ud with a sonorous and
musical voice, the ballad of _Betty Foy_. I was not critically or
sceptically inclined. I saw touches of truth and nature, and took the
rest for granted. But in the _Thorn_, the _Mad Mother_, and the
_Complaint of a Poor Indian Woman_, I felt that deeper power and
pathos which have been since acknowledged,

In spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,

as the characteristics of this author; and the sense of a new style
and a new spirit in poetry came over me. It had to me something of
the effect that arises from the turning up of the fresh soil, or of
the first welcome breath of Spring,

While yet the trembling year is unconfirmed.

Coleridge and myself walked back to Stowey that evening, and his voice
sounded high

Of Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,
Fix'd fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute,

as we passed through echoing grove, by fairy stream or waterfall,
gleaming in the summer moonlight! He lamented that Wordsworth was not
prone enough to believe in the traditional superstitions of the place,
and that there was a something corporeal, a _matter-of-fact-ness_, a
clinging to the palpable, or often to the petty, in his poetry, in
consequence. His genius was not a spirit that descended to him through
the air; it sprung out of the ground like a flower, or unfolded itself
from a green spray, on which the goldfinch sang. He said, however (if
I remember right), that this objection must be confined to his
descriptive pieces, that his philosophic poetry had a grand and
comprehensive spirit in it, so that his soul seemed to inhabit the
universe like a palace, and to discover truth by intuition, rather
than by deduction. The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at
Coleridge's cottage. I think I see him now. He answered in some degree
to his friend's description of him, but was more gaunt and Don
Quixote-like. He was quaintly dressed (according to the _costume_ of
that unconstrained period) in a brown fustian jacket and striped
pantaloons. There was something of a roll, a lounge in his gait, not
unlike his own Peter Bell. There was a severe, worn pressure of
thought about his temples, a fire in his eye (as if he saw something
in objects more than the outward appearance), an intense high narrow
forehead, a Roman nose, cheeks furrowed by strong purpose and feeling,
and a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth, a good deal
at variance with the solemn, stat