ordsworth were often false,
and that they betrayed fatally the temper of one who never _had_
sympathized heartily with the most exquisite parts of the Lyrical
Ballads, might have been a record injurious only to Coleridge himself.
But unhappily these perverse criticisms have proved the occasions of
ruin to some admirable poems; and, as if that were not enough, have
memorialized a painful feature of weakness in Wordsworth's judgment. If
ever on this earth there was a man that in his prime, when saluted with
contumely from all quarters, manifested a stern deafness to
criticism--it was William Wordsworth. And we thought the better of him
by much for this haughty defiance to groundless judgments. But the
cloak, which Boreas could not tear away from the traveller's resistance,
oftentimes the too genial Phoebus has filched from his amiable spirit
of compliance. These criticisms of Coleridge, generally so wayward and
one-sided, but sometimes desperately opposed to every mode of truth,
have been the means of exposing in William Wordsworth a weakness of
resistance--almost a criminal facility in surrendering his own
rights--which else would never have been suspected. We will take one of
the worst cases. Readers acquainted with Wordsworth as a poet, are of
course acquainted with his poem (originally so fine) upon Gipseys. To a
poetic mind it is inevitable--that every spectacle, embodying any
remarkable quality in a remarkable excess, should be unusually
impressive, and should seem to justify a poetic record. For instance,
the solitary life of one[51] who should tend a lighthouse could not fail
to move a very deep sympathy with his situation. Here for instance we
read the ground of Wordsworth's 'Glen Almain.' Did he care for torpor
again, lethargic inertia? Such a spectacle as _that_ in the midst of a
nation so morbidly energetic as our own, was calculated to strike some
few chords from the harp of a poet so vigilantly keeping watch over
human life.

FOOTNOTES:

[50] Valckenaer, in his famous 'Dissertation on the Phoenissae,' notices
such a dispute as having arisen upon the diction of Euripides. The
question is old and familiar as to the quality of the passion in
Euripides, by comparison with that in Sophocles. But there was a
separate dispute far less notorious as to the quality of the _lexis_.

[51] 'One,' but in the Eddystone or other principal lighthouses on our
coast there are _two_ men resident. True, but these two come upo