ABSTRACT
Sketch of the History of Poetry, and Characters of Southey, Crabbe, Scott, Moore, Lord Byron, Campbell, Lamb, Coleridge, and
Wordsworth’, The Pamphleteer, V, 413-71, 1815
To the consideration of Mr. Wordsworth’s sublimities we come with trembling steps, and feel, as we approach, that we are entering upon holy ground. At first, indeed, he seems only to win and to allure us, to resign the most astonishing trophies of the poet, and humbly to indulge, among the beauties of creation, the sweetest and the lowliest of human affections. We soon, however, feel how faint an idea of his capacities we have
entertained by classing him with the loveliest of descriptive poets, and how subservient the sweetest of his domestic pictures are to the grandeur of his lofty conceptions. That his writings abound with sketches of rural scenery, arises merely from his peculiar love of nature, and from his constant residence among the magnificent regions where his genius has been gradually unfolding.
