ABSTRACT
We have searched in vain among the notes for an explanation of the term ‘The blood of a man’s mind’ [misquoting ‘the vital blood / Of that Man’s mind what can it be?’].
October 1807, II, 138-42
MR. WORDSWORTH, in those poems which he is here pleased to call κατξοχγν´,1 by way of pre-eminence, the Lyrical Ballads, gave considerable testimony of strong feeling and poetic powers, although like a histerical school-girl he had a knack of feeling about subjects with which feeling had no proper concern: Feeling and nature are two very pretty words, and much in use with the philosophical and simple poets, among whom Mr. Wordsworth is ambitious to be enrolled: but the descriptions of feeling and nature are not necessarily valuable in all their shapes, and that affection of the mind which employed on a great or universally interesting topic would inspire our general sympathy, is most likely, when exercised upon a mean object, or a chimerical idea, to excite no emotion but laughter. In the Lyrical Ballads before mentioned, something was good, much tolerable, and a vast deal ridiculous. In the present volumes, the good is, as Shakspeare says of Gratiano’s reasons, like a grain of wheat hidden in a bushel of chaff, for which we may long labouriously seek, and which, when we have found it, is not worth the search. We really begin to think that the new school of poets, as they think fit to call themselves, suppose folly to be feeling, and consider nature as synonymous with nonsense. After reading the poems before us, we were, and still are, inclined to doubt the fulfilment of the motto
which stands prefixed,2 and which implies the possession of strong faculties:
Posterius graviore sono tibi musa loquetur Nostra: dabunt cum securos mihi tempera ‘fructus,’
Hereafter, at better opportunity, our muse shall speak to you in a more impressive tone.
