; namely, the pleasure which the io» 
 mind derives from the perception of similitude in dissimil- 
 itude.-^ This principle is the great spring of the activity 
 of our minds, and their chief feeder. From this principle 
 the direction of the sexual appetite, and all the passions 
 connected with it, take their origin: it is the life of our is 
 ordinary conversation; and upon the accuracy with which 
 similitude in dissimilitude, and dissimilitude in similitude 
 are perceived, depend our taste and our moral feelings. 
 It would not be a useless employment to apply this prin- 
 ciple to the consideration of metre, and to show that metre 20. 
 is hence enabled to afford much pleasure, and to point out 
 in what manner that pleasure is produced. But my limits 
 will not permit me to enter upon this subject, and I must 
 content myself with a general summary. 
 
 I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of 2$ 
 powerful feelings : it takes its origin from emotion recol- 
 lected in tranquillity : the emotion is contemplated till, by 
 a species of re-action, the tranquillity gradually disappears, 
 and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the sub- 
 ject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does 30 
 itself actually exist in the mind.^ In this mood successful 
 
26 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to 
 this it is carried on; but the emotion, of whatever kind, 
 and in whatever degree, from various causes, is qualified 
 by various pleasures, so that in describing any passions 
 
 5 whatsoever, which are voluntarily described, the mind will, 
 upon the whole, be in a state of enjoyment. If Nature be 
 thus cautious to preserve in a state of enjoyment a being 
 so employed, the Poet ought to profit by the lesson held 
 forth to him, and ought especially to take care, that, what- 
 
 10 ever passions he communicates to his Reader, those pas- 
 sions, if his Reader's mind be sound and vigorous, should 
 always be accompanied with an overbalance of pleasure. 
 Now the music of harmonious metrical language, the sense 
 of difficulty overcome, and the blind association of pleasure 
 
 15 which has been previously received from works of rhyme 
 or metre of the same or similar construction, an indistinct 
 perception perpetually renewed of language closely resem- 
 bling that of real life, and yet, in the circumstance of metre, 
 differing from it so widely — all these imperceptibly make 
 
 20 up a complex feeling of delight, which is of the most 
 important use in tempering the painful feeling always 
 found intermingled with powerful descriptions of the 
 deeper passions.-^ This effect is always produced in pathetic 
 and impassioned poetry; while, in lighter compositions, 
 
 25 the ease and gracefulness with which the Poet manages his 
 numbers are themselves confessedly a principal source of 
 the gratification of the Reader. All that it is tiecessa?'y to 
 say, however, upon this subject, may be effected by affirm- 
 ing, what few persons will deny, that, of two descriptions, 
 
 30 either of passions, manners, or characters, each of them 
 equally well executed, the one in prose and the other in 
 
PREFACE, 1800-1843. 27 
 
 verse, the verse will be read a hundred times where the 
 prose is read once. 
 
 Having thus explained a few of my reasons for writing 
 in verse, and why I have chosen subjects from common life, 
 and endeavoured to bring my language near to the real 5 
 language of men, if I have been too minute in pleading* my 
 own cause, I have at the same time been treating a subject 
 of general interest; and for. this reason a few words shall 
 be added with reference solely to these particular poems, 
 and to some defects which will probably be found in them. 10 
 I am sensible that my associations must have sometimes 
 been particular instead of general, and that, consequently, 
 giving to things a false importance, I may have sometimes 
 written upon unworthy subjects; but I am less apprehen- 
 sive on this account, than that my language may frequently ^5 
 have suffered from those arbitrary connections of feelings 
 and ideas with particular words and phrases, from which 
 no man can altogether protect himself.^ Hence I have no 
 doubt, that, in some instances, feelings, even of the ludi- 
 crous, may be given to my Readers by expressions which 20 
 appeared to me tender and pathetic. Such faulty expres- 
 sions, were I convinced they were faulty at present, and 
 that they must necessarily continue to be so, I would will- 
 ingly take all reasonable pains to correct. But it is dan- 
 gerous to make these alterations on the simple authority of 25 
 a few individuals, or even of certain classes of men; for 
 where the understanding of an Author is not convinced, or 
 his feelings altered, this cannot be done without great 
 injury to himself : for his own feelings are his stay and 
 support; and, if he set them aside in one instance, he may 3^ 
 be induced to repeat this act till his mind shall lose all 
 
28 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 confidence in itself, and become utterly debilitated. To 
 this it may be added, that the Critic ought never to forget 
 that he is himself exposed to the same errors as the Poet, 
 and, perhaps, in a much greater degree : for there can be 
 
 5 no presumption in saying of most readers, that it is not 
 probable they will be so well acquainted with the various 
 stages of meaning through which words have passed, or 
 with the fickleness or stability of the relations of particular 
 ideas to each other; and, above all, since they are so much 
 
 10 less interested in the subject, they may decide lightly and 
 carelessly. 
 
 Long as the Reader has been detained, I hope he will 
 permit me to caution him against a mode of false criticism 
 which has been applied to Poetry, in which the language 
 
 15 closely resembles that of life and nature. Such verses have 
 been triumphed over in parodies, of which Dr. Johnson's 
 stanza is a fair specimen : — 
 
 I put my hat upon my head 
 And walked into the Strand, 
 20 And there I met another man 
 
 Whose hat was in his hand. 
 
 Immediately under these lines let us place one of the 
 most justly-admired stanzas of the ' Babes in the Wood.' ^ 
 
 These pretty Babes with hand in hand 
 25 Went wandering up and down; 
 
 But never more they saw the Man 
 Approaching from the Town. 
 
 In both these stanzas the words, and the order of the 
 
 words, in no respect differ from the most unimpassioned 
 
 30 conversation. There are words in both, for example, 'the 
 
PREFACE, 1800-184S. 29 
 
 Strand,' and *the Town,' connected with none but the most 
 familiar ideas; yet the one stanza we admit as admirable, 
 and the other as a fair example of the superlatively con- 
 temptible. Whence arises this difference? Not from the 
 metre, not from the language, not from the order of the 5 
 words; but the itiatter expressed in Dr. Johnson's stanza is 
 contemptible. The proper method of treating trivial and 
 simple verses, to which Dr. Johnson's stanza would be a 
 fair parallelism, is not to say, this is a bad kind of poetry, 
 or, this is not poetry; but, this wants sense; it is neither 10 
 interesting in itself, nor can lead to any thing interesting; 
 the images neither originate in that sane state of feeling 
 which arises out of thought, nor can excite thought or feel- 
 ing in the Reader. This is the only sensible manner of 
 dealing with such verses. Why trouble yourself about the 15 
 species till you have previously decided upon the genus? 
 Why take pains to prove that an ape is not a Newton, when 
 it is self-evident that he is not a man? 
 
 One request I must make of my reader, which is, that in 
 judging these Poems he would decide by his own feelings 20 
 genuinely, and not by reflection upon what will probably 
 be the judgment of others.^ How common is it to hear a 
 person say, I myself do not object to this style of compo- 
 sition, or this or that expression, but, to such and such 
 classes of people it will appear mean or ludicrous ! This 25 
 mode of criticism, so destructive of all sound unadulterated 
 judgment, is almost universal : let the Reader then abide, 
 independently, by his own feelings, and, if he finds himself 
 affected, let him not suffer such conjectures to interfere 
 with his pleasure. 3° 
 
 If an Author, by any single composition, has impressed 
 
30 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 us with respect for his talents, it is useful to consider this as 
 affording a presumption, that on other occasions where we 
 have been displeased, he, nevertheless, may not have written 
 ill or absurdly; and further, to give him so much credit for 
 
 5 this one composition as may induce us to review what has 
 displeased us, with more care than we should otherwise 
 have bestowed upon it. This is not only an act of justice, 
 but, in our decisions upon poetry especially, may conduce, 
 in a high degree, to the improvement of our own taste : 
 
 10 for an accurate taste in poetry, and in all the other arts, as 
 Sir Joshua Reynolds has observed, is an acquired talent, 
 which can only be produced by thought and a long-contin- 
 ued intercourse with the best models of composition. This 
 is mentioned, not with so ridiculous a purpose as to pre- 
 
 15 vent the most inexperienced Reader from judging for 
 himself, (I have already said that I wish him to judge for 
 himself;) but merely to temper the rashness of decision, 
 and to suggest, that, if Poetry be a subject on which much 
 time has not been bestowed, the judgment may be erro- 
 
 20 neous; and that, in many cases, it necessarily will be so. 
 Nothing would, I know, have so effectually contributed 
 to further the end which I have in view, as to have shown 
 of what kind the pleasure is, and how that pleasure is pro- 
 duced, which is confessedly produced by metrical compo- 
 
 25 sition essentially different from that which I have here 
 endeavoured to recommend : for the Reader will say that 
 he has been pleased by such composition; and what more 
 can be done for him? The power of any art is limited; 
 and he will suspect, that, if it be proposed to furnish him 
 
 30 with new friends, that can be only upon condition of his 
 abandoning his old friends. Besides, as I have said, the 
 
PREFACE, 1 800- 1 84s. 31 
 
 Reader is himself conscious of the pleasure which he has 
 received from such composition, composition to which he 
 has peculiarly attached the endearing name of Poetry; and 
 all men feel an habitual gratitude, and something of an 
 honourable bigotry, for the objects which have long con- 5 
 tinned to please them : we not only wish to be pleased, but 
 to be pleased in that particular way in which we have been 
 accustomed to be pleased. There is in these feelings 
 enough to resist a host of arguments; and I should be the 
 less able to combat them successfully, as I am willing to 10 
 allow, that, in order entirely to enjoy the Poetry which T 
 am recommending, it would be necessary to give up much 
 of what is ordinarily enjoyed. But, would my limits have 
 permitted me to point out how this pleasure is produced, 
 many obstacles might have been removed, and the Reader 15 
 assisted in perceiving that the powers of language are not 
 so limited as he may suppose; and that it is possible for 
 Poetry to give other enjoyments, of a purer, more lasting, 
 and more exquisite nature. This part of the subject has 
 not been altogether neglected, but it has not been so much 20 
 my present aim to prove, that the interest excited by some 
 other kinds of poetry is less vivid, and less worthy of the 
 nobler powers of the mind, as to offer reasons for presum- 
 ing, that if my purpose were fulfilled, a species of poetry 
 would be produced, which is genuine poetry; in its nature 25 
 well adapted to interest mankind permanently, and likewise 
 important in the multiplicity and quality of its moral 
 relations. 
 
 From what has been said, and from a perusal of the 
 Poems, the Reader will be able clearly to perceive the 30 
 
32 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 object which I had in view: he will determine how far it 
 -has been attained; and, what is a much more important 
 'question, whether it be worth attaining : and upon the 
 decision of these two questions will rest my claim to the 
 5 approbation of the Public. 
 
APPENDIX, 
 
 See Preface, page 8, ' by what is usually called Poetic Diction ' 
 
 1802-1845. 
 
 Perhaps, as I have no right to expect that attentive 
 perusal, without which, confined, as I have been, to the 
 narrow limits of a Preface, my meaning cannot be thor- 
 oughly understood, I am anxious to give an exact notion 
 of the sense in which the phrase poetic diction has been 
 used; and for this purpose, a few words shall here be 
 added, concerning the origin and characteristics of the 
 phraseology, which I have condemned under that name. 
 
 The earliest poets of all nations generally wrote from^ 
 passion excited by real events; they wrote naturally, and jio 
 as men: feeling powerfully as they did, their language 
 was daring, and figurative.^ In succeeding times. Poets, 
 and Men ambitious of the fame of Poets, perceiving the 
 influence of such language, and desirous of producing the 
 same efi'ect without being animated by the same passion, 15 
 set themselves to a mechanical adoption of these figures of 
 speech, and made use of them, sometimes with propriety, 
 but much more frequently applied them to feelings and 
 thoughts with which they had no natural connection what- 
 soever.'-^ A language was thus insensibly produced, differ- ^o 
 ing materially from the real language of men in any 
 situation. The Reader or Hearer of this distorted lan- 
 
34 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES, 
 
 guage found himself in a perturbed and unusual state of 
 mind : when affected by the genuine language of passion 
 he had be®n in a perturbed and unusual state of mind also : 
 in both cases he was willing that his common judgment 
 
 5 and understanding should be laid asleep, and he had no 
 instinctive and infallible perception of the true to make 
 him reject the false; the one served as a passport for the 
 other. The emotion was in both cases delightful, and no 
 wonder if he confounded the one with the other, and 
 
 10 believed them both to be produced by the same, or similar 
 causes. Besides, the Poet spake to him in the character 
 of a man to be looked up to, a man of genius and authority. 
 Thus, and from a variety of other causes, this distorted 
 language was received with admiration; and Poets, it is 
 
 15 probable, who had before contented themselves for the 
 most part with misapplying only expressions which at first 
 had been dictated by real passion, carried the abuse still 
 further, and introduced phrases composed apparently in 
 the spirit of the original figurative language of passion, yet 
 
 20 altogether of their own invention, and characterised by 
 various degrees of wanton deviation from good sense and 
 Nature.^ 
 
 It is indeed true, that the language of the earliest Poets 
 was felt to differ materially from ordinary language, because 
 
 25 it was the language of extraordinary occasions; but it was 
 really spoken by men, language which the Poet himself 
 had uttered when he had been affected by the events which 
 he described, or which he had heard uttered by those 
 around him. To this language it is probable that metre of 
 
 30 some sort or other was early superadded. This separated 
 the genuine language of Poetry still further from common 
 
APPENDIX, 1802-184J. 35 
 
 life, so that whoever read or heard the poems of these 
 earliest Poets felt himself moved in a way in which he had 
 not been accustomed to be moved in real life, and by 
 causes manifestly different from those which acted upon 
 him in real life. This was the great temptation to all the 5 
 corruptions which have followed: under the protection of 
 this feeling succeeding Poets constructed a phraseology 
 which had one thing, it i» true, in common with the genu- 
 ine language of poetry, namely, that it was not heard in 
 ordinary conversation; that it was unusual. But the first 10 
 Poets, as I have said, spake a language which, though 
 unusual, was still the language of men. This circumstance, 
 however, was disregarded by their successors; they found 
 that they could please by easier means : they becam* proud 
 of modes of expression which they themselves had invented, 15 
 and which were uttered only by themselves. In process of 
 time metre became a symbol or promise of this unusual 
 language, and whoever took upon him to v/rite in metre, 
 according as he possessed more or less of true poetic 
 genius, introduced less or more of this adulterated phrase- 20 
 ology into his compositions, and the true and the false 
 were inseparably interwoven until, the taste of men becom- 
 ing gradually perverted, this language was received as a 
 natural language : and at length by the influence of books 
 upon men, did to a certain degree really become so. 25 
 Abuses of this kind were imported from one nation to 
 another, and with the progress of refinement this diction 
 became daily more and more corrupt, thrusting out of sight 
 the plain humanities of Nature by a motley masquerade of 
 tricks, quaintnesses, hieroglyphics, and enigmas.^ 3° 
 
 It would not be uninteresting to point out the causes of 
 
36 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 the pleasure given by this extravagant and absurd diction. 
 It depends upon a great variety of causes, but upon none, 
 perhaps, more than its influence in impressing a notion of 
 the peculiarity and exaltation of the Poet's character, and 
 
 5 in flattering the Reader's self-love by bringing him nearer 
 to a sympathy with that character; an effect which is 
 accomplished by unsettling ordinary habits of thinking, 
 and thus assisting the Reader to approach to that perturbed 
 and dizzy state of mind in which if he does not find 
 
 10 himself, he imagines that he is balked of a peculiar enjoy- 
 ment which poetry can and ought to bestow. 
 
 The sonnet quoted from Gray, in the Preface, except 
 the lines printed in Italics, consists of little else but this 
 diction, though not of the worst kind; and indeed, if one 
 
 15 may be permitted to say so, it is far too common in the 
 best writers both ancient and modern. Perhaps in no 
 
 . way, by positive example, could more easily be given a 
 notion of w^hat I mean by the phrase poetic diction than by 
 referring to a comparison between the metrical paraphrase 
 
 20 which we have of passages in the Old and New Testament, 
 and those passages as they exist in our common Transla- 
 tion. See Pope's ^Messiah' throughout; Prior's 'Did 
 sweeter sounds adorn my flowing tongue,' &c., &c., 
 'Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels,' 
 
 25 &c., &c. ist Corinthians, chap. xiii. By way of imme- 
 diate example, take the following of Dr. Johnson : — 
 
 Turn on the prudent Ant thy heedless eyes, 
 Observe her labours, Sluggard, and be wise; 
 No stern command, no monitory voice, 
 Prescribes her duties, or directs her choice; 
 
APPENDIX, 1802-184S. 37 
 
 Yet, timely provident, she hastes away 
 
 To snatch the blessings of a plenteous day; 
 
 When fruitful Summer loads the teeming plain, 
 
 She crops the harvest, and she stores the grain. 
 
 How long shall sloth usurp thy useless hours, 5 
 
 Unnerve thy vigour, and enchain thy powers? 
 
 While artful shades thy downy couch enclose, 
 
 And soft solicitation courts repose, 
 
 Amidst the drowsy charms of dull delight, 
 
 Year chases year with unremitted flight, 10 
 
 Till Want now following, fraudulent and slow. 
 
 Shall spring to seize thee, like an ambush'd foe. 
 
 From this hubbub of words pass to the original. 'Go to 
 the Ant, thou Sluggard, consider her ways, and be wise : 
 which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, provideth her 15 
 meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest. 
 How long wilt thou sleep, O Sluggard? When wilt thou 
 arise out of thy sleep? Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, 
 a little folding of the hands to sleep. So shall thy poverty 
 come as one that travelleth, and thy want as an armed 20 
 man.' Proverbs, chap. vi. 
 
 One more quotation, and I have done. It is from 
 Cowper's Verses supposed to be written by Alexander 
 Selkirk : — 
 
 Religion ! what treasure untold 25 
 
 Resides in that heavenly word ! 
 
 More precious than silver and gold, 
 
 Or all that this earth can afford. 
 
 But the sound of the church-going bell 
 
 These valleys and rocks never heard, 30 
 
 Ne'er sigh'd at the sound of a knell. 
 
 Or smiled when a Sabbath appeared. 
 
38 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 Ye winds, that have made me your sport, 
 Convey to this desolate shore 
 Some cordial endearing report 
 Of a land I must visit no more, 
 5 My Friends, do they now and then send 
 
 A wish or a thought after me? 
 O tell me I yet have a friend, 
 Though a friend I am never to see. 
 
 This passage is quoted as an instance of three different 
 
 10 styles of composition. The first four lines are poorly 
 expressed; some Critics would call the language prosaic; 
 the fact is, it would be bad prose, so bad, that it is 
 scarcely worse in metre. The epithet 'church-going ' 
 applied to a bell, and that by so chaste a writer as Cowper, 
 
 ,5 is an instance of the strange abuses which Poets have 
 introduced into their language, till they and their Readers 
 take them as matters of course, if they do not single them 
 out expressly as objects of admiration. The two lines 
 'Ne'er sigh'd at the sound,' &c., are, in my opinion, an 
 
 20 instance of the language of passion wrested from its proper 
 use, and, from the mere circumstance of the composition 
 being in metre, applied upon an occasion that does not 
 justify such violent expressions; and I should condemn the 
 passage, though perhaps few Readers will agree with me, 
 
 25 as vicious poetic diction. The last stanza is throughout 
 admirably expressed : it would be equally good whether in 
 prose or verse, except that the Reader has an exquisite 
 pleasure in seeing such natural language so naturally con- 
 nected with metre. The beauty of this stanza tempts me 
 
 30 to conclude with a principle which ought never to be lost 
 sight of, and which has been my chief guide in all I have 
 
APPENDIX, 1802-184S. 39 
 
 said, — namely, that in works of imagination and sentimenty 
 for of these only have I been treating, in proportion as 
 ideas and feelings are valuable, whether the composition 
 be in prose or in verse, they require and exact one and the 
 same language. Metre is but adventitious to composition, 5 
 and the phraseology for which that passport is necessary, 
 even where it may be graceful at all, will be little valued 
 by the judicious. 
 
