and that
a bald and naked simplicity of language was the perfection of style.
Singularly enough, he was confirmed in these notions by the very
writer of the day whose own natural genius, more than any of his
contemporaries, impelled him to revel 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 imbued. 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
his 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 trivialties 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.