ABSTRACT
I need not lengthen this letter by detailing my own opinion of the poem, since I can with more pleasure give you an extract from a letter written to me by my friend Mr. Montgomery the poet, of Sheffield, a most amiable man, wherein, I was surprised and much encouraged to see my own previous thoughts embodied in his beautiful and energetic language. I had before been gratified with his Critique on your Poem in the Eclectic
Review, which I hope you have seen; but he gives a bolder and more faithful exposition of its merits in his private correspondence. He writes as follows: ‘The Poem in my opinion, an opinion confirmed by repeated perusal of it, is incomparably the greatest and the most beautiful work of the present age of poetry, and sets Mr. Wordsworth beyond controversy above all the living and almost all the dead of his fraternity. I assure you that the spirit of that book, which I read first at Scarborough in September last, so possessed me, that I have scarcely yet recovered my relish for any other modern verse. The peculiar harmony of rhythm, felicity of language, and splendour of thought, for awhile made all beside poor or feeble in comparison, I am gradually returning to sober feelings, and though the transcendent powers of Wordsworth are not at all diminished in my estimation, those of others his contemporaries are recovered their natural size and shape and coloring, which they had before almost lost to my eye’. It adds afterward: ‘You have got a passport to posterity signed by Wordsworth’.