PREFACE, 
 
 1815-1845. 
 
 The powers requisite for the production of poetry are : 
 first, those of Observation and Description, — i.e., the 
 ability to observe with accuracy things as they are in 
 themselves, and with fidelity to describe them, unmodified 
 
 5 by any passion or feeling existing in the mind of the 
 describer : whether the things depicted be actually present 
 to the senses, or have a place only in the memory. This 
 power, though indispensable to a Poet, is one which he 
 employs only in submission to necessity, and never for a 
 
 10 continuance of time : as its exercise supposes all the higher 
 qualities of the mind to be passive, and in a state of sub- 
 jection to external objects, much in the same way as a 
 translator or engraver ought to be to his original. 2ndly, 
 Sensibility, — which, the more exquisite it is, the wider 
 
 15 will be the range of a poet's perceptions; and the more 
 will he be incited to obsers^e objects, both as they exist in 
 themselves, and as re-acted upon by his own mind. (The 
 distinction between poetic and human sensibility has been 
 marked in the character of the Poet delineated in the 
 
 20 original preface.) 3dly, Reflection, — which makes the 
 Poet acquainted with the value of actions, images, thoughts, 
 and feelings; and assists the sensibility in perceiving their 
 40 
 
PREFACE, 1813-184.3. 41 
 
 connection with each other. 4thly, Imagination and 
 Fancy, — to modify, to create, and to associate. Sthly, 
 Invention, — by which characters are composed out of 
 materials supplied by observation; whether of the Poet's 
 own heart and mind, or of external life and nature ; and 5 
 such incidents and situations produced as are most impres- 
 sive to the imagination, and most fitted to do justice to 
 the characters, sentiments, and passions, which the Poet 
 undertakes to illustrate. And, lastly. Judgment, — to 
 decide how and where, and in what degree, each of the 10 
 faculties ought to be exerted; so that the less shall not be 
 sacrificed to the greater; nor the greater, slighting the 
 less, arrogate, to its own injury, more than its due. By 
 judgment, also, is determined what are the laws and appro- 
 priate graces of every species of composition.* ^5 
 
 The materials of Poetry, by these powers collected and 
 produced, are cast, by means of various moulds, into divers 
 forms. The moulds may be enumerated, and the forms 
 specified, in the following order. ^ ist, the Narrative, — 
 including the Epopoeia, the Historic Poem, the Tale, the 20 
 Romance, the Mock-Heroic, and, if the spirit of Homer 
 will tolerate such neighbourhood, that dear production of 
 our days, the metrical Novel. Of this class, the distin- 
 guishing mark is, that the Narrator, however liberally his 
 speaking agents be introduced, is himself the source from 25 
 which every thing primarily flows. Epic Poets, in order 
 that their mode of composition may accord with the ele- 
 vation of their subject, represent themselves as singing 
 
 * As sensibility to hartnony of numbers, and the power of producing it, 
 are invariably attendants upon the faculties above specified, nothing has 30 
 been said upon those requisites. 
 
42 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 from the inspiration of the Muse, 'Arma virumque cano;' 
 but this is a fiction, in modern times, of slight value; the 
 'Iliad' or the 'Paradise Lost' would gain little in our 
 estimation by being chanted. The other poets who belong 
 
 5 to this class are commonly content to tell their tale; — so 
 that of the whole it may be aiifirmed that they neither 
 require nor reject the accompaniment of music. 
 
 2ndly, The Dramatic, — consisting of Tragedy, Historic 
 Drama, Comedy, and Masgue, in which the poet does 
 
 10 not appear at all in his own person, and where the whole 
 action is carried on by speech and dialogue of the agents; 
 music being admitted only incidentally and rarely. The 
 Opera may be placed here, inasmuch as it proceeds by 
 dialogue; though depending, to the degree that it does, 
 
 15 upon music, it has strong claim to be ranked with the 
 lyrical. The characteristic and impassioned Epistle, of 
 which Ovid and Pope have given examples, considered as 
 a species of monodrama, may, without impropriety, be 
 placed in this class. 
 
 20 sdly. The Lyrical, — containing the Hymn, the Ode, 
 the Elegy, the Song, and the Ballad; in all which, for the 
 production of their///// effect, an accompaniment of music 
 is indispensable. 
 
 4thly, The Idyllium, — descriptive chiefly either of the 
 
 23 processes and appearances of external nature, as the 'Sea- 
 sons ' of Thomson; or of characters, manners, and senti- 
 ments, as are Shenstone's 'Schoolmistress,' 'The Cotter's 
 Saturday Night ' of Burns, 'The Twa Dogs ' of the same 
 Author; or of these in conjunction with the appearances 
 
 30 of Nature, as most of the pieces of Theocritus, the 'Allegro ' 
 and 'Penseroso ' of Milton, Beattie's 'Minstrel,' Gold- 
 
PREFACE, J81S-184S. 43 
 
 smith's 'Deserted Village.' The p::pitaph, the Inscription, 
 the Sonnet, most of the epistles of poets writing in their 
 own persons, and all loco-descriptive poetry, belong to 
 this class. 
 
 5thly, Didactic, — the principal object of which is direct 5 
 instruction; as the Poem of Lucretius, the 'Georgics' of 
 Virgil, 'The Fleece ' of Dyer, Mason's 'English Gar- 
 den,' &c. 
 
 And, lastly, philosophical Satire, like that of Horace 
 and Juvenal j personal and occasional Satire rarely com- 10 
 prehending sufficient of the general in the individual to 
 be dignified with the name of poetry. 
 
 Out of the three last has been constructed a composite 
 order of which Young's 'Night Thoughts, ' and Cowper's 
 'Task,' are excellent examples. It is deducible from the ^5 
 above, that poems, apparently miscellaneous, may with 
 propriety be arranged either with reference to the powers 
 of TCiixi^ predominant in the production of them; or to the 
 mould in which they are cast; or, lastly, to the subjects to 
 which they relate. From each of these considerations, the 20 
 following Poems have been divided into classes;^ which, 
 that the work may more obviously correspond with the 
 course of human life, and for the sake of exhibiting in it 
 the three requisites of a legitimate whole, a beginning, a 
 middle, and an end, have been also arranged, as far as it 25 
 was possible, according to an order of time, commencing 
 with Childhood, and terminating with Old Age, Death, 
 and Immortality. My guiding wish was, that the small 
 pieces of which these volumes consist, thus discriminated, 
 might be regarded under a twofold view; as composing an 3° 
 entire work within themselves, and as adjuncts to the 
 
44 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 philosophical Poem, 'The Recluse.' This arrangement 
 has long presented itself habitually to my own mind. 
 Nevertheless, I should have preferred to scatter the con- 
 tents of these volumes at random, if I had been persuaded 
 
 5 that, by the plan adopted, any thing material would be 
 taken from the natural effect of the pieces, individually, 
 on the mind of the unreflecting Reader. I trust there is 
 a sufficient variety in each class to prevent this; while, for 
 him w^ho reads with reflection, the arrangement will serve 
 
 10 as a commentary unostentatiously directing his attention 
 to my purposes, both particular and general. But, as I 
 wish to guard against the possibility of misleading by this 
 classification, it is proper first to remind the Reader, that 
 certain poems are placed according to the powers of mind, 
 
 15 in the Author's conception, predominant in the production 
 of them; predominajit, which implies the exertion of other 
 faculties in less degree. Where there is more imagination 
 than fancy in a poem, it is placed under the head of 
 imagination, and vice versa. Both the above classes might 
 
 20 without impropriety have been enlarged from that consist- 
 ing of 'Poems founded on the Affections;' as might this 
 latter from those, and from the class 'proceeding from 
 Sentiment and Reflection. ' The most striking character- 
 istics of each piece, mutual illustration, variety, and pro- 
 
 25 portion, have governed me throughout. 
 
 None of the other Classes, except those of Fancy and 
 Imagination, require any particular notice. But a remark 
 of general application may be made. All Poets, except 
 the dramatic, have been in the practice of feigning that 
 
 30 their works were composed to the music of the harp or 
 lyre : with what degree of affectation this has been done in 
 
PREFACE, i8rs-i84S. 45 
 
 modern times, I leave to the judicious to determine. For 
 my own part, I have not been disposed to violate proba- 
 bility so far, or to make such a large demand upon the 
 Reader's charity. Some of these pieces are essentially 
 lyrical; and, therefore, cannot have their due force with- 5 
 out a supposed musical accompaniment; but, in much the 
 greatest part, as a substitute for the classic lyre or romantic 
 harp, I require nothing more than an animated or impas- 
 sioned recitation, adapted to the subject. Poems, however 
 humble in their kind, if they be good in that kind, cannot 1° 
 read themselves; the law of long syllable and short must 
 not be so inflexible, — the letter of metre must not be so 
 impassive to the spirit of versification, — as to deprive the 
 Reader of all voluntary power to modulate, in subordina- 
 tion to the sense, the music of the poem; — in the same 15 
 manner as his mind is left at liberty, and even summoned, 
 to act upon its thoughts and images. But, though the 
 accompaniment of a musical instrument be frequently 
 dispensed with, the true Poet does not therefore abandon 
 his privilege distinct from that of the mere Proseman; 20 
 
 He murmurs near the running brooks 
 A music sweeter than their own. 
 
 Let us come now to the consideration of the words 
 Fancy and Imagination, as employed in the classification 
 of the following Poems. ^ 'A man,' says an intelligent 25 
 author, 'has imagination in proportion as he can distinctly 
 copy in idea the impressions of sense : it is the faculty 
 which images within the mind the phenomena of sensation. 
 A man has fancy in proportion as he can call up, connect, 
 or associate, at pleasure, those internal images (^ai/ra^etj/ 30 
 
46 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 is to cause to appear) so as to complete ideal representa- 
 tions of absent objects. Imagination is the power of 
 depicting, and fancy of evoking and combining. The 
 imagination is formed by patient observation; the fancy 
 
 5 by a voluntary activity in shifting the scenery of the mind. 
 The more accurate the imagination, the more safely may a 
 painter, or a poet, undertake a delineation, or a descrip- 
 tion, without the presence of the objects to be character- 
 ised. The more versatile the fancy, the more original and 
 
 10 striking will be the decorations produced. ' ~ ^nV/^^ Syno- 
 nyms discrhninated, by IV. Taylor. 
 
 Is not this as if a man should undertake to supply an 
 account of a building, and be so intent upon what he had 
 discovered of the foundation, as to conclude his task 
 
 15 without once looking up at the superstructure? Here, as 
 in other instances throughout the volume, the judicious 
 Author's mind is enthralled by Etymology; he takes up the 
 original word as hi^ guide and escort, and too often does 
 not perceive how soon he becomes its prisoner, without 
 
 20 liberty to tread in any path but that to which it confines 
 him. It is not easy to find out how imagination, thus 
 explained, differs from distinct remembrance of images; 
 or fancy from quick and vivid recollection of them : each 
 is nothing more than a mode of memory. If the two 
 
 25 words bear the above meaning and no other, what term is 
 left to designate that faculty of which the Poet is 'all com- 
 pact;' he whose eye glances from earth to heaven, whose 
 spiritual attributes body forth what his pen is prompt in 
 turning to shape; or what is left to characterise Fancy, as 
 
 30 insinuating herself into the heart of objects with creative 
 activity? Imagination, in the sense of the word as giving 
 
PREFACE, 181S-1843. 47 
 
 title to a class of the following Poems, has no reference to 
 images that are merely a faithful copy, existing in the 
 mind, of absent external objects; but is a word of higher 
 import, denoting operations of the mind upon those 
 objects and processes of creation or of composition, gov- 5 
 erned by certain fixed laws. I proceed to illustrate my 
 meaning by instances. A parrot harigs from the wires of 
 his cage by his beak or by his claws; or a monkey from 
 the bough of a tree by his paws or his tail. Each creature 
 does so literally and actually. In the first Eclogue of 10 
 Virgil, the shepherd, thinking of the time when he is to 
 take leave of his farm, thus addresses his goats :• — 
 
 Non ego vos posthac viridi projectus in antro 
 T>\icavo%2i. pendere procul de rupe videbo. 
 
 half way down 15 
 
 Hangs one who gathers samphire, 
 
 is the well-known expression of Shakspeare, delineating 
 an ordinary image upon the cliffs of Dover. In these two 
 instances is a slight exertion of the faculty which I denom- 
 inate imagination, in the use of one word: neither the 20 
 goats nor the samphire-gatherer do literally hang, as does 
 the parrot or the monkey; but, presenting to the senses 
 something of such an appearance, the mind in its activity, 
 for its own gratification, contemplates them as hanging. 
 
 As when far off at sea a fleet descried 25 
 
 Hangs in the clouds, by equinoctial wind; 
 
 Close sailing from Bengala, or the isles 
 
 Of Ternate or Tidore, whence merchants bring 
 
 Their spicy drugs; they on the trading flood 
 
 Through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape 30 
 
 Ply, stemming nightly toward the Pole; so seemed 
 
 Far off the flying Fiend. 
 
48 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 Here is the full strength of the imagination involved 
 in the word ha?igs, and exerted upon the whole image: 
 First, the fleet, an aggregate of many ships, is represented 
 as one mighty person, whose track, we know and feel, is 
 
 5 upon the waters; but, taking advantage of its appearance 
 to the senses, the Poet dares to represent it as hanging in 
 the clouds J both for the gratification of the mind in con- 
 templating the image itself, and in reference to the motion 
 and appearance of the sublime objects to which it is 
 
 10 compared. 
 
 From impressions of sight we will pass to those of sound; 
 which, as they must necessarily be of a less definite char- 
 acter, shall be selected from these volumes : 
 
 Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods ; 
 
 15 of the same bird, 
 
 His voice was buried among trees, 
 Yet to be come at by the breeze; 
 O, Cuckoo ! shall I call thee Bird, 
 Or but a wandering Voice? 
 
 20 The stock-dove is said to coo, a sound well imitating the 
 note of the bird; but, by the intervention of the metaphor 
 broods, the affections are called in by the imagination to 
 assist in marking the manner in which the bird reiterates 
 and prolongs her soft note, as if herself delighting to 
 
 25 listen to it, and participating of a still and quiet satisfac- 
 tion, like that which may be supposed inseparable from 
 the continuous process of incubation. 'His voice was 
 buried among the trees, ' a metaphor expressing the love 
 of seclusion by which this Bird is marked; and character- 
 
 20 ising its note as not partaking of the shrill and the pierc- 
 
PREFACE, 181S-184S. 49 
 
 ing, and therefore more easily deadened by the intervening 
 shade; yet a note so peculiar and withal so pleasing, that 
 the breeze, gifted with that love of the sound which the 
 Poet feels, penetrates the shades in which it is entombed, 
 and conveys it to the ear of the listener. 5 
 
 Shall I call thee Bird, 
 
 Or but a wandering Voice? 
 
 This concise interrogation characterises the seeming 
 ubiquity of the voice of the cuckoo, and dispossesses the 
 creature almost of a corporeal existence; the Imagination 10 
 being tempted to this exertion of her power by a conscious- 
 ness in the memory that the cuckoo is almost perpetually 
 heard throughout the season of spring, but seldom becomes 
 an object of sight. 
 
 Thus far of images independent of each other and ^5 
 immediately endowed by the mind with properties that do 
 not inhere in them, upon an incitement from properties 
 and qualities the existence of w^hich is inherent and 
 obvious. These processes of imagination are carried on 
 either by conferring additional properties upon an object, 20 
 or abstracting from it some of those which it actually 
 possesses, and thus enabling it to re-act upon the mind 
 which hath performed the process, like a new existence. 
 
 I pass from the Imagination acting upon an individual 
 image to a consideration of the same faculty employed 25 
 upon images in a conjunction by which they modify each 
 other. The Reader has already had a fine instance before 
 him in the passage quoted from Virgil, where the appar- 
 ently perilous situation of the goat, hanging upon the 
 shaggy precipice, is contrasted with that of the shepherd 3° 
 
so WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 contemplating it from the seclusion of the cavern in which 
 he lies stretched at ease and in security. Take these 
 images separately, and how unaffecting the picture com- 
 pared with that produced by their being thus connected 
 5 with, and opposed to, each other ! 
 
 As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie 
 Couched on the bald top of an eminence, 
 Wonder to all who do the same espy 
 By what means it could thither come, and whence, 
 10 So that it seems a thing endued with sense, 
 
 Like a sea-beast crawled forth, which on a shelf 
 Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun himself. 
 
 Such seemed this Man; not all alive or dead 
 Nor all asleep, in his extreme old age. 
 
 J- 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. 
 
 In these images, the conferring, the abstracting, and the 
 modifying powers of the Imagination, immediately and 
 
 20 mediately acting, are all brought into conjunction. The 
 stone is endowed with something of the power of life to 
 approximate it to the sea-beast; and the sea-beast stripped 
 of some of its vital qualities to assimilate it to the stone; 
 which intermediate image is thus treated for the purpose 
 
 25 of bringing the original image, that of the stone, to a 
 nearer resemblance to the figure and condition of the aged 
 Man; who is divested of so much of the indications of life 
 and motion as to bring him to the point where the two 
 objects unite and coalesce in just comparison. After 
 
 30 what has been said, the image of the cloud need not be 
 commented upon. 
 
PREFACE, 1813^1843. 51 
 
 Thus far of an endowing or modifying power : but the 
 Imagination also shapes and creates; and how? By 
 innumerable processes; and in none does it more delight 
 than in that of consolidating numbers into unity, and 
 dissolving and separating unity into number, — alterna- 5 
 tions proceeding from, and governed by, a sublime con- 
 sciousness of the soul in her own mighty and almost divine 
 powers. Recur to the passage already cited from Milton. 
 When the compact Fleet, as one Person, has been intro- 
 duced 'Sailing from Bengala.' 'They,' i.e. the 'merchants,' 10 
 representing the fleet resolved into a multitude of ships, 
 'ply' their voyage towards the extremities of the earth: 
 'So' (referring to the word 'As' in the commencement) 
 'seemed the flying Fiend;' the image of his person acting 
 to recombine the multitude of ships into one body, — the 15 
 point from which the comparison set out. 'So seemed,' 
 and to whom seemed? To the heavenly Muse who dictates 
 the poem, to the eye of the Poet's mind, and to that of the 
 Reader, present at one moment in the wide Ethiopian, 
 and the next in the solitudes, then first broken in upon, of 20 
 the infernal regions! 
 
 Modo me Thebis, modo ponit Athenis. 
 
 Here again this mighty Poet, — speaking of the Messiah 
 going forth to expel from heaven the rebellious angels, 
 
 Attended by ten thousand thousand Saints ■ 35 
 
 He onward came : far off his coming shone, — 
 
 the retinue of Saints, and the Person of the Messiah him- 
 self, lost almost and merged in the splendour of that 
 indefinite abstraction 'His coming! ' 
 
52 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES 
 
 As I do not mean here to treat this subject further than 
 to throw some light upon the present Volumes, and espe- 
 cially upon one division of them, I shall spare myself and 
 the Reader the trouble of considering the Imagination as 
 
 5 it deals with thoughts and sentiments, as it regulates the 
 composition of characters, and determines the course of 
 actions : I will not consider it (more than I have already 
 done by implication) as that power which, in the language 
 of one of my most esteemed Friends, ' draws all things to 
 
 10 one; which makes things animate or inanimate, beings 
 with their attributes, subjects with their accessaries, take 
 one colour and serve to one effect. ' * The grand store- 
 houses of enthusiastic and meditative Imagination, of 
 poetical, as contradistinguished from human and dramatic 
 
 15 Imagination, are the prophetic and lyrical parts of the 
 Holy Scriptures, and the works of Milton; to which I 
 cannot forbear to add those of Spenser. I select these 
 writers in preference to those of ancient Greece and Rome, 
 because the anthropomorphitism of the Pagan religion 
 
 20 subjected the minds of the greatest poets in those countries 
 too much to the bondage of definite form; from which the 
 Hebrews were preserved by their abhorrence of idolatry. 
 This abhorrence was almost as strong in our great epic Poet, 
 both from circumstances of his life, and from the constitu- 
 
 25 tion of his mind. However imbued the surface might be with 
 classical literature, he was a Hebrew in soul; and all things 
 tended in him towards the sublime. Spenser, of a gentler 
 nature, maintained his freedom by aid of his allegorical 
 spirit, at one time inciting him to create persons out of 
 
 30 abstractions; and, at another, by a superior effort of ge- 
 
 * Charles Lamb upon the genius of Hogarth. 
 
