ABSTRACT
Wordsworth was the “representative man” of the Lake poetry, pre-eminently and peculiarly the head of the school. Coleridge and Southey, and their followers, diverged into other tracks, and aspired to loftier strains; but he was faithful to the Helicon waters of Cumberland and the mountain Parnassus of Skiddaw. His perceptions and conceptions, his means, his manner, his method, his objects of study, and his modes of thought and expression, were most distinctly and individually his own. He looked earnestly at matters generally esteemed not worth notice, and he treated them as a philanthropist and philosopher. The former habit imparted an originality to his musings, and the latter enabled him to draw beneficial lessons from small things in nature, and even good out of evil, when conflicting anomalies or gross aberrations were presented to his views.
