ses, where they
sit helplessly protruding the bare soles of their feet, like folks that
have got muzzy, in the stocks?

Wordsworth says well, that the language of common people, when giving
utterance to passionate emotions, is highly figurative; and hence he
concludes not so well fit for a lyrical ballad. Their volubility is
great, nor few their flowers of speech. But who ever heard them, but by
the merest accident, spout verses? Rhyme do they never--the utmost they
reach is occasional blanks. But their prose! Ye gods! how they do talk!
The washerwoman absolutely froths like her own tub; and you never dream
of asking her "how she is off for soap?" Paradise Lost! The Excursion!
The Task indeed! No man of woman born, no woman by man begotten, ever
yet in his or her senses spoke like the authors of those poems. Hamlet,
in his sublimest moods, speaks in prose--Lady Macbeth talks prose in her
sleep--and so it should be printed. "Out damned spot!" are three words
of prose; and who that beheld Siddons wringing her hands to wash them of
murder, did not feel that they were the most dreadful ever extorted by
remorse from guilt?

A green old age is the most loving season of life, for almost all the
other passions are then dead or dying--or the mind, no more at the mercy
of a troubled heart, compares the little pleasure their gratification
can ever yield now with what it could at any time long ago, and lets
them rest. Envy is the worst disturber or embitterer of man's declining
years; but it does not deserve the name of a passion--and is a disease,
not of the poor in spirit--for they are blessed--but of the mean, and
then they indeed are cursed. For our own parts, we know Envy but as we
have studied it in others--and never felt it except towards the wise and
good; and then 'twas a longing desire to be like them--painful only when
we thought that might never be, and that all our loftiest aspirations
might be in vain. Our envy of Genius is of a nature so noble, that it
knows no happiness like that of guarding from mildew the laurels on the
brows of the Muses' Sons. What a dear kind soul of a critic is old
Christopher North! Watering the flowers of poetry, and removing the
weeds that might choke them--letting in the sunshine upon them, and
fencing them from the blast--proclaiming where the gardens grow, and
leading boys and virgins into the pleasant alleys--teaching hearts to
love and eyes to see their beauty, and classifying, by the