PREFACE, 181S-184S. 53 
 
 nius, to give the universality and permanence of abstractions 
 to his human beings, by means of attributes and emblems 
 that belong to the highest moral truths and the purest sen- 
 sations, — of which his character of Una is a glorious 
 example. Of the human and dramatic Imagination the s 
 works of Shakspeare are an inexhaustible source. 
 
 I tax not you, ye Elements, with unkindness, 
 
 I never gave you kingdoms, call'd you Daughters ! 
 
 And if, bearing in mind the many Poets distinguished 
 by this prime quality, whose names I omit to mention; yet 10 
 justified by recollection of the insults which the ignorant, 
 the incapable and the presumptuous, have heaped upon 
 these and my other writings, I may be permitted to antici- 
 pate the judgment of posterity upon myself, I shall declare 
 (censurable, I grant, if the notoriety of the fact above 15 
 stated does not justify me) that I have given in these 
 unfavourable times, evidence of exertions of this faculty 
 upon its worthiest objects, the external universe, the moral 
 and religious sentiments of Man, his natural affections, and 
 his acquired passions; which have the same ennobling ten- 20 
 dency as the productions of men, in this kind, worthy to 
 be holden in undying remembrance. 
 
 To the mode in which Fancy has already been character- 
 ised as the power of evoking and combining, or, as my 
 friend Mr. Coleridge has styled it, 'the aggregative and 25 
 associative power,' my objection is only that the definition 
 is too general. To aggregate and to associate, to evoke 
 and to combine, belong as well to the Imagination as to 
 the Fancy; but either the materials evoked and combined 
 are different; or they are brought together under a differ- 3^ 
 
54 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 ent law, and for a different purpose. Fancy does not 
 require that the materials which she makes use of should 
 be susceptible of change in their constitution, from her 
 touch; and, where they admit of modification, it is enough 
 5 for her purpose if it be slight, limited, and evanescent. 
 Directly the reverse of these, are the desires and demands 
 of the Imagination. She recoils from every thing but the 
 plastic, the pliant, and the indefinite. She leaves it to 
 Fancy to describe Queen Mab as coming, 
 
 10 In shape no bigger than an agate-stone 
 
 On the fore-finger of an alderman. 
 
 Having to speak of stature, she does not tell you that her 
 
 gigantic Angel was as tall as Pompey's Pillar; much less 
 
 that he was twelve cubits, or twelve hundred cubits high; 
 
 15 or that his dimensions equalled those of Teneriffe or Atlas; 
 
 — because these, and if they were a million times as high 
 it would be the same, are bounded: The expression is, 
 'His stature reached the sky! ' the illimitable firmament! 
 
 — When the Imagination frames a comparison, if it does 
 20 not strike on the first presentation, a sense of the truth of 
 
 the likeness, from the moment that it is perceived, grows 
 
 — and continues to grow — upon the mind; the resem- 
 blance depending less upon outline of form and feature, 
 than upon expression and effect; less upon casual and 
 
 25 outstanding, than upon inherent and internal, properties : 
 moreover, the images invariably modify each other. — The 
 law under which the processes of Fancy are carried on is as 
 capricious as the accidents of things, and the effects are 
 surprising, playful, ludicrous, amusing, tender, or pathetic, 
 
 30 as the objects happen to be appositely produced or fortu- 
 
PREFACE, 181S-184S. 55 
 
 nately combined. Fancy depends upon the rapidityand 
 profusion with which she scatters her thoughts and images; 
 trusting that their number, and the felicity with which 
 they are linked together, will make amends for the want of 
 individual value : or she prides herself upon the curious 5 
 subtilty and the successful elaboration with which she can 
 detect their lurking affinities.^ If she can win you over to 
 her purpose, and impart to you her feelings, she cares not 
 how unstable or transitory may be her influence, knowing 
 that it will not be out of her power to resume it upon 10 
 an apt occasion. But the Imagination is conscious of an 
 indestructible dominion; — the Soul may fall away from 
 it, not being able to sustain its grandeur; but, if once felt 
 and acknowledged, by no act of any other faculty of the 
 mind can it be relaxed, impaired, or diminished. — Fancy 15 
 is given to quicken and to beguile the temporal part of 
 our nature, Imagination to incite and to support the eter- 
 nal. — Yet is it not the less true that Fancy, as she is an 
 active, is also, under her own laws and in her own spirit, 
 a creative faculty. In what manner Fancy ambitiously 20 
 aims at a rivalship with Imagination, and Imagination 
 stoops to work with materials of Fancy, might be illus- 
 trated from the compositions of all eloquent writers, 
 whether in prose or verse; and chiefly from those of our 
 own Country. Scarcely a page of the impassioned parts of 25 
 Bishop Taylor's Works can be opened that shall not afford 
 examples. — Referring the Reader to those inestimable 
 volumes, I will content myself with placing a conceit 
 (ascribed to Lord Chesterfield) in contrast with a passage 
 from the 'Paradise Lost:' — 30 
 
56 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES 
 
 The dews of the evening most carefully shun, 
 They are the tears of the sky for the loss of the sun. 
 
 After the transgression of Adam, Milton, with other 
 appearances of sympathising Nature, thus marks the imme- 
 5 diate consequence. 
 
 Sky lowered, and, muttering thunder, some sad drops 
 Wept at completion of the mortal sin. 
 
 The associating link is the same in each instance : Dew 
 and rain, not distinguishable from the liquid substance of 
 
 lo tears, are employed as indications of sorrow. A flash of 
 surprise is the effect in the former case; a flash of surprise, 
 and nothing more; for the nature of things does not sus- 
 tain the combination. In the latter, the effects from the 
 act, of which there is this immediate consequence and 
 
 15 visible sign, are so momentous, that the mind acknowl- 
 edges the justice and reasonableness of the sympathy in 
 nature so manifested; and the sky weeps drops of water 
 as if with human eyes, as 'Earth had before trembled from 
 her entrails, and Nature given a second groan. ' 
 
 20 Finally, I will refer to Cotton's 'Ode upon Winter,' an 
 admirable composition, though stained with some pecu- 
 liarities of the age in which he lived, for a general illus- 
 tration of the characteristics of Fancy. The middle part 
 of this ode contains a most lively description of the 
 
 25 entrance of Winter, with his retinue, as 'A palsied king,' 
 and yet a military monarch, — advancing for conquest with 
 his army; the several bodies of which, and their arms and 
 equipments, are described with a rapidity of detail, and a 
 profusion of fanciful comparisons, which indicate on the 
 
PREFACE, 1813-184^. 57 
 
 part of the poet extreme activity of intellect, and a corre- 
 spondent hurry of delightful feeling. Winter retires from 
 the foe into his fortress, where 
 
 a magazine 
 
 Of sovereign juice is cellared in; 5 
 
 Liquor that will the siege maintain 
 Should Phcebus ne'er return again. 
 
 Though myself a water-drinker, I cannot resist the pleasure 
 of transcribing what follows, as an instance still more 
 happy of Fancy employed in the treatment of feeling than, 10 
 in its preceding passages, the Poem supplies of her man- 
 agement of forms. 
 
 'Tis that, that gives the poet rage, 
 
 And thaws the gelly'd blood of age; 
 
 Matures the young, restores the old, 15 
 
 And makes the fainting coward bold. 
 
 It lays the careful head to rest. 
 Calms palpitations in the breast. 
 Renders our lives' misfortune sweet; 
 
 Then let the chill Sirocco blow, 20 
 
 And gird us round with hills of snow, 
 
 Or else go whistle to the shore. 
 
 And make the hollow mountains roar, 
 
 Whilst we together jovial sit 
 
 Careless, and crowned with mirth and wit, 25 
 
 Where, though bleak winds confine us home, 
 
 Our fancies round the world shall roam. 
 
 We'll think of all the Friends we know. 
 
 And drink to all worth drinking to; 
 
 When having drunk all thine and mine, 3° 
 
 We rather shall want healths than wine. 
 
58 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 But where Friends fail us, we'll supply 
 Our friendships with our charity; 
 Men that remote in sorrows live, 
 Shall by our lusty brimmers thrive. 
 
 5 We'll drink the wanting into M'ealth, 
 
 And those that languish into health, 
 The afflicted into joy; th' opprest 
 Into security and rest. 
 
 The worthy in disgrace shall find 
 jQ Favour return again more kind. 
 
 And in restraint who stifled lie, 
 Shall taste the air of liberty. 
 
 The brave shall triumph in success, 
 The lovers shall have mistresses, 
 15 Poor unregarded Virtue, praise. 
 
 And the neglected Poet, bays. 
 
 Thus shall our healths do others good. 
 Whilst we ourselves do all we would; 
 For, freed from envy and from care, 
 20 What would we be but what we are? 
 
 When I sate down to write this Preface, it was my inten- 
 tion to have made it more comprehensive; but, thinking 
 that I onght rather to apologise for detaining the reader 
 so long, I will here conclude. 
 
ESSAY SUPPLEMENTARY TO PREFACE, 
 
 1815-1845 
 
 With the young of both sexes, Poetry is, like love, 
 a passion; but, for much the greater part of those who 
 have been proud of its power over their minds, a necessity 
 soon arises of breaking the pleasing bondage; or it relaxes 
 of itself; — the thoughts being occupied in domestic cares, 5 
 or the time engrossed by business. Poetry then becomes 
 only an occasional recreation; while to those whose exist- 
 ence passes away in a course of fashionable pleasure, it is 
 a species of luxurious amusement. In middle and declin- 
 ing age, a scattered number of serious persons resort to 10 
 poetry, as to religion, for a protection against the pressure 
 of trivial employments, and as a consolation for the afflic- 
 tions of life.^ And, lastly, there are many, who, having 
 been enamoured of this art in their youth, have found 
 leisure, after youth was spent, to cultivate general litera- 15 
 ture; in which poetry has continued to be comprehended 
 as a study, '^ 
 
 Into the above classes the Readers of poetry may be 
 divided; Critics abound in them all; but from the last 
 only can opinions be collected of absolute value, and 20 
 worthy to be depended upon, as prophetic of the destiny 
 of a new work. The young, who in nothing can escape 
 
 59 
 
60 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES, 
 
 delusion, are especially subject to it in their intercourse 
 with Poetry. The cause, not so obvious as the fact is 
 unquestionable, is the same as that from which erroneous 
 judgments in this art, in the minds of men of all ages, 
 
 5 chiefly proceed; but upon Youth it operates with peculiar 
 force. The appropriate business of poetry, (which, never- 
 theless, if genuine, is as permanent as pure science,) her 
 appropriate employment, her privilege and her duty, is to 
 treat of things not as they are, but as they appear; not as 
 
 10 they exist in themselves, but as they seem to exist to the 
 senses, and to \)cvt. passions. What a world of delusion does 
 this acknowledged obligation prepare for the inexperi- 
 enced ! what temptations to go astray are here held forth 
 for them whose thoughts have been little disciplined by 
 
 15 the understanding, and whose feelings revolt from the 
 sway of reason ! — When a juvenile Reader is in the height 
 of his rapture with some vicious passage, should experience 
 throw in doubts, or common-sense suggest suspicions, a 
 lurking consciousness that the realities of the Muse are but 
 
 20 shows, and that her liveliest excitements are raised by 
 transient shocks of conflicting feeling and successive 
 assemblages of contradictory thoughts — is ever at hand to 
 justify extravagance, and to sanction absurdity. But, it 
 may be asked, as these illusions are unavoidable, and, no 
 
 25 doubt, eminently useful to the mind as a process, what 
 good can be gained by making observations, the tendency 
 of which is to diminish the confidence of youth in its 
 feelings, and thus to abridge its innocent and even profit- 
 able pleasures? The reproach implied in the question 
 
 3° could not be warded off, if Youth were incapable of being 
 delighted with what is truly excellent; ^ or, if these errors 
 
SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE PREFACE, 181^-1843. 61 
 
 always terminated of themselves in due season. But, with 
 the majority, though their force be abated, they continue 
 through life. Moreover, the fire of 5^outh is too vivacious 
 an element to be extinguished or damped by a philo- 
 sophical remark; and, while there is no danger that what 5 
 has been said will be injurious or painful to the ardent 
 and the confident, it may prove beneficial to those who, 
 being enthusiastic, are, at the same time, modest and 
 ingenious. The intimaton may unite with their own mis- 
 givings to regulate their sensibility, and to bring in, 10 
 sooner than it would otherwise have arrived, a more 
 discreet and sound judgment. 
 
 If it should excite wonder that men of ability, in later 
 life, whose understandings have been rendered acute by 
 practice in affairs, should be so easily and so far imposed 15 
 upon when they happen to take up a new work in verse, 
 this appears to be the cause; — that, having discontinued 
 their attention to poetry, whatever progress may have been 
 made in other departments of knowledge, they have not, 
 as to this art, advanced in true discernment beyond the 20 
 age of youth. If, then, a new poem fall in their way, 
 whose attractions are of that kind which would have 
 enraptured them during the heat of youth, the judgment 
 not being improved to a degree that they shall be dis- 
 gusted, they are dazzled; and prize and cherish the faults 25 
 for having had power to make the present time vanish 
 before them, and to throw the mind back, as by enchant- 
 ment, into the happiest season of life.^ As they read, 
 powers seem to be revived, passions are regenerated, and 
 pleasures restored. The Book was probably taken up after 30 
 an escape from the burden of business, and with a wish to 
 
62 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES, 
 
 forget the world, and all its vexations and anxieties. 
 Having obtained this wish, and so much more, it is 
 natural that they should make report as they have felt. 
 If Men of mature age, through want of practice, be thus 
 
 5 easily beguiled into admiration of absurdities, extrava- 
 gancies, and misplaced ornaments, thinking it proper that 
 their understandings should enjoy a holiday, while they 
 are unbending their minds with verse, it may be expected 
 that such Readers will resemble their former selves also in 
 
 lo strength of prejudice, and an inaptitude to be moved by 
 the unostentatious beauties of a pure style. ^ In the higher 
 poetry, an enlightened Critic chiefly looks for a reflection 
 of the wisdom of the heart and the grandeur of the imagi- 
 nation.^ Wherever these appear, simplicity accompanies 
 
 15 them; Magnificence herself, when legitimate, depending 
 upon a simplicity of her own, to regulate her ornaments.^ 
 But it is a well-known property of human nature, that our 
 estimates are ever governed by comparisons, of which we 
 are conscious with various degrees of distinctness. Is it 
 
 20 not, then, inevitable (confining these observations to the 
 effects of style merely) that an eye, accustomed to the 
 glaring hues of diction by which such Readers are caught 
 and excited, will for the most part be rather repelled than 
 attracted by an original Work, the colouring of which is 
 
 25 disposed according to a pure and refined scheme of har- 
 mony?* It is in the fine arts as in the affairs of life, no 
 man can serve (i.e. obey with zeal and fidelity) two 
 Masters. 
 
 As Poetry is most just to its own divine origin when it 
 
 30 administers the comforts and breathes the spirit of relig- 
 ion,^ they who have learned to perceive this truth, and 
 
SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE PREFACE, 181^-1843. 63 
 
 who betake themselves to reading verse for sacred purposes, 
 must be presented from numerous illusions to which the 
 two Classes of Readers, whom we have been considering, 
 are liable. But, as the mind grows serious from the weight 
 of life, the range of its passions is contracted accordingly; 5 
 and its sympathies become so exclusive, that many species 
 of high excellence wholly escape, or but languidly excite 
 its notice. Besides, men who read from religious or moral 
 inclinations, even when the subject is of that kind which 
 they approve, are beset with misconceptions and mistakes 10 
 peculiar to themselves. Attaching so much importance to 
 the truths which interest them, they are prone to over-rate 
 the Authors by whom those truths are expressed and 
 enforced. They come prepared to impart so much pas- 
 sion to the Poet's language, that they remain unconscious 15 
 how little, in fact, they receive from it. And, on the other 
 hand, religious faith is to him who holds it so momentous 
 a thing, and error appears to be attended with such tre- 
 mendous consequences, that, if opinions touching upon 
 religion occur which the Reader condemns, he not only zo 
 cannot sympathise with them, however animated the expres- 
 sion, but there is, for the most part, an end put to all 
 satisfaction and enjoyment. Love, if it before existed, is 
 converted into dislike; and the heart of the Reader. is set 
 against the Author and his book. — To these excesses, 25 
 they, who from their professions ought to be the most 
 guarded against them, are perhaps the most liable; I mean 
 those sects whose religion, being from the calculating 
 understanding, is cold and formal. For when Christianity, 
 the religion of humility, is founded upon the proudest 30 
 faculty of our nature, what can be expected but contradic- 
 
64 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 tions? Accordingly, believers of this cast are at one time 
 contemptuous; at another, being troubled, as they are and 
 must be, with inward misgivings, they are jealous and 
 suspicious; — and at all seasons, they are under tempta- 
 
 5 tion to supply, by the heat with which they defend their 
 tenets, the animation w^hich is wanting to the constitution 
 of the religion itself. 
 
 Faith was given to man that his affections, detached from 
 the treasures of time, might be inclined to settle upon 
 
 10 those of eternity: — the elevation of his nature, which this 
 habit produces on earth, being to him a resumptive evi- 
 dence of a future state of existence; and giviii'g him a title 
 to partake of its holiness. The religious man values what 
 he sees chiefly as an 'imperfect shadowing forth ' of what 
 
 13 he is incapable of seeing. The concerns of religion refer to 
 indefinite objects, and are too weighty for the mind to 
 support them without relieving itself by resting a great 
 part of the burthen upon words and symbols. The com- 
 merce between Man and his Maker cannot be carried on 
 
 20 but by a process where much is represented in little, and 
 the Infinite Being accommodates himself to a finite capac- 
 ity. In all this may be perceived the affinity between 
 religion and poetry; between religion — making up the 
 deficiencies of reason by faith; and poetry — passionate 
 
 25 for the instruction of reason; between religion — whose 
 element is infinitude, and whose ultimate trust is the 
 supreme of things, submitting herself to circumscription, 
 and reconciled to substitutions; and poetry — ethereal and 
 transcendent, yet incapable to sustain her existence without 
 
 30 sensuous incarnation. In this community of nature may 
 be perceived also the lurking incitements of kindred error; 
 
SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE PREFACE, 181^-1843. 65 
 
 — SO that we shall find that no poetry has been more 
 subject to distortion, than that species, the argument and 
 scope of which is religious; and no lovers of the art have 
 gone farther astray than the pious and the devout. 
 
