he pride of art with greater pride. The Ode and Epode, the
Strophe and the Antistrophe, he laughs to scorn. The harp of Homer, the
trump of Pindar and of Alcaeus are still. The decencies of costume, the
decorations of vanity are stripped off without mercy as barbarous, idle,
and Gothic. The jewels in the crisped hair, the diadem on the polished
brow are thought meretricious, theatrical, vulgar; and nothing contents
his fastidious taste beyond a simple garland of flowers. Neither does he
avail himself of the advantages which nature or accident holds out to him.
He chooses to have his subject a foil to his invention, to owe nothing but
to himself. He gathers manna in the wilderness, he strikes the barren rock
for the gushing moisture. He elevates the mean by the strength of his own
aspirations; he clothes the naked with beauty and grandeur from the stores
of his own recollections. No cypress grove loads his verse with funeral
pomp: but his imagination lends "a sense of joy

"To the bare trees and mountains bare,
And grass in the green field."

No storm, no shipwreck startles us by its horrors: but the rainbow lifts
its head in the cloud, and the breeze sighs through the withered fern. No
sad vicissitude of fate, no overwhelming catastrophe in nature deforms his
page: but the dewdrop glitters on the bending flower, the tear collects in
the glistening eye.

"Beneath the hills, along the flowery vales,
The generations are prepared; the pangs,
The internal pangs are ready; the dread strife
Of poor humanity's afflicted will,
Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny."

As the lark ascends from its low bed on fluttering wing, and salutes the
morning skies; so Mr. Wordsworth's unpretending Muse, in russet guise,
scales the summits of reflection, while it makes the round earth its
footstool, and its home!

Possibly a good deal of this may be regarded as the effect of disappointed
views and an inverted ambition. Prevented by native pride and indolence
from climbing the ascent of learning or greatness, taught by political
opinions to say to the vain pomp and glory of the world, "I hate ye,"
seeing the path of classical and artificial poetry blocked up by the
cumbrous ornaments of style and turgid _common-places_, so that nothing
more could be achieved in that direction but by the most ridiculous
bombast or the tamest servility; he has turned back partly from the bias
of his mind, partly perhaps from a judicious p