oes produce them,
from errors that must render it useless. Those who have most of the
talent, however, commonly acquire this knowledge with the greatest
facility;--and if Mr. Wordsworth, instead of confining himself almost
entirely to the society of the dalesmen and cottagers, and little
children, who form the subjects of his book, had condescended to mingle
a little more with the people that were to read and judge of it, we
cannot help thinking, that its texture would have been considerably
improved: At least it appears to us to be absolutely impossible, that
any one who had lived or mixed familiarly with men of literature and
ordinary judgment in poetry (of course we exclude the coadjutors and
disciples of his own school), could ever have fallen into such gross
faults, or so long mistaken them for beauties. His first essays we
looked upon in a good degree as poetical paradoxes,--maintained
experimentally, in order to display talent, and court notoriety;--and so
maintained, with no more serious belief in their truth, than is usually
generated by an ingenious and animated defence of other paradoxes. But
when we find, that he has been for twenty years exclusively employed
upon articles of this very fabric, and that he has still enough of raw
material on hand to keep him so employed for twenty years to come, we
cannot refuse him the justice of believing that he is a sincere convert
to his own system, and must ascribe the peculiarities of his
composition, not to any transient affectation, or accidental caprice of
imagination, but to a settled perversity of taste or understanding,
which has been fostered, if not altogether created, by the circumstances
to which we have already alluded.

The volume before us, if we were to describe it very shortly, we should
characterize as a tissue of moral and devotional ravings, in which
innumerable changes are rung upon a few very simple and familiar ideas:
--but with such an accompaniment of long words, long sentences, and
unwieldy phrases--such a hubbub of strained raptures and fantastical
sublimities, that it is often extremely difficult for the most skilful
and attentive student to obtain a glimpse of the author's meaning--and
altogether impossible for an ordinary reader to conjecture what he is
about. Moral and religious enthusiasm, though undoubtedly poetical
emotions, are at the same time but dangerous inspirers of poetry;
nothing being so apt to run into interminable dulness or m