 Whither then shall we turn for that union of qualifica- 5 
 tions which must necessarily exist before the decisions of 
 a critic can be of absolute value? For a mind at once 
 poetical and philosophical; for a critic whose affections are 
 as free and kindly as the spirit of society, and whose 
 understanding is severe as that of dispassionate govern- 10 
 ment? Where are we to look for that initiatory composure 
 of mind which no selfishness can disturb? For a natural 
 sensibility that has been tutored into correctness without 
 losing anything of its quickness; and for active faculties, 
 capable of answering the demands which an Author of 15 
 original imagination shall make upon them, associated 
 with a judgment that cannot be duped into admiration by 
 aught that is unworthy of it? — among those and those 
 only, who, never having suffered their youthful love of 
 poetry to remit much of its force, have applied to the 20 
 consideration of the laws of this art the best power of their 
 understandings. At the same time it must be observed 
 
 — that, as this Class comprehends the only judgments 
 which are trustworthy, so does it include the most errone- 
 ous and perv^erse. For to be mistaught is worse than to 25 
 be untaught; and no perverseness equals that which is 
 supported by system, no errors are so difficult to root out as 
 those which the understanding has pledged its credit to 
 uphold. In this Class are contained censors, who, if they 
 be pleased with what is good, are pleased with it only by 30 
 imperfect glimpses, and upon false principles; who, should 
 
66 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 they generalise rightly, to a certain point, are sure to 
 suffer for it in the end; who, if they stumble upon a sound 
 rule, are fettered by misapplying it, or by straining it too 
 far; being incapable of perceiving when it ought to yield 
 
 5 to one of higher order. In it are found critics too petulant 
 to be passive to a genuine poet, and too feeble to grapple 
 with him; men, who take upon them to report of the 
 course which he holds whom they are utterly unable to 
 accompany, — confounded if he turn quick upon the wing, 
 
 10 dismayed if he soar steadily 'into the region;' — men of 
 palsied imaginations and indurated hearts; in whose minds 
 all healthy action is languid, who therefore feed as the 
 many direct them, or, with the many, are greedy after 
 vicious provocatives; — judges, whose censure is auspi- 
 
 15 cious, and whose praise ominous ! -^ In this class meet 
 together the two extremes of best and worst. 
 
 The observations presented in the foregoing series are 
 of too ungracious a nature to have been made without 
 reluctance; and, were it only on this account, I would 
 
 20 invite the reader to try them by the test of comprehensive 
 experience. If the number of judges who can be confi- 
 dently relied upon be in reality so small, it ought to fol- 
 low that partial notice only, or neglect, pejhaps long 
 continued, or attention wholly inadequate to their merits 
 
 25 — must have been the fate of most works in the higher 
 departments of poetry; and that, on the other hand, numer- 
 ous productions have blazed into popularity, and have 
 passed away, leaving scarcely a trace behind them; it will 
 be further found, that when Authors shall have at length 
 
 30 raised themselves into general admiration and maintained 
 their ground, errors and prejudices have prevailed con- 
 
SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE PREFACE, 181^-184^. 67 
 
 cerning their genius and their works, which the few who 
 are conscious of those errors and prejudices would deplore; 
 if they were not recompensed by perceiving that there are 
 select Spirits for whom it is ordained that their fame shall 
 be in the world an existence like that of Virtue, which 5 
 owes its being to the struggles it makes, and its vigour to 
 the enemies whom it provokes; — a vivacious quality, ever 
 doomed ta meet with opposition, and still triumphing over 
 it; and, from the nature of its dominion, incapable of 
 being brought to the sad conclusion of Alexander, when 10 
 he wept that there were no more worlds for him to conquer. 
 
 Let us take a hasty retrospect of the poetical literature 
 of this Country for the greater part of the last two centuries, 
 and see if the facts support these inferences.-^ 
 
 Who is there that now reads the 'Creation ' of Dubartas? 15 
 Yet all Europe once resounded with his praise; he was 
 caressed by kings; and, when his Poem was translated 
 into our language, the 'Faery Queen' faded before it. 
 The name of Spenser, whose genius is of a higher order 
 than even that of Ariosto, is at this day scarcely known 20 
 beyond the limits of the British Isles. And if the value of 
 his works is to be estimated from the attention now paid to 
 them by his countrymen, compared with that which they 
 bestow on those of some other writers, it must be pro- 
 nounced small indeed. 25 
 
 The laurel, meed of mighty conquerors 
 And poets sage — 
 
 are his own words; but his wisdom has, in this particular, 
 been his worst enemy : while its opposite, whether in the 
 shape of folly or madness, has been their htst friend. But 3° 
 
68 
 
 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 he was a great power, and bears a high name : the laurel 
 has been awarded to him.^ 
 
 A dramatic Author, if he write for the stage, must adapt 
 himself to the taste of the audience, or they will not endure 
 
 5 him; accordingly the mighty genius of Shakspeare was 
 listened to. The people were delighted: but I am not 
 sufficiently versed in stage antiquities to determine whether 
 they did not flock as eagerly to the representation of many 
 pieces of contemporary Authors, wholly undeserving to 
 
 10 appear upon the same boards. Had there been a formal 
 contest for superiority among dramatic writers, that Shak- 
 speare, like his predecessors Sophocles and Euripides, 
 would have often been subject to the mortification of 
 seeing the prize adjudged to sorry competitors, becomes 
 
 15 too probable, when we reflect that the admirers of Settle 
 and Shadwell were, in a later age, as numerous, and 
 reckoned as respectable in point of talent, as those of 
 Dryden. At all events, that Shakspeare stooped to 
 accommodate himself to the People, is sufficiently appar- 
 
 20 entj and one of the most striking proofs of his almost 
 omnipotent genius, is, that he could turn to such glorious 
 purpose those materials which the prepossessions of the 
 age compelled him to make use of. Yet even this marvel- 
 lous skill appears not to have been enough to prevent his 
 
 25 rivals from having some advantage over him in public 
 estimation; else how can we account for passages and 
 scenes that exist in his works, unless upon a supposition 
 that some of the grossest of them, a fact which in my own 
 mind I have no doubt of, were foisted in by the Players, 
 
 30 for the gratification of the many? 
 
 But that his Works, whatever might be their reception 
 
SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE PREFACE, 181^-184^. 69 
 
 upon the stage, made but little impression upon the ruling 
 Intellects of the time, may be inferred from the fact that 
 Lord Bacon, in his multifarious writings, nowhere either 
 quotes or alludes to him.* — His dramatic excellence 
 enabled him to resume possession of the stage after the 5 
 restoration; but Dryden tells us that in his time two of the 
 plays of Beaumont and Fletcher were acted for one of 
 Shakspeare's. And so faint and limited was the percep- 
 tion of the poetic beauties of his dramas in the time of 
 Pope, that, in his Edition of the Plays, with a view of 1° 
 rendering to the general reader a necessary service, he 
 printed between inverted commas those passages which he 
 thought most worthy of notice. 
 
 At this day, the French Critics have abated nothing of 
 their aversion to this darling of our Nation: ^the English, ^5 
 with their bouffon de Shakspeare,' is as familiar an 
 expression among them as in the time of Voltaire. Baron 
 Grimm is the only French writer who seems to have per- 
 ceived his infinite superiority to the first names of the 
 French theatre; an advantage which the Parisian critic 20 
 owed to his German blood and German education. The 
 most enlightened Italians, though well acquainted with our 
 language, are wholly incompetent to measure the propor- 
 tions of Shakspeare. The Germans only, of foreign 
 nations, are approaching towards a knowledge and feeling 25 
 of what he is. In some respects they have acquired a 
 
 * The learned Hakewill (a third edition of whose book bears date 1635), 
 writing to refute the error ' touching Nature's perpetual and universal decay,' 
 cites triumphantly the names of Ariosto, Tasso, Bartas, and Spenser, as 
 instances that poetic genius had not degenerated ; but he makes no mention 
 of Shakspeare. 
 
70 
 
 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 superiority over the fellow-countrymen of the Poet: for 
 among us it is a current, I might say, an established opin- 
 ion, that Shakspeare is justly praised when he is pro- 
 nounced to be 'a wild irregular genius, in whom great 
 
 5 faults are compensated by great beauties.' How long may 
 it be before this misconception passes away, and it becomes 
 universally acknowledged that the judgment of Shakspeare 
 in the selection of his materials, and in the manner in 
 which he has made them, heterogeneous as they often are, 
 
 10 constitute a unity of their own, and contribute all to one 
 
 great end, is not less admirable than his imagination, his 
 
 invention, and his intuitive knowledge of human Nature ! 
 
 There is extant a small Volume of miscellaneous poems, 
 
 in which Shakspeare expresses his own feelings in his own 
 
 15 person. It is not difficult to conceive that the Editor, 
 George Steevens, should have been insensible to the beauties 
 of one portion of that Volume, the Sonnets; though in no 
 part of the writings of this Poet is found, in an equal 
 compass, a greater number of exquisite feelings felicitously 
 
 20 expressed. But, from regard to the Critic's own credit, 
 he would not have ventured to talk of an * act of parliament 
 not being strong enough to compel the perusal of those 
 little pieces, if he had not known that the people of 
 England were ignorant of the treasures contained in them : 
 25 and*if he had not, moreover, shared the too common 
 propensity of human nature to exult over a supposed fall 
 
 * This flippant insensibility was publicly reprehended by Mr. Coleridge 
 in a course of Lectures upon Poetry given by him at the Royal Institution. 
 For the various merits of thought and language in Shakspeare's Sonnets, 
 see Numbers, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 54, 64, 66, 68, j-^, 76, 86, 91, 92, 93, 97, gS, 
 105, 107, 108, 109, III, 113, 114, 116, 117, 129, and many others. 
 
SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE PREFACE, 181^-1843. 71 
 
 into the mire of a genius whom he had been compelled to 
 regard with admiration, as an inmate of the celestial 
 regions — 'there sitting where he durst not soar.' 
 
 Nine years before the death of Shakspeare, Milton was 
 born : and early in life he published several small poems, 5 
 which, though on their first appearance were praised by 
 a few of the judicious, were afterwards neglected to that 
 degree, that Pope in his youth could borrow from them 
 without risk of its being known. Whether these poems 
 are at this day justly appreciated, I will not undertake to 10 
 decide : nor would it imply a severe reflection upon the mass 
 of readers to suppose the contrary; seeing that a man of the 
 acknowledged genius of Voss, the German poet, could suffer 
 their spirit to evaporate; and could change their char- 
 acter, as is done in the translation made by him of the 15 
 most popular of those pieces. At all events, it is certain 
 that these Poems of Milton are now much read, and loudly 
 praised; yet were they little heard of till more than 150 
 years after their publication; and of the Sonnets, Dr. 
 Johnson, as appears from Boswell's Life of him, was in 20 
 the habit of thinking and speaking as contemptuously as 
 Steevens wrote upon those of Shakspeare. 
 
 About the time when the Pindaric odes of Cowley and 
 his imitators, and the productions of that class of curious 
 thinkers whom Dr. Johnson has strangely styled metaphysi- 25 
 cal Poets, were beginning to lose something of that extrav- 
 agant admiration which they had excited, the 'Paradise 
 Lost' made its appearance. 'Fit audience find though 
 few,' was the petition addressed by the Poet to his inspir- 
 ing Muse. I have said elsewhere that he gained more z^ 
 than he asked; this I believe to be true; but Dr. Johnson 
 
72 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 has fallen into a gross mistake when he attempts to prove, 
 by the sale of the work, that Milton's Countrymen were 
 ^just to it ' upon its first appearance. Thirteen hundred 
 Copies were sold in two years; an uncommon example, he 
 
 5 asserts, of the prevalence of genius in opposition to so 
 much recent enmity as Milton's public conduct had excited. 
 But, be it remembered that, if Milton's political and 
 religious opinions, and the manner in which he announced 
 them had raised him many enemies, they had procured him 
 
 10 numerous friends; who, as all personal danger was passed 
 away at the time of publication, would be eager to procure 
 the master-work of a man whom they revered, and whom they 
 would be proud of praising. Take, from the number of pur- 
 chasers, persons of this class, and also those who wished to 
 
 15 possess the Poem as a religious work, and but few I fear 
 would be left who sought for it on account of its poetical 
 merits. The demand did not immediately increase; 'for,' 
 says Dr. Johnson, 'many more readers ' (he means persons in 
 the habit of reading poetry) 'than were supplied at first the 
 
 20 Nation did not afford. ' How careless must a writer be who 
 can make this assertion in the face of so many existing title- 
 pages to belie it ! Turning to my own shelves, I find the folio 
 of Cowley, seventh edition, 1681. A book near it is Flat- 
 man's Poems, fourth edition, 1686; Waller, fifth edition, 
 
 25 same date. The Poems of Norris of Bemerton not long 
 after went, I believe, through nine editions. What further 
 demand there might be for these works I do not know; but 
 I well remember, that, twenty-five years ago, the book- 
 sellers' stalls in London swarmed with the folios of Cowley. 
 
 30 This is not mentioned in disparagement of that able writer 
 and amiable man; but merely to show — that, if Milton's 
 
SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE PREFACE, 181^-184^. 73 
 
 work were not more read, it was not because readers did 
 not exist at the time. The early editions of 'Paradise 
 Lost ' were printed in a shape which allowed them to be 
 sold at a low price, yet only three thousand copies of the 
 Work were sold in eleven years; and the Nation, says Dr. 5 
 Johnson, had been satisfied from 1623 to 1664, that is, 
 forty-one years, wnth only two editions of the Works of 
 Shakspeare; which probably did not together make one 
 thousand Copies; facts adduced by the critic to prove the 
 'paucity of Readers.' — There were readers in multitudes; 10 
 but their money went for other purposes, as their admira- 
 tion was fixed elsewhere. We are authorized, then, to 
 affirm, that the reception of the 'Paradise Lost,' and the 
 slow progress of its fame, are proofs as striking as can be 
 desired that the positions which I am attempting to estab- 15 
 lish are not erroneous.* — How amusing to shape to one's 
 self such a critique as a Wit of Charles's days, or a Lord 
 of the Miscellanies or trading Journalist of King William's 
 time, v/ould have brought forth, if he had set his faculties 
 industriously to work upon this Poem, every where impreg- 20 
 nated with original excellence. 
 
 So strange indeed are the obliquities of admiration, that 
 they whose opinions are much influenced by authority will 
 often be tempted to think that there are no fixed princi- 
 ples! i^ human nature for this art to rest upon. I have 25 
 
 * Hughes is express upon this subject : in his dedication of Spenser's 
 Works to Lord Somers, he writes thus. ' It was your Lordship's encour- 
 aging a beautiful Edition of" Paradise Lost " that first brought that incom- 
 parable Poem to be generally known and esteemed.' 
 
 fThis opinion seems actually to have been entertained by Adam Smith, 
 the worst critic, David Hume not excepted, that Scotland, a soil to which 
 this sort of weed seems natural, has produced. 
 
74 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 been honoured by being permitted to peruse in MS. a tract 
 composed between the period of the Revolution and the 
 close of that century. It is the Work of an English Peer 
 of high accomplishments, its object to form the character 
 
 5 and direct the studies of his son. Perhaps nowhere does 
 a more beautiful treatise of the kind exist. The good 
 sense and wisdom of the thoughts, the delicacy of the 
 feelings, and the charm of the style, are, throughout, 
 equally conspicuous. Yet the Author, selecting among 
 
 10 the Poets of his own country those whom he deems most 
 worthy of his son's perusal, particularises only Lord 
 Rochester, Sir John Denham, and Cowley. Writing about 
 the same time, Shaftsbury, an author at present unjustly 
 depreciated, describes the English Muses as only yet lisp- 
 
 15 ing in their cradles. 
 
 The arts by which Pope, soon afterwards, contrived to 
 procure to himself a more general and a higher reputation 
 than perhaps any English Poet ever attained during his 
 life-time, are known to the judicious. And as well known 
 
 20 is it to them, that the undue exertion of those arts is the 
 cause why Pope has for some time held a rank in literature, 
 to which, if he had not been seduced by an over-love of 
 immediate popularity, and had confided more in his native 
 genius, he never could have descended. He bewitched 
 
 25 the nation by his melody, and dazzled it by his polished 
 style, and was himself blinded by his own success. Hav- 
 ing wandered from humanity in his Eclogues with boyish 
 inexperience, the praise, which these compositions ob- 
 tained, tempted him into a belief that Nature was not to 
 
 30 be trusted, at least in pastoral Poetry. To prove this by 
 example, he put his friend Gay upon writing those 
 
SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE PREFACE, 1813-1843. 75 
 
 Eclogues which their author intended to be burlesque. 
 The instigator of the work, and his admirers, could per- 
 ceive in them nothing but what was ridiculous. Never- 
 theless, though these Poems contain some detestable 
 passages, the effect, as Dr. Johnson well observes, 'of 5 
 xeality and truth became conspicuous even when the inten- 
 tion was to show them grovelling and degraded.' The 
 Pastorals, ludicrous to such as prided themselves upon 
 their refinement, in spite of those disgusting passages, 
 * became popular, and were read with delight, as just 10 
 representations of rural manners and occupations.' 
 
 Something less than sixty years after the publication of 
 the 'Paradise Lost' appeared Thomson's 'Winter;' which 
 was speedily followed by his other 'Seasons.' It is a work 
 of inspiration; much of it is written from himself, and 15 
 nobly from himself. How was it received? 'It was no 
 sooner read,' says one of his contemporary biographers, 
 'than universally admired; those only excepted who had 
 not been used to feel, or to look for anything in poetry, 
 beyond a point of satirical or epigrammatic wit, a smart 20 
 antithesis richly trimmed with rhyme, or the softness of an 
 elegiac complaint. To such his manly classical spirit could 
 not readily commend itself; till, after a more attentive 
 perusal, they had got the better of their prejudices, and 
 either acquired or affected a truer taste. A few others 25 
 stood aloof, merely because they had long before fixed the 
 articles of their poetical creed, and resigned themselves to 
 an absolute despair of ever seeing any thing new and orig- 
 inal. These were somewhat mortified to find their notions 
 disturbed by the appearance of a poet, who seemed to owe 3° 
 nothing but to Nature and his own genius. But, in a short 
 
76 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 time, the applause became unanimous; every one wonder- 
 ing how so many pictures, and pictures so familiar, should 
 have moved them but faintly to what they felt in his 
 descriptions. His digressions too, the overflowings of a 
 
 5 tender benevolent heart, charmed the reader no less; leav- 
 ing him in doubt, whether he should more admire the Poet 
 or love the Man.' 
 
 This case appears to bear strongly against us: — but we 
 must distinguish between wonder and legitimate admira- 
 
 10 tion. The subject of the work is the changes produced in 
 the appearances of Nature by the revolution of the year : 
 and, by undertaking to write in verse, Thomson pledged 
 himself to treat his subject as became a Poet. Now it is 
 remarkable that, excepting the nocturnal 'Reverie ' of 
 
 15 Lady Winchilsea, and a passage or two in the 'Windsor 
 Forest,' of Pope, the poetry of the period intervening 
 between the publication of the 'Paradise Lost' and the 
 'Seasons ' does not contain a single new image of external 
 Nature; and scarcely presents a familiar one from which it 
 
 20 can be inferred that the eye of the Poet had been steadily 
 fixed upon his object, much less that his feelings had urged 
 him to work upon it in the spirit of genuine imagination. 
 To what a low state knowledge of the most obvious and 
 important phenomena had sunk, is evident from the style 
 
 25 in which Dryden has executed a description of Night 
 in one of his Tragedies, and Pope his translation of the 
 celebrated moonlight scene in the 'Iliad.' A blind man, 
 in the habit of attending accurately to descriptions casually 
 dropped from the lips of those around him, might easily 
 
 30 depict these appearances with more truth. Dryden' s lines 
 
SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE PREFACE, 181^-1843. 77 
 
 are vague, bombastic, and senseless; * those of Pope, though 
 he had Homer to guide him, are throughout false and 
 contradictory. The verses of Dryden, once highly cele- 
 brated, are forgotten; those of Pope still retain their hold 
 upon public estimation, — nay, there is not a passage of 5 
 descriptive poetry, which at this day finds so many and 
 such ardent admirers. Strange to think of an enthusiast, 
 as may have been the case with thousands, reciting those 
 verses under the cope of a moonlight sky, without having 
 his raptures in the least disturbed by a suspicion of their 10 
 absurdity ! — If these two distinguished writers could 
 habitually think that the visible universe was of so little 
 consequence to a poet, that it was scarcely necessary for 
 him to cast his eyes upon it, we may be assured that those 
 passages of the elder poets which faithfully and poetically 15 
 describe the phenomena of Nature, were not at that time 
 holden in much estimation, and that there was little 
 accurate attention paid to those appearances. 
 
