notions by the very writer of the day whose
own natural genius, more than any of his contemporaries, impelled, him
to riot in great, wild, supernatural conceptions; and to give utterance
to them in gorgeous language. Coleridge was perhaps the only
contemporary from whom Wordsworth ever took an opinion; and that he did
so from him, is mainly attributable to the fact that Coleridge did
little more than reproduce to him his own notions, sometimes rectified
by a subtler logic, but always rendered more attractive by new and
dazzling illustrations.

Fortunately it is out of the power of the most perverse theory to spoil
the true poet. The poems of Wordsworth must continue to charm and
elevate mankind, in defiance of his crotchets, just as Luther, Henri
Quatre, and other living impersonations of poetry do, despite all quaint
peculiarities of the attire, the customs, or the opinions of their
respective ages, with which they were embued. The spirit of truth and
poetry redeems, ennobles, hallows, every external form in which it may
be lodged. We may "pshaw" and "pooh" at _Harry Gill_ and the _Idiot
Boy_; but the deep and tremulous tenderness of sentiment, the
strong-winged flight of fancy, the excelling and unvarying purity, which
pervade all the writings of Wordsworth, and the exquisite melody of his
lyrical poems, must ever continue to attract and purify the mind. The
very excesses into which his one-sided theory betrayed him, acted as a
useful counter-agent to the prevailing bad taste of his time.

The _Prelude_ may take a permanent place as one of the most perfect of
Wordsworth's compositions. It has much of the fearless felicity of
youth; and its imagery has the sharp and vivid outline of ideas fresh
from the brain. The subject--the development of his own great
powers--raises him above that willful dallying with trivialities which
repels us in some of his other works. And there is real vitality in the
theme, both from our anxiety to know the course of such a mind, and from
the effect of an absorbing interest in himself excluding that languor
which sometimes seized him in his efforts to impart or attribute
interest to themes possessing little or none in themselves. Its mere
narrative, though often very homely, and dealing in too many words, is
often characterized also by elevated imagination, and always by
eloquence. The bustle of London life, the prosaic uncouthness of its
exterior, the earnest heart that beats beneath it,