ABSTRACT
It is not to be wondered at then, if a system which professed to have nature for its guide, and humility for its handmaid, and which was in every respect so diametrically opposed to the reigning schools of the day, should have been considered as a daring and an idle innovation on established principles. Those critics, who were unable to discover flaws where they most essayed to detect them, and who read in the transcripts of their own hearts, the poet’s faithful adherence to nature, still joined in the hue and cry that was universally excited against the professors of the new system, and imagined that they had destroyed the hydra, when in fact they had only bruised one of his fifty heads. The light fanciful song of that lyre, which could at times respond to the deep fitful strains of
inspiration, were attacked with all the bigotry of criticism; and the graceful badinage with which the poet, in his livelier hours, occasionally condescended to sport, were taken as criterions of his general powers, when his more lofty and impassioned flights were purposely disregarded and despised. The ‘Excursion,’ which abounds every where in beauties of the highest description, and which, taken as a meditative philosophy, is grand, or, as a poem, unequalled by any production of the present day, and which may also be considered as the touchstone of its author’s talent, has met with little or no encouragement. Its modest and retiring beauties, lovely as the summer violet, sweet as the balmy breath of evening; its somewhat fastidious rejection of the ruling systems of the day; its delineation of the humbler characters of life, and its metaphysical diffuseness, have rendered it but idly adapted to the effects of general circulation. But with all these popular disadvantages, it is a work that must immortalize the genius of its author; it is the work to which future ages will turn as the grand luminary of its era; and long after the poet that traced the sentiments is mouldering in the dust, his spirit shall survive in his productions, pure, fresh, and indestructible. Before we conclude our disquisition, we shall offer a few cursory observations on the style and writings of Wordsworth, as an accompaniment to his review that follows. He is evidently, as we have previously mentioned, a deep searcher into the works of nature; like the Abyssinian traveller that discovered the sources of the Nile, he has worshipped her at her fountainhead, and inhaled draughts of inspiration; but in his anxious wish to delineate her inmost thoughts, and her most trifling peculiarities, he has led himself into numerous errors, both of sentiment and versification, that notwithstanding the general tone of passion and fidelity that pervades his works, have subjected him to the charge of affectation and puerility. Well aware of the stronger feeling of sincerity that is met with among the lower classes than the higher orders of society; acquainted with the dramatic effects that might be produced, if properly elicited; and the novelty of the attempt at representing them; he has drawn forth what from its intrinsic modesty, and its timid sensitiveness, was unable to encounter the rude blast of popular opinion, and has consequently failed in his attempt. The different poems on these lowly and familiar subjects in the associated work of the Lyrical ballads, were both interesting and delightful, if considered with regard to individuals to whom a knowledge of the author, or an intimate acquaintance with the spirit of his works, might impart additional pleasure in the perusal. But when estimated with reference to the greater number of the reading public, to whose
refined ears, fastidious taste, and over excited sensibility, such writings were wholly unentertaining, were certainly merited failures. Had they possessed less peculiarities of idiom and feeling; had the occasional ruggedness of their versification been softened down, and their interjectional phrases been diminished, they would then perhaps have been less remarkable, but would have sustained less animadversion than at present. As they are now constituted, they form a remarkable, instance of the diversity of taste carried to the utmost latitude of opinion. The literary world is divided into opposite parties. Of those who enthusiastically admire, and those who as cordially despise them. But with respect to the following stanzas there can be but one undivided opinion; and never did Collins, in his more exquisite moments of scusibility [an unrecorded word: possibly ‘sensibility’?], pen so tender, so delicate a poem.