 Wonder is the natural product of Ignorance; and as the 
 soil was 171 such good condition at the time of the publica- 20 
 tion of the ^Seasons,' the crop was doubtless abundant. 
 Neither individuals nor nations become corrupt all at once, 
 nor are they enlightened in a moment. Thomson was an 
 inspired poet, but he could not work miracles; in cases 
 
 * Cortes alone in a yiight-gown. 
 
 All things are hush'd as Nature's self lay dead ; 
 The mountains seem to nod their drowsy head. 
 The little Birds in dreams their songs repeat, 
 And sleeping Flowers beneath the Night-dew sweat : 
 Even Lust and Envy sleep ; yet Love denies 
 Rest to my soul, and slumber to my eyes. 
 
 Dryden's Indian Emperor. 
 
78 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 where the art of seeing had in some degree been learned, 
 the teacher would further the proficiency of his pupils, but 
 he could do little more ; though so far does vanity assist 
 men in acts of self-deception, that many would often fancy 
 
 5 they recognised a likeness when they knew nothing of the 
 original. Having shown that much of what his biographer 
 deemed genuine admiration must in fact have been blind 
 wonderment — how is the rest to be accounted for? — 
 Thomson was fortunate in the very title of his poem, which 
 
 10 seemed to bring it home to the prepared sympathies of 
 every one : in the next place, notwithstanding his high 
 powers, he writes a vicious style; and his false ornaments 
 are exactly of that kind which would be most likely to 
 strike the undiscerning. He likewise abounds with senti- 
 
 15 mental common-places, that, from the manner in which 
 they were brought forward, bore an imposing air of novelty. 
 In any well-used copy of the 'Seasons ' the book generally 
 opens of itself with the rhapsody on love, or with one of 
 the stories (perhaps 'Damon and Musidora'); these also 
 
 20 are prominent in our collections of Extracts, and are the 
 parts of his Work, which, after all, were probably most 
 efficient in first recommending the author to general 
 notice. Pope, repaying praises which he had received, 
 and wishing to extol him to the highest, only styles him 
 
 25 'an elegant and philosophical poet;' nor are we able to 
 collect any unquestionable proofs that the true character- 
 istics of Thomson's genius as an imaginative poet* were 
 
 *- Since these observations upon Thomson were written, I have perused 
 the second edition of his ' Seasons,' and find that even that does not contain 
 the most striking passages which Warton points out for admiration; these 
 with other improvements, throughout the whole work, must have been added 
 at a later period. 
 
SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE PREFACE, 1813-184^. 79 
 
 perceived, till the elder Warton, almost forty years after 
 the publication of the 'Seasons,' pointed then! out by a 
 note in his Essay on the Life and Writings of Pope. In 
 the 'Castle of Indolence ' (of which Gray speaks so coldly) 
 these characteristics were almost as conspicuously dis- 5 
 played, and in verse more harmonious, and diction more 
 pure. Yet that fine poem was neglected on its appearance, 
 and is at this day the delight only of a few ! 
 
 When Thomson died, Collins breathed forth his regrets 
 in an Elegiac Poem, in which he pronounces a poetical lo 
 curse upon }ii77i who should regard with insensibility the 
 place where the Poet's remains were deposited. The 
 Poems of the mourner himself have now passed through 
 innumerable editions, and are universally known; but if, 
 when Collins died, the same kind of imprecation had been 15 
 pronounced by a -surviving admirer, small is the number 
 whom it would not have comprehended. The notice which 
 his poems attained during his life-time was so small, and 
 of course the sale so insignificant, that not long before his 
 death he deemed it right to repay to the bookseller the 20 
 sum which he had advanced for them, and threw the edi- 
 tion into the fire. 
 
 Next in importance to the 'Seasons ' of Thomson, though 
 at considerable distance from that work in order of time, 
 come the Reliques of Ancient Englisli Poetry ; collected, 25 
 new-modelled, and in many instances (if such a contradic- 
 tion in terms may be used) composed by the Editor, Dr. 
 Percy. This work did not steal silently into the world, as 
 is evident from the number of legendary tales, that appeared 
 not long after its publication; and had been modelled, as 3° 
 the authors persuaded themselves, after the old Lallad. 
 
80 WORDS IVOR TH'S PREFA CES. 
 
 The Compilation was however ill suited to the then exist- 
 ing taste af city society; and Dr. Johnson, 'mid the little 
 senate to which he gave laws, was not sparing in his exer- 
 tions to make it an object of contempt. The critic 
 
 5 triumphed, the legendary imitators were deservedly disre- 
 garded, and, as undeservedly, their ill-imitated models 
 sank, in this country, into temporary neglect; while 
 Burger, and other able writers of Germany, were translat- 
 ing, or imitating these Reliqiies, and composing, with the 
 
 10 aid of inspiration thence derived, poems which are the 
 delight of the German nation. Dr. Percy was so abashed 
 by the ridicule flung upon his labours from the ignorance 
 and insensibility of the persons with whom he lived, that, 
 though while he was writing under a mask he had not 
 
 15 wanted resolution to follow his genius into the regions of 
 true simplicity and genuine pathos (as is evinced by the 
 exquisite ballad of 'Sir Cauline ' and by many other 
 pieces), yet when he appeared in his own person and 
 character as a poetical writer, he adopted, as in the tale of 
 
 20 the 'Hermit of Warkworth, ' a diction scarcely in any one 
 of its features distinguishable from the vague, the glossy, 
 and unfeeling language of his day. I mention this remark- 
 able fact* with regret, esteeming the genius of Dr. Percy 
 in this kind of writing superior to that of any other man 
 
 * Shenstone, in his ' Schoolmistress,' gives a still more remarkable in- 
 stance of this timidity. On its first appearance, (See D'Israeli's 2d Series 
 of the Curiosities of Literature) the Poem was accompanied with an absurd 
 prose commentary, showing, as indeed some incongruous expressions in 
 the text imply, that the whole was intended for burlesque. In subse- 
 quent editions, the commentary was dropped, and the People have since 
 continued to read in seriousness, doing for the Author what he had not 
 courage openly to venture upon for himself. 
 
SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE PREFACE, 181^-184^. SI 
 
 by whom in modern times it has been cultivated. That 
 even Burger (to whom Klopstock gave, in my hearing, a 
 commendation which he denied to Goethe and Schiller, 
 pronouncing him to be a genuine poet, and one of the few 
 among the Germans whose works would last) had not the 5 
 fine sensibility of Percy, might be shown from many pas- 
 sages, in which he has deserted his original only to go 
 astray. For example, 
 
 Now daye was gone, and night was come, 
 
 And all were fast asleepe, ro 
 
 All save the Lady Emeline, 
 
 Who sate in her bowre to weepe : 
 
 And soone she heard her true Love's voice 
 
 Low whispering at the walle, 
 
 Awake, awake, my dear Ladye, 15 
 
 'Tis I thy true-love call. 
 
 Which is thus tricked out and dilated : 
 
 Als nun die Nacht Gebirg' und Thai 
 Vermummt in Rabenschatten, 
 
 .Und Hochburgs Lampen iiberall 20 
 
 Schon ausgeflimmert batten, 
 Und alles tief entschlafen war; 
 Doch nur das Fraulein immerdar 
 Voll Fieberangst, noch wachte, 
 
 Und seinen Ritter dachte : 25 
 
 Da horch ! Ein siisser Liebeston 
 Kam leis' empor geflogen. 
 ' Ho, Triidchen, ho ! Da bin ich schon ! 
 Frisch auf ! Dich angezogen ! ' 
 
 But from humble ballads we must ascend to heroics. 3° 
 
 All hail, Macpherson ! hail to thee, Sire of Ossian ! The 
 
82 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 Phantom was begotten by the smug embrace of an impu- 
 dent Highlander upon a cloud of tradition — it travelled 
 southward, where it was greeted with acclamation, and the 
 thin Consistence took its course through Europe, upon the 
 
 5 breath of popular applause. The Editor of the Reliques 
 had indirectly preferred a claim to the praise of invention, 
 by not concealing that his supplementary labours were 
 considerable ! how selfish his conduct, contrasted with that 
 of the disinterested Gael, who, like Lear, gives his king- 
 
 10 dom away, and is content to become a pensioner upon his 
 own issue for a beggarly pittance ! — Open this far-famed 
 Book ! — I have done so at random, and the beginning of 
 the 'Epic Poem Temora, ' in eight Books, presents itself. 
 'The blue waves of Ullin roll in light. The green hills 
 
 15 are covered with day. Trees shake their dusky heads in 
 the breeze. Grey torrents pour their noisy streams. Two 
 green hills with aged oaks surround a narrow plain. The 
 blue course of a stream is there. On its banks stood 
 Cairbar of Atha. His spear supports the king; the red 
 
 20 eyes of his fear are sad. Cormac rises on his soul with 
 all his ghastly wounds. ' Precious memorandums from the 
 pocket-book of the blind Ossian! 
 
 If it be unbecoming, as I acknowledge that for the most 
 part it is, to speak disrespectfully of Works that have 
 
 25 enjoyed for a length of time a widely-spread reputation, 
 without at the same time producing irrefragable proofs of 
 their unworthiness, let me be forgiven upon this occasion. 
 — Having had the good fortune to be born and reared in 
 a mountainous country, from my very childhood I have 
 
 30 felt the falsehood that pervades the volumes imposed upon 
 the world under the name of Ossian. From what I saw 
 
SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE PREFACE, 181^-1843. 83 
 
 with my own eyes, I knew that the imagery was spurious. 
 In Nature everything is distinct, yet nothing defined into 
 absolute independent singleness. In Macpherson's work, 
 it is exactly the reverse; every thing (that is not sto.len) is 
 in this manner defined, insulated, dislocated, deadened, 5 
 
 — yet nothing distinct. It will always be so when words 
 are substituted for things. To say that the characters 
 never could exist, that the manners are impossible, and 
 that a dream has more substance than the whole state of 
 society, as there depicted, is doing nothing more than 1° 
 pronouncing a censure which Macpherson defied; when, 
 with the steeps of Morven before his eyes, he could talk 
 
 so familiarly of his Car-borne heroes; — of Morven, which, 
 if one may judge from its appearance at the distance of a 
 few miles, contains scarcely an acre of ground sufficiently 15 
 accommodating for a sledge to be trailed along its surface. 
 
 — Mr. Malcolm Laing has ably shown that the diction of 
 this pretended translation is a motley assemblage from all 
 quarters; but he is so fond of making out parallel passages 
 
 as to call poor Macpherson to account for his ^ ands ' and 20 
 '■butsl' and he has weakened his argument by conducting 
 it as if he thought that every striking resemblance was a 
 co7iscious plagiarism. It is enough that the coincidences 
 are too remarkable for its being probable or possible that 
 they could arise in different minds without communication 25 
 between them. Now as the Translators of the Bible, and 
 Shakspeare, Milton, and Pope, could not be indebted to 
 Macpherson, it follows that he must have owed his fine 
 feathers to them; unless we are prepared gravely to assert, 
 with Madame de Stael, that many of the characteristic 3° 
 beauties of our most celebrated English Poets are derived 
 
S^^ WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 from the ancient Fingallian; in which case the modern 
 translator would have been but giving back to Ossian his 
 own. — It is consistent that Lucien Buonaparte, who could 
 censure Milton for having surrounded Satan in the infernal 
 
 5 regions with courtly and regal splendour, should pronounce 
 the modern Ossian to be the glory of Scotland ; — a country 
 that has produced a Dunbar, a Buchanan, a Thomson, and 
 a Burns! These opinions are of ill-omen for the Epic 
 ambition of him who has given them to the world. 
 
 10 Yet, much as those pretended treasures of antiquity have 
 been admired, they have been wholly uninfluential upon 
 the literature of the Country. No succeeding writer 
 appears to have caught from them a ray of inspiration; no 
 author, in the least distinguished, has ventured formally 
 
 15 to imitate them — except the boy, Chatterton, on their 
 first appearance. He had perceived, from the success- 
 ful trials which he himself had made in literary forgery, 
 how few critics were able to distinguish between a real 
 ancient medal and a counterfeit of modern manufacture ; 
 
 20 and he set himself to the work of filling a magazine with 
 Saxon Poems, — counterparts of those of Ossian, as like 
 his as one of his misty stars is to another. This incapa- 
 bility to amalgamate with the literature of the Island, is, 
 in my estimation, a decisive proof that the book is essen- 
 
 25 tially unnatural; nor should I require any other to demon- 
 strate it to be a forgery, audacious as worthless. Contrast, 
 in this respect, the effect of Macpherson's publication 
 with the Reliques of Percy, so unassuming, so modest in 
 their pretensions ! — I have already stated how much Ger- 
 
 30 many is indebted to this latter work; and for our own 
 country, its poetry has been absolutely redeemed by it. I 
 
SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE PREFACE, 181^-184^. S5 
 
 do not think that there is an able writer in verse of the 
 present day who would not be proud to acknowledge his 
 obligations to the Reliques; I know that it is so with my 
 friends j and, for myself, I am happy in this occasion to 
 make a public avowel of my own. \ 
 
 Dr. Johnson, more fortunate in his contempt of the 
 labours of Macpherson than those of his modest friend, 
 was solicited not long after to furnish Prefaces biographi- 
 cal and critical for the works of some of the most eminent 
 English Poets. The booksellers took upon themselves to ic 
 make the collection; they referred probably to the most 
 popular miscellanies, and, unquestionably, to their books 
 of accounts; and decided upon the claim of authors to be 
 admitted into a body of the most eminent, from the famil- 
 iarity of their names with the readers of that day, and by ^5 
 the protits, which, from the sale of his works, each had 
 brought and was bringing to the Trade. The Editor was 
 allowed a limited exercise of discretion, and the Authors 
 whom he recommended are scarcely to be mentioned with- 
 out a smile. We open the volume of Prefatory Lives, and 20 
 to our astonishment the yfri"/ name we find is that of Cow- 
 ley! — What is become of the morning-star of English 
 Poetry? Where is the bright Elizabethan constellation? 
 Or, if names be more acceptable than images, where is 
 the ever-to-be-honoured Chaucer? Where is Spenser? 25 
 where Sidney? and, lastly, where he, whose rights as a 
 poet, contradistinguished from those which he is univer- 
 sally allowed to possess as a dramatist, we have vindicated, 
 — where Shakspeare? — These, and a multitude of others 
 not unworthy to be placed near them, their contempo- 3° 
 raries and successors, we have not. But in their stead, we 
 
86 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 have (could better be expected when precedence was to be 
 settled by an abstract of reputation at any given period 
 made, as in this case before us?) Roscommon, and Step- 
 ney, and Phillips, and Walsh, and Smith, and Duke, and 
 
 5 King, andSpratt — Halifax, Granville, Sheffield, Congreve, 
 Broome, and other reputed Magnates — metrical writers 
 utterly worthless and useless, except for occasions like the 
 present, when their productions are referred to as evidence 
 what a small quantity of brain is necessary to procure a 
 
 10 considerable stock of admiration, provided the aspirant 
 will accommodate himself to the likings and fashions of 
 his day. 
 
 As I do not mean to bring down this retrospect to our 
 own times, it may with propriety be closed at the era of 
 
 15 this distinguished event. From the literature of other ages 
 and countries, proofs equally cogent might have been 
 adduced, that the opinions announced in the former part 
 of this Essay are founded upon truth. It was not an 
 agreeable office, nor a prudent undertaking, to declare 
 
 20 them; but their importance seemed to render it a duty. 
 It may still be asked, where lies the particular relation of 
 what has been said to these Volumes? — The question 
 will be easily answered by the discerning Reader who is old 
 enough to remember the taste that prevailed when some of 
 
 25 these poems were first published, seventeen years ago; 
 who has also observed to what degree the poetry of this 
 Island has since that period been coloured by them; and 
 who is further aware of the unremitting hostility with 
 which, upon some principle or other, they have each and 
 
 30 all been opposed. A sketch of my own notion of the 
 constitution of Fame has been given; and, as far as con- 
 
SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE PREFACE, 181^-184^. 87 
 
 cerns myself, I have cause to be satisfied. The love, the 
 admiration, the indifference, the slight, the aversion, and 
 even the contempt, with which these Poems have been 
 received, knowing, as I do, the source within my own 
 mind, from which they have proceeded, and the labour 5 
 and pains, which, when labour and pains appeared need- 
 ful, have been bestowed upon them, must all, if I think 
 consistently, be received as pledges and tokens, bearing 
 the same general impression, though widely different in 
 value; — they are all proofs that for the present time I 10 
 have not laboured in vain; and afford assurances, more or 
 less authentic, that the products of my industry will endure. 
 
 If there be one conclusion more forcibly pressed upon 
 us than another by the review which has been given of the 
 fortunes and fate of poetical Works, it is this, — that every ^5 
 author, as far as he is great and at the same time oiiginal, 
 has had the task of creatitig the taste by which he is to be 
 enjoyed; so has it been, so will it continue to be. This 
 remark was long since made to me by the philosophical 
 Friend for the separation of whose poems from my own I 20 
 have previously expressed my regret. The predecessors of 
 an original Genius of a high order will have smoothed the 
 way for all that he has in common with them; — and much 
 he will have in common; but, for what is peculiarly his 
 own, he will be called upon to clear and often to shape his 25 
 own road : — he will be in the condition of Hannibal 
 among the Alps. 
 
 And where lies the real difficulty of creating that taste by 
 which a truly original poet is to be relished? Is it in 
 breaking the bonds of custom, in overcoming the preju- 3° 
 dices of false refinement, and displacing the aversions of 
 
88 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 inexperience? Or, if he labour for an object which here 
 and elsewhere I have proposed to myself, does it consist 
 in divesting the reader of the pride that induces him to 
 dwell upon those points wherein men differ from each 
 
 5 other, to the exclusion of those in which all men are alike, 
 or the same; and in making him ashamed of the vanity 
 that renders him insensible of the appropriate excellence 
 which civil arrangements, less unjust than might appear, 
 and Nature illimitable in her bounty, have conferred on 
 
 10 men who may stand below him in the scale of society? 
 
 Finally, does it lie in establishing that dominion over the 
 
 spirits of readers by which they are to be humbled and 
 
 humanised, in order that they may be purified and exalted? 
 
 If these ends are to be attained by the mere communica- 
 
 15 tion of knowledge, it does not lie here. — Taste, I would 
 remind the reader, like Imagination, is a word which has 
 been forced to extend its services far beyond the point to 
 which philosophy would have confined them.^ It is a 
 metaphor, taken from a passive sense of the human body, 
 
 20 and transferred to things which are in their essence not 
 passive, — to intellectual acts and operations. The word, 
 Imagination, has been overstrained, from impulses hon- 
 ourable to mankind, to meet the demands of the faculty 
 which is perhaps the noblest of our nature. In the instance 
 
 25 of Taste, the process has been reversed; and from the 
 prevalence of dispositions at once injurious and discredit- 
 able, being no other than that selfishness which is the child 
 of apathy, — which, as Nations decline in productive and 
 creative power, makes them value themselves upon a pre- 
 
 30 sumed refinement of judging. Poverty of language is the 
 primary cause of the use which we make of the word, 
 
SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE PREFACE, 181^-184^. 89" 
 
 Imagination; but the word, Taste, has been stretched tQ 
 the sense which it bears in modern Europe by habits of 
 self-conceit, inducing that inversion in the order of things 
 whereb)^ a passive faculty is made paramount among the 
 faculties conversant with the fine arts. Proportion and > 
 congruity, the requisite knowledge being supposed, are 
 subjects upon which taste may be trusted; it is competent 
 to this office; — for in its intercourse with these the mind 
 I?, passive, and is affected painfully or pleasurably as by an 
 instinct. But the profound and the exquisite in feeling, 10 
 the lofty and universal in thought and imagination; or, in 
 ordinary language, the pathetic and the sublime; — are 
 neither of them, accurately speaking, objects of a faculty 
 which could ever without a sinking in the spirit of Nations 
 have been designated by the metaphor — Taste. And 15 
 why? Because without the exertion of a co-operating 
 power in the mind of the Reader, there can be no ade- 
 quate sympathy with either of these emotions : without this 
 auxiliary impulse, elevated or profound passion cannot exist. 
 
