to mention, that
the language so highly extolled by Mr. Wordsworth varies in every
county, nay in every village, according to the accidental character of
the clergyman, the existence or non-existence of schools; or even,
perhaps, as the exciseman, publican, and barber happen to be, or not
to be, zealous politicians, and readers of the weekly newspaper _pro
bono publico_. Anterior to cultivation the _lingua communis_ of every
country, as Dante has well observed, exists everywhere in parts, and
nowhere as a whole.

Neither is the case rendered at all more tenable by the addition of
the words, _in a state of excitement_. For the nature of a man's
words, where he is strongly affected by joy, grief, or anger, must
necessarily depend on the number and quality of the general truths,
conceptions and images, and of the words expressing them, with which
his mind had been previously stored. For the property of passion is
not to create; but to set in increased activity. At least, whatever
new connexions of thoughts or images, or (which is equally, if not
more than equally, the appropriate effect of strong excitement)
whatever generalizations of truth or experience the heat of passion
may produce; yet the terms of their conveyance must have pre-existed
in his former conversations, and are only collected and crowded
together by the unusual stimulation. It is indeed very possible to
adopt in a poem the unmeaning repetitions, habitual phrases, and other
blank counters, which an unfurnished or confused understanding
interposes at short intervals, in order to keep hold of his subject,
which is still slipping from him, and to give him time for
recollection; or, in mere aid of vacancy, as in the scanty companies
of a country stage the same player pops backwards and forwards, in
order to prevent the appearance of empty spaces, in the procession of
_Macbeth_, or _Henry VIII_. But what assistance to the poet, or
ornament to the poem, these can supply, I am at a loss to conjecture.
Nothing assuredly can differ either in origin or in mode more widely
from the apparent tautologies of intense and turbulent feeling, in
which the passion is greater and of longer endurance than to be
exhausted or satisfied by a single representation of the image or
incident exciting it. Such repetitions I admit to be a beauty of the
highest kind; as illustrated by Mr. Wordsworth himself from the song
of Deborah. _At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her f