, he _could_ do
something. They met with no great success, and he afterward corrected
them so much as to destroy all their interest as juvenile productions,
without communicating to them any of the merits of maturity. In
commenting, sixty years afterward, on a couplet in one of these
poems,--

And, fronting the bright west, the oak entwines
Its darkening boughs and leaves in stronger lines,--

he says: 'This is feebly and imperfectly expressed, but I recollect
distinctly the very spot where this first struck me.... The moment was
important in my poetical history; for I date from it my consciousness
of the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been
unnoticed by the poets of any age or country, so far as I was
acquainted with them, and I made a resolution to supply in some degree
the deficiency.'

It is plain that Wordsworth's memory was playing him a trick here,
misled by that instinct (it may almost be called) of consistency which
leads men first to desire that their lives should have been without
break or seam, and then to believe that they have been such. The more
distant ranges of perspective are apt to run together in
retrospection. How far could Wordsworth at fourteen have been
acquainted with the poets of all ages and countries,--he who to his
dying day could not endure to read Goethe and knew nothing of
Calderon? It seems to me rather that the earliest influence traceable
in him is that of Goldsmith, and later of Cowper, and it is, perhaps,
some slight indication of its having already begun that his first
volume of _Descriptive Sketches_ (1793) was put forth by Johnson, who
was Cowper's publisher. By and by the powerful impress of Burns is
seen both in the topics of his verse and the form of his expression.
But whatever their ultimate effect upon his style, certain it is that
his juvenile poems were clothed in the conventional habit of the
eighteenth century. 'The first verses from which he remembered to have
received great pleasure were Miss Carter's _Poem on Spring_, a poem in
the six-line stanza which he was particularly fond of and had composed
much in,--for example, _Ruth_.' This is noteworthy, for Wordsworth's
lyric range, especially so far as tune is concerned, was always
narrow. His sense of melody was painfully dull, and some of his
lighter effusions, as he would have called them, are almost
ludicrously wanting in grace of movement. We cannot expect in a modern
poet the thrush-li