 Passion, it must be observed, is derived from a word 20 
 which signifies suffering ; but the connection which suffer- 
 ing has with effort, with exertion, and action, is immediate 
 and inseparable. How strikingly is this property of human 
 nature exhibited by the fact, that, in popular language, to 
 be in a passion, is to be angry ! — But, 25 
 
 Anger in hasty ivords or blows 
 Itself discharges on its foes. 
 
 To be moved, then, by a passion, is to be excited, often 
 to external, and always to internal, effort : whether for the 
 continuance and strengthening of the passion, or for its 3^^ 
 
90 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 suppression, accordingly as the course which it takes may 
 be painful or pleasurable. If the latter, the soul must 
 contribute to its support, or it never becomes vivid, — and 
 soon languishes, and dies. And this brings us to the 
 
 5 point. If every great poet with whose writings men are 
 familiar, in the highest exercise of his genius, before he 
 can be thoroughly enjoyed, has to call forth and to com- 
 municate powe7% this service, in a still greater degree, falls 
 upon an original writer, at his first appearance in the world. 
 
 lo — Of genius the only proof is, the act of doing well what 
 is worthy to be done, and what was never done before : Of 
 genius, in the fine arts, the only infallible sign is the 
 widening the sphere of human sensibility, for the delight, 
 honour, and benefit of human nature.^ Genius is the 
 
 '5 introduction of a new element into the intellectual uni- 
 verse: or, if that be not allowed, it is the application of 
 powers to objects on which they had not before been exer- 
 cised, or the employment of them in such a manner as to 
 produce effects hitherto unknown. What is all this but an 
 
 ^o advance, or a conquest, made by the soul of the poet? Is 
 it to be supposed that the reader can make progress of this 
 kind, like an Indian prince or general — stretched on his 
 palanquin, and borne by his slaves? No; he is invigorated 
 and inspirited by his leader, in order that he may exert 
 
 25 himself; for he cannot proceed in quiescence, he cannot be 
 carried like a dead weight. Therefore to create taste is 
 to call forth and bestow power, ^ of which knowledge is the 
 effect; and there lies the true difficulty. 
 
 As the pathetic participates of an ^;z/;;/^/ sensation, it 
 
 .30 might seem — that, if the springs of this emotion were 
 genuine, all men, possessed of competent knowledge of the 
 
SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE PREFACE, 1813-184^. 91 
 
 facts and circumstances, would be instantaneously affected. 
 And, doubtless, in the works of every true poet will be 
 found passages of that species of excellence, which is 
 proved by effects immediate and universal. But there are 
 emotions of the pathetic that are simple and direct, and 5 
 others — that are complex and revolutionary; some — to 
 which the heart yields with gentleness; others — against 
 which it struggles with pride; these varieties are infinite 
 as the combinations of circumstance and the constitutions 
 of character. Remember, also, that the medium through 10 
 which, in poetry, the heart is to be affected — is language; 
 a thing subject to endless fluctuations and arbitrary associ- 
 ations. The genius of the poet melts these down for his 
 purpose; but they retain their shape and quality to him 
 who is not capable of exerting, within his own mind, a 15 
 corresponding energy. There is also a meditative, as well 
 as a human, pathos; an enthusiastic, as well as an ordinary, 
 sorrow; a sadness that has its seat in the depths of reason, to 
 which the mind cannot sink gently of itself — but to which 
 it must descend by treading the steps of thought. And 20 
 for the sublime, — if we consider what are the cares that 
 occupy the passing day, and how remote is the practice 
 and the course of life from the sources of sublimity in the 
 soul of Man, can it be wondered that there is little exist- 
 ing preparation for a poet charged with a new mission to 25 
 extend its kingdom, and to augment and spread its enjoy- 
 ments? 
 
 Away, then, with the senseless iteration of the word 
 popular, applied to new works in poetry, as if there were 
 no test of excellence in this first of the fine arts but that 3<^ 
 all men should run after its productions, as if urged by an 
 
92 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 appetite, or constrained by a spell! — The qualities of 
 writing best fitted for eager reception are either such as 
 startle the world into attention by their audacity and 
 extravagance; or they are chiefly of a superficial kind 
 5 lying upon the surfaces of manners; or arising out of a 
 selection and arrangement of incidents, by which the mind 
 is kept upon the stretch of curiosity and the fancy amused 
 without the trouble of thought. But in every thing which 
 is to send the soul into herself, to be admonished of her 
 10 weakness, or to be made conscious of her power: — wher- 
 ever life and Nature are described as operated upon by 
 the creative or abstracting virtue of the imagination; 
 wherever the instinctive wisdom of antiquity and her heroic 
 passions uniting, in the heart of the poet, with the medi- 
 cs tative wisdom of later ages, have produced that accord of 
 sublimated humanity, which is at once a history of the 
 remote past and a prophetic enunciation of the remotest 
 future, there, the poet must reconcile himself for a season 
 to few and scattered hearers. — Grand thoughts (and 
 20 Shakspeare must often have sighed over this truth), as 
 they are most naturally and most fitly conceived in soli- 
 tude, so can they not be brought forth in the midst of 
 plaudits, without some violation of their sanctity. Go to 
 a silent exhibition of the productions of the Sister Art, and 
 25 be convinced that the qualities which dazzle at first sight, 
 and kindle the admiration of the multitude, are essentially 
 different from those by which permanent influence is 
 secured. Let us not shrink from following up these prin- 
 ciples as far as they will carry us, and conclude with 
 30 observing — that there never has been a period, and per- 
 haps never will be, in which vicious poetry, of some kind 
 
^ 
 
 SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE PREFACE, 1813-1843. 93 
 
 or other, has not excited more zealous admiration, and 
 been far more generally read, than good; but this advan- 
 tage attends the good, that the individual, as well as the 
 species, survives from age to age ; whereas, of the depraved, 
 though the species be immortal, the individual quickly 5 
 pe?'islies ; the object of present admiration vanishes, being 
 supplanted by some other as easily produced; which, 
 though no better, brings with it at least the irritation of 
 novelty, — with adaptation, more or less skilful, to the 
 changing humours of the majority of those who are most 10 
 at leisure to regard poetical works when they first solicit 
 their attention. 
 
 Is it the result of the whole, that, in the opinion of the 
 Writer, the judgment of the People is not to be respected? 
 The thought is most injurious; and, could the charge be ^5 
 brought against him, he would repel it with indignation. 
 The People have already been justified, and their eulogium 
 pronounced by implication, when it was said, above — 
 that, of good poetry, the individual, as well as the species, 
 su7'vives} And how does it survive but through the People? 20 
 What preserves it but their intellect and their wisdom? 
 
 Past and future, are the wings 
 
 On whose support, harmoniously conjoined, 
 
 Moves the great Spirit of human knowledge MS. 
 
 The voice that issues from this Spirit, is that Vox Populi 25 
 which the Deity inspires. Foolish must he be who can 
 mistake for this a local acclamation, or a transitory outcry 
 — transitory though it be for years, local though from a 
 Nation. Still more lamentable is his error who can 
 believe that there is anything of divine infallibility in the 3° 
 
94 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 clamour of that small though loud portion of the commu- 
 nity, ever governed by factitious influence, which, under 
 the name of the Public, passes itself, upon the unthinking, 
 for the People. Towards the Public, the Writer hopes 
 
 5 that he feels as much deference as it is entitled to : but to 
 the People, philosophically characterised, and tc the 
 embodied spirit of their knowledge, so far as it exists and 
 moves, at the present, faithfully supported by its two wings, 
 the past and the future, his devout respect, his reverence, 
 
 10 is due. He offers it willingly and readily; and, this done, 
 takes leave of his Readers, by assuring them — that, if he 
 were not persuaded that the contents of these Volumes, 
 and the Work to which they are subsidiary, evince some- 
 thing of the 'Vision and the Faculty divine;' and that, 
 
 15 both in words and things, they will operate in their degree, 
 to extend the domain of sensibility for the delight, the 
 honour, and the benefit of human nature, notwithstanding 
 the many happy hours which he has employed in their 
 composition, and the manifold comforts and enjoyments 
 
 20 they have procured to him, he would not, if a wish could 
 do it, save them from immediate destruction; — from 
 becoming at this moment, to the world, as a thing that had 
 never been.^ 
 
LETTER TO LADY BEAUMONT. 
 
 CoLEORTON, May 21, 1807.- 
 My dear Lady Beaumont, 
 
 Though I am to see you so soon, 1 cannot but write a 
 word or two, to thank you for the interest you take in my 
 poems, as evinced by your soHcitude about their immediate 
 reception. I write partly to thank you for this, and to ex- 5, 
 press the pleasure it has given me, and partly to remove 
 any uneasiness from your mind which the disappointments 
 you sometimes meet with, in this labour of love, may occa- 
 sion. I see that you have many battles to fight for me, — 
 more than, in the ardour and confidence of your pure and lo- 
 elevated mind, you had ever thought of being summoned 
 to ; but be assured that this opposition is nothing more 
 than what I distinctly foresaw that you and my other friends 
 would have to encounter. I say this, not to give myself 
 credit for an eye of prophecy, but to allay any vexatious 15 
 thoughts on my account which this opposition may have 
 produced in you. 
 
 It is impossible that any expectations can be lower thara 
 mine concerning the immediate effect of this little work 
 upon what is called the public. I do not here take into 2a 
 consideration the envy and malevolence, and all the bad 
 passions which always stand in the way of a work of any 
 
 95 
 
96 WORDS WOR TH'S PRE FA CES. 
 
 merit from a living poet ; ^ but merely think of the pure, 
 absolute, honest ignorance in which all worldlings of every 
 rank and situation must be enveloped, with respect to the 
 thoughts, feelings, and images, on which the life of my 
 
 5 poems depends. The things which I have taken, whether 
 from within or without, what have they to do with routs, 
 dinners, morning calls, hurry from door to door, from street 
 to street, on foot or in carriage ; with Mr. Pitt or Mr. Fox, 
 Mr. Paul or Sir Francis Burdett, the Westminster election 
 
 30 or the borough of Honiton? In a word — for I cannot stop 
 to make my way through the hurry of images that present 
 themselves to me — what have they to do with endless talk- 
 ing about things nobody cares anything for except as far 
 as their own vanity is concerned, and this with persons they 
 
 as care nothing for but as^ their vanity or selfishness is con- 
 cerned? — what have they to do (to say all at once) with 
 a life without love? In such a life there can be no thought ; 
 for we have no thought (save thoughts of pain) but as far 
 as we have love and admiration. 
 
 20 It is an awful truth, that there neither is, nor can be, any 
 genuine enjoyment of poetry among nineteen out of twenty 
 of those persons who live, or wish to live, in the broad light 
 of the world ^ — among those who either are, or are striving 
 to make themselves, people of consideration in society. 
 
 ^5 This is a truth, and an awful one, because to be incapable 
 of a feeling of poetry, in my sense of the word, is to be 
 without love of human nature and reverence for God. 
 
 Upon this I shall insist elsewhere ; at present let me con- 
 fine myself to my object, which is to make you, my dear 
 
 30 friend, as easy-hearted as myself with respect to these 
 poems. Trouble not yourself upon their present reception ; 
 
LETTER TO LADY BEAUMONT. 97 
 
 of what moment is that compared with what I trust is their 
 destiny ? — to console the afflicted ; to add sunshine to day- 
 light, by making the happy happier ; to teach the young 
 and the gracious of every age to see, to think, and feel, and, 
 therefore, to become more actively and securely virtuous ; 5 
 this is their office, which I trust they will faithfully perform, 
 long after we (that is, all that is mortal of us) are mould- 
 ered in our graves.^ I am well aware how far it would seem 
 to many I overrate my own exertions, when I speak in this 
 way, in direct connection with the volume I have just made 10 
 public. 
 
 I am not, however, afraid of such censure, insignificant as 
 probably the majority of those poems would appear to very 
 respectable persons. I do not mean London wits and wit- 
 lings, for these have too many foul passions about them to 15 
 be respectable, even if they had more intellect than the 
 benign laws of Providence will allow to such a heartless 
 existence as theirs is ; but grave, kindly-natured, worthy 
 persons, who would be pleased if they could. I hope that 
 these volumes are not without some recommendations, even 20 
 for readers of this class : but their imagination has slept ; 
 and the voice which is the voice of my poetry, without 
 imagination, cannot be heard. Leaving these, I was going 
 
 to say a word to such readers as Mr. . Such ! — how 
 
 would he be offended if he knew I considered him only as 25 
 a representative of a class, and not an unique ! 'Pity,' says 
 
 Mr. ' that so many trifling things should be admitted 
 
 to obstruct the view of those that have merit.' Now, let 
 this candid judge take, by way of. example, the sonnets, 
 which, probably, with the exception of two or three other 3° 
 poems, for which I will not contend, appear to him the 
 
98 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 most trifling, as they are the shortest. I would say to him, 
 omitting things of higher consideration, there is one thing 
 which must strike you at once, if you will only read these 
 poems, — that those ' to Libe7'ty^ at least, have a connec- 
 
 5 tion with, or a bearing upon, each other ; and, therefore, if 
 individually they want weight, perhaps, as a body, they may 
 not be so deficient. At least, this ought to induce you to 
 suspend your judgment, and quahfy it so far as to allow 
 that the writer aims at least at comprehensiveness. 
 
 lo But, dropping this, I would boldly say at once, that these 
 sonnets, while they each fix the attention upon some impor- 
 tant sentiment, separately considered, do, at the same time, 
 collectively make a poem on the subject of civil liberty and 
 national independence, which, either for simplicity of style 
 
 ^5 or grandeur of moral sentiment, is, alas ! likely to have few 
 parallels in the poetry of the present day.^ Again, turn to 
 the ' Moods of my own Mind.^ There is scarcely a poem 
 here of above thirty hnes, and very trifling these poems will 
 appear to many ; but, omitting to speak of them individu- 
 
 ^° ally, do they not, taken collectively, fix the attention upon 
 a subject eminently poetical, viz., the interest which objects 
 in Nature derive from the predominance of certain affec- 
 tions, more or less permanent, more or less capable of salu- 
 tary renewal in the mind of the being contemplating these 
 
 25 objects? This is poetic, and essentially poetic. And why? 
 Because it is creative. . . . 
 
 My letter (as this second sheet, which I am obliged to 
 take, admonishes me) is growing to an enormous length ; 
 and yet, saving that I-have expressed my calm confidence 
 
 30 that these poems will live, I have said nothing which has 
 a particular application to the object of it, which was to 
 
LETTER TO LADY BEAUMONT. 99 
 
 remove all disquiet from your mind on account of the con- 
 demnation they may at present incur from that portion of 
 my contemporaries who are called the public. I am sure, 
 my dear Lady Beaumont, if you attach any importance to 
 it, it can only be from an apprehension that it may affect 5 
 me, upon which I have already set you at ease ; or from a 
 fear that this present blame is ominous of their future or 
 final destiny. If this be the case, your tenderness for me 
 betrays you. Be assured that the decision of these persons 
 has nothing to do with the question ; they are altogether 10 
 incompetent judges. These people, in the senseless hurry 
 of their idle lives, do not read books, they merely snatch 
 a glance at them, that they may talk about them.^ And 
 even if this were not so, never forget what, I believe, was 
 observed to you by Coleridge, that every great and original ^5 
 writer, in proportion as he is great or original, must himself 
 create the taste by which he is to be reUshed ; he must 
 teach the art by which he is to be seen ; this, in a certain 
 degree, even to all persons, however wise and pure may 
 be their lives, and however unvitiated their taste. But for 20 
 those who dip into books in order to give an opinion of 
 them, or talk about them to take up an opinion — for this 
 multitude of unhappy, and misguided, and misguiding beings, 
 an entire regeneration must be produced ; and if this be 
 possible, it must be a work of time. To conclude, my ears 25 
 are stone-dead to this idle buzz, and my flesh as insensible 
 as iron to these petty stings; and, after what I have said, I 
 am sure yours will be the same, I doubt not that you will 
 share with me an invincible confidence that my writings 
 (and among them these httle poems) will co-operate with 3° 
 the benign tendencies in human nature and society, wher- 
 
100 WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES. 
 
 » 
 ever found ; and that they will, m their degree, be effica- 
 cious in making men wiser, better, and happier.^ Farewell ! 
 I will not apologise for this letter, though its length demands 
 an apology. Believe me, eagerly wishing for the happy day 
 5 when I shall see you and Sir George here. 
 
 Most affectionately yours, 
 
 W. Wordsworth. 
 
NOTES. 
 
 PREFACE (1 800-1 845). 
 
 Page i, 1. 7. i. Cf. ''Advertisement," Zj^zVa/^^/Z-^d'^ (1798) : "The 
 majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. 
 They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language 
 of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to 
 the purposes of poetic pleasure." 
 
 Line 16. 2. Cf. Arnold, Essays i)i Criticism, '* Wordsworth " : "I firmly 
 believe that the poetical performance of Wordsworth is, after that of 
 Shakespeare and Milton, of which all the world now recognizes the worth, 
 undoubtedly the most considerable in our language from the Elizabethan 
 age to the present time." 
 
 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 162: ** I cannot likewise but add 
 that the comparison of such poems of merit as have been given to the 
 public within the last ten or twelve years, with the majority of those pro- 
 duced previously to the appearance of that Preface, leave no doubt in my 
 mind that Mr. Wordsworth is fully justified in believing his efforts to have 
 been by no means ineffectual." 
 
 Pater, Appreciations, 40 : " Those who have undergone his (Words- 
 worth's) influence are like people who have passed through some initiation, 
 a disciplijia Arcani^ by submitting to which they become able constantly 
 to distinguish in art, speech, feeling, manners, that which is organic, 
 animated, expressive, from that which is only conventional, derivative, 
 inexpressive." 
 
 P. 2, 1. 3. I. Cf. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 36: " In the critical 
 remarks, prefixed and annexed to the Lyrical Ballads, I believe that we 
 
 101 
 
102 NOTES. 
 
 may safely rest, as the true origin of the unexampled opposition which 
 Mr. Wordsworth's writings have been since doomed to encounter." 
 
 Knight, Life of Wordstvorth^ X., 329: "The Preface was written at the 
 request of Mr. Coleridge." — W. W. 
 
 P. 3, 1. 18. I. These lines are from " Advertisement " to lyrical Ballads 
 (1798). Cf. Robertson, Lectures ana Addresses^ 92: "But of course if 
 you lead a sensual life, or a mercenary or artificial life, you will not read 
 these truths in nature. A pure heart and a simple, manly life alone can 
 reveal to you all that which seer and poet saw." 
 
 Sir Henry Taylor, Critical Essays ojt Poetry, 46 : " For an ear which 
 knows of no other rhythmical music than the unqualified up and down 
 movement of trochees and iambs, or the canter of anapests, the ' numerous 
 verse ' of Wordsworth will have been modulated in vain." 
 
 P. 4, 1. 10. I. These lines were written in 1802 and are the develop- 
 ment of the following, written in 1798 and 1800 respectively: "The 
 majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. 
 They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language 
 of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to 
 the purposes of poetic pleasure." — Advertisement (1798). 
 
 " The principal object, then, which I proposed to myself in these 
 poems was to make the incidents of common life interesting by tracing in 
 them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature, 
 chiefly as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state 
 of excitement." — Preface (1800). 
 
 "The knowledge of nature is only half the task of a poet; he must 
 be acquainted likewise with all modes of life. His character requires that he 
 estimate the happiness and misery of every condition." — Johnson, Rasselas. 
 
 " Imitative art in its highest form — poetry — is an expression of the 
 universal element in human life." — Aristotle, Poetics. 
 
 L. 23. 2. "There is nothing that exists, except things ignoble and mean, 
 in which the true poet may not find himself at home, — in the open sights 
 of nature, in the occult secrets of science, in the qiiicqtiid agnnt homines, 
 in men's character and fortunes, in their actions and sufferings, their joys 
 and sorrows. . . . Those who are familiar with the poor know how much 
 of that feeling language, which is the essence of poetry, may be heard 
 under cottage roofs." — SiiAiRP, Aspects of Poetry. 
 
PREFACE ( 1 800-1 845). 103 
 
 " In every parish there is a whole IHad of action and of passion, if we 
 have been taught to trace their workings by one of those men whom nature 
 has chosen for her expositors." — De Vere, Essays, Literary and Ethical. 
 
 " Poetry is essentially of the people and for the people." — F. W. 
 Robertson, Lectures and Addresses. 
 
 Cf. Coleridge, Biographia LMeraria, 168: "To this I reply that a rus- 
 tic's language, purified from all provincialism and grossness, and so far 
 reconstructed as to be made consistent with the rules of grammar, will not 
 differ from the language of any other man of common sense, however 
 learned or refined he may be, except so far as the notions which the rustic 
 has to convey are fewer and more indiscriminate." 
 
 P. 5, 1. 9. I. Cf. Shairp, Aspects of Poetry^ 19 : " And the poet, instead 
 of adopting the approved diction of poets, or coining tropes and images 
 of his own, cannot do better than adopt the language of genuine emotion, 
 as it comes warm from the lips of suffering men and women." 
 
 L. 25. 2. Cf. Shairp, Aspects of Poetry, 22: "The impulse to poetic 
 composition is, I believe, in the first instance spontaneous, almost uncon- 
 scious; and where the inspiration, as we call it, is most strong and deep, 
 there a conscious purpose is least apparent." Cf. Shelley, Defense of Poetry, 
 
 39- 5-12. 
 
 L. 27. 3. Cf. Shelley, Defense of Poetry, 2. 1-3; 10. 8-9. Cf. Shairp, 
 Aspects of Poetry, 41 : " Philosophers, who themselves, gifted with imagina- 
 tion, understand its ways of working, acknowledge that there is about the 
 origin of the poetic impulse something which defies analysis, — born not 
 taught, — inexplicable and mysterious. Plato's few words upon it in Lon 
 are worth all Aristotle's methodical treatise on poetry." 
 
 P. 6, 1. 4. I. Cf. Shelley, Defense of Poetry, 10. 5-7; 14. 6-10. 
 
 L. 24. 2. Cf. Arnold, Essays in Criticism, " Byron " : " Wordsworth's 
 simplicity is in the power with which he feels the resources of joy offered 
 to us in nature, offered to us in the primary human affections and duties, 
 and in the power with which, in his moments of inspiration, he renders 
 this joy and makes us, too, feel it. . . . But for poetry the idea is every- 
 thing; the rest is a world of illusion." Cf. Shairp, Aspects of Poetry, 17: 
 " You admire Homer, /Eschylus, Shakespeare, perhaps Scott and Words- 
 worth and Shelley, but v/here did these get their inspiration? ... by 
 going straight to the true sources of all poetry, by knowing and loving 
 
104 NOTES. 
 
 nature, by acquaintance with their own hearts, and by knowledge of their 
 fellow-men." 
 
 P. 7, 1. 4. I. Cf. Shairp, Aspects of Poetry, 12 : "To appeal to the higher 
 side of human nature, and to strengthen it, to come to its rescue when it 
 is overborne by worldliness and material interests, to support it by great 
 truths, set forth in their most attractive form, — this is the only worthy 
 aim, the adequate end of all poetic endeavor." Cf Shelley, Defense of 
 Poetry, 46. 4-6. 
 
 L. 19. 2. Cf. Bagehot, Literary Studies, II., 389: "A dressy literature, 
 an exaggerated literature, seem to be fated to us; these are our curses." 
 Harrison, Choice of Books, 23 : " If you find Milton, Dante, Calderon, 
 Goethe, 90 much Hebrew-Greek to you; if your Homer and Virgil, your 
 Moliere and Scott rest year after year undisturbed, . . . and you are wont 
 to leave the Bible and the Imitation for some wet Sunday afternoon . . . 
 your mental digestion is ruined or sadly out of order." 
 
 P. 8, 1. 10. I. Cf. Shairp, Aspects of Poetry, Ch. V. 
 
 L. 13. 2. Aristotle says, " Art imitates nature," but by imitation he 
 means, not copying, but a creative act by which the various elements are 
 united into an organic whole, — an ideal. How extremely difficult this 
 creative imitation is has been beautifully expressed by Sir Henry Taylor : — 
 
 " 'Tis a speech 
 That by a language of familiar lowness 
 Enhances what of more heroic vein 
 Is next to follow. But one fault it hath ; 
 It fits too close to life's realities, 
 In truth to Nature, missing truth to Art." — A Sicilian Summer. 
 
 Cf. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 162. 31 et seq. 
 
 L. 27. 3. Cf Arnold, Essays in Criticism, " Wordsworth " : " Words- 
 worth's poetry, when he is at his best, is inevitable, as inevitable as nature 
 herself It might seem that nature not only gave him the matter for his 
 poem, but wrote his poem for him." Cf. Newman, Poetry ivith Reference 
 to Aristotle^s Poetics, 27. 6-15; Sidney, Defeiice of Poesy, ii. 8-12. 
 
 P. 9, 1. 3. I. Wordsworth here agrees with Aristotle who was the first 
 critic to insist that poetry is an emotional delight, its end to give pleasure. 
 Of course here Aristotle distinguishes between the higher and lower forms 
 of pleasure, and means aesthetic delight coming from contemplating the 
 
PREFACE ( 1 800- 1 845). 105 
 
 beautiful. Cf. Butcher, Glimpses of Greek Genius, for a study of Aristotle's 
 idea. Cf. 'ih.d.\xY>, Aspeds of Poetry^ ii: "As to the aim which the poets 
 set before him, the end which poetry is meant to fulfil, what shall be said? 
 Here the critics, ancient and modern, answer almost with one voice, that 
 the end is to give pleasure." Cf. Dallas, Gay Science, Ch. V.; Sidney, 
 Defence of Poesy, 9. 12-16; Shelley, Defense of Poetry, 11. 16-12. 7. 
 
 L. 7. 2. Cf. Arnold, Essays in Criticism, "Gray": "The language of 
 genuine poetry is the language of one composing with his eye on the sub- 
 ject; its evolution that of a thing which has been plunged into the poet's 
 soul until it comes forth naturally and necessarily." 
 
 L. 12. 3. Cf. kxT\o\^, Essays in Criticism^ "Wordsworth": " Long ago 
 in speaking of Homer, I said that the noble and profound application of 
 ideas to life is the most essential part of poetic greatness." Cf. Newman, 
 Aristotle's Poetics, 22. 15-30. 
 
 L. 31. 4. Cf. Newman, Aristotle's Poetics, 12. 16-20; Shelley, Defense 
 of Poetry, 9, 5-7. Cf. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Ch. XXI. "The 
 strength of poetry is in its thought, not in its form; and with great 
 lyrists, their music is always secondary, and their substance, primary. — ' 
 RUSKIN. 
 
 " Readers of superior judgment may disapprove of the style in which 
 many of these pieces are executed. It must be expected that many lines 
 and phrases will not exactly suit their taste. It will perhaps appear to them 
 that, wishing to avoid the prevalent fault of the day, the author has some- 
 times descended too low, and that many of his expressions are too familiar, 
 and not of sufficient dignity." — Advertisement (1798). 
 
 P. 10, 1. 7. I. Aristotle in his Poetics places little stress on the idea that 
 metre is essential to poetry. Says Professor Butcher, " It seems that he 
 was inclined to extend the meaning of the word poet to include any prose 
 writer whose work was an ' imitation ' (creation) within the artistic mean- 
 ing of the term." Keble says, "This notion of the uses of metre as sub- 
 sidiary to the end we attribute to poetry may seem to be confirmed by 
 references to the compositions to which the term poetry is applied without 
 any sort of metre." Cf. Shelley, Defense of Poetry, 9. 5-7; Sidney, 
 Defence of Poesy, il. 4-25; Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 149. 28 
 et seq. 
 
 P. II, 1. 9. I. Cf. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 182. 9 et seq. "A 
 
106 NOTES. 
 
 poet should think like a genius, but talk the same language as any one 
 else." — Schopenhauer, Art in Literature. 
 
 L. 12. 2. " It might have been foreseen that, in the rotations of mind, 
 the province of poetry in prose v^ould find its assertor. . . . Prose will 
 exert in due measure all the varied charms of poetry down to the rhythm 
 which, as in Cicero, Michelet, or Newman, gives its musical value to 
 every syllable." — Pater. Cf. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 170. 25 
 etseq.; Shelley, Z)<?/t'«j'(? of Poetry, 9. 5-7; '^iv^xv^y, Defence of Poesy, ii. 
 8-25. Shairp, Aspects of Poetry, 51 : "I grant that the old limits between 
 prose and poetry tend to disappear." Cf. Shairp, Aspects of Poetry, Ch. 
 XIV. Whipple says of Emerson, " His greatest poetic achievements have 
 been in prose." 
 
 P. 12, 1. 14. I. Cf. Shelley, Defense of Poetry, 7. 3 et seq. Pater, Appre- 
 ciations, 6 : " All beauty is, in the long run, ov\y finetiess of truth, or what 
 we call expression, the finer accumulation of speech to the vision within." 
 Cf. Bagehot, Literary Studies, II. : The Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque in 
 Art and Poetry. 
 
 P. 13, 1. 20. I. "It was part of Wordsworth's great message to this 
 country to remind us that the sphere of the poet is not only in the extraor- 
 dinary, but in the ordinary and common." — Rev. F. W. ROBERTSON. 
 
 Pater, Appreciations, 12 : " Great mental force certainly was needed by 
 Wordsworth to break through the consecrated poetic associations of a 
 century and speak the language that was his, that was to become in a 
 measure the language of the next generation." 
 
 L. 24. 2. Cf. Shairp, Aspects of Poetry, 8 : *' A great poet must be a man 
 made wise by large experience, much feeling, and deep reflection; above 
 all, he must have a hold of the great central truth of things." Cf. Cole- 
 ridge, Biographia Literaria, 148 : " A poem is that species of composition 
 which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object 
 pleasure, not truth; and from all other species (having this object in 
 common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight 
 from the whole as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each 
 component part." Cf. Shelley, Defense of Poetry, 38. 16 <?/ seq.; Sidney, 
 Defence of Poesy, 31. 18-32. 7; Tennyson, The Poet. 
 
 P. 15, 1. 2. I. Cf. Shairp, Aspects of Poetry, 3: "He does not feel 
 differently from other men, but he feels more." 
 
PREFACE (1 800-1 845). 107 
 
 " A work of art is an idealised copy of human life, — of character, emo- 
 tion, action, — under forms manifest to sense." — Butcher. 
 
 ''Poetry has ever recognised these two great offices, distinct though 
 allied, — the one, that of representing the actual world; the other, that of 
 creating an ideal region, into which spirits whom this world has wearied 
 may retire. ... A perfect poet ought to discharge both these great 
 offices of poetry." — De Vere, Two Schools of Poetry. Cf. Newman, 
 Aristotle's Poetics, li. 4-10; Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 150. 5 
 et seq. 
 
 L. 13. 2. " Depend upon it, you would gain unspeakably if you would 
 learn with me to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and 
 the comedy, lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through 
 dull gray eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones." — 
 George Eliot. 
 
 L. 27. 3. Cf. Arnold, Essays in Criticism. The Study of Poetry, 55: 
 " Good literature never will lose currency with the world ; in spite of 
 momentary appearances, it never will lose supremacy. Currency and 
 supremacy are insured to it ... by the instinct of self-preservation in 
 humanity." 
 
 P. 16, 1. I. I. Cf. Shelley, Defense of Poetry, r^. 33-11. 7; Sidney, 
 Defence of Poesy, 13. 6-26. il; Coltxidge, Biographia Literaria, 155. 
 
 De Vere, Essays, Literary and Ethical, 10 : " Poetry is but the flashing 
 eye and philosophy the brooding brow, of one and the same contemplative 
 Intelligence." 
 
 Leslie Stephen, Hours in a Library, 178: "Under every poetry, it has 
 been said, there lies a philosophy. Rather, it may almost be said, every 
 poetry is philosophy." 
 
 " Poetry is more philosophic and of higher worth than history." — 
 Aristotle, Poetics. Both poetry and philosophy deal with the universal, 
 and have their meeting-point in it; the one expresses the universal through 
 the imagination, the other through the reason. 
 
 L. 7. 2. " It is the poet's function to relate not what has happened, 
 but what may happen according to the law of necessary sequence." — 
 Aristotle, Poetics. 
 
 " Art commends not counterparts and copies, 
 But from our life a nobler life would shape : 
 
108 NOTES. 
 
 Bodies celestial from terrestrial raise, 
 And teach us not jujunely what we are, 
 But what we may be, when the Parian block 
 Yields to the hand of Phidias." 
 
 — Sir H. Taylor, A Sicilian Summer, 
 
 L. 1 6. 3. Cf. Shelley, Defense of Poetry ^ 11. 15; Newman, Aristotle's 
 Poetics, 10. 6-7; Dallas, Gay Sciejice ; The Agreement of the Critics. 
 
 L. 21. 4, Aristotle in his Ethics implies that it is to the man of moral 
 insight that ethical questions are to be submitted, and in his Poetics he 
 implies that it is to the man of sure and sound appreciation that the question 
 of taste is to be submitted. In either case the judgment will be immediate. 
 
 P. 17, 1. 26, I. Cf. Excursion, Proem, On Alan, on N'attire, etc. "The 
 whole grand idea is that God has made these two — man and nature — for 
 one another and to develop each other; and this mighty object is, that we 
 should realize, in the marriage of the mind and the external w^orld, the 
 pre-arranged harmony. It is a sketch which is filled up in various ways in 
 the minor poems. It forms the true burden of the * Excursion ' and the 
 ' Prelude.' " — Stopford Brooke, Theology in the English Poets. 
 
 P. 18, 1. II. I. Cf. Arnold, Discourses in America, " Numbers." 
 
 P. 19, I. I. Cf. Shelley, Defense of Poetry, 38. 16; Sidney, Defence of 
 Poesy, 57. 1-27. Cf. Arnold, Essays in Criticism, "Wordsworth": "It is 
 important, therefore, to hold fast to this : that poetry is at bottom a criti- 
 cism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful 
 application of ideas to life, — to the question. How to live?" Cf. 
 Symonds, J. A,, Essays, Speculative and Suggestive : " Is Poetry a Criticism 
 of Life?" 
 
 L. 21. 2. Science deals with facts; poetry with truths. Facts reveal 
 what has been; truths what must be. Lowell (^Latest Literary Essays, 
 183), says, "The more she (science) makes one lobe of the brain Arie- 
 totelian, so much more will the other intrigue for an invitation to the 
 banquet of Plato." 
 
 Stopford Brooke, Theology in English Poets : " Wordsworth disliked, 
 as much as Socrates did, the people who would believe in nothing or con- 
 sider nothing but that which lay before their eyes." Cf. " Wordsworth's 
 Relation to Science," Wordsworth Society Transactions. 
 
 L. 27. 3. Cf. Pater, Appreciations, 15: "A true artist will remember 
 
PREFACE (1800- 1 845). 109 
 
 that, as the very word ornament indicates what is in itself non-essential, so 
 the * one beauty ' of all literary style is of its very essence and independent, 
 in prose and verse alike, of all removable decoration." 
 
 P. 20, 1. 21. I. Cf. Arnold, Essays in Criticism, •' Maurice de Guerin " : 
 "Poetry interprets in two ways; it interprets by expressing with magical 
 felicity the physiognomy and movement of the outward world, and it 
 interprets by expressing, with inspired conviction, the ideas and laws of 
 the inward world of man's moral and spiritual nature. In other words, 
 poetry is interpretative, both by having natural magic in it and by having 
 moral profundity.'''' 
 
 P. 21, 1. 25. I. Cf. Pater, Appreciatiotis : "With him (Wordsworth) 
 metre is but an additional grace, accessory to that deeper music of words 
 and sounds, that moving power, which they exercise in the nobler prose, 
 no less than in formal poetry." Cf. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 186. 
 II. Cf. Shairp, Aspects of Poetry, " Prose Poets." 
 
 P. 25, 1. 12. I. Cf. Ruskin, The Imaginatioji ; UTodern Painters, Vol. 
 II., part III., Chs. I.-IV. 
 
 L. 31. 2. Cf. Newman, Aristotle'' s Poetics, 15. 20 et seq. ; Wordsworth, 
 Tintern Abbey, Daffodils, Ode On Intimations of Ii7imortality ; Myers' 
 Life of Wordszvorth, 144. Dallas, Gay Science, I., 318: "Given the 
 magic words, given the magic touch . . . and all good poetry and art will 
 force the burial places of memory to render up their dead. . . . The 
 poetry of Wordsworth abounds with passages that vividly refer to the con- 
 cealed life of the mind and the secret of poetry." 
 
 " Aristotle says its origin is in the after effect of a sensation, the con- 
 tinued presence of an impression after the object which first excited it 
 has been withdrawn from actual experience." — Wallace, Aristotle'' s 
 Psychology. 
 
 Dowden, Transcripts and Studies, 114, 115: "His creative mood was 
 itself a return upon some moment or season of involuntary rapture or 
 vision." 
 
 P. 26, 1. 23. I. "Poetry must have truth and seriousness in subject, 
 felicity and perfection in form." — Arnold. 
 
 P. 27, 1. 18. I. Cf. Dowden, Transcripts and Studies, 143: "Not a 
 few of the later readings in Wordsworth's text had their origin in the 
 writer's wish to temper some expression which seemed too harsh or violent. 
 
no NOTES. 
 
 to bring within bounds some extravagance, or to tone down into harmony 
 with its surroundings some line of crude vividness." 
 
 P. 28, 1. 23. I. Mr. Myers, in comparing this Preface with that of the 
 edition of 1815, says: "His first Preface is violently polemic. ... In 
 his Preface of 181 5 he is not less severe oh false sentiment and false 
 observation. But his views of the complexity and dignity of poetry have 
 been much developed, and he is willing now to draw his favorable instances 
 (not from Babes in the Wood), but from Shakespeare, Milton, Virgil, and 
 himself." Cf. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 178. 
 
 P. 29, 1. 22. I. Cf. Dowden, Transcripts and Studies ; Interpretation 
 of Literature ; J. A. Symonds, Essays, Speculative and Suggestive, I., 
 98; On Some Principles of Criticism ; Arnold, Essays in Criticism, 6. 
 Robertson, Lectures and Addresses, 163: "And here lies the great diffi- 
 culty, the peculiar difficulty of our age; it is an age of cant, without love, 
 of criticism, without reverence. . . . What we want is the old spirit of 
 our forefathers; the firm conviction that not by criticism, but by sympathy, 
 we must understand." 
 
 APPENDIX (1 802- 1 845). 
 
 P. 33, 1. 12. I. Cf. Shelley, Z'i?/c";/i'6' of Poetry, 5. 8-14; Sidney, Defence 
 of Poesy, 2. 27-30. 
 
 L. 20. 2. Cf. De Vere, Essays, Literary and Ethical: "Literature 
 begins by being a Vocation or an Art; it becomes subsequently a Profes- 
 sion; in its decline it sinks into a Trade." 
 
 Cf. Keats, Sleep and Poetry : — 
 
 "A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask 
 Of Poesy." 
 
 P. 34, 1. 22, I. Cf. Lowell, Latest Literary Essays, 2: "Diction was 
 expected to do for imagination what only imagination could do for it, and 
 the magic which was personal to the magician was supposed to reside in 
 the formula." 
 
 P- 35> 1- 7P- I- Cf. Corson, Lntroduction to Broitniing^ " Spiritual Ebb 
 and Flow in English Poetry." 
 
SUPPLEMENTARY ESSAY (1815-1845). Ill 
 
 PREFACE (1815-1845). 
 
 P. 41, 1. 19. 2. Cf. Sidney, Defence of Poesy, 26. 12-31. 17. Pastoral, 
 elegiac, iambic, satiric, comedy, tragedy, the lyric, the epic. 
 
 P. 43, 1. 21. I. There is no doubt that Wordsworth's classification of 
 his poems was the correct one. Mr. Arnold attempted a revision, but it 
 can hardly be considered as an improvement. Professor Knight has used 
 the chronological arrangement in his edition of the poet's works, and with 
 good reason, we think, as his plan is to present the growth of Words- 
 worth's mJnd and art. 
 
 P. 45, 1. 25. I. Cf. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Ch. IV.; Dallas, 
 Gay Science, I., Ch. VI.; Ruskin, Modern Painters, Vol. II., Chs. I.-IV. 
 
 P- 55) 1- 7* I- "Fancy plays like a squirrel in its circular prison, and 
 is happy; but Imagination is a pilgrim on the earth, and her home in 
 heaven." — Ruskin. 
 
 ESSAY SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE PREFACE (181 5-1 845). 
 
 P. 59, 1. 13. I. The nation, as the individual, has three periods in its 
 relation to poetry and art: first, youth, or the heroic, creative period; 
 second, manhood, or the materialistic and critical period; and third, 
 when there is a return to the early joys and loves, on the part of some. 
 Wordsworth expresses this in 
 
 " My heart leaps up when I behold 
 
 A rainbow in the sky ; 
 So was it when my life began ; 
 So is it now I am a man ; 
 So be it when I grow old, 
 
 Or let me die ! " 
 
 L. 17. 2. Cf. Arnold, Essays in Criticism, "The Study of Poetry": 
 " We should conceive of poetry worthily, and more worthily than it has 
 been the custom to conceive of it. We should conceive of it as capable 
 of higher uses, and called to higher destinies than those which in general 
 men have assigned to it hitherto. More and more mankind will discover 
 that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to 
 sustain us." 
 
112 NOTES. 
 
 P. 60, 1. 31. I. Cf. Arnold, Essays in Criticism, " The Study of Poetry " : 
 " But if we conceive thus highly of the destinies of poetry, we must also 
 set our standard for poetry high, since poetry to be capable of fulfilhng 
 such high destinies must be poetry of a high order of excellence." 
 Lowell, Democracy and other Essays, 116: "The first lesson in reading 
 well is that which teaches us to distinguish between literature and merely 
 printed matter." 
 
 P. 61, 1. 28. I. "The thoughts which inspire a vigorous literature are 
 those which have been quickened by experience. . . . Action and suffer- 
 ing, not abstraction, bequeath experience, and experience communicates 
 reality to thought." — De Vere, Literature in its Social Aspects. 
 
 " That time is pas*-, 
 And all its aching joys are now no more, 
 And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this 
 Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts 
 Have followed; for such loss I would believe. 
 Abundant recompense. — Ti?itern Abbey. 
 
 " So once it would have been, — 'tis so no more ; 
 I have submitted to a new control ; 
 A power is gone, which nothing can restore ; 
 A deep distress hath humanized my soul. — Peele Castle. 
 
 " We will grieve not, rather find 
 Strength in what remains behind ; 
 In the primal sympathy 
 Which having been must ever be ; 
 In the soothing thoughts that spring 
 Out of human suffering." — Intimations 0/ Immortality. 
 
 P. 62, 1. II. I. Cf. Lowell, Latest Literary Essays, 6: *' Through the 
 whole eighteenth century the artificial school of poetry reigned by a kind 
 of undivine right over a public which admired — and yawned." 
 
 L. 14. 2, Cf Leslie Stephen, Hours in a Library, 187: "Other poetry 
 becomes trifling when we are making our inevitable passages through the 
 Valley of the Shadow of Death. Wordsworth's alone retains its power. 
 We love him the more as we grow older and become more deeply im- 
 pressed with the sadness and seriousness of life. We are apt to grow 
 
SUPPLEMENTARY ESSAY (1815-1845). 113 
 
 t 
 
 weary of his rivals when we have finally quitted the regions of youthful 
 enchantment." 
 
 L. 16. 3. Cf. Arnold, On Translating Homer, 200: "Homer is rapid 
 in his movement, Homer is plain in his words and style. Homer is simple 
 in his ideas, Homer is noble in his manner." Bagehot, Literary Studies, 
 353: "English literature contains one great, one nearly perfect, model of 
 pure style in the literary expression of typical sentiment ; and one not 
 perfect, but gigantic and close approximation to perfection in the pure 
 delineation of objective character. Wordsworth, perhaps, comes as near 
 to choice purity of style in sentiment as is possible. Milton, with excep- 
 tions and conditions, approaches perfection by the strenuous purity with 
 which he depicts character." 
 
 L. 26, 4. Cf. Dowden, I'ranscripts and Studies, 244: "The poetry of 
 Wordsworth brought a new thing into English literature, and its speech 
 was at first an utterance in an unknown tongue." 
 
 257: "If therefore we would exclude, as far as possible, a personal 
 disturbing element in our recognition and judgment of literature and art, 
 we shall do well to keep constantly in the company of some one of the 
 universal writers." 
 
 P. 62, 1. 31. 5. Cf. Shairp, Aspects of Poetry, 57: "Let us then take 
 courage, and accept for a time, as settled, the old conviction that the 
 moral substance of human nature is the soil on which true poetry grows." 
 
 Arnold, Essays in Criticism, " Milton," 63 : " The mighty power of 
 poetry and art is generally admitted. But where the soul of this power, 
 of this power at its best, chiefly resides, very many of us fail to see. It 
 resides chiefly in the refining and elevation wrought in us by the high and 
 rare excellence of the great style." 
 
 Lang, Essays in Little, 181: "Science advances, old knowledge be- 
 comes ignorance; it is poetry that does not die, and that will not die." 
 
 P. 66, 1. 15. I. Jeff'rey, the famous Edinburgh reviewer, pronounced the 
 Ode on Lntimations of Lmmortality " beyond doubt the most illegible and 
 unintelligible part of the publication (^Lyrical Ballads'). We can pre- 
 tend to give no analysis or explanation of it." Cf. Critical Essays, Francis 
 Jeffrey, Edinburgh Revieiv, October, 1807-November, 1814; and for con- 
 trast compare Lamb's review of the Excursion in the Quarterly, October, 
 1814. These represent what some one has called Eyes and No Eyes. 
 
114 NOTES. 
 
 P. 67, 1. 14. I. Cf. Edmund Gosse, From Shakespeare to Pope and 
 Eighteenth Century Literature. 
 
 P. 68, 1. 2. I . Cf. Wordsworth, sonnet, Personal Talk : — 
 
 " Books, we know, 
 Are a substantial world, both pure and good: 
 Round these with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, 
 Our pastime and our happiness will grow. 
 There find I personal themes a plenteous store, 
 Matter wherein right voluble I am, 
 To which I listen with a ready ear : 
 Two shall be named, pre-eminently dear, — 
 The gentle lady married to the Moor, 
 And heavenly Una, with her milk-white lamb." 
 
 P. 88, 1. 18. I. Cf. Dallas, Gay Science, Chs. I.-VIL; Ruskin, Modern 
 Painters, Vol. XL, Part III., Chs. I.-IV. ; C. C. Everett, Poetry, Coynedy 
 and Dtdy, Chs. I. -IV. 
 
 P. 90, 1. 14. I. Cf Ruskin, Stones of Venice, Vol. III., Ch. IV.: "Art 
 is valuable or otherwise, only as it expresses the personality, activity, and 
 living perception of a good and great human soul." 
 
 L. 27. 2. Ruskin's Modern Painters is but an expansion of this principle 
 of Wordsworth's art. 
 
 P. 93, 1. 20. I. 
 
 " O little bard, is your lot so hard, 
 If men neglect your pages? 
 I think not much of yours or of mine, 
 
 I hear the roll of the ages." — TENNYSON. 
 
 I P. 94, 1. 23. I. Cf. De Vere, Genius and Passion of Wordsworth, 
 
 \ Wisdotn and Truth of Wordsworth'' s Poetry. These are two of the very 
 ', best estimates of Wordsworth's poetry that we have in the language. 
 
 To determine in what degree Wordsworth's estimate of the results of 
 his own work was prophetic, let us take the testimony of two critics, far 
 removed from each other in time, — Sir Henry Taylor in 1834, and James 
 Russell Lowell in 1884. 
 
 " The sanative influence of Mr. Wordsworth's poetry is felt — where 
 such influence is most wanted — in natures of peculiar sensibility; and it 
 
SUPPLEMENTARY ESSAY (1815-1845). 115 
 
 applies itself to that which in those natures is commonly the peccant part. 
 Gross corruption or demoralization is not ordinarily to be apprehended for 
 such minds; but they are subject to be weakened, wasted, and degraded 
 by the vanities and petty distractions of social life or by accesses of casual 
 and futile amatory sentiment. The love of Mr. Wordsworth's poetry takes 
 possession of such a mind like a virtuous passion, fortifying it against 
 many selfish and many sentimental weaknesses, precluding trivial excite- 
 ment, and coupling the indulgence (necessary in one way or another) of 
 passionate feeling with serious study and as much intellectual exercise as 
 the understanding may happen to have strength to bear. To such a mind 
 . . . how often and with what an invigorating impulse will those passages 
 occur, in which Mr. Wordsworth has invoked, with all plainness and gravity 
 of style, but with an earnestness not on that account the less impressive, 
 the aid which is requisite to make the weak stand fast : — 
 
 " If such theme 
 May sort with highest objects, then dread Power, 
 Whose gracious favour is the primal source 
 Of all illumination, may my life 
 Express the image of a better time, 
 More wise desires, and simpler manners ; nurse 
 My heart in genuine freedom ; all pure thoughts 
 • Be with me, — so shall thy unfailing love 
 
 Guide and support and cheer me to the end." 
 
 — Taylor. 
 " His teaching, whatever it was, is a part of the air we breathe, and 
 has lost that charm of exclusion and privilege that kindled and kept alive 
 the zeal of his acolytes while it was still sectarian or even heretical. His 
 finest utterances do not merely nestle in the ear by virtue of their music, 
 but in the soul and life by virtue of their meaning. . . . Popular, let us 
 admit, he can never be; but as in Catholic countries men go for a time 
 into retreat from the importunate dissonances of life to collect their better 
 selves again by communion with things that are heavenly, and therefore 
 eternal, so this Chartreuse of Wordsworth, dedicated to the Genius of 
 Solitude, will allure to its imperturbable calm the finer natures and the 
 more highly tempered intellects of every generation, so long as man has 
 any intuition of what is most sacred in his own emotions and sympathies, 
 
116 NOTES. 
 
 or of whatever in outward nature is most capable of awakening them and 
 making them operative, whether to console or strengthen. And over the 
 entrance-gate to that purifying seclusion shall be inscribed, 'The teachers 
 shall shine as the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as 
 the stars forever and ever.' " — Lowell. 
 
 LETTER TO LADY BEAUMONT, 
 
 Perhaps no friend of Wordsworth is more deserving of remembrance 
 than Sir George Beaumont. He was among the very first to recognize 
 the high quality of the Lyrical Ballads, and by word and deed minis- 
 tered to the author's strength and encouragement. During the rebuilding 
 of Coleorton Hall, Sir George occupied the farm-house adjoining; and on 
 leaving it in the fall of 1806, he invited the Wordsworths to spend the 
 winter there. As the home at Town End was too small for the growing 
 family, they accepted the invitation, and in October left Grasmere for 
 Leicestershire. While at Coleorton, Wordsworth was busy planning the 
 grounds — especially the winter garden — of the hall, and besides the 
 inscriptions for various places in the grounds, he wrote the following to 
 Lady Beaumont : — 
 
 " Lady ! the songs of spring were in the grove 
 While I was shaping beds for winter flowers, 
 While I was planting green, unfading bowers. 
 And shrubs to hang upon the warm alcove. 
 And sheltering wall ; and still, as fancy wove 
 The dream, to time and nature's blended powers 
 I gave this paradise for winter hours, 
 A labyrinth, Lady ! which your feet shall rove : 
 Yes ! when the sun of life more feebly shines. 
 Becoming thoughts, I trust, of solemn gloom 
 Or of high gladness you shall hither bring; 
 And these perennial bowers and murmuring pines 
 Be gracious as the music and the bloom 
 And all the mighty ravishment of Spring." 
 
 Cf. Meffiories of Coleorton, v. I. 
 
LETTER TO LADY BEAUMONT. 117 
 
 In the year 1807 Wordsworth pubHshed the two-volume edition of his 
 poems, and this letter relating to the edition shows that through all the 
 storm of abuse and ribaldry he had lost none of his confidence in the 
 ultimate victory of his ideas. Professor Knight has truly said, " The letter 
 is altogether unique as a literary forecast, and is almost sublime in its calm 
 anticipation of the reversal of temporary opinion by the wiser insight of 
 the future." In October of this year, Jeffrey launched his famous diatribe 
 against Wordsworth, which contained as a closing paragraph the following : 
 " We venture to hope that there is now an end of this folly, and that, like 
 other follies, it will be found to have cured itself by the extravagances 
 resulting from its unbridled indulgence." 
 
 There is no recent utterance so full of the spirit and truth of this letter 
 as the first chapter of Frederick Harrison's Choice of Books. 
 
 P. 96, 1. I. I. "Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Tennyson, Car- 
 lyle, Whitman, — each in his day has stood in the stocks, and every fool 
 has been free to throw a cabbage-stump or a rotten tgg at the convicted 
 culprit." — DowDEN. 
 
 L. 23. 2. " At no period and in no country has the love of Truth 
 existed among men self-occupied, or mainly devoted to external things." — 
 De Vere. 
 
 " The first qualification necessary for appreciating poetry is unworldli- 
 ness. By worldliness, I mean entanglement in the temporal and the 
 visible." — F. W. Robertson. 
 
 P. 97, 1. 8. I. Cf. note 2, p. i. " What earth's far-off lonely mountains 
 do for the plains and the cities, that Wordsworth has done and will do for 
 literature, and through literature for society, sending down great rivers of 
 higher truth, fresh purifying winds of feeling, to those who least dream 
 from what quarter they come. The more thoughtful of each generation 
 will draw nearer and observe him more closely, will ascend his imaginative 
 heights, and sit under the shadow of his profound meditations, and, in 
 proportion as they do so, will become more noble and pure in heart." — 
 Shairp. 
 
 " Not Milton's keen, translunar music thine ; 
 
 Not Shakespeare's cloudless, boundless human view; 
 Not Shelley's flush of rose on peaks divine ; 
 Nor yet the wizard twilight Coleridge knew. 
 
118 NOTES. 
 
 " What hadst thou that could make so large amends 
 For all thou hadst not and thy peers possessed? 
 Motion and fire, swift means to radiant ends? 
 T/wu hadst for weary feet the gift of rest. 
 
 " From Shelley's dazzling glow or thunderous haze, 
 From Byron's tempest anger, tempest mirth. 
 Men turned to thee, and found not blast and blaze, 
 Tumult of tottering heavens, but peace on earth. 
 
 " Nor peace that grows by Lethe, scentless flower, 
 There in white languors to decline and cease ; 
 But peace whose names are also rapture, power, 
 Clear sight and love : for these are parts of peace. 
 
 " He felt the charm of childhood, grace of youth. 
 Grandeur of age, insisting to be sung. 
 The impassioned argument was simple truth. 
 Half wondering at its own melodious tongue. 
 
 " Impassioned? Ay, to the heart's ecstatic core! 
 But far removed were clangor, storm, and feud; 
 For plenteous health was his exceeding store 
 
 Of Joy, and an impassio7ied quietude^ — William Watson. 
 
 P. 98, 1. 16. I. "The depth of Wordsworth's devotion to true liberty 
 is shown by the large number of his best sonnets devoted to the illustration 
 of events which record her history and vindicate her claims. In them 
 alone are a breadth and variety of thought seldom to be found in the whole 
 compass of a poet's works. . . . The liberty Wordsworth sings in a strain 
 at once impassioned and profound is a liberty which cannot forget its 
 responsibilities, and cannot but exult yet more in its duties than its privi- 
 leges." — De Vere. 
 
 P. 99, 1, 13. I. "The noises and sights and talk, the whirl and volatility 
 of life around us, are too strong for us. A society which is forever gossip- 
 ing in a sort of perpetual ' drum ' loses the very faculty of caring for anything 
 but 'early copies,' and the last tale out." — Frederick Harrison. 
 
WORKS REFERRED TO IN THE NOTES. 119 
 
 P. 100, 2. I. 
 
 " Ah ! since dark days still bring to light 
 Man's prudence and man's fiery might, 
 Time may restore us in his course 
 Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force ; 
 But where will Europe's latter hour 
 Again find Wordsworth's healing power? 
 Others will teach us how to dare, 
 And against fear our breasts to steel ; 
 Others will strengthen us to bear — 
 But who, ah ! who, will make us feel? 
 The cloud of mortal destiny, 
 Others will front it fearlessly — 
 But who, like him, will put it by? " — Matthew Arnold. 
 
 " Enough that there is none since risen who sings 
 
 A song so gotten of the immediate soul, 
 So instant from the vital fount of things 
 
 Which is our source and goal ; 
 And though at touch of later hands there fioat 
 
 More artful tones than from his lyre he drew, 
 Ages may pass ere trills another note 
 
 So sweet, so pure, so true." — William Watson. 
 
 QUOTED OR REFERRED TO IN THE NOTES. 
 
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 Corson, H. — Introduction to Browning. D. C. Heath. 
 
120 NOTES. 
 
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 Rousseau's Emile. " Perhaps the most influential book ever written on the 
 
 subject of Education." — R. H. Quick 0-90 
 
 Pestalozzi's Leonard and Gertrude, " If we except ' Emile ' only, no 
 
 more important educational book has appeared, for a century and a half, than 
 
 ' Leonard and Gertrude.' " — The Nation, ....... 0.90 
 
 Richter's Levana; or the Doctrine of Education. "A spirited 
 
 and scholarly book." — Prof. W. H. Payne 1.40 
 
 Rosmini'S Method in Education. " The most important pedagogical 
 
 work ever written." — Thomas Davidson. 1.50 
 
 Malleson's Early Training" of Children. " The best book for mothers 
 
 I ever read." — Elizabeth P. Peabody. 0.75 
 
 Hall's Bibliography of Pedagogical Literature. Covers every 
 
 department of Education 1.50 
 
 Peabody's Home, Kindergarten and Primary School Educa- 
 tion. "The best book outside of the Bible I ever read." — A Leading 
 Teacher. i.oo 
 
 Ne'WSholme'S School Hygiene. Already in use in the leading training 
 
 colleges in England. ............ 0.75 
 
 DeGarmo's Essentials of Method. " It has as much sound thought to 
 
 the square inch as anything I know of in pedagogics." — Supt. Balliht, 
 Springfield, Mass. 0.65 
 
 Hall's Methods of Teaching History. " Its excellence and helpful- 
 ness ought to secure it many readers." — The Nation, ..... 1.50 
 
 Seidel'S Industrial Education. " It answers triumphantly all objections 
 to the introduction of manual training to the public schools." — Charles H. 
 Ham, Chicago 0.90 
 
 Badlam's Suggestive Lessons on Language and Reading. 
 
 "The book is all that it claims to be and more. It abounds in material that 
 
 will be of service to the progressive teacher." — Supt. Dutton, New Haven. 1.50 
 
 Red"way's Teachers' Manual of Geography. " Its hints to teachers 
 are invaluable, while its chapters on ' Modern Facts and Ancient Fancies ' will 
 be a revelation to many." — Alex. E. Frye, Author of " T/ie Child in 
 Nature.'^'* 0.65 
 
 Nichols' Topics in Geography. "Contains excellent hints and sug- 
 gestions of incalculable aid to school teachers." — Oakland {Cal.) Tribune, . 0.65 
 
 D. C. HEATH & CO., Publishers, 
 
 BOSTON, NEW YORK AND CHICAGO.